Emmett Rensin
The era of Obama is over. Now the majority of Americans may see it clearly for the first time. Over the past eight years, it has become apparent that President Obama’s presence in office was a distortion. His calm demeanor and steady optimism seduced liberals into thinking that they were living in good—if occasionally dull—days, at war with an intransigent Congressional GOP, but blind to the breadth and power of the reaction brewing below. Liberals were often frustrated by the slow progress under Obama, even offended by the indifference and injustice that persisted in the practice of American power, but 
Francis Galton was an idealist. He was a scientist, a gentleman, and a reformer. He dreamed, according to Evan Kindley, of “a world remade by asking the right questions.” In 1870, he looked to realize that dream, submitting a seven-page set of questions to 180 of his colleagues in the British Royal Society in which he asked after their education, their temperament, ancestry, religion—even the rim size of their hats. In the years that followed, he would become the “founding father of questionnaire research,” writing several books based on his surveys of his friends and of strangers, and establishing “the 
The most essential passage in Kids These Days, Malcolm Harris’s new book on the “making of millennials,” does not appear until its 113th page and is not really about millennials at all. “When history teachers talk about government policy decisions, they tend to use the progressive frame: The government improves things over time,” he writes.