Steve Sailer's Published Articles: Sports, Race, Gender, and Human Biodiversity

Book Reviews
Reviews of Books on Human Biodiversity
My reviews of books with a Human Biodiversity slant by authors like Tom Wolfe, Steven Pinker, Robert Heinlein, JP Rushton, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Dan Seligman, Dinesh D'Souza, and lots more.
The Nature of Nurture	National Review	10/12/98
The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do by Judith Rich Harris
Despite her many strengths, her Camille Paglia-like ambitiousness drives her to overstate both the novelty of her true ideas (that genes and peers matter) and the truth of her novel idea (that parent's don't matter).
The Half Full glass
The g Factor: The Science of Mental Ability by Arthur Jensen
"Denouncing Jensen proclaims one's faith in empirical egalitarianism, which serves as the perfect excuse for ignoring the irksome demands of moral egalitarianism. By declaring that everyone could Be Like Me (if only they were properly socialized), the clever can, with clear conscience, continue to surreptitiously wage class war against the clueless." This is a hugely important, and shamefully neglected book, and my review offers a new perspective on the IQ wars.
For Richer, For Poorer	National Review	4/6/98
The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor, by David S. Landes
"Interestingly, many of the most striking racial differences can be thought of as resembling faint sex differences." I used this review to launch a potentially important trial balloon outlining the two major dimensions differentiating Asians from whites from blacks: Asians tend to be the most masculine in terms of mental skills, blacks the most masculine in terms of physical and personality traits, with whites generally in the mediocre middle.

Hysteria, His and Hers	National Review	9/1/97
Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture, by Elaine Showalter
"Hystories has elicited quite a backlash, with chronic fatigue sufferers proving the most energetic in hounding the author."
"We're Bad Too!" Hanging curveball of a complaining letter about my unfairness toward female child molesters from the Director of the National Judicial Education Program to Promote Equality for Women and Men in the Courts, & my response.	National Review	9/29/97

The Clash of Continents	National Review	5/19/97
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, by Jared Diamond
"To Diamond, the three most important engines of history are location, location, and location."
The Ebony Tower	National Review	3/10/97
The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., et al
"To squeeze 2,709 pages into a size that coeds would find tolerably luggable, Gates & Co. had to specify paper of a thinness (and consequent transparency) seldom seen outside European public lavatories. So, stay close to a strong reading lamp and a bottle of aspirin."
All in the Family	National Review	12/9/96
Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives, by Frank J. Sulloway
"Despite heroic research efforts, Sulloway does sound at times like Matt Groening's 7th Type of College Professor: The Single Theory to Explain Everything Maniac. ('The nation that controls magnesium controls the universe!')"
The Secret Zora Neale Hurston	National Review	4/3/95
Zora Neale Hurston -- Novels and Stories (Vol. I) and Folklore, Memoirs and Other Writings (Vol. II), 1,800 words
"Thanks to feminism, never before has Zora (the first great black woman writer) been so widely read, but seldom has any author been so uniformly misread by her self-proclaimed (but self-absorbed) heirs."
Up the Amazon	National Review	12/31/94
Vamps & Tramps: New Essays, by Camille Paglia, 1,130 words
"The crazier the world gets, the saner Camille Paglia sounds."

Shocking Exposés!
Senator Charged with Humor Harassment	Enter Stage Right	3/93
Just before presstime, Senator Noland issued a statement that he had been diagnosed as a victim of Humor Addiction Malady, and was checking himself into a clinic in order "To learn if my alleged behavior (which I deny completely but personally apologize for if it offended anyone) stems from my history of childhood sports abuse. After 50 years of repression, I have only now recovered my buried memory of how my father made me play Little League. The experts are finally realizing the terrible toll taken by 'Right Field Syndrome.' I hope my accusers can somehow find it in their hearts to forgive my Dad."
Sexism in the Drug Rackets	American Spectator	10/92
Activists denounce the lack of government programs to meet the special needs of mothers who are also drug dealers. "The very term 'Day Care' reflects institutional insensitivity toward those who work mostly between midnight and dawn," points out Dr. Spode.

Short Essays
The Eunuch Columbus	National Review Online	9/16/97
The world still noisily debates 1492: Did Europe do more for America or to America? Yet, the greatest admiral of the age was not Columbus but the Chinese eunuch Cheng Ho. We can gain new perspective on this question by asking: Why did Cheng’s voyages prove so much more infertile than Columbus'?
What Affirmative Action Really Does to Campuses	Christian Science Monitor	3/26/91
Race relations on our nation's campuses are getting worse. A vast number of "racial incidents," ranging in seriousness from the sadistic to the psychosomatic, are reported annually.
Golf Club Discrimination	St. Louis Post- Dispatch	12/12/90
Even today, the premiere clubs ration memberships Soviet-style: how long you will wait, who your friends are, and who your father was. Since they don't discriminate solely on ability to pay (for example, a lifetime membership at Augusta National is merely $25,000 and monthly dues are $100), they can afford to discriminate on race, religion, ethnicity, or whim.
Who Is Asian? Hispanic? Native American?	Greensboro News & Record	3/24/91
Roughly 70% of Americans now qualify for affirmative action, and several billion foreigners are potential beneficiaries. Yet, government bodies have made only whimsical attempts to rationalize their racial definitions. The result is endless amusement for connoisseurs of bureaucratic befuddlement.
Ethnic Studies: Cure or Cause?	Chicago Tribune	3/18/92
Seldom discussed, however, is whether sermons stressing victimization actually persuade whites to treat minorities better. Or do young whites simply respond by mentally casting themselves as martyrs, too?
What Lenin Knew about College Sports	Sacramento Bee	4/18/91
College football and basketball are de facto professional sports, highly lucrative for the adults involved, but not for the players (many from poor families), who are forced by an open conspiracy of their employers to subsist on scholarships and the occasional envelope stuffed with cash.
Why They Really Hate the SAT	Cleveland Plain Dealer	5/2/91
Ironically, critics of the "biased" SAT urge more reliance on subjective criteria: grades, interviews, and recommendations. What they really can't stand about the SAT, it seems, is its objectivity.

Clinton v. Sexual Harassment Laws
Immediately following Bill Clinton's 1992 election, I predicted that the expansive modern definition of sexual harassment was going to seriously threaten his Presidency. (Having spent a good bit of 1992 in Arkansas on business, I was well aware of what most Arkansawyers knew about his not-particularly-private private life.) I wrote a number of pieces on this subject, but nobody wanted to print them back then. (However, by submitting "A Specter is Haunting the Clinton Presidency" to the American Spectator, I may have helped encourage them to send David Brock to Arkansas, which lead to the Paula Jones sexual harassment lawsuit, which lead to Clinton lying under oath about Monica Lewinsky.)
NEW (but old: written 2/93) "Senator Charged with Humor Harassment"	National Review	2/23/98
"Humorism activist Bismarck sums up, 'We are not against humor. Everybody wants wanted humor, but nobody wants unwanted humor. It's that simple.''' The logical next step after sexual harassment laws in de-hostilizing work evironments. Written in 1993 in response to the Packwood brouhaha and in anticipation of the inevitable Clinton scandal, it's still pretty funny. (Here's the full length version.)
NEW (but old: written 12/92) -- A Specter Is Haunting the Clinton Presidency: Why, logically, either the current sexual harassment laws or Bill Clinton will have to go.	Never Published
Over 5 years ago I explained why the ever-expanding definition of sexual harassment might force the then-President Elect Clinton from office. No one wanted to publish it then, but it now offers a suprisingly accurate forecast of the chain of events leading from the American Spectator's Troopergate reporting to Paula Jones to Clinton's perjury and witness tampering in the Lewinsky affair. This finally became conventional wisdom among the pundits at the time Paula Jones' lawsuit was dismissed.
NEW (but old: written 1/94) -- Why Revelation of Clinton's Industrial Scale Adulteries Won't Hurt Him with the Voters	Never Published
"Mr. Clinton's ability to charm and satisfy large numbers of women, to do without sleep, to lie persuasively, to keep track of his many lies, even his capacity for eating a baked potato in two bites . . . these are not traits of the average man but of a certain kind of natural leader, the type that Africans call a "Big Man"." A WSJ article in April '98 finally introduced this concept to the media.

Copyright Steve Sailer 1990-2000