As always, a great conversation between two of my favorite thinkers: Glenn Loury and John McWhorter. I love John's reference to "Turkey in the Straw." There's a brand of young progressive that has an almost prurient fascination/obsession with finding evil and racism in everything from the past.

I'm doing "The Wizard of Oz" and have a line where I call Dorothy a "whippersnapper," and a couple of the young actors started speculating that this must be some term deriving from slavery days (whips etc). They were enjoying themselves enormously reading something nasty into this colloquialism. Of course the word means none of that--it was coined in the 16th century in England as a descriptor for loud, obnoxious young men who made noise in public to attract attention to themselves.