Pun Salad

In the half a year that Joe Biden has been president, it has become something approaching conventional wisdom that he is a boring politician, running a boring presidency that is focused on enacting boring policies. Even his most entrenched political opposition cannot seem to find much to engage or enrage.

A recent Atlantic article on the downturn in conservative publishing, for example, noted that it has been hard for right of center authors and editors to turn Biden into the sort of villain who moves books, and that his "relative dullness is his superpower." Similarly, a report in Axios this week declared that the "boring news cycle" had led to a downturn for partisan media. Opposition outlets usually see a boost when a new president from the opposing party settles in the White House; this time, that hadn't happened. "While the Biden administration has seen plenty of debate over policy," the Axios report said, "economics and a crisis at the border, personality-based controversy has largely been absent."

President Biden gave a speech in Philadelphia at the end of April as part of a celebration of Amtrak’s 50th anniversary. During the speech he told a particular story about something that had happened to him during his years as vice president. The story involved an Amtrak conductor named Angelo Negri who had become Biden’s friend over the years. Negri allegedly came up to Biden one day as he was getting on the train to tell him that he had done the math and concluded Biden had traveled 1.5 million miles on Amtrak over the years, even more miles than he’d traveled by air.

But when a few news outlets including Fox News and the Daily Mail looked into it, there were significant problems with the story. The most glaring was that the conductor who had supposedly grabbed Biden’s arm to tell him about the milestone had retired decades earlier. In fact, that particular conductor died a full year before Biden hit the milestone mentioned in the story.

I come not to bury Charles Murray, but not to praise him, either.

He has a new book out, Facing Reality. It’s a doozy.

His books have a way of being doozies, going up against ideas sacred to the American intelligentsia on race as well as class.

He is also one of America’s most brilliant thinkers.

To many familiar with Murray’s work, I have already revealed myself as a “racist” in engaging his work at all, and/or not calling him one.

However, Murray’s work is too carefully reasoned and too deeply founded on scholarly sources to be dismissed as “racist,” except by people whose definition of “racist” is “That which people of the black American race don’t like for any reason.”

Rather: I salute Murray’s brilliance while being disturbed by many of his arguments. What many will call racism is what I call being able to walk and chew gum at the same time.

Both Canada and the United States are suffering through a heat wave. Thus far, the BBC reports, more than 65 people have died in British Columbia, while, in the United States, there have been “at least a dozen deaths in Washington and Oregon.” The technical causes of these deaths are multifarious, and yet one variable stands out: A disproportionate number of the deceased did not have access to air-conditioning.

It is fashionable around this time of year for click-hungry outlets to run pieces condemning A/C. Sometimes, the argument is that air-conditioning is unnecessary. Sometimes, the argument is that air-conditioning is making us weak. Occasionally, the argument is that air-conditioning is sexist. Always, the arguments are silly. Far from being a problem, air-conditioning is a top-five-of-all-time invention. Even better: It saves lives.