My wife made this video to celebrate our engagement a few months ago and it's my favorite thing: youtube.com/watch?v=HWkE3g0w…

Definition of “working class” is infinitely elastic. Have the right opinions, wear distressed denim, sell oysters to your mother’s farm-to-table restaurant. Applies to right and left.

Again, really dispiriting that we've just had a mass-casualty attack in a prime location, including at least one critical injury, and the mayor and governor have just cheerily moved right along ... to all sports all the time. Not a word about how better to approach the mess at Penn Station or Grand Central on a day-to-day basis to prevent these now non-surprising attacks.

47 murders on the subway in the past 5.5 years is a huge increase. In 20 years from 2000 to 2019 there were 44 murders. And 8 in the 6 years from 2013 to 2018. *We use murders not to ignore other crimes, but because murders are a reliable stat for comparative purposes over time.

@reihan hitting the nail on the head on the similarity of aspects of American Muslim politics and American Jewish politics of old.

People are rightly critiquing this piece for presenting the "12.3% reached eminence" stat as a debunking of G&T when it's actually a data-point on the confirmation side of the ledger. The piece also conflates identification and provision. Arnold-Ratliff is right to call out referral-based identification as bullshit. But the fact that NYC is using a terrible identification process (teacher and parent referrals) does not condemn the entire enterprise! See, for example, this Card and Giuliano paper on the impact of better screening in Broward County. It's pretty compelling! ideas.repec.org/p/cdl/ucscec… Her critique of enrichment programs lands punches too. But she doesn't grapple with the evidence on acceleration programs. She cites "A Nation Decieved," a report that makes the case FOR acceleration, but she mischaracterizes its findings. She claims it is "damning" evidence that gifted ed doesn't work. But the report shows that bright kids falter not because G&T programs fail, but because schools don't let kids move faster through the curriculum. The bored kindergarteners she quotes from the report aren't evidence that acceleration doesn't work, the report is pointing to them as evidence for why it's necessary! The "deception" in the report's title refers to schools telling parents that acceleration will harm their kid's social development - a claim that the evidence contradicts. accelerationinstitute.org/Na…

One interesting and underappreciated development: as AIPAC has become a bogeyman in Democratic politics, wealthy tech workers of Muslim origin are powering American Priorities, the anti-AIPAC effort backing DSA candidates in NYC and elsewhere. This is a social world I know a bit by virtue of my background, and its rising political clout has brought to mind something I touch on in my essay for @SapirJournal: "Together, the integration paradox and religious attrition explain something that might otherwise seem puzzling: why the most committed and articulate voices of Muslim anti-Americanism in the United States are not marginalized, dispossessed, under-assimilated newcomers. Rather, they are privileged, cosmopolitan, first- and second-generation insiders who lead largely secular lives." Why is Third Worldism proving so seductive to the most upwardly mobile, influential, high-status members of America's fastest-growing religious minority? This is not a story about failed assimilation. Rather, it is about the changing character of assimilation. More below: sapirjournal.org/fixing-amer…

I remain convinced that @TheStalwart is right: shift toward algorithmic media is lowering the salience of national identity. This isn't irreversible. Technology will keep shaking the kaleidoscope. But it's a trend that helps explain otherwise puzzling aspects of youth politics.

One big challenge with closed primaries in the context of nationalized politics: voters don't have reliable heuristics to make sense of where candidates stand, so they look for whatever signals they can find. Because of Mamdani's incredible visibility -- a real accomplishment that didn't happen by accident -- his endorsement counts for a lot. But what do we actually know about these candidates, especially when you have a ton of elections and most people aren't consuming a ton of substantive news sources (for all sorts of defensible reasons)? In this low-information environment, voters often use demographic cues that draw on stereotypes about sex, age, race, and ethnicity, e.g., we have certain preconceived notions about older white men, younger women with Latin surnames, etc. It is extremely common for voters to use surnames to identify co-ethnic candidates. Among Democratic primary voters, an interesting dynamic has emerged: college-educated white voters tend to prefer ethnic minority candidates over white candidates (all else being equal, this is a way for racially liberal whites to express their political identity); at the same time, ethnic minority candidates often prefer co-ethnic candidates. Under these conditions, the demographic element of candidate selection can count just as much as more conventional qualifications. When I read this reporting from @LevineJonathan, I thought, "wow, ZM is really on one when it comes to selecting unconventional candidates." If we take for granted that he is going to select committed leftists (fair enough, he is a committed leftist), is this candidate really the best-qualified committed leftist for the job? But if you look the candidate selection through the lens of who will activate latent positive stereotypes, attract attention, etc., this makes a lot of sense. Further, if you haven't had a ton of life experience, don't have an independent fundraising base, are explicitly a movement person, you are much more likely to embrace the principle of collective leadership. Under our system, it is a bit unusual to have people who are subject to this kind of collective leadership by a para-party vanguard organization. But here we are.

Much of America's welfare state was designed and built by Jim Crow Southern Democrats. Is there a smaller, fairer, and more effective way to structure these programs? amazon.com/dp/1630695432/ read "The American Way of Welfare" to find out

My new @ManhattanInst report makes the case for state legislatures to take up the fight against grade inflation at public universities Universities struggle to maintain strong policies on grading reform b/c institutional incentives discourage serious internal reform⬇️ shorturl.at/U2JDK

Simpler explanation: leftward tilt (first visible in early '10s) was an outgrowth of career frustrations, as too many people in creative fields and the NGO sector competed for limited opportunities. They found each other on social media, where algorithms had a radicalizing effect

The stabbing at Penn Station on Sunday is yet another story of a frequent offender allowed to remain on the street until he kills or seriously maims someone. Every time, people ask: why does this keep happening? As I argue @thedispatch, you're not being deceived. Frequent offenders make up a massive share of crime. The 10 percent of the population most prone to offending accounts for 66 percent of all crime, in one estimate. But the problem is that in many places, our system isn't designed to recognize that different criminals are different. We discriminate based on offense rather than based on offender. We decline to charge misdemeanors (even when there are 60 of them); our habitual offender laws are old and outdated; our policing strategies react to calls rather than targeting prolific actors. Until our system actually recognizes the reality of offender concentration, we'll keep seeing brutal attacks like Sunday's. Read the whole piece 👇 thedispatch.com/article/crim…

We're on the cusp of a crime-fighting revolution. Question is which jurisdictions will embrace it and which will fight it on ideological grounds.

S-tier philosophers for understanding the world we live in (in no particular order): Adam Smith Friedrich Nietzsche Charles Darwin F. A. Hayek James Burnham Aristotle David Hume Did I miss any?

The Mellon Foundation just spent $1.5M to help the American Association of University Professors’ Isaac Kamola “name and shame” and delegitimize the new classical civics schools at UF and UT Austin—rare outposts of sanity teaching Western civ and viewpoint diversity inside otherwise leftist-dominated universities. John Sailer reports: city-journal.org/article/mel…

@MellonFdn spent years funding faculty pipeline programs that placed left-wing radicals in professorships nationwide. People like Lorgia García Peña, whom Mellon funded at nearly every stage of her career and who now, as a Princeton professor, calls the school a "racial-capitalist, white-supremacist institution" and tells scholars to "dismantle the university within." Now Mellon appears to be bankrolling an @AAUP campaign to delegitimize the newly-formed civic centers that state leaders and legislatures established to widen viewpoint diversity at public universities: Florida's Hamilton School, UT Austin's School of Civic Leadership, UNC's School of Civic Life and Leadership, and the like. According to @JohnDSailer's reporting in @cityjournal, @isaac_kamola, director of the AAUP's Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, indicated that ~$10M in Mellon funding for a "rapid response" operation is in the works. Of the civic centers, Kamola says he wants to "strategically map who these f---ers are," find their weaknesses, and "knock them out." One irony is that Kamola attacks the Charles Koch Foundation for seeding faculty hires that universities later absorb—the exact mechanism Mellon uses for its own pipeline. For all the talk of academic freedom, the AAUP and its patrons—Mellon chief among them—look to be primarily devoted to preserving the left-wing ideological monoculture that now pervades higher education. city-journal.org/article/mel…

This, of course, raises questions about what Mellon has been up to in the two years since its stopped updating its grants database. At the very least, the center itself seems to have more funding, so reformers should expect more pushback. city-journal.org/article/mel…

In fact, the center appears to be part of a larger Mellon project to fight reform efforts. "This is not public, so don’t share this anywhere, please... They’ve gotten a budget that looks like it may be $10 million to create a new organization that would do rapid response."

As I've reported before, Mellon does exactly that: funding faculty through the like of the UC's "President's Postdoctoral Fellowship Program" and UVA's "Race, Place, and Equity" program, which eventually make universities pick up the tab. wsj.com/opinion/the-mellon-f…

Kamola specifically argues that, through "right-wing" centers, donors pull a sneaky trick, funding new faculty for a limited time, only to later leave universities to foot the bill. This is an especially ironic complaint, given the practices of Kamola's own funder...