From the New York Times news section:

Mamdani Leaves Door Open to Paying Reparations to Black New Yorkers

The mayor said in recent interviews that it was important to acknowledge the city’s role in slavery but that he could not commit to payouts before his racial equity commission completes its report.

By Jeffery C. Mays

July 30, 2026

Mayor Zohran Mamdani said this week that he supported reparations efforts in New York City but that it was too early to commit to making monetary payouts to descendants of slavery.

In a recent interview on The Root,

Remember The Root?

Mr. Mamdani was asked whether he would support cash reparations if the city’s Commission on Racial Equity, which is currently studying the matter, recommended them. The mayor said he would have to wait for the commission’s report but acknowledged the city’s complicity in slavery.

“We often think about slavery and the complicity in slavery as being exclusively to certain geographic areas of the country,” Mr. Mamdani told the former New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow in the interview. “Here in New York City, we were very complicit. And so, I look forward to whatever those findings are.”

“I can’t give you an answer in advance of them,” the mayor continued, “but I can tell you that this is critically important because this is also what it looks like to acknowledge what history truly was.”

He told Mr. Blow that he stood by a pledge, written when he was running for mayor, that he would support the descendants of slavery in, as the pledge states, “rectifying historical discrimination” and “repairing ongoing inequalities.”

In another interview this week on Sirius XM’s Urban Views channel, Mr. Mamdani said that “if we are taking an honest and accurate approach to what New York City’s role was, you will see that complicity is something that cannot be debated.”

When asked about the mayor’s recent comments, Jeremy Edwards, a spokesman for the mayor, said Mr. Mamdani’s statements spoke for themselves.

There are currently separate city and state commissions studying reparations and reconciliation. In 2023, Gov. Kathy Hochul signed a law creating the New York State Community Commission on Reparations Remedies to study the legacy of slavery and the ongoing impact on descendants dealing with extreme wealth gaps and other social issues that are the consequences of the loss of generational wealth. The group is not expected to release its findings for at least two years.

The New York City Commission on Racial Equity, created in 2022 by public ballot, is also studying reparations and creating “a public process for truth, healing and reconciliation” that will offer New Yorkers a way to “publicly acknowledge the history and harm of slavery,” according to the commission. …

“You can’t talk about the question of affordability without talking about the racial wealth gap,” Mr. Washington said. “You can’t talk about question of the racial wealth gap without talking about reparations.”

“You don’t get Mamdani without the fight for reparations,” he added.

Keris Lové, the organizing strategist for New Yorkers for Reparations, a statewide coalition, says that many people regard slavery as a “footnote that happened, instead of being recognized as the root of everything that was built afterward.”

She said she preferred an approach in which cash reparations and other changes, such as investments in housing or education, were both on the table.

“We know that there’s immediate needs right now,” said Ms. Lové. “We also know that if we don’t fix the structural issues, the next generation of Black New Yorkers will still find themselves at the bottom of the caste system.”

New York was a focal point of slavery in the country. New York City had more enslaved Africans before the American Revolution than any other U.S. city except Charleston, S.C., according to the governor’s office.

New York is the financial capital of the world in part because of the benefit it derived from the slave trade. Enslaved Africans were traded at a market on Wall Street. Banking, insurance and shipping also flourished in the city because of chattel slavery. New York abolished slavery in 1827.

Anthony Vidal Torres, the director of communications at Get Free, a group dedicated to making reparations a national issue, said, “We know that entities like Citibank, New York Life Insurance and some others that have been here since the early days of the colony that became New York directly made their founding profits on the financing of enslavement.”

I can’t find a table of the racial population of New York City since 1790, so let’s look at my graph of New York State:

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Spain Celebrates Both a Soccer Win and a Sense of Wider Success

For many fans, the World Cup victory cemented a belief that something promising — a cultural, economic and sports revival — is happening in the country.

By Jason Horowitz

Reporting from Madrid

July 20, 2026

…. By winning the world championship, only three years after their female counterparts did the same, Spain’s men’s soccer team have bolstered the sense that — amid a broader cultural, economic and sports renaissance — something promising is happening in Spain, and that to be here now is to be in the right place, at the right time. …

As other countries turn their backs on immigrants, Spain is also drawing attention, and praise from liberals, because of its government’s efforts to encourage immigration,

Until recently, a large fraction of immigrants to Spain were either northern Europeans looking for sun or Spanish-speaking Latin American Christians — i.e., less trouble on average than Muslim and/or sub-Saharan immigrants.

though not everyone in Spain sees that as a positive. Some soccer crowds have joined in anti-Muslim chants; a former prime minister said France’s diverse team did not have “any French players.” But diversity — embraced by some Spaniards even if scorned by the far right — is increasingly reflected in the national men’s soccer team.

After Spain won, its star player, the 19-year-old Lamine Yamal, a Muslim born to parents from Morocco and Equatorial Guinea, made an Islamic prostration on the field while the defeated Argentine players scuffled with his teammates behind him. Nico Williams, who delivered the game-winning assist and who is also the child of African immigrants, celebrated by giving his gold medal to his Ghanaian-born mother, who crossed the Sahara to reach Spain.

Politically, too, Spain is a standout. Though at home Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s inner circle is embroiled in graft accusations, he has emerged as a global liberal darling for positioning the country as a left-wing island amid a right-wing tide.

He has stood up to President Trump over the war in Iran, as well as taking a different stance on migration and other issues.

But then, this week:

And from Jason Horowitz again in the New York Times news section today:

Spain Mobilizes Military as Thousands of Migrants Cross Into Ceuta

The arrivals in Ceuta, a six-mile-long peninsula on Morocco’s northern coast that Spain has governed for centuries, have fueled political tensions.

By Jason Horowitz

July 30, 2026

Thousands of migrants climbed over a border fence or swam onto the shores of Spain’s North African enclave of Ceuta on Thursday, prompting a mobilization of the Spanish military and fueling political tensions on the Spanish mainland.

Ceuta has been ruled by either Portugal or Spain since 1415.

… At least 18 people have died attempting to enter the territory, a spokesman for the Spanish government said on Thursday.

The arrivals were so numerous — and the potential political and security ramifications so serious — that the Spanish government on Thursday evening said that it had mobilized its armed forces to reinforce the police in Ceuta. It said in a statement that it was dispatching military platoons to enforce border security, increasing air and naval support, and sending diving teams to patrol the waters. The European Union offered to send Spain support from Frontex, its border and Coast Guard agency, to reestablish order.

“We are in a situation of total humanitarian and social emergency,” Mr. Vivas told a Spanish radio station on Thursday.

On Thursday evening, the Ceuta government added in a statement that “this is an unprecedented situation that is testing our institutional response capacity and causing profound concern among the entire citizenry.” Fernando Rodríguez Contreras, an official in the government, said the working estimate for the number of people who had crossed was in the tens of thousands, though that figure could not be confirmed.

Migration at Ceuta, and at Melilla, another autonomous Spanish city in North Africa,

Melilla is another port, this one further east on the Mediterranean’s southern shore. Melilla has been ruled by Spain since 1497.

has long been a point of tension between Morocco and Spain. The two areas constitute the European Union’s sole land border with Africa, and can draw large numbers of young men and other migrants seeking to enter the bloc. More than 10,000 people came over the border in two days in 2021, when the migration crisis reached its peak. In 2022, at least 23 migrants died in a stampede during an attempted mass crossing in Melilla. Many others have died at sea.

It was unclear on Thursday evening what had prompted the latest amassing of people in Ceuta. Analysts said it was too soon to draw conclusions but …

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Solidarity letter

Stand in solidarity with Jason Arday

10,882 have signed. Let’s get to 25,000

Jean signed less than 1 minute ago

Martin signed less than 1 minute ago

Brenda signed less than 1 minute ago

Christine signed less than 1 minute ago

Jason is the youngest Black professor in Cambridge’s history. Rightwing newspapers are trying to smear him with fake accusations of plagiarism. We can’t let them. Stand up to their hate and division by adding your name.

We, the undersigned, are appalled by the sustained and malicious attacks on the academic integrity of Professor Jason Arday.

Entirely false allegations of plagiarism were made against Professor Arday and referred to two universities. Investigations have found no evidence whatsoever of wrongdoing. The relevant academic journals also found no basis for the claims.

Yet despite these unequivocal findings, rightwing media have attempted to smear Professor Arday’s reputation and undermine his career. That should concern everyone who believes in academic freedom, fairness and due process.

It is difficult to ignore the question of motivation. When a distinguished Black academic is repeatedly subjected to baseless allegations after being fully exonerated, it signals there is an attempt to undermine Black people who hold positions of influence.

Professor Arday, a working class Black man, became the youngest Black professor in the University of Cambridge’s history. His remarkable journey, scholarship and leadership should be celebrated, not overshadowed by campaigns built on allegations that have been comprehensively rejected.

Professor Arday has contributed to public life for many years, building a distinguished record of charitable and community service. This latest smear campaign and the spread of misinformation are deeply alarming – not only because of the impact on one individual, but because of the message they send to aspiring Black and Brown young people who seek to attain positions of leadership.

The demonisation of Professor Arday, and recently on Misan Harriman, risks creating a chilling effect, signalling that success and public service may be met with hostility, misrepresentation, and disproportionate scrutiny.

We stand in unwavering solidarity with Professor Arday. We call on universities not only to defend academic freedom and robust scholarship, but also to confront racism wherever it manifests itself, whether overtly or through persistent attempts to discredit exceptional Black academics.

There can be no place in higher education for campaigns that weaponise baseless accusations to damage reputations and careers. Universities must ensure that excellence is protected and that every scholar is judged on the merit of their work, not the colour of their skin.

Then follows the names of 38 VIPs who signed it

One question is the racial tilt of the initial VIPs. Are blacks avoiding signing because Arday’s career is embarrassing to them and the story raises questions about their qualifications in an era of DEI? …

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A lot of New Yorker cartoons are only semi-classic because a regular theme is making fun of new trends and technologies that the older generation finds hilarious, but that the younger generation finds perfectly sensible, such as drinking water or having a camera in your phone:

Over the last generation, Americans have obsessed over drinking gallons of water.

But when I was young, Real Men Didn’t Drink Water.

From Esquire in 1968,

Scared Guys Finish First: What Made Vince Lombardi the NFL’s Toughest Coach

If you weren’t fired up to play for the legendary coach of the Green Bay Packers, you would be fired with enthusiasm.

By Leonard Shecter

… Now Donny Anderson, a Viking type from Texas Tech who got, it is said, $600,000 as a bonus when he signed a year ago, whispers to a veteran player on the sidelines of the practice field: “Slip me some water.” The veteran laughs. “There hasn’t been any water around here in eleven years.” Not true. There are perhaps six pints for the seventy huge players who will spend a violent two hours under a summer sun. But if Lombardi sees a player drinking water he shouts, “Whaddaya want to get, a bellyache?” …

Lombardi’s most vocal admirer on the team is Bart Starr, the first-string quarterback, who quietly and over a long period of time has become recognized as one of the best of a highly intelligent and talented group of N.F.L. quarterbacks. The son of an Army sergeant, Starr is a soft-spoken, self-effacing Alabaman who keeps a Bible by his bed. He takes all of Lombardi’s commandments literally. He never goes near the water bucket.

Even crazier back then was the combination of the not drinking water fad with the salt pill fad to prevent muscle cramps.

But when did hydrating become a Thing? I’ve got a specific inflection point in mind …

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More on the hilarious Jason Arday scandal that I first wrote about in “Retarded Child Becomes Youngest Black Full Professor at Cambridge U.:”

From Retraction Watch on July 27, 2026:

Exclusive: News outlet killed story on plagiarism allegations after Cambridge prof hired law firm

Author: Brendan Borrell

In September 2025, Times Higher Education had a bombshell story in the works: A star sociology professor at the University of Cambridge had allegedly plagiarized parts of his Ph.D. thesis and several journal articles. In one of the articles, the borrowed text appeared in quotes from subjects the professor, Jason Arday, claimed to have interviewed himself.

But after Arday enlisted Carter-Ruck, one of the United Kingdom’s leading defamation law firms, to send Times Higher Education a letter, the publication spiked the story, according to three sources who spoke to Retraction Watch.

Carter-Ruck is a famous (and/or infamous) pit bull libel firm in London. From founder Peter Carter-Ruck’s 2003 obituary in the Telegraph:

Peter Carter-Ruck

22 December 2003 • 12:02am

Peter Carter-Ruck, the libel lawyer who died on Friday aged 89, had an unrivalled client list and a uniquely fearsome reputation in the offices of newspaper and magazine editors and rival solicitors. …

He was the author of the standard work on libel and slander. His clients included Princes Elizabeth of Toro, Stewart Granger, Robert Maxwell, Diana Lamplugh, Randolph Churchill, Sir James Goldsmith and Lucian Freud. He also acted for many members of the Conservative Party, including Neil Hamilton, Norman Lamont, Michael Heseltine, Norman Tebbit, Nigel Lawson, Cecil Parkinson and Edwina Currie.

Yet he was perhaps best known for is regular run-ins with Private Eye. “I’d feel neglected if a few weeks went by without a letter from Carter-Ruck,” the magazine’s editor Ian Hislop once said. Private Eye would retaliate to his writs by misspelling his last name. “It is a very, very amusing magazine,” Carter-Ruck admitted. “But they lack any sort of sensitivity and can sometimes be very hurtful.”

In 1989 Carter-Ruck publicly attacked the £600,000 damages awarded to Sonia Sutcliffe against the magazine and was invited to an Eye lunch, an occasion he attended with some trepidation. Not long afterwards, he asked if, in the new spirit of friendship, they would now stop printing the first letter of Ruck as an F. Their response, not unpredictably, was to print the first letter of Carter as an F as well. “I think my relationship with Private Eve is now definitely hate,” he said later.

Back to Retraction Watch:

One of the sources was David Sanders, a biochemist at Purdue University in Indiana, and a sleuth who contributes to the Times Higher Education on topics related to academic misconduct. He reviewed a 63-page dossier of text comparisons prepared by the publication last year and came back with his own findings. “There is no question that there is extensive plagiarism,” Sanders told us.

The allegations against Arday finally emerged last week following a Substack post from Nathan Cofnas, a philosopher at the University of Ghent in Belgium. Cofnas, who is known for his controversial writings on racial differences,

Cofnas got fired by Cambridge during the Racial Reckoning for endorsing a hereditarian perspective on racial differences in average IQ. A Belgian jurist recently demanded his arrest in an op-ed. He hasn’t been arrested … yet.

independently identified dozens of passages in Arday’s 2015 dissertation that were taken nearly verbatim from the 2009 dissertation of Paula Zwozdiak-Myers, a reader at Brunel University of London. Cofnas says he learned about the unpublished Times Higher Education story only after he began working on his own piece about Arday.

Arday is known for his work on topics related to race, inequality and education. His interest was more than scholarly: From humble beginnings as a nonverbal autistic kid in South London, he became, at age 37, the youngest Black person appointed to a professorship at Cambridge.

That achievement was covered by the BBC, CBS News, and Good Morning America. He is listed as a collaborator on more than $10 million in recent grants from two U.K. funding agencies, U.K. Research and Innovation and the National Institute for Health and Care Research.

Arday’s achievements have not been limited to academia. He has said he has raised more than $8 million for charity and performed impressive athletic feats, including running 30 marathons in 35 days. His forthcoming memoir, Great and Unfortunate Things, is slated to be published next month by Simon & Schuster.

Arday did not respond to three requests for comment sent to his Cambridge email address, but during a plenary he gave at the British Sociological Association conference in Edinburgh this April, he spoke vividly about recent attacks on Black academics.

“You get the email and they say you conducted academic misconduct. And you think to yourself, ‘Well this is incredible. I’m on the back foot here. How do I defend myself against this machine?” he said.

A whole bunch of the sociologists in the audience likely believed Professor Arday that there exists a giant machine out there to destroy black heroes like Arday.

Sociologists these days are …

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Here’s a graph of the total fertility rate (projected births per woman) among non-Hispanic white women from 1990 through 2025:

White fertility went up a little around the turn of the millennium, then rose notably during the Housing Bubble of 2006-2007. It then dropped rapidly during the Housing Bust, then stabilized in 2012-2014. But then came the rather mysterious drop from 2015 through 2019.

This new paper argues that (young) children haven’t been getting more expensive since 1990 relative to spending on adults:

The Child Cost Index

Christina Patterson Chicago Booth, CEPR & NBER Heather Sarsons Chicago Booth, CEPR & NBER

July 2026

Despite rapid inflation in childcare and tuition prices, the goods-and-services CCI closely tracks adult prices, as these increases are offset by children’s lower exposure to shelter and by slower price growth elsewhere in the child basket. Households devote substantially more real resources to children than they did in 1990, but this increase parallels the growth of real adult consumption rather than reflecting a child-specific rise in prices. A similar offsetting pattern appears for parental time: the rising value of women’s time is largely counterbalanced by declining motherhood penalties in earnings and work hours, so forgone market work adds little to relative cost growth. The main departure from this stability comes from the growing amount of leisure displaced by childcare; valuing that time raises the CCI, although the magnitude depends on the shadow value assigned to leisure.

… Our central finding is that the monetary price of a child-year has risen at almost exactly the pace of the adult consumption it displaces. Children are expensive, but by the standard tools economists use to measure price change over time, there is little evidence that their relative price has risen dramatically. Only when we price parents’ forgone leisure does the relative cost of children increase meaningfully.

Declining leisure among parents has been noted before, perhaps most vividly in Dave Barry’s 2015 article about all the wild parties his parents threw in the 1950s. Note that Dave’s father was a Protestant minister, they had four children, and lived in Armonk, NY down the road from the IBM headquarters.

My guess is that labor-intensive child-rearing (e.g., today’s intensive concern about speaking to your small children to expand their vocabularies) got fashionable among the upper middle class awhile later, and has spread down the class scale in this century.

Nobody talks much about this, but my impression is that lower class people have gotten more responsible since perhaps 2008 about having children and how they bring them up. So, a lot of the big drop in fertility over the last half of a generation seems to have to do with people further down the social scale taking to heart higher class habits about when they can afford to bring children into this world.

But some of the study’s assumptions seem doubtful:

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Here’s an op-ed in The Guardian in The Summer of George:

If we want a more equal Britain, we must teach its true black history

Sat 13 Jun 2020 07.00 EDT

This article is more than 6 years old

Jason Arday

Dr Jason Arday is an assistant professor of sociology at Durham University

British curriculums ignore the atrocities of empire and the contributions of black people. These must be acknowledged

Martin Luther King Jr once said: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

Really? Wow, I’ve never heard anybody quote that line before. This Professor Arday must be a genius scholar to have discovered that MLK “arc of the moral universe” quote deep in the archives.

From The Guardian in 2023:

Jason Arday: he learned to talk at 11 and read at 18 – then became Cambridge’s youngest Black professor

Diagnosed with autism as a child, Arday found his voice through speech therapy and his mother’s unflagging support. Now he is using it with the same tenacity that saw him run 30 marathons in 35 days

By Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff

Tue 11 Jul 2023 05.00 EDT

Jason Arday believes in destiny. The University of Cambridge’s youngest Black professor, he joined its faculty of education in March 2023, at 37.

Arday’s official title is “Professor of Sociology of Education,” which does not sound terribly rigorous.

Before then, he had been a professor at Glasgow and Durham universities; published three books of academic work, mainly focusing on race and education; and, most importantly to him, raised more than £5m by doing charity work. All of this he has squeezed into a time period where he was learning to navigate the world with neurodivergence; Arday didn’t speak until he was 11 and couldn’t read or write until the age of 18.

It’s an unlikely story, he concedes, one that has made headlines and changed his life irrevocably. But he believes he was always going to do something great. “I knew I was destined to do something,” he says with a smile. “But I didn’t know it’d be this, admittedly.”

Arday’s story is one of grand heights, but also of profound lows. He has barely slept over the past 15 years, he says, working through most nights – often on his academic and charity work, but sometimes just to make ends meet.

“Barely slept over the past 15 years?”

Until recent years, he struggled to find the balance he needed in the chronically underfunded academic sector, replete with zero-hours contracts. …

Arday grew up on a council estate in Clapham in south London to Ghanaian parents. …

Of course, another major facet of his upbringing was the fact that he couldn’t speak, read or write for much of his childhood. Diagnosed with autism and global developmental delay when he was three, he was taught sign language when he was four. When he was 11, after “thousands of hours” of speech therapy and support from his mother, who used music and lyrics to help him understand how words flowed and fit together, something clicked one day.

“The experts made some pretty bleak diagnoses about how I would have to be in assisted living,” he says. “But on that fateful day, I said hello.” He stopped using sign language shortly after.

… “When you’re cognitively impaired, you make sense of things in different ways.” …

Arday does not view himself as intellectual, necessarily, but as someone who has determination. In 2010, he ran 30 marathons in 35 days to raise money for charity. “If you have the will, it will always supersede skill,” he says, smiling. …

Arday is humbled by the recent attention he has received in the press and from the public since his appointment, he says. He has had more than 200,000 emails from all over the world, many from well-wishers. …

To explain his ideology, he leans on the fighting lessons of Rocky Balboa: “You’re going to be in a very archaic, hostile environment, to some extent, which will be predicated by people outside of that who may not want your existence in that place. But you’ve got to be willing to take the hits, because the greater mission is to achieve equality, and to achieve diversity, and to make that space as big as possible.” …

“We’re talking about thousand-year-old white establishments. And anytime you’re a person of colour that penetrates those legacy spaces, it can be difficult for some people to digest or manage. Our mission, in some respects, is very simple. It goes back to what we’ve always tried to do, which is to democratise education information and redistribute resources as far and wide as possible to those most in need. And those two institutions have a lot of capital.”

Oxford and Cambridge have a staggering £21bn in wealth between them, according to a 2018 report from the Guardian. On a practical level, when it comes to redistributing resources and capital, Arday is engaging in as many schemes and interventions as he can to give education access to marginalised communities.

“A lot of it is about going into schools, across the gambit of intersectionality, not just focused on race, and really giving minoritised groups the opportunity to be in these spaces and not just to absorb these thousand-year-old buildings, but to express themselves,” he says.

Now, an unsurprising revelation:

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Here’s “Hannibal” from Budweiser’s 1975-2000 series of 30 Afrocentrist heroic paintings, “The Great Kings and Queens of Africa.”

From my UPI article in 2002:

Denzel as Afrocentrist Hannibal?

Press reports that 20th Century Fox is considering making an epic movie starring Denzel Washington as Hannibal - not the cannibal, but the North African general who led his war elephants over the Alps to surprise ancient Rome by attacking from the north - are reviving controversies over Afrocentrism and just how “ethnically correct” movies need to be.

Washington is one of Hollywood’s most honored and consistently profit-generating leading men. Washington can “open” a movie big, and with the kind of budget this costume war movie would require, that’s a crucial consideration.

Washington is black. But, what was Hannibal?

After many decades in which white actors played non-white characters, such as John Wayne’s curious portrayal of the Mongolian Genghis Khan in 1956’s “The Conqueror,” should non-whites like Washington now play ancient figures who were probably Caucasian, such as Hannibal? How important is it for actors to racially match their characters?

Hollywood will have to come up with some solution to the complications that Afrocentrism and other forms of identity politics pose for the casting of ancient epics, because a huge number of these sword-and-sandal films are being planned. The box-office success of the Oscar-winner “Gladiator” and the 30% increase in revenue over the last two years have combined to allow Hollywood’s more macho and grandiose moguls, directors, and stars to seriously propose filming some of their favorite role models - the conquerors of the ancient world.

These include at least four potential Alexander the Great projects and two Julius Caesars.

The latter might raise the hugely controversial issue of the race of Caesar’s lover Cleopatra.

One thing to keep in mind about rumored Hollywood productions, though, is that after all is said and done, a lot more is said than done. Southern California is full of respected, veteran screenwriters driving S-class Mercedes who have never had one of the numerous scripts they’ve sold actually made into a movie.

Meanwhile, Revolution Studios is trying to beat Washington’s Hannibal with its own biopic of the Carthaginian military genius who posed the gravest threat to Rome in its first thousand years of existence.

It would feature Vin Diesel, the action star of “The Fast and the Furious.”

Diesel doesn’t like to discuss his racial background in detail, other than to say, “I am truly multiracial.” He appears to have some black ancestry, but strikes many as Mediterranean-looking. “When people view me they don’t necessarily see a black man,” he notes.

To some Afrocentrists, Hannibal ranks not far behind Cleopatra as a black hero. Since 1975, Anheuser-Busch has been promoting its corporate image in the African-American community by commissioning and distributing portraits of “The Great Kings and Queens of Africa.” These attractive and forceful paintings include a Hannibal who is depicted as even blacker than Washington. In the beer company’s view, Hannibal more closely resembled Michael Clarke Duncan, the imposing 6’5” African-American actor who earned an Oscar nomination for “The Green Mile.”

Generally speaking, white liberals are more or less clueless that giant American corporations have been promoting historically dubious but fun Afrocentrist myths for a half-century.

In contrast, non-Afrocentrists interested in the classical world have generally not reacted enthusiastically to the rumors that Washington might play Hannibal.

Mary Lefkowitz, a leading classicist from Wellesley, and author of the anti-Afrocentrist bestseller “Not Out of Africa,” told UPI that Hannibal “came from one of the elite families of Carthage; his ancestors were settlers from Phoenicia [in modern Lebanon], Semites like other peoples in that area of the world. They spoke Phoenician, a Semitic language.”

However, a 2025 ancient DNA study by David Reich’s lab found that most Carthaginians traced their ancestry to the Greeks rather than Phoenicians. From Nature:

23 April 2025

Punic people were genetically diverse with almost no Levantine ancestors

Nature volume 643, pages 139–147 (2025)

Abstract

The maritime Phoenician civilization from the Levant transformed the entire Mediterranean during the first millennium bce1,2,3. However, the extent of human movement between the Levantine Phoenician homeland and Phoenician–Punic settlements in the central and western Mediterranean has been unclear in the absence of comprehensive ancient DNA studies. Here, we generated genome-wide data for 210 individuals, including 196 from 14 sites traditionally identified as Phoenician and Punic in the Levant, North Africa, Iberia, Sicily, Sardinia and Ibiza, and an early Iron Age individual from Algeria. Levantine Phoenicians made little genetic contribution to Punic settlements in the central and western Mediterranean between the sixth and second centuries bce, despite abundant archaeological evidence of cultural, historical, linguistic and religious links4. Instead, these inheritors of Levantine Phoenician culture derived most of their ancestry from a genetic profile similar to that of Sicily and the Aegean. Much of the remaining ancestry originated from North Africa, reflecting the growing influence of Carthage5. However, this was a minority contributor of ancestry in all of the sampled sites, including in Carthage itself.

Generally speaking, most ancient DNA studies have confirmed traditional expectations. So I’m not sure I would wholly buy this one about Carthaginians being Greeks rather than Phoenicians until it is replicated.

Back to my 2002 article:

Carthage was a colony founded by the Phoenicians in what is now modern Tunisia, which is only about 125 miles southwest of Sicily. Philippe Gouillou, a French evolutionary psychologist who spent the last two years in that North African country, laughingly commented about his former hosts, who aren’t always terribly sensitive towards diversity, “I imagine Tunisians would hate Hannibal being considered as a black African.”

Indeed, in the depictions of Hannibal on Carthaginian coins, he appears to be a strong, handsome Semitic white man. Of course, ancient artworks weren’t always perfectly realistic.

One participant in an online discussion group about the Roman Empire asked rhetorically if anyone would think it odd if Hollywood cast Swedish muscle-man Dolph Lundgren as the brilliant Southern African military innovator Shaka Zulu. “Isn’t there enough ignorance without deliberately setting out to make more?”

Salim George Khalaf, a North Carolinian of Lebanese origin who runs the informative Phoenicia.org website, commented, “Although Washington is a great actor, for him to play Hannibal would be joke.”

On the other hand, as Lefkowitz noted, “Of course, the Phoenician colonists could have intermarried with native African peoples.”

Richard Poe is a white conservative political pundit. He wrote a sophisticated Afrocentrist book called “Black Spark, White Fire,” which argued against Lefkowitz’s view that the ancient Egyptians had very little influence on Greek culture. Poe said, “Nobody really knows to what extent the Phoenicians did or did not intermarry with Africans during the hundreds of years that followed the colonization of Carthage.” He suggested, “For this reason, it is possible that Hannibal might have resembled either Diesel or Washington, but it’s perhaps more probable that he resembled Diesel.”

Still, the indigenous people of Africa’s northern coast west of the Nile were largely white. (Today, the U.S. Census Bureau classifies individuals of North African descent as white.) The largest North African ethnic group of that time was the Berbers, many of whom are quite European looking. Among the Rifian Berbers of Morocco today, redheads are as common as in Ireland.

Probably the best-known Berber is the star of the French national soccer team, Zinedine Zidane, who looks quite German.

Yet, there are also other Berbers tribes who have some clear sub-Saharan black admixture. Further, there are some quite black occupational castes in North Africa, such as the blacksmiths. When exactly the bulk of these admixtures took place is hard to say. Although the Nile provided an easy road from the Equator through the Sahara desert to the Mediterranean,

No, the Sud swamp on the Nile that divides the brown people of Sudan from the black people of South Sudan was pretty much impenetrable by the ancients.

crossing the central Sahara to Carthage was much harder, especially before the domestication of the camel.

The racial diversity of North Africans offers the more erudite Afrocentrists a clever response. If you use the old American “one drop of blood rule” for defining who is black, then you could argue that there is a strong probability that Hannibal was “black” in the Jim Crow sense of having at least one black ancestor somewhere in his family tree.

The passions these kind of questions arouse make casting politically delicate.

Many theatre companies these days use colorblind casting. For example, the prominent Goodman Theatre in Chicago blithely cast a black actor as a 17th Century Italian Cardinal in Bertolt Brecht’s “Galileo.”

Film is a rather different medium, however, and moviemakers obsess over whether actors would look right to audiences during close-ups. As fans travel more and become more sophisticated about how different peoples from around the world look, this puts added pressure on casting.

The more ethnically correct the casting tries to be, the narrower the talent pool it can draw from. Lebanese-American actors who would be perfect as Carthaginian aristocrats include the distinguished F. Murray Abraham, the Oscar winner for “Amadeus,” and the respected Tony Shalhoub (”Monk” on the USA Network). Yet, both are a little too old for the sword-swinging Hannibal, so they’d be better for supporting roles. It might not be easy to find a Lebanese or Tunisian action star who can carry such a massive movie.

Hollywood has a long tradition of using stars to portray ancient North Africans who, like Diesel, are hard to pin down racially. The exotic European and Mongolian Yul Brynner made a striking Pharaoh in “The Ten Commandments,” and wrestler The Rock (who is Samoan and black) was a likable hero in “The Scorpion King.”

Poe argued, “Using racially ambiguous stars in some roles is not only a reasonable precaution, but also probably gives a relatively accurate picture of how many people in ancient North African societies looked.”

Several ancient world enthusiasts who objected to Washington as Hannibal, approved of Diesel in the role. Khalaf of the Center for Phoenician Studies enthused over the star of the upcoming “XXX, “Vin Diesel is the absolute best choice for playing Hannibal. He looks very Mediterranean, much like the us who can trace our origin to Phoenician blood.”

And here’s my 2004 review of Troy:

Troy

reviewed by Steve Sailer

The American Conservative, June 7, 2004

The lavish, and deserved, success of 2000’s “Gladiator” set off an almost comical frenzy among Hollywood’s he-man stars and directors to mount stupendous productions honoring the pagan heroes with whom they most closely identify. Back in the 1930s, studios would have hustled out numerous knock-offs of Ridley Scott’s sword-and-sandal hit within a year, but in today’s entrepreneurial industry, the pace of dealmaking is ponderous and the chance of a particular project making it all the way to your local multiplex is shaky.

For example, veteran director Michael Mann (”Ali”) tried to launch movies about a couple of guys he feels he can relate to: Julius Caesar and King Leonidas of Sparta, hero of Thermopylae. But in Hollywood, after all is said and done, more is said than done, so don’t expect to see either any time soon.

Similarly, Denzel Washington was attached to an Afrocentrist life of Hannibal (not the Cannibal, but the elephant-bestriding Carthaginian general). Vin Diesel’s more ethnically correct Hannibal, though, now looks likelier to get off the ground.

At one point, Oliver Stone, Mel Gibson, Martin Scorsese, and, improbably enough, Baz Luhrmann of “Moulin Rouge” were all vying to make Alexander the Great movies. The only right and fitting solution would have been for each to lead his cast of thousands into a four-way mass melee upon an agreed-upon battlefield, with the last auteur standing getting to make his conqueror epic while the losers lick their wounds. Disappointingly, a humdrum race to organize financing and logistics instead ensued, with Stone the apparent winner.

Yet, the laurel for being the first to wrap a “Gladiator” facsimile goes to Wolfgang Petersen, director of “Das Boot” and “The Perfect Storm.” His seriously barbaric “Troy,” starring Brad Pitt as the wrathful Achilles, turns out to be worth the 48 month wait.

Just as Achilles is destined to fight Hector, prince of Troy, Pitt’s looks and talent have always seemed to foreordain that he’ll challenge Tom Cruise, prince of blockbusters, for leading man supremacy. Although Pitt resembles a younger Robert Redford, he seems to lack the necessary Legend in His Own Mind gene. Notorious as an underachiever who sells more magazines than movie tickets, Pitt has favored quirky roles better suited to Steve Buscemi.

Yet, by starring in this super-colossal $185 million extravaganza as fabled Achilles, a hero driven solely by his lust for eternal fame, Pitt finally has submitted to his fate. Of course, Achilles is such an antihero that Pitt isn’t fully sacrificing his indie-cred. (The 40-year-old’s insanely ripped abs and ferociously masculine persona make me wonder whether he turned to hormonal help.)

The film works best for semi-educated folks like me who know the characters of Homer’s Iliad, but had forgotten the finer points of his plot. Homeric aficionados will sniff that young screenwriter David Benioff cut the meddlesome Olympian gods while expanding the plot beyond Homer’s tight focus to include such traditional crowd-pleasers as the launching of the thousand ships and the delivering of the Trojan Horse.

Even more heretically, Benioff makes up new scenes. For instance, Homer violated Screenwriting 101 by killing off his star before the boffo finale, so Benioff sends Achilles with the commandos inside the Trojan Horse.

The gay crowd will moan that Achilles’ pal Patroclus has been turned into a chaste cousin, but ancient Greek bisexuality was so radically unlike modern American homosexuality that gays shouldn’t have proprietary rights over Achilles’ depiction.

I fear that Petersen, a 63-year-old German, may too generously estimate the classical learning of America’s movie-going lumpen-youth. For example, the wily but likeable tactician played by Sean Bean is introduced only as “the King of Ithaca.” A less trusting soul would have explained to the teen audience that he’s Odysseus. (”The one who got, like, his own spin-off sequel, you know?”)

Moreover, “Troy,” like Homer, refuses to tell them for whom to root. The minding-their-own-business Trojans are nicer, but the belligerent Greeks are winners.

Still, the youth market may find the Bronze Age warriors comprehensible since their prickly, pre-chivalric trash-talking ethos prefigures that of post-chivalric African-American athletes like the petulant hoops prodigy Allen Iverson and rappers like the murdered Tupac Shakur. Achilles sulking in his tent because King Agamemnon insulted his honor by taking his spoils-of-war sweetheart Briseis is surprisingly like Kobe Bryant moping on the court because Shaquille O’Neal dissed him by demanding the basketball.

My review of Alexander by Oliver Stone from later in 2004:

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Back in 2020, I created a popular tweet thread on 1945 as the dividing line in the history of architecture, using city halls in upscale California communities like Beverly Hills (1932) vs. Malibu (1978) to provide apples to apples comparisons. I wrote in 2024:

You might well say that there is no disputing taste. But I think I’ve come up with an objective measure of public sentiment regarding the beauty of public buildings: Simply measure how much demand there is from brides to be married there.

For example, I doubt if the San Jose city hall is booked up as long in advance for weddings as the stupendous 1915 beaux arts San Francisco city hall, where Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio were married. Tom Wolfe admiringly called it “this Golden Whore’s dream of paradise ... it’s like some Central American opera house ... a veritable angels’ choir of gold … and all kept polished as if for the commemoration of the Generalissimo’s birthday.”

I only recently figured out fifty years after first reading Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers that by “Golden Whore,” Wolfe was referring to Mrs. DiMaggio, but not so blatantly as to get punched out by Mr. DiMaggio.

Lately, there’s been a not unreasonable trend toward mid-priced weddings at fancy city halls.

The Washington Post reports:

All the cool girls want chic courthouse weddings

City hall was once a go-to option for couples looking to elope, save money or simply get their wedding over with. Now it’s a venue with a recognizable aesthetic.

July 12, 2026

By Megan Buerger

… Rosser and Preka belong to a class of couples who are effectively establishing a new wedding tier centered on city hall.

For decades, the market offered two options: the $35 license-and-done or the full production with its 18-month runway. The new middle path takes the courthouse moment and builds a single, art-directed day around it — hair and makeup in a hotel suite, a styled portrait somewhere in the city, a buyout at a Michelin-starred restaurant — for a fraction of the traditional budget and a fraction of the stress. “It’s a chance to design a whole day with their favorite people in a way that feels genuinely elevated,” said Kait Peña, a wedding photographer, “for a lot less than bringing 150 people to Italy.” …

In addition to fewer rules, lower costs (a recent study by the Knot, the popular wedding-planning website, says the average American wedding costs $34,000) and more flexibility, courthouse ceremonies carry a certain cachet. Jenny Fu, a photographer who arranged her own pandemic elopement outside a courthouse that she loved purely for its architecture, offers a fashion analogy: quiet luxury. “We’ve been bombarded with so much luxury in your face, like, ‘How rich am I,’ that people want to do something more intimate to balance that out,” she said.

But some courthouses are more romantic than others. For example, at the opposite end of the romance scale from the all-world 1915 San Francisco city hall is the efficient but forgettable post-1945 Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk office in Norwalk:

Now that courthouse weddings are in fashion, it’s easy to see which kinds of courthouses appeal most to brides. The Los Angeles Times reports:

The fierce competition to get married at California’s most popular public buildings

By Sonja Sharp

July 14, 2026

… “Less than a decade ago, courthouse weddings were still the purview of camera-shy celebrities, midlife second marriages and mother-to-be brides. But since the COVID-19 pandemic, their popularity has boomed, transforming certain courthouses and municipal buildings into sought-after locales to tie the knot.

Snagging an appointment to elope has become almost as difficult as scoring Olympic tickets.

In Santa Barbara, marriage appointments open 90 days in advance, with new slots released every hour while the courthouse is open. On a recent weekday, slots in October vanished in less than five minutes. …

The shift toward boutique legal ceremonies has transformed the marriage business and the municipal buildings where such nuptials take place, turning elopement from a breezy wedding alternative into a formal contact sport.

“It books up so fast, you have to be online at the exact time [of day] you plan on having your appointment,” explained the photographer, whose viral 2024 snaps helped supercharge the Santa Barbara courthouse’s popularity on social media. “A lot of my brides get stressed out.” …

Santa Barbara’s Moorish Revival hall of justice has long been Southern California’s most coveted civil marriage spot. Vice President Kamala Harris and Doug Emhoff took their vows in its storied Mural Room in 2014. Reality TV star Kourtney Kardashian and Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker were wed on the steps outside in 2022.

But officials say demand has exploded in recent years, thanks in part to Pinterest and TikTok.

“We see dozens a day, starting at 8 o’clock in the morning,” said Lee, the county supervisor and officiant for the day, whose office is across the street. “I see them line up right there outside the doors.”

The race to the clerk’s window is not limited to Santa Barbara. Other popular courthouses such as the L.A. County Courthouse in Beverly Hills and the Old County Courthouse in Santa Ana have seen similar surges in demand.

But no municipal building in the state compares to …

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Is race a social construct?

Or is it a good idea?

From the New York Times science section:

This Lifesaving Genetics Tool Works Best if You’re White

Genetic prediction models are poised to revolutionize medicine. But because they have been trained on European DNA, they threaten to widen health care disparities.

By Emily Baumgaertner Nunn

July 20, 2026

The National Institutes of Health recently announced a remarkable achievement: the world’s largest database of human genomes, a repository of information that the agency says will help usher in a new era in personalized medicine.

Scientists are already developing clinical tools and techniques based on genomic information gathered from the agency’s All of Us program. One of the most promising? Polygenic risk scores. These can help predict a person’s likelihood of developing complex diseases, like cardiovascular disease and breast cancer, from as early as infancy.

But there’s a glaring problem: The tools were trained overwhelmingly on the DNA of people of European descent, so they often fail to accurately assess risks for anyone else. For some conditions, the forecasts for people of color are almost no better than flipping a coin.

Researchers are racing to correct the biases through advancements in modeling and widespread recruitment of minority groups. They fear that failing to close the gaps could worsen health care disparities — and prevent the technology from realizing its promise of helping to decrease chronic disease. …

For patients at the extremely high end of the risk distribution, the scores can offer a medical advantage, potentially giving doctors a decades-long runway to intervene. Those in the highest percentiles for a cardiovascular disease score, for instance, can be prescribed cholesterol-lowering statins earlier, potentially helping prevent some heart attacks and strokes.

But the entire premise rests on the data used to train the model in the first place. The UK Biobank — established in the early 2000s and widely considered a leading genomic trove — is overwhelmingly homogenous; roughly 94 percent of its participants are white. The Million Veteran Program, a repository run by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, is almost three-quarters white.

The cohort in the All of Us program, built by the N.I.H. with the goal of diversifying data, is still about 50 percent European, according to Alicia Martin, a statistical geneticist at the Broad Institute. …

The All of Us database was started in 2015. At last count, it has 297,549 participants.

… “You can’t just snap your fingers and overnight have a biobank from Africa, a biobank from India, a biobank from China that are all as large and open and comprehensive as the UK Biobank,” Dr. Martin said. “We can develop all the fancy statistical methods we want, but still not be able to overcome without more diverse representation.”

Other clinical tools could be affected by the ancestry bias, such as integrated artificial intelligence models that draw upon genomics and other biomedical data. Doctors who sequence a genome to look for rare mutations may also find genetic variants in patients of color that researchers have not studied enough to understand.

Genetic blind spots can also cause scientists to miss discoveries that benefit everyone. One example: the PCSK9 gene. Scientists found that a rare mutation that occurred mostly in a small proportion of Black people could naturally reduce the risk of developing coronary heart disease by 88 percent. That set off a race to develop drugs that mimic the mutation for people of all races and ethnicities. But scientists only found the variant because one study in Dallas had ensured that its participant pool was more than half Black.

Major demographic events in history, like mass migrations,

Or warm weather

explain why genetic findings from people in Africa or of African descent are vital to study. Communities there have accumulated great genetic diversity over hundreds of thousands of years. By contrast, present-day Europeans descend from a small group of Africans who expanded out of Africa about 50,000 years ago. As a result, they have much less diversity.

Those losers, them.

Diversity is our strength!

“If you’re going to pick a population to study for the sake of everybody’s good, the Europeans are the worst you could choose,” said Jay Kaufman, an epidemiologist at McGill University who has written about race and genomics.

The most obvious solution is to recruit more people of color, something the All of Us program says it has prioritized. The group works with local partner organizations like churches and community health centers to host discussion sessions and enroll rural communities through a mobile clinic. It also returns individualized health findings and genetic risks to the participants to establish a sense of reciprocity.

Still, recruitment can be an upstream endeavor, particularly in the United States, which has a history of mistreatment of people of color, from the Tuskegee Syphilis Study to discriminatory sickle-cell screening to the story of Henrietta Lacks, a Black patient whose cancer cells were used for research without her knowledge or consent.

Oh dear …

“Why would you contribute if you’ve been wronged in that way in the past?” Dr. Martin said. “There is some earned mistrust that needs to be addressed — to have that level of trust to be willing to say, ‘Take my data, monitor it for decades, do whatever you want with it.’”

After all, nobody ever expects non-whites to do anything positive for the rest of humanity.

In the meantime, researchers designing polygenic risk scores have found technical ways to diversify data. Modeling tools can now pull weighted information from a variety of sources simultaneously, rather than drawing only from the largest European cohorts and then forcing their algorithms onto other groups. Mount Sinai Health System in New York and U.C.L.A. in Los Angeles, for example, have both established more diverse biobanks than the UK Biobank, with each of them containing tens of thousands of genomes.

Scientists also draw from rapidly growing biobanks in China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, which bolster the accuracy of polygenic risk scores for East Asian groups. Localized initiatives are underway in Peru, Mexico, Qatar and elsewhere. And a continentwide program called H3Africa is collecting genetic data in African populations and supporting efforts by scientists there to study how genes and environments cause diseases.

Academic networks have also tapped sources beyond biobanks, integrating data from large, disease-specific cohort projects, including the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities Study, or ARIC, which intentionally enrolled thousands of Black participants from North Carolina and Mississippi.

For breast cancer, a project called Confluence aggregates data from over 300 individual studies across 62 countries, providing information from 400,000 breast cancer cases and more than 1.5 million controls. The influx of data from minority groups is being used to sharpen breast cancer polygenic risk scores for everyone.

Obviously, white people with breasts, those racists haters (but are they woen and thus holy?) are trying to hide this data from non-white people with breasts.

Private genomics companies and start-ups looking to develop and sell polygenic risk scores do not typically have access to those vast networks. Until recently, they relied almost exclusively on data from the UK Biobank. But the All of Us program recently expanded its policies so that companies can use its more diverse data.

Will all of these efforts, taken together, be enough? It depends on whom you ask. Some experts argue that even an ethnically representative data pool is still imperfect, since variations in other factors — socioeconomic status, health access, age or even sex — can still cause a score’s accuracy to decay. Others believe that the statistical issue was overblown in the first place.

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Demographically, the cast of The Odyssey is much like that seen in a high school musical production of My Fair Lady. (It even has a girl playing a boy.) Likewise, the casting of The Odyssey seems slightly amateurish.

It’s not at all uncommon in adventure epics to portray characters from far away, such as T.E. Lawrence in Lawrence of Arabia, Gurkha soldier Billy Fish in The Man Who Would Be King, and Azeem in the Kevin Costner Robin Hood. But these kind of movies traditionally took pains to offer an explanation for why, say, Morgan Freeman is in medieval Sherwood Forest. The backstories of how they got there are part of the adventure.

But The Odyssey is very different in that it doesn’t deign to offer any explanations for its distracting casting. Lupita Nyong’o’s Helen of Troy isn’t, say, a princess of the Aethiopes who was forced into an arranged marriage with Spartan king Menelaus. No, she’s just Helen of Troy, no explanation given.

Similarly, the Korean crewman who jumps overboard after hearing the Sirens’ song doesn’t have a fascinating tale of how he walked 10,000 miles from Korea. No, he’s presumably just another member of the deep-rooted Korean-Ithacan community. Or something.

That of course raises questions, such as:

• Why is Himesh Patel shouting “We are Greeks from Ithaca”?

• How did Latinx casting activist John Leguizamo, who claims to be Puerto Rican but appears to be upper class Colombian, get to the Old World from the New World 2700 years before Columbus?

But these days, it’s widely considered as impolite to question Christopher Nolan’s casting decisions as it would be to inquire why the introverted Chinese boy with the 800 math SAT score got the role in the school musical as Liza Doolittle’s cockney dad:

But there are other reasons as well.

A lot of people these days seem to actually believe that it’s a white supremacist myth that classical Greeks, much less Bronze Age Greeks, were white. They really do believe that many famous Greeks from before Alexander the Great’s vast Hellenistic Empire were black, Indian, Chinese, or whatever.

They just had to be.

Where, you might wonder, did these nonwhite ancient Greeks all go?

But why do you want to know? Are you a racist?

A few people may know better. But many of them find it unthinkable to point it out. The very concept that whites have any homelands to which they are indigenous seems dangerously racist.

So, here’s a big question: What does the ancient DNA say?

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Christopher Nolan has many strong suits, but a sense of fun does not rank high among them.

Thus, the first time on his journey that Matt Damon as Odysseus smiles may be about two-thirds through The Odyssey when he is having his crew lash him to the mast so he can listen to the singing of the Sirens. Damon isn’t as young as he used to be, but he’s still got a movie star smile when Nolan finally allows him to flash it about two hours into the movie. (Note: he may smile earlier in some family scene or when playing with his long-lived dog, but this is the first time he smiles during his famous adventure.)

Why doesn’t Nolan allow Odysseus to have some fun on his adventure? Because that might encourage young men to go on adventures, and we can’t have that!

Nor does Nolan have a sense of humor. I laughed once during The Odyssey, but I don’t believe anybody else did. I don’t know whether that bit I snorted at was supposed to be funny or not.

Nor does Nolan allow Damon to display any charisma. Throughout he must be, like Nolan, a Gloomy Gus. Even in her wildly over-the-top rave, the New York Times critic Manohla Dargis is forced to admit that Nolan doesn’t let his top three cast members show their stuff, which is normally pretty dire for a movie:

The performances are uniformly good,

Eh, most of the performances are fair-to-middling, with Robert Pattinson the best and John Leguizamo the worst.

though Damon’s Odysseus is tamped down and notably devoid of charisma, as if he were as hollow as the wood decoy. In action-adventure terms it’s a counterintuitive choice even if it serves Nolan’s tricky, more non-triumphalist ends.

Like a lot of people ever since, the ancients were divided on whether the Good Guys were the Greeks (Achaeans), such as Achilles and Odysseus, or the Trojans, such as Hector, who is more or less the best man in The Iliad. Note that the top college football team in Los Angeles in 2026 are the USC Trojans.

But, still, if you are going to pay money to see a movie about Odysseus, you want to see him doing cool stuff rather than psychologically suffering PTSD over past cool stuff he did like the Trojan Horse.

The usual solution for this is to have the hero look awesome as he smites his foes in the beginning of the movie, then suffer PTSD later on, then, somehow, reach a resolution. But Nolan is so morally austere that he can’t let Odysseus enjoy for awhile coming up with most famous trick in history, the Trojan Horse. (I actually wouldn’t disbelieve that the raised-Catholic Nolan, a colossally successful entrepreneur in an industry where your reputation depends in part upon how you treat others, is morally more upright than Achilles and Odysseus. But still …)

One upshot, though, is that few of the actors, Damon included, manage to hold you with the same emotional force that Nolan’s filmmaking does. Both Holland and especially Hathaway have bracingly strong moments, but his character has too little presence and hers remains shrouded in mystery, which Nolan expresses by filming her behind a latticed screen or the threads on her loom. Mother and son are sympathetic; they’re also routinely upstaged by Pattinson’s wildly enjoyable flop-sweating suitor whose demise you hunger for.

I wouldn’t call Robert Pattinson’s bad guy “wildly enjoyable,” but at least he was unleashed to entertain more than anybody else in the film.

On the other hand, tabulating Nolan’s shortcomings like this is rather like pointing out that Wilt Chamberlain couldn’t shoot free throws or outside jump shots. Those were definite weaknesses, but Wilt was still a giant who put up huge numbers.

Nonetheless …

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Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey were only two of the eight ancient books recounting the full story of the Trojan War. Many of the most famous episodes, such as the Trojan Horse and the sacking of Troy, the child sacrifice of Iphigenia by Agamemnon, and the murder of Agamemnon by his wife Clytemnestra in revenge, are not in Homer’s books. Instead, they are in ones we only know from summaries, fragments, Virgil’s Aeneid, stage tragedies based on their plots, and the like.

The six lost books of the Epic Cycle appear to have been written down by later authors to fill in the parts of the tale that Homer left out to focus on his two chosen topics, the wrath of Achilles and the long homecoming of Odysseus.

(By the way, this poses a problem for filmmakers of movies like Troy and The Odyssey. Audiences paying to see a film about the Trojan War based on Homer want to see, for example, the Trojan Horse, dammit. They don’t care if the Trojan Horse is not in The Iliad and is only briefly mentioned in The Odyssey. But film critics tend to be English majors who have read their Homer, so they tend to take pedantic pride in pointing out what’s not in Homer.)

All eight books, the two attributed to Homer and the other six, presumably emerged from the enormous Greek dark age oral tradition.

Importantly, the lost six were not seen in the ancient world as challenging Homer’s primacy in precedent or quality, but were instead created later to complement Homer’s two classics. In Aristotle’s Poetics, for example, the philosopher explains why The Iliad and The Odyssey are better works of literature than the rest. The others’ lesser reputations help explain why they didn’t survive intact.

Here’s Wikipedia’s table of how the eight books once fit together chronologically.

Here’s Edward N. Luttwak’s 2024 article in The New Criterion on the Epic Cycle.

These lost books of the Trojan War evidently inspired a terrific 2010 work of fiction, The Lost Books of The Odyssey by Zachary Mason, which I reviewed for Taki’s Magazine.

Mason is an interesting but not prolific writer because his Computer Science Ph.D. dissertation, A computational, corpus-based metaphor extraction system, was in artificial intelligence. So he can presumably make more money these days on his day job.

Mason’s conceit in The Lost Books of The Odyssey is that before the Homeric crystallization there once existed an immense body of alternative tellings of the Trojan War legends with the familiar characters such as Odysseus, Achilles, Agamemnon, Helen, Penelope, Athena, and so forth, but with wildly different plots in which the classic personalities make different (but not implausible) choices, and that he is presenting a new translation of a (fictitious) palimpsest of 44 short fragments.

I reread it a couple of years ago and enjoyed it just as much the second time.

Due to a kind of digital decay analogous to the physical decay suffered by papyrus manuscripts, my old writings are becoming harder to find and then read online. So, here’s a cleaned-up version of my 16-year-old review of The Lost Books of the Odyssey. …

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Overall: a good movie, but not as fine as his 2023 Oppenheimer or his 2017 Dunkirk.

Nolan, of course, is an extremely gifted director, whose fame and broad appeal remind me of Hitchcock’s 60-70 years ago.

So, I’m more inclined to dwell upon the fundamental problem with his Odyssey than upon its various virtues: Even though much of the movie was filmed in the Mediterranean, Nolan lacks a love of Mediterranean scenery, culture, or people.

Practically everybody else on Earth has a soft spot for the Mediterranean, but not Nolan.

He is, instead, a man of the North Atlantic and of America’s Great Lakes. A British-American dual citizen, the son of an Irish Catholic advertising man in England and an American stewardess turned English teacher, he grew up spending 9 months per year in London and his summers in Evanston, IL.

Homer, who was reportedly blind, frequently calls the Mediterranean “wine-dark.” But it’s actually bright blue … except in Nolan’s movie, where it’s the dull blue-gray of the Pacific off Malibu.

Back in the 1980s, films were typically shot in bright colors (e.g., see 1984’s modest budget Terminator). When James Cameron’s Terminator 2 appeared in 1991 in a muted blue-gray palette, it seemed brilliantly novel. But 35 years later, practically all movies are still subdued in color, even Nolan’s colossal budget Odyssey.

In fact, quite a bit of the movie could have been filmed on the sandy western coast of Michigan across from Evanston, with little loss in realism or beauty.

I was also frequently reminded of the setting and color palette of Nolan’s Dunkirk, which was filmed on the huge beaches where the rivers of northwestern Europe pour sand into the north Atlantic.

Culturally, Nolan is more in tune with the Vikings and Celts than with the ancient Greeks.

Hence, the main prop in the movie is a 114 foot Viking longboat, the Draken Harald Hårfagre, which a Norwegian zillionaire recently had built because Vikings are cool. However, the scene in which Matt Damon’s Odysseus and his crew must play for their lives in a soccer match against Erling Haaland’s Team Norway may strike some viewers as anachronistic.

And, while most of the world tends to find Mediterranean people good-looking and warmly extraverted, count Nolan out. He evidently strongly prefers people like himself of northern European ancestry, such as Matt Damon as Odysseus, Anne Hathaway as his wife Penelope, Tom Holland as his son Telemachus, and Robert Pattinson as the leader of the evil suitors for the hand of Penelope.

The three leads are basically fine (Damon has long been the star you sign if you can’t get Leonardo DiCaprio). Pattinson is interestingly well-cast as the villain trying to disinherit the proto-Hamlet Telemachus of his throne because Pattinson is so close to looking like the Platonic ideal of the Melancholy Dane. So it’s interesting to have the Hamlet-looking Pattinson play the anti-Hamlet.

Charlize Theron plays sorceress Calypso as a New Age hippie chick who waylays a wayward husband for seven idyllic, drug-enhanced years on the beach in Montecito, California before he finally breaks free and escapes to his wife in Pasadena.

Samantha Morton is good as Circe, a Celtic witch who casts a spell on Odysseus’s crew when they land in the Outer Hebrides or some place similarly far from the Mediterranean.

Nolan seems to have gone out of his way to avoid casting a Greek in any role, or even an Italian, Spaniard, Portuguese or Frenchman. Here’s …

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A forgotten episode of American innovation was the Major Indoor Soccer League, founded in 1978 near the peak of the success of the outdoor North American Soccer League, which was paying huge sums for aging foreign legends like Johan Cruyf, the Bobby Orr of the Netherlands who revolutionized the game by playing all over the field. The New York Cosmos signed Pele and Franz Beckenbauer and averaged over 40,000 in attendance for a few years.

There was much talk at the time that soccer’s conquest of America would be as inevitable as the metric system displacing the USA’s obsolete imperial measures, which the Ford Administration was promoting. Soon, we’d all have forgotten doomed American sports like tackle football and instead be watching soccer stars take penalty kicks from the 11 meter spot.

On the other hand, once they had a chance to see it, not all Americans turned out to be fully thrilled by soccer:

Playing soccer in 80,000 seat American football stadiums had multiple downsides for American fans:

1. They are more expensive to rent than smaller facilities

2. The crowd experience was desultory due to the less packed stands.

3. It’s hard to pick out the famous soccer player you’d come to see from the nobodies from all the way up in the stands.

4. And that world-renowned 30-something you wanted to boast of having seen might only touch the ball a few times per game.

5. In soccer, nothing very exciting happens far from the goals, but it takes a long time to advance the ball from one end of a football field to the other.

6. It’s hard to score with your feet against 11 defenders, so you have a lot of nil-nil draws.

To the American mind, indoor soccer looked like a solution: play 6-on-6 soccer on carpeted hockey rinks with capacities of around 10,000 to 20,000. Scoring would be higher, stars would handle the ball more, less time would be wasted in midfield, and the fans would be packed together.

And, indeed, the Major Indoor Soccer League did pretty well for a few years, averaging, it claimed, over 8,000 in attendance in the early 1980s. This was enough to start a bidding war for players with the outdoor North American Soccer League. The NASL struck back by starting its own indoor soccer circuit.

I had totally forgotten until several weeks into this World Cup, but I finally recalled paying to attend two indoor soccer matches in the 1980s. I believe one was the MISL and the other was the Los Angeles Aztecs of the NASL, who played at the Los Angeles Sports Arena in 1980-81.

My main memories of the Aztecs game is arriving with my friends and thinking, “Hey, we got lucky! Look at these great seats in the third row.” But it turned out there was nobody sitting much beyond the fifth row.

And practically no spectators were sitting behind either goal, which led to my single vivid memory of professional indoor soccer:

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An Elite N.Y.C. Public School Admitted 777 Students. Only 3 Were Black.

New York’s specialized high schools give disproportionately few seats to Black and Hispanic students, continuing a pattern that has drawn criticism.

By Matthew Haag

July 14, 2026

A disproportionately small number of Black and Hispanic students received admission offers to New York City’s elite public high schools for the upcoming academic year, continuing a pattern of racial and ethnic gaps that has existed for years despite promises by elected officials to address the divide.

You might also point out that not only has this disparity existed for decades in New York City, it exists all over the rest of the country too. Famous public exam schools like Thomas Jefferson in the D.C. suburbs and Lowell in San Francisco have the exact same problems getting equal percentages of each race to pass the entrance test.

And the problems blacks have making the cut in exam schools without the help of blatant racial preferences are particularly severe in liberal metropolises with multiracial populations, especially lots of Asian immigrants.

It’s hard to make the totality of facts fit the conventional wisdom that the great majority of the New York Times’ 13 million paying subscribers subscribe to, so many facts about exam schools are ignored or shoved to the back of the article.

About 62 percent of the students in the city’s public schools are Black or Hispanic. But at its eight most prestigious high schools, about 10 percent of the students in the incoming freshman class are expected to be Black or Hispanic, roughly the same as last year. About 80 percent of the seats went to Asian and white students.

Lumping Asians and whites is misleading, as we’ll finally be informed in the 13th and 14th paragraphs.

At Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, often considered the most selective of the city’s specialized high schools, three of the 777 offers were made to Black students, and 21 were for Hispanic students, together representing a nearly one-third decline from the previous freshman class.

But how many black students turned down Stuyvesant to go to a private school?

It doesn’t help attract black boys that the name of the school football team is the Stuyvesant Peglegs.

How many who could have passed Stuyvesant’s test got offered a scholarship by Dalton or Phillips Exeter?

For example, there is the lavishly funded Prep for Prep charity program in NYC. From Wikipedia:

Each year, a citywide “talent search” selects about 125 students—95 fifth-graders and 30 sixth-graders. To qualify for recruitment, 5th-graders must have a scaled score of 330 or above on the English Language Arts (ELA) test administered during their 4th-grade year or have scored in the 90th percentile on any standardized reading test administered in that year. 6th-graders must have a scaled score of 335 (90th percentile) or above on the ELA exam administered during their 5th-grade year. Applicants then undergo a series of interviews and further standardized testing to gain admission. Fifth- and sixth-graders are admitted into Prep for Prep and earn spots at leading day schools in New York City.

Program

Admitted students undergo a rigorous 14-month academic course known as the “Preparatory Component” before their sixth- or seventh-grade year, which includes two intensive seven-week summer sessions and after-school Wednesday and all-day Saturday classes during the intervening school year. Courses include History, Algebra, Pre-Algebra, Research, Latin, French, Spanish, Mandarin, Literature, Writing Conference, and Science, which includes biology, physics, and chemistry, Invictus, a sociology and psychology-based course, PIMAS (Problems and Issues in Modern American Society), term paper research, and Computer Science. On average, 60% of students complete this program and are placed in schools among three dozen leading New York City independent schools. These schools commit places for Prep for Prep students and almost $12 million annually in scholarships. Throughout the program and after high school graduation, students receive personal and academic counseling, college counseling, and career counseling, and participate in leadership and community development activities, parties, and trips for alumni.

The program also helps students after college with placement into positions at prestigious firms such as Goldman Sachs, Google, and J.P. Morgan Chase through corporate partnerships designed to expand diverse talent pools on Wall Street, in engineering, and across business.

No doubt there are other such efforts in New York.

I was involved in a similar charity in Chicago in the early 1990s. I tended to argue …

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For example, here’s the 7th Nolan Wells article on CNN:

A timeline of Nolan Wells’ disappearance, death and the unfolding investigation

By Danya Gainor

CNN’s Hanna Park, Chelsea Bailey, Ryan Young, Elizabeth Wolfe, Holly Yan and Sydney Bishop contributed to this report.

Updated 13 hr ago

In the days since the puzzling death of an 18-year-old, investigators have undertaken a painstaking effort to reconstruct the events that unfolded on Horn Island, a remote barrier island about 10 miles off the Mississippi coast.

The investigation has unfolded rapidly since Nolan Wells disappeared on the Fourth of July from the island he was visiting with high school friends. While those friends returned to the mainland, Wells’ body was found days later in the water.

As public interest escalates, investigators are working to piece together Wells’ final hours while his family continues to press for transparency and answers. The young man’s death has stoked speculation and distrust in part due to Mississippi’s fraught racial history and the fact that Wells appeared to be the only person of color in an image with friends on the trip.

Here’s a timeline of key developments in the case and where the investigation stands.

Wells graduated in 2025 from Ocean Springs High School in the coastal Mississippi town of Ocean Springs, just east of Biloxi. He then enrolled in Southwest Mississippi Community College, where he was a wide receiver on their football team, according to The Associated Press. …

And like countless Americans across the country, Wells set out to mark the July Fourth holiday on the water.

He joined his friends for a boat trip to Horn Island – a federally protected barrier island known for its untouched beaches, shifting shoreline and quiet isolation. It wasn’t uncommon for Wells to visit the island with friends, according to his family.

… In photos from the boat that day, the 18-year-old towers above his friends, his arm casually slung around their shoulders as he smiles for the camera. …

But by the time the group returned to the mainland that afternoon, a day that began as a holiday celebration took an unsettling turn: Wells was not with them. His family reported him missing the night of July 4, after they received a phone call around 11 p.m. from one of his friends.

What followed was an intense search effort that would soon end tragically. …

Wonsley said when she went through her son’s phone, it struck her as “too clean” because there were no videos or pictures in Snapchat from the day he was on the island.

“I know my child well … if he has a phone out all the time at home, he’s definitely going to have a phone out whenever he’s out and he’s doing things with his friends,” she told Coates. “So that was just really hard to believe that there was nothing there.” …

Sheriff John Ledbetter would later tell the AP: “From the people we’ve talked to, it sounds like he chose to stay on the island with the assumption that he was going to ride back to the mainland with someone else.” …

If someone had fallen into the water, Brian Trascher said, strong rip currents that day may have posed a risk. …

But hours later, the search for Wells ended with the news his family had feared most. A body matching Wells’ description was recovered from the water near the shoreline, officials said. …

There were no immediate signs of physical injury, Jackson County Coroner Bruce Lynd told CNN. The coroner’s office requested that the autopsy be conducted at the state medical examiner’s office because of the “condition” in which Wells’ body was found and to definitively determine whether there was any trauma or foul play, Lynd said.

Officials are still awaiting test results, including toxicology, before determining a cause of death, according to Lynd.

But underneath the anticipation, skepticism was mounting online over the accounts of Wells’ final hours with his friends and statements from police. …

A statement from the sheriff on July 6 that “no foul play was suspected” in Wells’ death seemed to only fuel frustration and anger on social media.

Many have looked at the photos of Wells, where he appears to be the only young Black man in group pictures, and sensed danger – a reminder of Mississippi’s fraught racist past many argue is still alive today.

Others have taken to social media to post about their own experiences of being the only person of color in predominantly White spaces, and the challenge that can bring.

The Wells family retained civil rights attorney Ben Crump on July 7 to represent them as the investigation into his death continues.

Ben Crump is the famous black lawyer involved with Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and George Floyd.

… A GoFundMe launched for Wells’ family to pay for his funeral expenses says he will be “forever loved. Forever remembered. Never Forgotten.”

Nolan Wells’ father, Elmore Wonsley, holds a news conference with family attorney Ben Crump and Rev. Al Sharpton after Wells’ death over the 4th of July weekend.

… Some public figures have also stepped up to help cover the family’s expenses. Civil rights activist and former football player Colin Kaepernick helped fund the independent autopsy, while filmmaker Tyler Perry will be covering funeral expenses, according to Crump.

Ben Crump, Al Sharpton, and Colin Kaepernick are on the case!

But of course there is a much more plausible racial angle to this story …

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Climate change becoming a major driver of child marriage across Asia and the Pacific

What can’t climate change do? It’s a floor wax and a desert topping!

By Claire Campbell

Thursday 9 July

In short:

The growing intensity of natural disasters across Asia is leading to increasing numbers of child marriages of girls, according to aid organisations.

They’re worried this year’s El Niño could exacerbate the issue of child marriage.

What’s next?

Advocates are calling for funding and resources around child marriage to be better integrated into climate change response and resilience programs.

Runa was 15 when she married a man she had never met.

Cyclone Remal had ripped through her camp in Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar region, killing her family’s chickens and ducks, which were the source of both their food and income.

Runa’s mother, who had become the sole income earner after her husband died a year earlier, then lost weeks of labouring work due to the natural disaster.

She could no longer financially support Runa, now 17, and her three brothers.

“She felt she had no choice but to arrange my marriage,” Runa told the ABC.

Twelve million girls are tipped to become child brides this year, according to Plan International.

Plan International defines a child bride as female who gets married before her 18th birthday. That would include Marilyn Monroe. Barack Obama Jr.’s mother was impregnated at age 17, but didn’t start to show until she was 18 when she briefly married Barack Obama Sr.

During the 1950s, about 16% of American females who got married were less than 18. (Presumably, a large fraction were pregnant or had recently given birth or appeared likely to get pregnant shortly.)

One thing to keep in mind is that the very young average age of marriage during the Baby Boom, for both females and males, wasn’t traditional in English-speaking world. Economic historian Gregory Clark’s research shows the average age of marriage for females in England in 1200-1800 bounced around between 24 and 26. Only the rich married young. For everybody else, delaying marriage was the main technique for keeping the population below the Malthusian ceiling. And it was a successful technique: England hasn’t had a major killer famine since the 1310s.

But during the Baby Boom, Americans didn’t have to worry about traditional constraints. We’d just won the Big One, and the American masses were now the richest people in the history of humanity.

In earlier times, puberty appears often to have arrived later due to nutritional shortcomings. But postwar American youths grew up being driven to the hamburger stand.

Lots of teenage girls were getting knocked up on the ride home, and getting a quick marriage a few months later. Here’s Chuck Berry’s last great song, written while he was in prison in the early 1960s:

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Also, the CDC’s data seems to deal well with Hispanics, while some police departments are notorious laggards about updating their demographic categories after all these decades of having the federal Office of Management & Budget declare the existence of a Hispanic ethnicity.

But the CDC does put a 6-month lag on reporting mortality numbers for more fraught categories like homicide, suicide, and motor vehicle accidents to allow coroners time to come to a final decision. So, we only now have complete 2025 numbers for homicides.

Here’s the total homicide death rate for 1999-2025:

The homicide death rate fell almost 15% last year, and is down 35% since peaking in 2021 at the crest of Black Lives Matter getting so many black lives murdered. 2025 saw the second lowest homicide rate in the 1999-2025 era, above only 2014. (Black Lives Matter emerged in August 2014 at Ferguson, and spread the lethal Ferguson Effect in 2015-2016, then returned with a bang on May 25, 2020 with George Floyd’s expiration.)

A thumbnail history: homicide rates have been relatively stable over the last 27 years compared to the historic surge in the 1960s and the crack wars’ increase in the late 1980s-early 1990s, followed by the big drop in the Giuliani Era of the later 1990s.

The spike in 2001 was due to 9-11, which the CDC counts, not unreasonably, as homicides (although the FBI doesn’t count the ~3,000 deaths as murders).

The bursting of the Bush Housing Bubble in 2008 led to a sizable decline in homicides. Unlike in Les Miserables, hard times don’t cause modern Americans to more often murder shopkeepers to steal loaves of bread to feed their starving families. Instead, homicides in modern America tend to be Deaths of Exuberance that rise in number when people have more cash in their pockets.

Homicides stayed relatively low into 2014, but then Ferguson in August 2014 launched the first Black Lives Matter era, which caused murders to soar first in the St. Louis area, then in Baltimore, later in Chicago, and so forth.

The election of Donald Trump in late 2016 appears to have caused elite institutions to back off from promoting BLM’s war on the police quite so enthusiastically as in the late Obama years.

But sometime in mid 2019, the homicide rate stopped going down. Starting in March 2020, Covid led to releases of some jailbirds, rent moratoria and cash handouts, and the police choosing to back off getting in suspicious characters faces, where they might get coughed upon.

But, simply plotting the CDC’s weekly homicides counts (not rates, but no big difference for our purpose) shows that the historic explosion of murder occurred not with covid in March 2020, but in the 6 weeks following George Floyd’s death on May 25, 2020. American elites declared that a long-needed “racial reckoning” had finally arrived, and the police got the message that they should police blacks less.

Murders stayed around this 21st Century peak in 2020, 2021, and 2022 before a vibe shift started to be noticeable as elite enthusiasm for depolicing finally started to wane. The last huge murder spasm was the Fourth of July week in 2023.

How low can we go?

Jeff Asher’s survey of 30 major law enforcement agencies and the Gun Violence Archive tracking of gun killings show that winter 2026 was down vs. winter 2025. (Homicides are fairly seasonal. But keep in mind that winters can be variable due to some winters keeping people inside more than others.) But, Asher notes, the rate of decline might be slowing. So let’s not declare victory and go back to the woke policies that proved so catastrophic, especially for blacks, twice over the last dozen years.

What about homicide death rates by race?

The Ferguson and Floyd Effects especially stand out in the sky-high black rate for homicide deaths.

Here’s the homicide death rates for males 15-34, who no doubt commit a large fraction of murders as well as dying often by homicide:

We can graph the homicide death rate for other races/ethnicities relative to non-Hispanic whites.

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In reality, a month from now when the NFL preseason gets rolling, most Americans who got worked up about Team USA losing to Belgium will have more or less forgotten about the World Cup until 2030.

And that’s fine. There are a lot of sports in this world that are only worth following when they contest their world championship or Olympic gold medal every four years.

Yet, let’s think this through this Best Athletes question.

What stands out about these We Get the Best Athletes demands is that I haven’t yet heard a single plan for how to persuade African Americans to care about soccer.

It’s the usual confused conventional wisdom imposed on American discourse by the taboo on public discussion of human biodiversity.

Everybody in America sort of knows that when we talk about “the best athletes” we are basically talking about blacks. But we aren’t supposed to say that because it implies that there are significant racial differences, which is a no-no.

And because they aren’t supposed to talk about Nature, their opinions on Nurture tend to be unrealistic.

So American soccer discourse never gets to the crucial problem with all these plans for getting the best athletes to win the World Cup for America, which is …

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