Occupy Wall Street is, like the Tea Party, a messy populist movement. The concern is real that it refuses to recognize an essential tragic component of human affairs: unfairness is the abiding fact of our condition

Now that candidates can run respectably on a platform of torture, how long before we see a frontrunner advocating slavery? Surely everything's open for reconsideration. It's time to retire an inconvenient prejudice: that America's progress should be in a forward direction.

It is painful to be called an anti-Semite by a deceased saint. Yet the dead speak, even when we wish they'd keep their thoughts to themselves. There is a tremendous effort to deny that Martin Luther King ever said these words: "When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You're talking anti-Semitism." Unfortunately, he did.

The IQ swindle is just this: an attempt to quantify the unquantifiable. The field aspires to the level of science, therefore it has to boast precision. It attempts to achieve this, disastrously, by counting something that can't be counted. By measuring something that isn't even, when looked at closely, a thing. The IQ scientists, at their worst, force their wretched notions to become facts.

Vampire science is already poaching some of the best. The woman who teaches vampires at Harvard is a serious scholar of Romantic English literature. Now, Lord Byron did in fact invoke the undead in "The Giaour." But don't kid yourself: it's still a huge and weird notional leap to go from Byron Studies to Vampire Studies.