“There’s two Tony Soprano’s,” Tony Soprano tells his therapist, Dr Melfi, in a last-ditch attempt to woo her. “You’ve never seen the other one. That’s the one that I want to show to you.” Loury similarly raises the spectre of two conflicting selves, but unlike Soprano who wants Melfi to see his good self while minimising his bad one, Loury wants to immerse the reader in the ways of Bad Glenn. Indeed, this is a deliberate strategy on his part, designed to foster the impression that he’s a reliable narrator. “The more self-discrediting information I deploy, the more credible I will become,” he surmises, echoing George Orwell’s dictum that an “autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful”. “No sane person would invent the discrediting things I’m going to tell you about myself”, Loury writes, reasoning that having shown readers his worst they will be more inclined to believe the passages that “cast me in a more conventionally positive light”.

As an academic, economist and commentator, Loury has had a long and remarkably successful career, holding positions at elite American universities, including Brown, MIT and Harvard, joining the latter as a tenured full professor at the young age of 33. As a father, husband and friend, he has been decidedly less triumphant, and much of Late Admissions is devoted to documenting the myriad lies and betrayals he inflicted on those closest to him. Indeed, Late Admissions is so remorselessly frank and meticulous in tallying up Loury’s dreadful behaviour that the reader is apt to feel like a voyeur, engrossed and grossed out in equal measure.

Over the course of several hundred pages, we learn that Loury is an absent father to his first two children; that he abandons another child that results from an affair and refuses to pay child support to the mother of that child; that he commits further multiple acts of infidelity during his second marriage; that he becomes a crack addict; that he cruises for hookers; that he has flings with his students; that he carries on with the wife of a best friend he knew since childhood; that he continues to cheat on his second wife throughout her struggle with cancer; and that he writes a mean obituary of a conservative friend (James Q. Wilson) because he thought it would make him popular among liberals. Confessions of An Enormous Douchebag would have been a more apt subtitle for Loury’s memoir.

More from this author

The hypocrisy of the BBC's misinformation war

By Simon Cottee

Anyone who is prudish or puritanical should not read Late Admissions, for it is saturated in illicit sex. Loury recalls that his uncle Adlert had told him that the overriding goal in life, that what really mattered, was “to get as much pussy as you can”. Loury was in his teens when his uncle relayed this to him and it seems like he took it to heart. He has certainly had a lot of pussy, as Adlert would put it, and in recounting his many sexual conquests and romantic entanglements, he displays an almost adolescent pride, bordering on boastfulness. One of the funnier anecdotes he relates is how, when at a conference in Israel, he slopes off to an empty stretch of beach with his mistress, where after several minutes of “going at it” they draw the attention of two IDF soldiers. “A beautiful woman, an exotic beach on the other side of a great ocean, and me, the transcontinental jet-setter who made it all happen,” he writes. “To such lengths was I willing to go to in order to get what I wanted, and I wouldn’t be denied anything.”

Nor does or did Loury seem to have any misgivings about paying for sex, remembering “a wild few hours together” with two prostitutes in a hotel while away on business. “After they leave,” he writes, “I smile and think that I cannot wait to tell Adlert about this one.”

To say that Loury’s private dealings stood in tension with his public pronouncements and personae is rather an understatement. As he rapidly rose to prominence in his academic career, he styled himself as a black conservative intellectual who argued that racial inequality in America persisted not because of white racism (the “enemy without”), but rather because of pathologies within the black community itself (the “enemy within”). He was also a vocal critic of affirmative action, insisting that the problems of the black ghetto could be better managed through entrepreneurism rather than government handouts. The values he most admired were exemplified in the figure of his father, whom he revered and who’s approval he always sought: namely, “rigorous austerity and personal responsibility”. “If black people want to thrive,” he believed, “we can only depend on ourselves to make that happen.” Yet in his private life, Loury was the very personification of the pathologies he railed against publicly.

In other words, Loury was living a lie, all the while publicly donning what the sociologist Laud Humphreys called “the breastplate of righteousness” to conceal and compensate for his disreputable self. And yet he couldn’t renounce the lure of the double life, until it came crashing down when his 23-year-old side-woman accused him of assault (the charges were eventually dropped) and when he got busted for drugs possession not long after. This spelled the beginning of the end of his time at Harvard, which he traded for Boston University. It wasn’t that his colleagues there didn’t support him, quite the contrary. But he felt that they pitied him and his sense of pride couldn’t tolerate this.

Around this time, Loury sought solace and redemption in religion and began attending an African Methodist Episcopal church with his wife Linda. Although this filled a spiritual void, it wasn’t a lasting conversion. He also started to shapeshift into a man of the Left, recanting many of his earlier positions. This was quite a turnaround. Loury had been never less than trenchant in his belief that violent crime was a far more urgent problem for black people than police brutality, but now he backtracked, focusing his attention instead on the racialised evils of mass incarceration. While he once delighted in scandalising what he scathingly called the “Negro Cognoscenti” — middle-class posers who faked authentic blackness, unlike working-class Loury who grew up on the South Side of Chicago — he now went all in on courting them and professing his fidelity to the cause.

But just as things had soured with his conservative bedfellows, they too began to sour with his fellow progressives. While he enjoyed the adulation that came with righteous causes, he felt that it was a pose. “I was a conservative,” he writes, “and in truth I suspected that’s what I always had been.”

More recently, particularly on his weekly podcast, The Glenn Show, Loury has carved out a niche as a fierce and compelling critic of America’s “racial reckoning”, sternly rebuking the excesses of BLM and the sanctification of George Floyd and other victims of police shootings “as though they were civil rights heroes”. “It seemed to me,” he writes, “that the activists concerned with preserving black life and well-being ought to worry about what was going on within black communities at least as much as they worried about the cops.”

It isn’t clear why or how Loury went from being a conservative to a Leftist and then back again, and Late Admissions is not particularly incisive at explaining it. But it offers some interesting pointers. The one enduring continuity in Loury’s life seems to be his desire for contention. It’s as if he needed to unmake friends or manufacture grievances because whenever he achieved anything of worth or settled anywhere he would become interminably bored. He needed contention because of the excitement and sense of purpose it afforded him. “The real story,” he confides, “is that I revelled in playing the bad boy, in drawing the ire of those for whom I had contempt. I loved the fight.”

Suggested reading

How to weaponise the BBC

By Aris Roussinos

At the same time, Loury craves the warmth of comradeship and community, because without that where is the audience for your genius and where is the love? But he also finds community and its “we” talk and its ethical obligations a suffocating imposition on his freedom to live on his own terms. This is one of the tragedies of his life and explains much of the turbulence that defines it.

Loury’s political positioning seems more dictated by his personal needs than by strictly intellectual considerations. While his current thinking is shaped by a thread of common sense and pragmatism that has been latent in Loury from the beginning, it lacks a footing in a wider perspective about how the world is and where it’s headed.

Late Admissions is less successful at capturing the weight of Loury’s intellectual achievements, especially those that relate to economic theory. That isn’t where the energy is and Loury knows this. “I’ve always cared how it went with women and that’s taken up much of my free time,” the late Martin Amis once said in an interview, elaborating: “Even powerful figures start to dismiss what they’ve done in the public sphere. It’s the personal stuff at the very end that’s important and it gives them agony and regret and remorse. It’s a man thing.” I think Loury would more or less assent to this and much of the substance of Late Admissions bears this out.

Loury’s is now 75 and nearing the end of his life. As a young man he’d always wanted to become, in his words, a “Player of his own making”, and he has achieved that and much more. He has also played and wounded a lot of people. But at no point does he excuse or minimise this, much less try to therapise it. In the closing pages of the book, Loury acknowledges that he is a fallen man and that he has an internal enemy and that it is an indelible part of him. This is to his immense credit. Like Philip Roth, Loury suggests that we can never hope to erase the “human stain” that afflicts all of humankind. The great achievement of Late Admissions is that it confronts this head on and in a startlingly honest way.

In the US, a small group of African American thinkers is pushing back against progressive orthodoxy on the race issue. Glenn Loury — a Professor of Economics at Brown University — has long argued that while historical discrimination against African Americans is undeniable, it is not the sole explanation for racial disparities in income or education. And Thomas Sowell, the conservative African American Stanford University economist, has taken on what he sees as progressives’ faulty answers in a new book, Social Justice Fallacies.

“At the heart of the social justice vision”, Sowell writes, “is the assumption that, because economic and other disparities among human beings greatly exceed any differences in their innate capacities”, they must be the result of “such human vices as exploitation and discrimination”. In his 2019 book, How to be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi stated this case plainly: “Antiracist ideas argue that racist policies are the cause of racial inequities.” Here in Britain, leading progressive think-tanks such as the Runnymede Trust also often link racial disparities — in spheres such as health, housing, education and employment — to “systemic racism”.

Debates over the causes of group disparities are fierce precisely because they shape the answers to the practical questions of what is to be done and who is responsible for doing it. If racial disparities are caused by racism, the responsibility for redressing them lies with those perpetuating it, hence today’s progressive focus on the ideology of white supremacy.

But Sowell has other ideas about why some groups are doing much better. While he acknowledges that exploitation and discrimination do “prevent different groups of people — whether classes, races or nations — from having equal, or even comparable, outcomes in economic terms”, he maintains that this is only part of the story. Some groups, he suggests, may be better off because they have, over a period of time, collectively mastered endeavours that have turned out to be profitable, teachable to younger generations and conducive to group progress. He cites people of German ancestry having created leading beer brands in countries as varied as the US, Argentina, Brazil, Australia and China — not by coincidence, but because the ancestors of today’s Germans were producing beer as far back as the days of the Roman Empire. “When a particular people have been doing a particular thing for more than a thousand years,” he writes, “is it surprising if they tend to be more successful in that particular endeavour than others who have had no such history?”

More from this author

Antiracism is too middle-class

By Remi Adekoya

All groups excel at something. Those statistically worse off educationally, for whatever reason, may be underrepresented in jobs where a degree is essential but over-perform in endeavours where personal talent determines success. Sowell cites sports and entertainment as spheres in which “American groups rising out of poverty” have excelled. But most people would find it odd if someone argued that the fact that 72% of NBA players are black implies that other groups are being discriminated against in US basketball. Likewise, the fact that the median per capita income of Americans of Chinese, Japanese, Indian and Korean ancestry is higher than that of white Americans is not interpreted as a sign that the US system is designed to advantage those minorities.

To “honestly admit the reality of vast differences in specific capabilities of different peoples, at different times and in different places, is no capitulation to genetic determinism”, Sowell insists. It is an assertion that will likely make more than a few people uneasy, depending on the groups being compared (although I would argue that we should always be wary of making generalisations about groups). Because China is now one of the world’s two economic superpowers, few object to comments about how the Chinese may do such-and-such better than the Americans, but the Americans are better at such-and-such than the Chinese. But most of us feel uncomfortable if similar comparisons are made between, say, Africans and Europeans. Disparities between these two groups are so wide that there exist strong fears that drawing parallels could be interpreted as arguing that the richer group is simply superior to the poorer. Which was, of course, the explicit justification for enslaving and colonising Africans — something people haven’t forgotten.

Partly because of this, if certain behavioural patterns among some groups of African ancestry — here in the West or in Africa — are pointed to as detrimental to wider black progress, Western progressives will often describe this as ‘victim-blaming’. If an African country is corruptly and ineffectively governed, the argument goes, it is because its leaders inherited exploitative colonial structures. The question of why such structures have not been dismantled or at least significantly reformed in the decades since independence will usually be answered with reference to structural constraints, imposed by the West. Africa’s ruling elites are ultimately victims — in the Western progressive worldview, anyway. No African progressive living in Africa thinks this way.

The phrase ‘victim-blaming’ was coined by psychologist William Ryan in his 1971 book, Blaming the Victim — which was a response to discussions about the role of African American family structures, which were described as perpetuating black poverty in the infamous Moynihan Report of 1965. But I believe the concept of ‘victim-blaming’ gained the power it wields today mostly thanks to feminist activists, who used it to describe how female rape victims may be questioned about what clothes they were wearing when attacked or how late they had been out. Their rhetoric was then adopted by anti-colonialists. Explaining his reasons for rejecting an MBE in 2019, British spoken word artist, George the Poet, who is of Ugandan descent, said: “Your forefathers grabbed my motherland, pinned her down and took turns. They did that every day for a couple hundred years and then left her to treat her own burns.” In many a Western progressive mind, the West violates other nations via neoliberal economic exploitation, then has the gall to tell those it has exploited that their poverty is their fault — because they didn’t work hard enough, were not well-organised enough, or allowed corruption to flourish. All in order to convince the world that the system they have built is a just one, when it obviously isn’t.

But dismissing, as ‘victim-blaming’, any arguments citing a weaker group’s actions as obstacles to that group’s progress is not helpful to anyone, least of all the weaker groups themselves. It is especially unfortunate when people do this not because they genuinely believe the argument is baseless, but because they want to signal empathy by demonstrating that they always side with the underdog — which is the sine qua non to being accepted by the progressive elite. This self-serving approach is deeply hypocritical, given that progressivism’s stated aim is to uplift groups in a weaker position, and to do that we need to have frank conversations about what may be going wrong within a group. Scholars such as Sowell and Loury, for instance, argue that the questions raised in the Moynihan Report remain valid points of discussion.

In my recent book, It’s Not About Whiteness, It’s about Wealth, I argue that the future status of blackness depends not on what happens in Britain and America — where just 3% of the world’s black population live — but on what happens in Africa, where 90% of black people live. If we are ever to speak of any kind of meaningful global racial equality, Africa must succeed. If it is to succeed, we must talk about its failures.

Suggested reading

The narcissism of America's race politics

By Tomiwa Owolade

Does anyone genuinely believe that the mind-boggling corruption of Africa’s ruling elites is not a major factor contributing to the continent being the poorest and least economically developed? To there being close to 500 million Africans — more than the EU’s population — living on less than $2 a day? To there being 600 million people lacking access to electricity in the year 2023? Can anyone maintain that all this poverty can be blamed on legacies of colonialism and slavery?

Even if we can blame all Africa’s problems on the past, shouldn’t the focus be on what can be done to change things today? Merely identifying the root cause of a problem does not give you a solution to the problem. That is another task entirely. Without radically improving the way most African countries are run, prosperity will continue to elude the continent. Africa has been dealt a terrible hand by history, but none of us can change the past. All we can do is play the cards we have today as best we can, so that our hand may be stronger in the future.

Of course, today’s Western progressives often appear to believe that only Westerners have the power to change anything fundamental about society, including in countries thousands of kilometres away. It is the modern-day manifestation of Eurocentrism: the idea that the world revolves around what white Westerners think and do. Development outcomes elsewhere are thus always traceable to some Western action, past or present.

In his book, Sowell emphasises that the onus of changing the fortunes of worse-off groups rests primarily on them. But the debate over the factors driving group disparities — between those who emphasise individual agency and those who emphasise external factors — does not have to be a zero-sum game in which one side must ultimately triumph. Both can play their part in taking practical steps to improve things for the worse-off in this world — which would involve looking at big-picture structural changes as well as honest analysis of potentially damaging group dynamics. Ideologies like products are subject to the laws of demand and supply, and there is clearly a strong demand for the social justice vision today — signalling a genuine mass craving for a fairer world in which there is less poverty, inequality and needless human suffering. We’d surely rather this craving existed than not. The key is to apply it usefully: to always be open to evidence about what is working and what isn’t, about who needs to do what, when and how.

Freddie Sayers spoke to Glenn about Joe Rogan and Whoopi Goldberg, Joe Biden’s new Supreme Court Justice, and how to fix America’s torturous racial politics.

Joe Biden has pre-announced that his nominee for the Supreme Court will be a black woman. What do you think about this? 

I think it is strange. I think no one needs to be apologetic about reacting to that announcement with a bemusement and kind of quizzical ‘what?’ This comes out of Joe Biden’s political ambition, and the character of American politics. During the South Carolina primary when Biden was uncertain of prevailing in the contest for the nomination of the Democratic Party, in 2020, he wanted to appeal to the black vote and so he made this announcement. He announced that his vice presidential selection would be a woman and that his first appointment to the Supreme Court, should he be fortunate enough to have one, would be a black woman.

You could call this craven pandering. I’m bemused by it because it unnecessarily raises questions about the fitness of whomever he might appoint, when he might have simply chosen a black woman as his nominee, and crowed about it after the fact. To avoid casting any doubt over the choice that he would have made, he could have said this is the best, most qualified person that I could find. But in any case, as he’s done it now, he’s limited his range of options to a very small percentage of the total population of people who might have been selected, and, you could say, has put an asterisk by the name of whomever it is that he might ultimately select.

Suggested reading

The Godfather of Critical Race Theory

By Tomiwa Owolade

This is, by the way, the Supreme Court of the United States of America, this is the final stopping point for any legal dispute. There are nine justices serving there, the quality of an appointment is not a small matter. We’re not now admitting a marginal student to an elite college campus, we’re selecting the people who are going to govern the country. The President might have engaged in a kind of subtle and tacit preference, rather than crowing about it and making it overt and explicit. It sows a kind of contempt for the standards that we ought to be employing.

Is it right to aim for public bodies to be “representative” of the population? 

What do we mean by representativeness and who can represent whom? How many Catholics are there on the US Supreme Court? I’m pretty sure there are more Catholics on the court in proportion than there are Catholics in the population. Dare we ask the question: how many Jews, how about gays, how many openly gay people are on the Supreme Court? How dare we. That’s a rabbit hole that we don’t really want to go down.

And it’s kind of silly because it presupposes that something as superficial as racial identity or sexual orientation is of such fundamental significance that legal counsels must have members present who, when they act out in that context, are acting on behalf of, quote unquote, their group. Well, these individuals are not only women, or blacks, or gays, or Catholics. These are human beings whose humanity supersedes and reaches beyond the categories that we might impose on them.

You were the first African American to become a tenured professor at Harvard. Would you have felt differently about this achievement had the governors at Harvard pre-announced before selecting you that they were going to choose someone of African American heritage? 

My appointment as professor of economics at Harvard, which happened in 1982, was accompanied by an initiative at Harvard to enhance the quality of the Afro American Studies department there. I was jointly appointed: economics and Afro American Studies. I was 33 years old. It would have been entirely fair, for some outside observer looking at that to say: “Oh, well, fine. But if he hadn’t been black, they wouldn’t have appointed him.” That’s probably true. So such is the condition that we find ourselves in.

How do you think someone like Whoopi Goldberg can get to the point where said that the Holocaust was not about race? 

I assume it’s because she thinks Jews are white. I would chalk that up to ignorance and naïveté — just not being immersed in the long history of modern Europe and anti Semitism and the ideology of Nazism, in which the notion of race had a very particular meaning. I think Whoopi just didn’t appreciate the actual meaning of the word race, in the context in which the Holocaust arose, revealing her ignorance. She ought not to have put it that way. It is a misstatement or mischaracterisation to say that the Holocaust was not about race — it just wasn’t about ‘race’ in the way in which we in the United States might be talking about race.

Suggested reading

What liberals get wrong about race

By Eric Kaufmann

One finds anti-Semitism not only on the far-Right, with ‘Jews will not replace us’ kind of sentiments, but also in ethnic minority communities. Especially among African Americans, there’s quite a bit of anti-Semitism; there are attacks on Jewish interests. The Reverend Al Sharpton, a prominent civil rights leader, got his start in part by demagoguery over incidents in which there was conflict between blacks and Jews. He has a history in which I think anti-semitism would be a fair descriptor.

Why is there not more sympathy for the Asian community among progressive activists? 

The Asians are called a model minority — people say that sardonically. And of course, the subtle implication there is that you must be anti-black if you compare blacks to Asians, and you find the blacks wanting — or anti-Latino.

Some of the corruption and decadence of the legacy population here, black and white, in American society, is exposed by Asian success. They expose the lack of depth and seriousness of too many of our people by their assiduous self application, and their excellence in the mastery of the currency of the modern world. I’m talking about calculus, I’m talking about biochemistry.

Do you think this kind of thinking actually makes racial tensions worse? 

So George Floyd is killed — murdered, a jury has spoken — by Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis, in 2020. A policeman inappropriately applying force, he had his knee on the man’s neck, the man expires. Was that a racial incident? Now the police officer was white, the man was killed, George Floyd was black — it became a racial incident. A whole movement was launched or abetted by the racial characterisation of that incident. But why should we understand it as a racial incident?

There is very little evidence at all, if any, that Chauvin was motivated by racial animus when he acted. And on the victim side, George Floyd, the fact that a policeman might over use his power and harm a citizen — that’s something that happens to white people, too. There are cases parallel to the George Floyd case in which the victim has been white, which have not occasioned national attention. So that’s one thing.

Suggested reading

Why anti-racism should be resisted

By Asra Q. Nomani

But the other thing that I would say is that by cultivating a practice of looking at such incidents in racial terms, invites a parallel practice of looking at criminal victimisation of citizens in racial terms. You want to count the number of white cops who have killed unarmed black men, somebody is going to start counting the number of black murderers who have abused, black carjackers who have robbed and threatened, black assaulters who have bludgeoned and beaten white people. There are an endless number of such cases.

There is enough racial blame to go around, and I’d hate to live in a country in which when a white person was victimised by a black criminal, the first words out of their mouth were “a black criminal victimised me”. That’s not good for black people, because there are many black criminals. And that’s not good for our country because the issue is a criminal victimising a person; the criminal’s blackness doesn’t stand in for his race. He doesn’t represent his race when he acts badly. The victim’s whiteness doesn’t stand in for her race.

What would happen if Affirmative Action is deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court? 

The Supreme Court has six conservative justices, the majority of whom have publicly stated that they have serious doubts about affirmative action. There’s a very good chance that racial affirmative action will be stricken by the Supreme Court.

If it happens, I assure you, there will be mobs in the streets of this country. No progressive activist is going to take the Supreme Court’s ruling as an opportunity to turn within and consider: “if we want to be at Harvard or the University of North Carolina in larger numbers, why don’t we get busy preparing our youngsters from the cradle to be competitive in this great country that we live in where competition is the coin of the realm?” No, they’re not going to do that. They’re going to interpret that as an anti-black move by a racist Supreme Court. I assure you that it is a disaster and I think we’re headed toward it.

In the past week there has been a big, powerful movement to get Joe Rogan removed from Spotify over historic cases of him using the N-word. What should we make of this?

I’m not going to say the N-word on your programme, but I should be able to say it, it’s just a word. I’m talking about a word — I’m not talking about a slur. And neither was Joe Rogan’s use of it a slur. He wasn’t pointing to a person and calling them one in a way of being a derogation, of an insult. He was speaking about speaking. That is to say he was saying that the word exists and then he was saying the word in the context of quoting someone else’s use of it or whatever.

Suggested reading

Kamala Harris was set up to fail

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

We have a genre here of music, it’s called hip hop or rap, in which the word is used regularly. And they are not using it as a slur either. It’s a part of the English language. Now, this thing that we’re doing here — where we’re making the utterance of certain sounds an indication of a person’s racism, and then seeking to cancel people for it being revealed that they uttered sounds, without any reference to their intent — is a bizarre phenomenon.

And I think that it’s actually not a sign of strength, by the people, black people, who insist that the sound of the word is so injurious to them. I think it’s a sign of their weakness. There’s something almost pathetic about requiring people to indulge you by not making certain sounds with their mouth because hearing it reminds you of lynching, of nightriders coming down on black people who are defenceless and are being set upon and whatnot.

It seems like a lot of the voices that were most upset about this were white. And it seems like more of an intra-elite power battle to do with the nature of the media, in which the race issue is used as a battering ram. What do you think?

Who are those people who listen to Joe Rogan? They are mostly not latte-sipping, National Public Radio-listening, coastal elites in New York City or Washington DC or San Francisco or whatever. They are mostly, or more often than not, male, more often than not, white. There’s some truck drivers among them. There’s some Trump voters among them.

Suggested reading

Designated Criminal

By David Mamet

So this culture war that’s well-advanced here in the United States in which we are in effect, mutually contemptuous of one another based upon what camp we belong in — Joe Rogan is right at the centre of it and his audience substantially is on the ‘wrong side’ from a progressive’s point of view. A lot of this enmity directed toward Rogan is really directed toward his audience.

How do we make it better? 

I’d like to tone down the emphasis on race and be more concerned about the humanity of people. If we want to talk about disadvantage, poverty and the lack of wealth in America, there are more poor white people than there are black people. And anything worth doing, whether it be reform of education, or changes in the tax laws or extension of the welfare state programmes, anything worth doing to help black people is worth doing to help people who are in need of of help. I would have our arguments, that is our African American arguments, couched in broad, humanistic terms. And I think that less attention to racial identity and more attention to human common need is healthy for the country.

This transcript has been lightly edited.