Charles Murray has written a magnificent review of Nicholas Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History. He sees the publication of this book as a major cultural event, but the impact he forecasts remains carefully hedged:

… as of 2014, true believers in the orthodoxy still dominate the social science departments of the nation’s universities. I expect that their resistance to “A Troublesome Inheritance” will be fanatical, because accepting its account will be seen, correctly, as a cataclysmic surrender on some core premises of political correctness. There is no scientific reason for the orthodoxy to win. But it might nonetheless.

So one way or another, “A Troublesome Inheritance” will be historic. Its proper reception would mean enduring fame as the book that marked a turning point in social scientists’ willingness to explore the way the world really works. But there is a depressing alternative: that social scientists will continue to predict planetary movements using Ptolemaic equations, as it were, and that their refusal to come to grips with “A Troublesome Inheritance” will be seen a century from now as proof of this era’s intellectual corruption.

Bryce Laliberte passed along this pop culture celebration of democracy’s death in imperialist chaos. It’s worth a look. (Kevin Spacey seems to have made himself the iconic face of mass media dark enlightenment.)