If Abdul El-Sayed wins his election, he will be a controlling figure in Michigan Democratic politics, and there will be no place in his party for Haley Stevens. She’s done if he wins. She clearly thinks he’s an antisemite and loathes him. 48% of Michigan Democrats voted for her. If she endorses Rogers or does an anti-Abdul ad, she might very well shift 2-3% of the vote and torpedo his run. Why doesn’t she do it? What does she have to lose?

Scott Snyder is a Democrat who doesn’t like Trump, but “Absolute Batman” is not a woke book. Rolling Stone’s argument that this book is “progressive” is based on the fact that instead of Batman’s parents being killed in a mugging (a kind of crime right-wingers are concerned about), his father was killed in a random mass shooting at the zoo (a kind of crime left-wingers are concerned about). Otherwise, writer Scott Snyder has said that he intentionally keeps overt political theming out of the book to keep it welcoming to as large an audience as possible. I have a pretty sharp sense of woke, and I don’t like it, and I have a diminishing tolerance for it. I do not like some of the choices Snyder has made in “Absolute Batman” for non-political reasons — his preoccupation with turning the Joker into a supernatural monster is something I do not agree with. But I do not consider this book to be woke or left-wing propaganda. That said, I would not read “Absolute Superman” or “Absolute Martian Manhunter.”

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the pipeline into scientific and medical research, especially being from Boston where I still spend a lot of time and frequently hear researchers complaining about the Trump administration supposedly killing science. But even if you believe that Trump administration policies have hurt science (which honestly I don’t), you should acknowledge that it is only after about fifteen years of toxic dynamics that used dubious allegations to throw out those who lived and breathed science, like @DMSabatini, whom I interviewed for @PirateWires—insofar as academia is struggling right now, it only has itself to blame. In Sabatini’s case, he literally trained nearly 50 academic lab heads—seven whom he was able to send to Harvard, five of them women—and all he got for it was being publicly humiliated out of MIT for the not-crime of having had a consensual sexual relationship with a woman in another lab. When great scientists are marginalized and even abused by the system, you know who remains? Mediocrities, those who do everything by the book, color coded, neat handwriting, the types who will never accidentally drink one glass of mulled wine too many at a Christmas party, the types who say “holiday party,” the types who never come across as flirtatious or crude, not even accidentally—but ultimately they will never push the frontiers of science, and they will never attract those who will to work for them either (these days, those types will simply go to San Francisco).

This was a choice. Liberals talk about how they want to have lively walkable downtowns where people can live near their work and then they turn loose swarms of meth zombies to destroy all the businesses in the very neighborhoods they say they want to revitalize. The Democrats settled 100,000 Somalis in Minneapolis and instead of the Somalis becoming Minnesotans, they turned Minneapolis into Mogadishu, complete with Mogadishu clan wars in the streets and Mogadishu property values.

Don’t Nod, the studio that made “Life is Strange,” hired former games journalist Leigh Alexander to write on their sci-fi game “Aphelion.” Leigh Alexander wrote the famous “Gamers are over” article during GamerGate in 2014. Don’t Nod makes narrative-focused adventure games, so the story and writing are especially important in determining the success or failure of a game like “Aphelion.” “Aphelion” was a game with a production budget of about $10 million and Don’t Nod was a studio with 85 full-time employees whose livelihoods were dependent on the success of the game. On Steam, “Aphelion” peaked at just 219 users, and is estimated to have sold between 4000 and 7000 copies on the platform. Today, the studio closed and everyone is fired. There have been over 37,000 layoffs and jobs lost to studio closures in the video games industry since 2024. Game designers like Leigh Alexander believe they get to decide who their audiences are, but they don’t. They have to make games that appeal to gamers, because gamers are the only people who reliably buy games. Whoever “Aphelion” was for, that audience didn’t show up to play it.

Nayib Bukele fixed problems like this in El Salvador and now Delcy Rodriguez is doing it in Venezuela. People think high crime is endemic to these countries, but all it takes is a few death squads or superprisons to can restore order in even the most violent cities in a matter of months.

Polygon’s editor thinks they can finish Mass Effect for $5 million, because that is what salaries would cost for 50 people at $50k per year for 2 years. First of all, the team would have to scale up considerably to build a game of this scale — the credits for “Dragon Age: The Veilguard” has 3,671 people listed. Second, most of these people make a lot more than $50k per year. Third, this game was a lot more than two years from shipping. Fourth, even if you imagine a “Mass Effect” game can be made by 50 people who all make less than an assistant manager at a Chipotle, the $5 million covers salaries, but not benefits, payroll taxes, office space, equipment or any of the other costs associated with running a company. The cost of finishing the “Mass Effect” game is in the neighborhood of $200 million. If they could finish it for $5 million, they would have done it.

Nobody ever goes to Ukraine to fuck with the Russians. No activists are going to be “human shields” in Sudan or Congo Yemen or for the victims of the cartels. They go to the West Bank to do their activism because they know the IDF and even the Hilltop Youth settlers won’t hurt them, and then they go on TikTok and claim the Israelis are worse than all those other people.

1/ Russian imperialism 2/ Jihad 3/ Jihad 4/ Jihad 5/ Jihad 6/ Jihad 7/ Jihad + natural resource control 8/ Drug cartels 9/ Drug cartels 10/ Jihad 11/ Jihad + natural resource control 12/ Jihadis vs Zionists

When college admissions are highly subjective and admissions officials have a lot of discretion, the rich and powerful who donate to universities can use their influence to get their kids and their friends’ into schools and also to keep people they don’t like out. College admissions committees should be disbanded and colleges should admit students based on an algorithm.

When progressives were trumpeting statistics claiming that New York was the safest it had ever been, I insisted the stats were misleading, and that Manhattan felt noticeably more dangerous, that scary encounters with crazy people were becoming more common and that encampments and junkies were everywhere on city sidewalks It turns out what I said is true. Jessica Tisch’s hotspot policing has been extremely successful in reducing crime in the poorest and most violent precincts, but Mamdani’s edicts against public order policing and Alvin Bragg’s insistence on releasing repeat offenders means that crime is surging in Manhattan and reductions in shootings and robberies in the Bronx and East Brooklyn are masking declining public safety and order in Midtown, the Village and the Upper West Side. Any time the statistics contradict the vibes, the vibes are the truth and the stats are a lie.

The change in a game studio is often described as a "Ship of Theseus," but that's misleading. A Ship of Theseus is rebuilt one plank at a time, replacing a part with an identical part until all the parts have been replaced and nothing of the original remains, yet the ship is identical. Studios like BioWare, Blizzard and Bungie have been transformed into very different ships.

Central Park Fives vanished from New York in the early 1990s as a result of racist overpolicing and full-page New York Times ads purchased by Donald Trump. But thanks to the concerted efforts of progressive activists to create conditions conducive to its return, this beautiful species, once thought extinct, is once again thriving in its natural habitat.

Annabel Richter was a 19 year old FIT student. She was fed fentanyl by a man named Moises Friere who told her it was cocaine. Friere knew what he was doing — he gave the drugs to two female students and didn’t take any himself. While Annabel was overdosing, Friere stripped off her clothes, took photos of her naked body, and then raped her instead of calling for help. Because of what he did, she is dead. There are no “I am Jane Doe” rallies for Annabel Richter. There is no daily coverage of her death on CNN. There are no New York Times investigations creating timelines of her last day. Unless you read local crime news in New York City, you will not have heard about this case. Why is Cornell’s Jane Doe of so much more interest to mainstream news than FIT’s Annabel Richter? Perhaps because news loves to create narratives about predatory white male college students and refuses to make national-news villains of men like Friere, who commit most of the actual crime in places like New York City. The NYT and CNN aren’t lying when they do 50 stories about Jane Doe and zero about Annabel Richter. They’re just exercising editorial judgment about which parts of the news you need to hear.

One thing that worries me a lot is that the economy is basically a Ponzi scheme. Older people's wealth is tied up in their houses. They are depending on ever-rising asset prices that they can borrow against. Younger people would like to buy houses. But policymakers have been pushing up asset prices to shore up the boomers. Now, there is nobody to buy the houses at the prices they are at, and nobody selling wants to lower the prices. When asset prices start to fall, overleveraged homeowners will start defaulting. But if asset prices stay where they are, younger people can't buy homes.

Stuy is New York’s most prestigious high school because it admits the highest-performing students as determined entirely by scores on an objective, unbiased test. Seats at Stuy are not allocated by race. They are not given out through a subjective process that can be influenced by politics or favoritism or money. The kids who got in did the best, and the kids who did not do the best cannot get in, no matter how much rich parents or woke politicians want to corrupt the fair and objective admissions competition. People like Lincoln Restler think Stuy is prestigious for reasons other than the fact that it has a rigorous objective admissions standard. He thinks the prestige these kids earned through their excellence can be redistributed to the students who are not the best that he would prefer to pretend are the best. But these students are not prestigious because they go to Stuy; Stuy is prestigious because these students go there. And if different students — inferior students— went there, then Stuy would no longer be the school that is a magnet for the smartest kids in New York and its prestige and reputation would dissipate rapidly, just like the University of California system’s has. Or maybe Restler knows this, and he just wants to destroy Stuy, because he wants to prevent these students’ talent from being measured and identified, so they can be scattered into low-performing schools where they will languish instead of having their talent cultivated. Regardless, his ideology of racial grievance and destruction is a monstrous evil masquerading as “social justice,” and it will not be tolerated.