HE WAS ALWAYS WAY AHEAD OF EVERYONE ELSE: Adam Smith on the Negativity Effect. Long before psychologists and economists documented the negativity effect — “Bad is stronger than good,” as Roy Baumeister and I summarized it in The Power of Bad — Adam Smith recognized its many manifestations (like loss aversion — we fear losses more than we appreciate gains) and offered lucid explanations, as Yahya Alshamy and Daniel Klein explain in a new paper.

THE SMOKING GUN: New Documents Largely Confirm That Covid Was Created in Wuhan Lab. Nicholas Wade, the veteran science journalist who forced the mainstream media to stop pretending that a Covid lab leak was a crazy conspiracy theory, describes newly unearthed documents that are being called definitive evidence the virus was created in a lab. In 2022, researchers noted an unusual symmetric structure in the virus that was highly unlikely to be natural, and theorized the procedure for creating this structure in the lab.  The new documents show that in 2018 other researchers, including one from the Wuhan lab, had submitted a proposal to use this exact procedure to synthesize a virus.

ANOTHER DOOMSDAY AVERTED: The Retirement Crisis That Wasn’t. Experts predicted that baby boomers would be broke in their old age — prompting endless media alarms and and calls for the government to intervene.  Instead, the boomers are now one of history’s richest generations.

STAY TUNED: The Covid Governors’ Debate. Except possibly for the Great Depression, the response to Covid was the worst domestic-policy fiasco of the past 150 years. Most Democrats and their acolytes in the mainstream media want to “move on” from the pandemic. But unless Sean Hannity, the moderator, lets Gavin Newsom, the nation’s most zealous Covid authoritarian, off the hook in the debate with Ron DeSantis on Fox News Thursday evening, this is a a golden opportunity chance for 2024 voters to contemplate how the two governors — and Donald Trump and Joe Biden –responded to the greatest test of leadership of their careers. (Spoiler: Most of them flunked.)

CAMPUS INQUISITORS: Harvard’s Double Standard for Free Speech. At the university, you’re free to excuse Hamas’ atrocities and put up murals in Harvard Yard slurring Jews. The Crimson student newspaper will defend your First Amendment rights, and professors will even argue that you deserve to be exempt from criticism. But don’t dare to offend progressives with your research findings, political views or even isolated comments in an interview or blog post.

After the backlash against student groups who blamed Israel for Hamas’ terrorism, the school’s president, Claudine Gay, proclaimed that Harvard protects free speech and academic freedom. Tell that to the scholars with unpopular views who have been denounced, investigated, disinvited, or punished by her and other administrators, and who have endured the Crimson’s outrageous campaigns to slander, silence, sanction, and banish them. My City Journal article details how hard Harvard has been working to earn its ranking from FIRE as America’s worst campus  for free speech.

NOBODY’S FOOL: Richard Russo’s Deplorable Storytelling. Steven Malanga discusses the career and the latest novel of Richard Russo.

Among the many whose stories have increasingly been ignored by what now passes for serious fiction are America’s working classes, who have progressively struggled to find a place in the twenty-first-century economy and social order.

One happy exception is the novelist Richard Russo, who started out trying to establish a career as a professor/novelist but discovered that what really interested readers were his stories about growing up with an often-absent father in a declining upstate New York manufacturing community filled with struggling but memorable characters whom some might call “deplorables.” Russo, who won a Pulitzer Prize for Empire Falls, the tale of a New England mill town and its down-on-their-luck residents, has now returned with his tenth novel, Somebody’s Fool. It’s the third book in a trilogy about upstate New York’s fictional North Bath, a town that first appeared in Russo’s touching comic novel Nobody’s Fool, whose main character, the irascible yet still somehow lovable Donald “Sully” Sullivan, bears striking resemblance to the father Russo says came in and out of his life.

Read the whole thing — and Russo’s novel. If you haven’t read the earlier North Bath books, start with Nobody’s Fool, which made a great movie, too, starring Paul Newman as Sully. Another of Russo’s novels, Straight Man, a lampooning of campus culture, has been turned into “Lucky Hank,” an AMC series now on streaming platforms.

NO SEX, PLEASE, WE’RE ANTHROPOLOGISTS: Dis-empaneled. Bowing to political pressure, two leading anthropological associations cancel a conference discussion on the centrality of biological sex. The American Anthropological Association now wants to pretend that there are not two biological sexes, which is even more appalling than the group’s earlier decision to pretend that there is no such thing as race (never mind the genomic evidence revealing five distinguishable races). The Left’s War on Science continues.

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WON’T GET FOOLED AGAIN: The Covid Cover-up. James Meigs provides excellent summary of the lies and corruption of the public-health and scientific establishments.

10 BLOCKS PODCAST: Discussing the New Tom Wolfe Documentary. Richard Dewey, the director of “Radical Wolfe,”  the documentary opening this weekend, joins me to analyze Wolfe’s life, career and politics. (Transcript provided.)

(Link now fixed.)

TWO-PARENT PRIVILEGE: The Indispensable Institution. A new book by an author with impeccable center-left credentials may relax the taboo in policy circles on discussing the importance of two-parent families.

WHAT, ALLOW DUE PROCESS? Campus Inquisitors Worried They Might Have to Conduct Fair Trials.  Now that a court has allowed a former Yale student to proceed with his defamation lawsuit against the university and a woman who accused him of rape, campus bureaucrats and “women’s rights advocates” are fretting that women will be discouraged from making accusations against men if they have to face cross-examination. (The Yale student was expelled after the Title IX hearing, which allowed no cross-examination, but then acquitted by a jury in a criminal trial that allowed cross-examination.)

A board member of the Association of Title IX Administrators described cross-examination as a “basically worthless” procedure — which tells you just how much respect these administrators have for equal treatment under the law. Can you imagine anyone arguing that a woman accused of a crime was not entitled to the fundamental right to cross-examine her accuser? It’s one more example of how both sexes are biased against men, as I point out in “The Misogyny Myth.”

THE LOCKDOWNS AND THE DAMAGE DONE: Megyn Kelly Asks Trump a Few Hard Questions. Trump has no good answers about his disastrous Covid response. He dodges Kelly’s questions and makes ridiculous accusations against DeSantis and ridiculous assertions (like claiming credit for saving 100 million lives). And he keeps pretending that he administration wasn’t pushing lockdowns and masks by allowing Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx to set administration  policy. (Birx bragged about conning Trump into extended lockdowns.)

Covid was by far the biggest test Trump faced as president, and he flunked it. Not as badly as Biden, of course, but that’s a low bar. Jeffrey Tucker sets the record straight:

 When Megyn Kelly pointed out that Trump made Fauci a star, he asked “You think so?” and then feigned a brief moment of internal reflection.

There ought to be some other phrase than “rewriting history.” This is Orwellian gaslighting on a different level, as if Trump truly believes that he can reconstruct reality based on what he wants to be true rather than what everyone knows to be true and all facts point to as true.

There are so many questions crying out for answers. In this interview, however, he says that he left it up to the states under a federalist idea. This is the line bandied about in Mar-a-Lago and no one around him dares question it.

It is demonstrably untrue. The one state that stayed almost entirely open – South Dakota – was in defiance of the White House in doing so. The first state to open up after that was Georgia under Governor Kemp, whom Trump blasted for the decision. Moreover, Trump has repeatedly bragged about how he shut down the country, as if that makes him awesome.

Even his discussion of which governors did well is disingenuous. The sole basis of his reasoning is a loyalty test, detached from the substance of Covid policies. He celebrates South Dakota’s Kristi Noem and South Carolina’s Henry McMaster because they have endorsed him for the 2024 election. Meanwhile, he derides the two governors who received the most backlash for opening up their states, Georgia’s Brian Kemp and Florida’s Ron DeSantis.

Read the whole thing.

UNEXPECTEDLY: The Return of Urban Retail Deserts. Stores fleeing from rising theft will leave residents in cities like New York with fewer places to shop, less merchandise to buy, and higher prices to pay.

LET’S HOPE. Will the Supreme Court End Rent Control?

THEY HATE YOU, THEY REALLY HATE YOU: America’s Wokest Company. Penzeys Spices wants Republicans to know that they’re the “#1 threat to this country.” The upscale spice chain tops Dave Seminara’s list of woke companies (which unfortunately includes just about every big one).

THEY JUST CAN’T QUIT: More Mask Hysteria. From White House to elementary schools, from the CDC to its useful idiots in the media, the insanity continues.

SKEWERING THE ELITE: How Did Tom Wolfe Get Away With It? In his day, the liberal establishment was  more dominant and even smugger than it it today, but somehow Tom Wolfe took on its high priests and triumphed, celebrating red-state culture and hilariously exposing the pretensions of the blue-state intelligentsia. I discuss the reasons for his success in a review of “Radical Wolfe,” a superb new documentary chronicling his career. The film opens in theaters this weekend in New York City, next weekend in Los Angeles and Toronto, and then in other cities. Definitely worth watching.

NO, BARBIE, THERE IS NO PATRIARCHY: The myth of male privilege. Toby Young, the Daily Sceptic’s editor-in-chief, proposes another law:

A few weeks ago I had a crack at coming up with my own sociological ‘law’ and my first effort went as follows: “The more progressive a country is when it comes to sex and gender, the more authoritarian it is when it comes to speech and language.” I was thinking of Ireland which, having legalised abortion in 2018, is about to impose the most draconian speech restrictions in Europe. I now propose a second law: “^Any group described as privileged is in fact marginalised; and any group described as marginalised is in fact privileged.’

A case in point is white men – and in particular cisgendered, heterosexual, able-bodied, middle-class white men – who are now at the bottom of the intersectional hierarchy of oppression in most professions. But to add to their misery, these poor, benighted souls have to pretend they’re at the top of that self-same pyramid if they’re to retain their jobs, apologising for their ‘privilege’ in front of their more powerful black, female, non-binary, gay and disabled colleagues.

Read the whole thing. And for a look at the overwhelming evidence that both sexes are biased against men, check out my article in City Journal, “The Misogyny Myth.” 

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Related: Academia’s Missing Men: Men are disappearing from science and academia. The public perception is, however, exactly the opposite.

THE BIG LIE THAT WON’T DIE: The Misogyny Myth. Contrary to what you see in the press (or “Barbie”), misogyny is not rampant in modern societies. There is no evil patriarchy oppressing women. Quite the reverse: Both men and women are guilty of misandry, a bias against men. My City Journal article reviews the overwhelming evidence (ignored or suppressed by misandrist journalists and scholars) of bias against men, from the “women are wonderful” effect reported by psychologists to the discrimination against men in the legal system,  government, schools, corporations, and academia.

This misandrist bias is probably innate, and it’s being exploited by a diversity industry that falsely blames sexism for any gender gap not favoring women. Yes, women are “underrepresented” in some fields, especially at the top, but it’s not because of discrimination. It’s because of factors like the “gender productivity gap” and the “competition gap” (which explains why scientists in the 99th percentile of productivity are disproportionately male, and why 95 of the top 100 Scrabble players are men). The misogyny myth serves the interests of the diversity industry, but it’s enormously damaging to the rest of  society — women as well as men — because it poisons relations between the sexes and undermines the system that has provided unprecedented opportunities and prosperity to everyone: meritocracy.

BIPARTISAN FOLLIES: The Costs of Protectionism. The Biden administration lambasted Trump’s latest tariff proposals, but it’s been doubling down on his protectionism. At Cafe Hayek, Don Boudreaux notes the damage from current tariffs, including an extra $726 annually for food and clothing in the average U.S. household.

CHRISTOPHER RUFO: No to the Politics of Whiteness. The case against right-wing racialism.

AGELESS WISDOM: Adam Smith at 300. Some of the smartest scholars and liveliest writers on Adam Smith will be convening to celebrate the 300th anniversary of his birth. The conference, at the Union League Club in New York City on September 13th, is open to the public, with tickets at $75 apiece. Dan Klein, Anne Bradley, Dominic Pino, and David Bahnsen will be discussing The Wealth of Nations, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and more from the father of modern economics. For a sample of Klein’s thoughts, here’s a podcast of him being interviewed by James Howard Kunstler on the viciousness of left-wing politics — what Klein calls “lefpotism.” 

WHY THE MEDIA DOESN’T TALK ABOUT SWEDEN ANYMORE: Sweden’s ‘Laissez Faire’ Pandemic Policies Paid Off. Sweden, which the media denounced in 2020 as a “pariah” and a “cautionary tale” because it stayed open and and told its citizens not to wear masks, has come through the pandemic with the lowest rate of excess mortality in Europe, as Johan Norberg shows in a Cato Institute report. All the more reason its public-health leaders deserve a Nobel Prize.

BAD MEDICINE: Testimony, or Evidence? Glossing over the damning facts and the lack of evidence for gender-transition treatments.

MASKAHOLISM IS AN INCURABLE DISEASE: No Masks, Please, We’re Rational. Mask mandates are starting to return despite 97 percent of Americans having acquired Covid antibodies and all the evidence that the mandates failed to make a difference in Covid infections or mortality (including a recent study in The Lancet  reporting that the only significant effect of the state mask mandates in the U.S. was a decrease in fourth-graders’ test scores). Yet the media are urging the return of masks, and the CDC, unlike every country in Europe, continues to advise masking toddlers. The maskaholics’ faith remains as strong as that of the Cambodian villagers who protected themselves from the coronavirus by erecting magic scarecrows in front of their huts.