From NBC News (Angela Yang): Washed Out's latest song, "The Hardest Part," was released Thursday, complete with a four-minute music video following a couple's romance from high school through the rest of their adult lives together — speeding through scenes alluding to a wedding, child-rearing and eventual death. The video's director, Paul Trillio, wrote in a statement shared by Washed Out's record label, Sub Pop, that he had wanted to film such an "infinite zoom" concept for a decade now but never attempted it because he believed it would be too ambitious. "I was specifically inter ..read more

Neither of the two men most likely to be elected president in November has anything that could properly be described as a workable plan for addressing the approaching insolvency of America's two largest entitlement programs. This week's news from the Social Security and Medicare trustees ought to underscore just how foolish that is. On Monday, annual reports from the officials charged with running the two old-age entitlement programs confirmed once again that the clock is ticking for both: Social Security is expected to hit insolvency in 2035, while the portion of Medicare that pays for hospi ..read more

You can read the just-filed Complaint in C.M. v. Davidson County Bd. of Ed.; here's my post on the incident from when it first hit the news. [* * *] The New York Post (Yaron Steinbuch) reports: A 16-year-old North Carolina high school student says he was suspended just for saying "illegal alien" while discussing word meaning in English class — possibly ruining his chances of landing a college sports scholarship. Christian McGhee, a student at Central Davidson High School in Lexington, received a three-day suspension last week after he used the term in English class, the Carolina Jou ..read more

An interesting Persuasion interview (text and audio). I expect I disagree with Patel on much, but I found his comments to be thoughtful and well expressed. One excerpt from the beginning: What's happened is an interesting critique morphed into a paradigm which then shifted into a regime. Anti-racism is an interesting critique. Here's what you're not talking about: you're not talking about structural racism; you're not talking about oppressed peoples; you're not talking about oppressors, etc. So I think that's an interesting critique. But when it becomes a paradigm, it seeks to explain all of ..read more

After surviving a disastrous congressional hearing, Claudine Gay was forced to resign as the president of Harvard for repeatedly copying and pasting language used by other scholars and passing it off as her own. She's hardly alone among elite academics, and plagiarism has become a roiling scandal in academia. There's another common practice among professional researchers that should be generating even more outrage: making up data. I'm not talking about explicit fraud, which also happens way too often, but about openly inserting fictional data into a supposedly objective analysis. Instead of d ..read more

Going into Rafah: "The Israeli military said on Tuesday that it had sent tanks into Rafah and established control over the Gaza side of the border crossing with Egypt, in what it called a limited operation aimed at destroying Hamas targets it says were used to attack Israeli soldiers," reports The New York Times.  The day prior, Israeli authorities had warned Palestinians sheltering in Rafah to move elsewhere, saying an invasion was imminent after Hamas had launched rockets from Rafah that killed four Israeli soldiers. "A sense of panic coursed through Rafah, in southern Gaza, on Mo ..read more

The boycott of Columbia graduates by a group of judges led me to the following thoughts (adapted from a post about the 2022 boycott of Yale Law graduates, which was begun by a judge who is also one of the signatories to the Columbia boycott). [A.] Just to make clear at the outset, I agree that judges are entitled to choose whom to hire, and that they indeed often prefer some law schools or colleges over others for many reasons that are often only weakly correlated to the school's relative academic quality. (Columbia students may well have been the beneficiary of such preferences far more often ..read more

5/7/1873: Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase died. One month earlier, he dissented in the Slaughter-House Cases, and was the lone dissenter in Bradwell v. Illinois.   The post Today in Supreme Court History: May 7, 1873 appeared first on Reason.com ..read more

People write and write and write about the need to deregulate housing construction, and yet some days it seems like minimal progress is being made. Perhaps Yes In My Backyard (YIMBY) reformers would be better off drawing the argument against zoning instead. That's certainly the view of George Mason University economics professor Bryan Caplan. His new comic book Build, Baby, Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing Regulation makes the illustrated case for eliminating basically all restrictions on building new homes. This is Caplan's second comic book. His first, 2019's Open Borders: The Scien ..read more

Joanna Andreasson/DALL-E4 When the conceptual poet Lillian-Yvonne Bertram began to experiment with large language models (LLMs) in 2018, they discovered unexpected poetry inside ChatGPT-2. "The prompt responses were quirky: prone to interesting conversations and uncanny and poetic slippages. There was a strangeness about them," they wrote in the introduction to their new AI poetry collection, A Black Story May Contain Sensitive Content. "The responses made you feel like someone was maybe looking over your shoulder, or the machine had read your horoscope or your diary, like it just knew&n ..read more