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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 three 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.
- Radio Derb, a half-hour program of spoken commentary on the passing scene, broadcast weekly on National Review Online since mid-2004.
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 and her immediate neighbors, including some travel diaries.
- Other international topics (mostly British and Irish).
- Religion — mainly Christianity and Islam.
- Most of the "human sciences" articles are about either h-bd (that is, human biodiversity) topics — matters of race, sex, and human development — or the mind sciences.
- "Math & other sciences" is just that.
- "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.