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Opinion, said C.P. Scott, is cheap, but facts are sacred. Just so. If a thing is cheap, you will find plenty of it lying around. Sure enough, I seem to have written hundreds of opinion pieces. Those that have survived are gathered here.
The quality of these pieces is very variable. They range from the type of thing sailors call "a quick lash-up" to carefully-argued, well-researched thumb-suckers. The odd thing, reading through the earlier pieces again after a lapse of years, is that it's not always easy to tell which is which...
There is of course a good deal of opinionating in my reviews and literary articles. Some pieces could fit equally well here or there.
I have organized these pieces into the categories listed in the navigation box, and described below. The top two categories are no problem; the others are to some degree fuzzy, the classifications often arbitrary.
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The categories include, first, regular columns:
- "The Straggler"—An as-I-please column that I have been doing in alternate issues of National Review since October 2002.
- The monthly diaries I have been contributing to National Review Online since December 2001.
- The monthly column I contributed to New English Review from May 2006 to October 2007.
Then there are one-off opinion pieces on various topics:
- Commentary on the "National Question"—immigration, citizenship, demography.
- Commentary on other topics relating to U.S. politics, diplomacy, and war.
- Pieces on China, including some travel diaries.
- British and Irish affairs.
- Religion—mainly Christianity and Islam.
- Most of the "human sciences" articles are about h-bd (that is, human biodiversity) topics—matters of race, sex, and human development.
- "The culture" covers any aspect of current Western society I have felt like passing comment on.
- "Spoofs & satires" is just that—my occasional attempts at humor, parody, and wish-fulfilment fantasy.