A Million Words
What are my greatest hits columns in Taki's Magazine over the last 19 years?
From my latest column in Taki’s Magazine:
One Million Words
January 01, 2026
At the end of 2025, I’m feeling nostalgic. So, I’ll look back on the approximately 875 columns I’ve written for Taki’s Magazine since 2007.
That has to add up to well over one million words.
The first column I ever wrote for Taki’s was a positive 2007 review of Jimmy Carter’s book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. Eighteen years later, it holds up fairly well:
If I might, as a foreign observer who wishes Israel well, make a hard-headed suggestion: Instead of democratic neighbors, what Israel needs now are more moderately well-armed dictatorships on its frontiers, along the lines of Jordan, Egypt, and even Syria. Israel, the regional military superpower, can intimidate these into suppressing their native terrorists.
The Jordanian government, for example, knows that if some group within its borders shoots rockets at Israel, the Israeli military will come and break with impunity the shiny war toys that are the symbol and sword of the monarchy’s stranglehold on domestic power. So, the Jordanian secret police makes sure nobody in Jordan does anything that will make the big bad Israelis too mad.
Even Syria, which hates Israel (which has occupied Syria’s Golan Heights for a third of a century), has rigorously made sure that its territory is not the point of origin for direct attacks on Israel.
Unfortunately, Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon aren’t well-established dictatorships, but semi-anarchic territories, so Israel will continue to be intermittently pestered by organizations operating out of them. Eventually, if Israel is lucky, they may coalesce into centralized dictatorships that the IDF can intimidate into stopping terrorism.
Then again, they may not.
That is the nature of the Middle East. It may seem intolerable, but Middle Easterners have lived (and died) like that for thousands of years, and they won’t stop anytime soon.
Admittedly, though, I’m bored with Israel vs. Palestine.
What are some of my favorite Taki’s columns?
Many of my best are published in my collection Noticing.
But, among those that aren’t, I’d recommend my 2012
column “Goodbye, Mr. Chimps.” Since then, I’ve been campaigning against using chimpanzees and children in movies and TV:Although future behavioral taboos are notoriously hard to predict, it’s clear that within this decade America will end the use of chimpanzees in entertainment. I’ll go much further out on a limb and also predict that within a generation, and for much the same reasons, we will seriously consider banning child stars….
As it becomes clear that having men play monkeys is better for all concerned, a similar question will suggest itself: Is it humane to use human children as professional entertainers?
The digital technology enabling adults to portray kid characters is rapidly arriving. Should audiences encourage that switch?
We should definitely consider it. We can all think of child stars who grew up to be sane adults, but the casualty list is long and lurid. A recent study found that 58 percent of retired laboratory chimpanzees show symptoms of depression. What would a study of former child actors find? A consuming hunger to get back into the spotlight and a permanent aversion to a normal job?
One obvious problem is sexual exploitation of ambitious minors.
From my 2012 review of psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s influential book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion:
What Haidt never quite gets across is that conservatives typically define their groups concentrically, moving from their families outward to their communities, classes, religions, nations, and so forth. If Mars attacked, conservatives would be reflexively Earthist. As Ronald Reagan pointed out to the UN in 1987, “I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.” (Libertarians would wait to see if the Martian invaders were free marketeers.)
In contrast, modern liberals’ defining trait is making a public spectacle of how their loyalties leapfrog over some unworthy folks relatively close to them in favor of other people they barely know (or in the case of profoundly liberal sci-fi movies such as ‘Avatar,’ other 10-foot-tall blue space creatures they barely know).
As a down-to-Earth example, to root for Manchester United’s soccer team is conservative…if you are a Mancunian. If you live in Portland, Oregon, it’s liberal.
This urge toward leapfrogging loyalties has less to do with sympathy for the poor underdog (white liberals’ traditional favorites, such as soccer and the federal government, are hardly underdogs) as it is a desire to get one up in status on people they know and don’t like.
In 2013, the year before the Rotherham report broke open the scandal of Pakistani rape gangs, I wrote “The Real Threat to British Elites”:
British leaders repeatedly swept the Muslim statutory gang-rapist phenomenon under the rug for over a decade.
Read the whole thing there.
A book of all your Taki articles would be a fantastic read. Of course one could just click on them but it would be nice to have a physical copy.
Perhaps an article combining the themes of "The Rise and Fall of Statistics" with "The Self-Righteous Hive Mind" would provide some insights into the explosion of useless sports "metrics". Could also also insert something about gambling.
Re: Raising the Bard
"Who needs reason when you have Lived Experience?"
One thing - perhaps the only thing - that annoys me about you is your dismissive attitude towards the Shakespeare Authorship Question. If the Bard had copious Lived Experience, when did he experience it?
The "Lost Years" number only seven. What written records we have of the next twenty years of the lived experience of "English language’s best-known pre-Enlightenment writer," according to the conventional wisdom, consist mostly of those those that might be expected of an ambitious exurban man of that period: moneylending, arbitrage of agricultural commodities and such, as well as dodging charges of grain hoarding during a famine and tax evasion.
Sure, he spend some time in London, involved in the nascent industry of theatre production. But the only mark left of him in town was the disembodied name "William Shakespeare" attached to some of the plays (and poems! he was poet, too). And during that time, it was a two-day ride between London, where the theatres were, and Stratford, where, during that same time, he engaged in those well-documented bucolic pursuits.