Today is the day! My first book, "The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America," is now out in fine bookstores everywhere! The Audiobook is read by yours truly! penguinrandomhouse.com/books…

If, when you say regulation, you mean the dead and clammy hand of the commissar—the gentleman who has never in his life built a single thing, drafting rules to govern a thing he cannot define, to be enforced by men who cannot read them; if you mean the form in triplicate, the impact assessment upon the impact assessment, the compliance officer who breeds, in the warm dark of the org chart, further compliance officers unto the third and fourth generation; if you mean the moat—the deep cold moat that the giant digs around his own castle and christens, with a perfectly straight face, public safety—the drawbridge he hauls up behind himself the very instant he is across, lest any hungrier and hungrier man should follow; if you mean the precautionary principle, which, had it governed our grandfathers, would have banned the wheel pending further study of the hill, and left us yet shivering and raw in the mouth of the cave, blessing its excellent ventilation; if you mean the European disease—that magnificent open-air museum of a continent, which produces in our time precisely two things in great abundance, and they are regulation, and the eloquent and well-footnoted regret of cultivated men explaining at length why they have produced nothing else; if you mean the license required to think, the permission slip for honest arithmetic, the king’s wax stamp pressed upon the forehead of every new idea before it may draw its first breath; if you mean the agency dispatched, with trumpets, to slay a single dragon, which arrives at the cave, surveys the accommodations, and moves in—and spends the ensuing century laying eggs and devouring the very villagers it was sworn to defend; if you mean the startup that perishes not of the market’s honest verdict but of the filing fee, the genius decamping by the next tide to a freer and warmer shore; if you mean the law that arrives, faithful as the swallows, exactly one whole epoch too late—helmeted, plumed, and magnificently armed—to regulate the stagecoach—then certainly, my friends, I am against it. But—but, my friends—if, when you say regulation, you mean instead the humble steel guardrail upon the mountain road at midnight, the very thing you curse on the easy days and bless on your knees the one night the fog comes down; if you mean the brakes—for it is the brakes, and not the engine alone, that permit a sane man to drive fast and yet arrive alive—and the buttress, without which no cathedral was ever flung so high, but only in spite of which, but because of which; if you mean the meat inspector, who is the single homely reason a man may eat a sausage in this republic without first composing his last will and testament; if you mean the firebreak cut clean through the forest before the dry season of the burning, the smallpox cordon, the buoy that marks the channel, the rule of the road that lets ten thousand strangers hurtle past one another in the dark at fearful speed and arrive, by its quiet grace, every one of them home; if you mean the honest scale and the true weight, the reason a pound is a pound and a dollar a dollar from Natchez to Nome; if you mean the firm and decent wall between the counterfeit voice and the widow’s bank account, between the deepfaked candidate and the ballot box on the eve of the vote, between the loosed and loveless machine and the schoolyard it neither knows nor pities; if you mean the simple plank of law that says the strong shall not, in the gray dawn, feed the weak quietly into the furnace and sell the rising smoke as progress; if you mean, in the end, the one slender thread of trust without which no citizen will ever dare to use the marvelous thing at all—for where there is no rule there is no trust, and where there is no trust there is no commerce, and a miracle that no man dares to touch is no miracle, but only a handsome and expensive ghost—then certainly I am for it. This is my stand. I will not retreat from it. I will not compromise one inch of it.

Coleman Hughes and John McWhorter weren’t too bothered to learn that Lupita Nyong’o was cast as Helen of Troy. McWhorter: “If woke is getting somebody fired for using the wrong word, that’s bad. If woke is Lupita Nyong'o playing Helen of Troy...I figure it’s a good lesson to have the most beautiful woman in the world be her.”

John McWhorter: American politicians who build their brand around black grievances are “becoming a relic of another time…. I almost feel sorry for them.” “We need more cosmopolitan, and frankly more honest, people as black leaders.”

Candid conversation on @coldxman with @JohnHMcWhorter: Has America’s intense racial reckoning finally ended? They explore the cooling of peak wokeness, rising black male Republican support as rejection of victimhood narratives, how mass immigration scrambled old grievance politics, campus antisemitism double standards, the Supreme Court’s Voting Rights Act shift, and even Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy. Two of the clearest voices on race argue we’ve turned a page — but the new chapter is messier than many admit. youtu.be/UAUHP1w2UFU

How AI makes initiative beat intelligence | Tyler Cowen youtu.be/aJlg6o0A_Js?si=nb-c… @tylercowen

In a new Stanford study, law professors by far preferred Gemini 2.5 Pro's responses over those written by their peers when they were unaware of who wrote the answers.

EPISODE 156: Coleman Hughes Takes on America's Most Contentious Debate  @JTLonsdale sits down with @coldxman to discuss his new @uaustinorg course: "The Legacy of Slavery"  (00:00) Episode intro (01:40) Teaching the Legacy of Slavery (06:20) Coleman's journey from Columbia to UATX (08:30) Dr. King vs Derrick Bell (11:20) Racial disparities by IQ and salary (13:00) Thomas Sowell & the Real History of Slavery (19:00) America's Founding Hypocrisy (24:00) Will the Left cancel Dr. King? (26:20) Understanding the 1619 Project (30:25) Breakdown of the black family (37:20) Is America wealthy because of slavery? (43:50) Are you worried about woke AI? (45:40) Three solutions for racial progress

Something I told 14 yo: There's a kind of politician who tells people "Your life is bad because <outgroup> stole what's rightfully yours. Vote for me and I'll get it back for you." They do it on both the left (Lenin) and right (Hitler), and they're invariably bad news.

Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) system lacks meaningful oversight and shields doctors from accountability, says @RupaSubramanya. “There hasn’t been a single doctor in Canada who's been reprimanded or lost their license because there have been concerns about the fact that they approved someone for MAID when that person could have lived.”

Michael @Shellenberger is one of the rare public figures willing to go against the grain on the Epstein conspiracy and admit he was previously wrong. “My fear of God is greater than my fear of public opinion,” he tells @coldxman.

“You can do whatever you want. You can be whatever you want. I think it’s not true.” Michael @Shellenberger says modern parenting and education increasingly sell children a fantasy of limitless freedom that leaves many kids more anxious, not more fulfilled. “Giving them too much freedom will scare them from a very young age,” he tells @coldxman. “Too much choice also creates a kind of stress on people.”

Epstein became a kind of national Rorschach test: a story about sex, power, corruption, intelligence agencies, billionaires, and the growing belief that the public is never being told the full truth. Michael @Shellenberger says some of the details are genuinely disturbing. But he argues the public story around Epstein has drifted far beyond what can actually be proven. “We have weird things,” he tells @coldxman. “But for the CIA or Mossad to be involved? That’s where I start to get a little more skeptical.” He also argues something else is fueling the obsession: growing distrust of institutions after Russiagate, censorship controversies, and intelligence community abuses and, in some corners of the internet, outright antisemitism.

This is absolutely beautiful. Weinstein can’t defend his nonsense on the merits. I thought he was genuinely schizo. But he doesn’t respond to Tracey by saying “yes Epstein is alive.” He knows he can’t defend it. At some level he knows he’s full of it.

The ultimate compilation of Tucker Carlson contradicting himself.

Which are the most common everyday phenomena that we don't properly understand? Off the top of my head: • Lightning (how does it happen?) • Sleep; dreams (why do they exist?) • Glass (thermodynamics of formation) • Turbulence (when does it start?) • Morphogenesis (how does a creature know what should go where?) • Rain (it seems to start faster than models would predict) • Ice (dynamics of slipperiness) • Static electricity (which material will donate electrons?) • General anaesthetic. (And the mechanism of a lot of drugs, e.g. paracetamol.)

A young girl practicing wushu at the bus stop while waiting. Sometimes, you need less than you think to stay active...

Wow. thefp.com/p/tgif-too-crazy-a…

Someone should ask AOC if Beyoncé earned her billion

In which @coldxman asks me questions about Christian Zionism: thefp.com/p/walter-russell-m…

RT @sapinker: When a self-proclaimed civil rights organization puts Ayaan Hirsi Ali, of all people, on a "hate watch" list, you know it ha…