A Soulless Argument

Dr. David Barash begins this book by commenting that he did not put "his heart and soul" into it because he does not believe there is any such thing as a "soul." After reading it, I can only assume he has serious doubts about the philosophical category of "substance" too, as he has also put very little of that into it. The jacket commendations are laudatory: a "wise, scientific philosopher… deftly disposes of dualism" (Richard Dawkins); an argument written with "clarity and wit" that "shows how appreciating our actual lives is the ultimate uplifting value" (Steven Pinker); "Superb read, erudite and stimulating" (Robert Sapolsky); a book that is "sharp, deeply informed, and often darkly entertaining" (Paul Bloom); "brilliant, ground-breaking, magisterial … the best analysis and demolition of the topic I ever encountered" (Michael Shermer). The reality, however, is far different.

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How Israel’s High Court Reigns Supreme

Those of us who spend some of our lives defending Israel in the public discourse are accustomed to being told, even mocked, that we are incapable of finding any fault in the Jewish state at all—that we instinctively hear criticism of Israel and cry "anti-Semitism!"

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Crossover Appeal

Allen Iverson finally wants to talk about practice.

"The Answer" opens Misunderstood: A Memoir recounting a question that would spawn one of the most legendary postgame press conference monologues in the history of professional sports: "So what about the situation with the practices?"

Iverson was off to the races

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Harry Reid and the Art of Ruthlessness

Power, not anchored to any larger principles, is a recipe for self-preservation over good governance. That's the picture that veteran Nevada political journalist Jon Ralston paints of the late former Senate majority leader Harry Reid and his worldview, in a meticulously reported if largely solicitous book about Reid's political life, The Game Changer.

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Do the Ends No Longer Justify the Means?

At age 93, the magisterial Harvey Mansfield of Harvard has given us a splendid new book, The Rise and Fall of Rational Control. The title will be perplexing to most people. "What is ‘rational control’?" they will ask. And "how can such a thing, whatever it is, ‘rise and fall’?" Professor Mansfield provides a hint in the work’s subtitle: "The History of Modern Political Philosophy."

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Class Dismissed

When Stefan Merrill Block is about 12 years old, his paternal grandmother, Mimi, comes to visit his family in Texas. "The boy should be in school," the elderly Jewish woman tells his mother. "It's a Thursday! A boy on Thursday should be in a school learning a thing. He needs the—what do they call it? The curriculum." Stefan's mother, who made the decision to homeschool her younger son for five years starting in elementary school, tells Mimi, "Actually, the new theory in education is that what matters most is teaching a child to love to learn, to let them follow their interests."

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Are You Ready for Some Football?

Three weeks ago, my beloved San Francisco 49ers were unceremoniously dispatched from the NFL playoffs by the Seattle Seahawks, who are vying for their second Super Bowl championship today. The result didn’t surprise many; the Niners were hobbled by injuries to many of their best players and, frankly, enjoyed more than a bit of luck in getting as far as they did this past season. But every year, the Grim Reaper comes for all but one team, and my guys could not evade his grip.

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Kicking and Screaming Against America and Israel

In the 1970s, after the Six-Day War had time to sink in, an impressive number of Western academics, journalists, politicians, diplomats, spooks, and especially oil executives gave Israel a centripetal eminence in the Middle East that neither its population, geography, faith, wealth, nor even military accomplishments merited. Thirteen hundred years of Islamic history over 3.8 million square miles started getting boiled down to onerous and acrimonious conversations about the contemporary bloody wrestling matches between Jews and Arabs on less than 11,000 square miles of the eastern Mediterranean littoral. Modern Middle Eastern studies, where certainly the most passionate if not the most accomplished students gravitated, became battlefields where anti-Zionist sentiments usually proved triumphant.

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China Is Stealing Our Tech. And It's Partly Our Fault.

In recent years, there has been growing concern that the United States and China might find themselves in a war over Taiwan. Such worries overlook an important fact: Washington and Beijing are already at war. But as David Shedd and Andrew Badger document in their new book, The Great Heist: China's Epic Campaign to Steal America's Secrets, only one side has been acting like it.

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Membership Has Its Privileges

London Clubland: A Companion for the Curious, by historian Seth Alexander Thévoz, is the rare book that manages to be both reverent and sly: an impeccably researched directory of London’s private members’ clubs that understands, at a cellular level, which of these places want to be mythologized and which would rather die than be written about at all. The former are treated gently, the latter mercilessly. My favorite section, "What They Probably Don’t Want You to Know," skewers this distinction perfectly, offering quiet mockery for the clubs desperate to be talked about—Soho House, for instance, which has built an entire business model on insisting it is still misunderstood—while maintaining gentlemanly discretion around those that still prize silence over clout.

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