The Pale Male Paradox: How White Men Achieve Most And Are Vilified Worst
It’s one of the most interesting, enlightening and eye-opening books I’ve ever read: Simon Winchester’s Exactly: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World (2018). Winchester tells a story of astonishing ingenuity, intelligence and effort from the steam-engine (44) to the “extreme ultraviolet” laser (296). And it’s almost exclusively a story of stale pale males—of White men from northwestern Europe. They’re the ones who have created the modern world, whether living on ancestral soil, like the English ironmaster John Wilkinson (1728–1808) and the Swedish machinist Carl Edvard Johansson (1864–1943), or transplanted to the United States, like the manufacturer Henry Ford (1863–1947) and the space scientist Roger Easton (1921–
