Both of those were fantastic! Nathan Robinson never fails to disappoint.
As an aside, this one particular line from DeParle's profile jumped out at me:
>Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich may have more power than Murray, and Rush Limbaugh and Pat Buchanan may have more direct influence.
I'm pretty sure I get what he's trying to say ("[political] power" and "direct [social] influence"), but if I were to read a contemporary article that didn't make that distinction explicit, I would definitely wonder if the author thought that "power" and "direct influence" were somehow different things.
Based on the review, it sounds like he's added still more caveats - to the point of contradicting himself - that will make it even easier for him to claim even-handedness in the face of obvious criticism.
The first few sections on race does a decent job explaining some older work and then suddenly concludes things much too strong for the description Murray gives. It’s almost funny
[Apparently](https://twitter.com/123456789blaaa/status/1228510552084942848) he's finally stopped citing certain "leading scolar[s] of racial and ethnic difference", and [promised](https://twitter.com/itsbirdemic/status/1228351121606885376) all of his pre-reviewers that he wouldn't mention their names.
One step forward, one step back.
is there even such a thing as GWAS SNP frequency differences between populations?
like, isn't the existence of "populations" in this sense exactly the bugaboo that ruins a GWAS?
(for the laypeople: IIRC from grad school, genetic association studies usually require the subjects to have homogenous ethnic ancestry, which is why their results often don't translate from one population to another and certainly don't make sense to compare whole populations)
Yeah there’s about 1,000,000 ways for any differences in those SNPs to be at different frequency purely by artifact of the methodology and produce no actual difference between the two populations. That’s why actual researchers use different methods to try and compare groups
Nathan Robinson still has the best Murray sneer of all time
but also don’t miss this 1994 profile by Jason DeParle, which is, as Sehgal says, “one for the ages”
God the analysis in Murray’s new book is so bad but you’d have no clue unless you were actually a researcher in the field