WILLIAM VOEGELI (6/30): Happy 92nd birthday to economist Thomas Sowell, born in Gastonia, North Carolina. Both his parents died when he was young, and he moved to New York City with his extended family at the age of nine. Due to financial issues, he dropped out of Stuyvesant High School and served in the Marine Corps during the Korean War. After an honorable discharge in 1952, Sowell took night classes at Howard University before matriculating at Harvard University, where he graduated magna cum laude in 1958. Sowell earned a master's degree in economics from Columbia University in 1959, and his doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago in 1968. In addition to teaching at several institutions, Sowell has been since 1980 a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where he holds a fellowship in public policy named after Milton Friedman, his mentor from the University of Chicago. He has written 47 books, the first in 1971 and the most recent, Charter Schools and Their Enemies, in 2020. In addition, there are ten books of Sowell's collected writings in print and he wrote a syndicated newspaper column from 1991 to 2016. Sowell was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2002 and the Bradley Prize the following year.