Social Affairs

Transatlantic Tour

Frances Weaver — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 16:56:50 +0000

Author:Douglas Murray

To the US for a five-day speaking tour of ten cities from Boston to Texas. On the penultimate day I arrive in Houston and stare at the luggage carousel board. A member of the airport staff approaches helpfully. "Where have you flown in from, sir?" she asks. I look at her blankly before admitting, "I'm not sure." She looks at me in a kindly manner.

Frank Furedi

Frances Weaver — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 18:11:32 +0000

Author:Michael Mosbacher

(David Smith) In 1950s and 1960s New York there flourished a political cult which claimed that it — and it alone — had the answer to all political, philosophical and economic questions. Its adherents, most famously Alan Greenspan, called themselves objectivists and maintained that their guru, the Russian émigré novelist Ayn Rand, was the living embodiment of reason. Those not agreeing with objectivism's conclusions — support for unfettered capitalism, radical individualism and dogmatic atheism — were either evil or stupid, they maintained.

Charles Murray

Frances Weaver — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 17:44:51 +0000

Author:David Green

(David Smith)

Charles Murray has acquired some bitter enemies. In 1984 he attracted strident criticism for arguing that the "war on poverty" was increasing the number of poor people. The criticism turned to plain hostility in 1989 when he popularised the term "underclass" and then morphed into sheer hatred in 1994 when The Bell Curve discussed the average IQs of different ethnic groups. And yet Murray is a mild-mannered scholar with a penchant for number-crunching who writes and speaks in the folksy style of America's Midwest.