There's No Place Like Home

Defining Affordability, Springsteen on Minneapolis

It’s not quite the economy, stupid. Affordability has become the core issue and key buzzword of the upcoming midterms. But what do people, particularly young ones, mean when they say it? It turns out that when you ask people about affordability, they’re not necessarily talking about “the costs of goods that surged in the wake of the pandemic, like gas, cars and food.” In the NYT(Gift Article), Nate Cohn tries to make sense of the latest polling on the topic, and to explain why there’s a somewhat unusual disconnect between the concerns about affordability and the overall job market and economy. What people seem to be most disillusioned about is “the rising price of entry for a middle-class life: buying a home; paying for child care, college and health care; saving for retirement, and so on. These are familiar issues in American politics, but they add up to an entirely different problem under the all-encompassing label of affordability. The difficulty of purchasing a ticket to the middle class has created a sense that the economy isn’t working, even when the economy isn’t so bad by usual measures like growth or unemployment.” What Americans Really Mean by Affordability. Among young people, there seems to be a general sense that they can afford a hat, but they don’t believe they’ll ever have a place to hang it. “Around half of them said they worried most about affording housing, more than every other item combined, including retirement, health care, education, bills, cars and food.” (Attached ballroom, optional...)

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Career Building

“For decades, the American law school has served as a popular hedge against a cooling economy. When the ‘Help Wanted’ signs disappear, the ‘J.D.’ applications surge.” Well, applications to law schools are surging. Big time. “The number of U.S. law school applicants for the 2026 cycle is up an estimated 17 percent from last year, according to data from the American Bar Association compiled by the Law School Admission Council. That figure is a staggering 44 percent increase from just two years ago.” But this cycle, things are a little more uncertain. And that’s not just because it’s unclear whether we’ll have laws in America by the time these students graduate. “New limits on student loans that go into effect this year could make financing a degree more expensive. And artificial intelligence threatens to bring major changes to the industry, affecting which jobs are available and how much they pay.” Interest in Law School Is Surging. A.I. Makes the Payoff Less Certain.

+ Too bad you can’t get a graduate degree in becoming a data center. Amazon to Cut 16,000 Jobs in Latest Round of Layoffs. “The e-commerce giant has been cutting costs while pouring resources into building data centers to compete in the race to dominate artificial intelligence.”

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Membership Has Its Rewards

Groucho Marx famously explained, “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.” But the truth is that making others feel welcomed as a member of a club, organization, or political movement is one of the core determinants of long-term growth. In the New Yorker, the always interesting Charles Duhigg examines the differences between organizing and mobilizing, and several other factors that determine whether or not organizations become effective. What MAGA Can Teach Democrats About Organizing—and Infighting. “Republicans have become adept at creating broad coalitions in which supporting Trump is the only requirement.” (If you’re still for an America that remains a liberal democracy, consider yourself welcome in my coalition.) “The sociologist Liz McKenna, of Harvard, told me that movements succeed best when people feel welcome. A movement becomes sustainable when members feel empowered and find friends. ‘The left loves big protests, but protesting is a tactic in search of a strategy,’ she said. There must be some shared core values among a movement’s members, of course, but the requirement can’t be that every value is shared. ‘Making room for difference isn’t a nice-to-have thing—it’s table stakes,’ she told me. ‘The rallies are by-products of the community, not the goal.’ Most of all, even though anger can be useful, a movement also needs to provide some joy. ‘Trump rallies are fun,’ McKenna noted. ‘The Turning Point campus debates are fun.’ For a long time, she said, the left was less fun and more angry, ‘and so the right was out-organizing them at every turn.’”

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Citius, Altius, Fortius ... Ditior

The Latin motto of the Olympic Games translates as, Faster, Higher, Stronger. It might be time to add a new word to the motto: Richer. “Team USA has won more Olympic medals than any other nation on earth. But unlike other powerhouses of the Games, the U.S. government doesn’t spend a dime rewarding Olympic athletes. Any prize money comes mainly from sponsorship and the sale of broadcast rights. One man is hoping to give them a little more financial security. Starting from the Milan Cortina Olympics next month, financier Ross Stevens will give $200,000 to each U.S. Olympic and Paralympic athlete, regardless of performance.” WSJ (Gift Article): The U.S. Government Doesn’t Fund Olympic Athletes. So One Man Is Paying Them $200,000 Each.

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Extra, Extra

Outstretched Armada: “Mr. Trump gave no specifics about the deal he was demanding, saying only that a ‘massive Armada’ was heading toward Iran and that the country should make a deal. But U.S. and European officials say that in talks, they have put three demands in front of the Iranians: a permanent end to all enrichment of uranium, limits on the range and number of their ballistic missiles, and an end to all support for proxy groups in the Middle East, including Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis operating in Yemen. Notably absent from those demands — and from Mr. Trump’s post on Truth Social on Wednesday morning — was any reference to protecting the protesters who took to the streets in Iran in December.” NYT (Gift Article): Trump Threatens Iran With ‘Massive Armada’ and Presses a Set of Demands.

+ Bucking the Trend: “Spain’s government announced Tuesday it will grant legal status to potentially hundreds of thousands of immigrants living and working in the country without authorization, the latest way the country has bucked a trend toward increasingly harsh immigration policies imposed in the United States and much of Europe.”

+ Noem Alone: “From Democratic Party leaders to the nation’s leading advocacy organizations to even the most centrist lawmakers in Congress, the calls are mounting for the Homeland Security secretary to step aside after the shooting deaths in Minneapolis of two people who protested deportation policy. At a defining moment in her tenure, few Republicans are rising to Noem’s defense.”

+ Spraying Mantis: A man arrested in an attack on Ilhan Omarhas a criminal history and made pro-Trump posts. Trump responded to news of the attack by calling on Americans to tone down the aggressive rhetoric and explaining that violence has no place in American politics. Just kidding. He created a conspiracy theory suggesting that Omar orchestrated her own attack. Trump Floats Conspiracy Theory After Man Shoots Liquid at Ilhan Omar: ‘She Probably Had Herself Sprayed’.

+ Matching Funds: JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America said Wednesday morning that they will match the US government’s $1,000 contribution to so-called Trump accounts for thousands of their US employees.

+ Vlad Handing: “President Trump’s on-off relationship with President Putin is so volatile that he has veered from describing the Russian leader as ‘a nice gentleman’ to saying he was ‘pissed off’ with him. Now there is a sign that the ‘bromance’ is on again, as Trump hung a picture of himself and Putin in the White House.”

+ Still Looking for Those 11K Votes: “Speaking last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, President Donald Trump repeated his false claim that the 2020 election was ‘rigged,’ and said that ‘people will soon be prosecuted for what they did.’” And this week? The FBI just conducted court-authorized law enforcement actions at a Fulton County election office.

+ A Place in History: “Born to Black farmers in rural Virginia, Dr. West lived through remarkable societal and technological transformations — from segregation to the civil rights movement, from calculators to supercomputers, and from paper maps to Google Maps. Through it all, she worked in near obscurity. She was almost 90 before she received any recognition for her work.” Gladys West, Unsung Figure in Development of GPS, Dies at 95.

+ Nicollet Avenue Freeze Out: “Just don’t believe your eyes. It’s our blood and bones. And these whistles and phones. Against Miller and Noem’s dirty lies.” Bruce Springsteen Releases ICE Protest Song: Streets of Minneapolis.

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Bottom of the News

“As the storm recedes, residents of lesser-affected areas might be tempted to whip up bowls of ‘snow cream’ — snow combined with milk, sugar and vanilla — after seeing techniques demonstrated on TikTok. Others might want to try ‘sugar on snow,’ a taffy-like confection made by pouring hot maple syrup onto a plate of snow.” After one of the biggest and broadest storms of the season, I guess you’d have to call this a public service announcement. Eating snow cones or snow cream can be a winter delight, if done safely.

+ Kitty’s back in town... Majestic’ mountain lion captured after hours-long SF standoff.

+ John Mellencamp has a pretty unique treadmill workout to prepare for his upcoming tour.