Who Lost Occam’s Razor?

Thinking logically about the JFK assassination files

A reputed image of William of Ockham, from a stained glass window in a church in England.

The new JFK assassination files contain nothing of historic importance, our famous pundits agree. Bupkes, sniffed the New Yorker critic Adam Gopnik, deploying the Yiddish for nothing of significance. “Oswald did it,” sighed veteran New York Times reporter Adam Nagourney on March 18, the day 77,000 pages of new material began to be posted on the National Archives web site. A. O. Scott, the Times movie critic, wailed: “Occam’s Razor has been lost.”

The ability of these speed-readers to master the contents of some 2,500 new documents in the course of a day was impressive, perhaps. Their rush to judgment, however, betrayed the abandonment of their own critical faculties.