THE TIMES LOOKS BACK ON COVID: “The New York Times looks back on covid, four years down the road, and says ‘Here’s what we’ve learned.’ I would say we have learned some things that the Times doesn’t touch, like the idiocy of shutting down stores, businesses, churches and, especially, schools. But admitting that would be a bridge too far for the Times. Even on the lessons the Times acknowledges, you sometimes have to read between the lines.”

JAMES PETHOKOUKIS: My chat (+transcript) with Spencer Weart on the history of nuclear energy fear.

Interesting, but missing here is that as the Vietnam War ended, activists turned to the anti-nuclear movement — in some sense created it — in order to preserve the infrastructure, and fundraising, that had been created for the Vietnam antiwar movement. The issue is never the issue, the issue is always the revolution. And the grift. Always the grift.

A NEW RULE: Tennessee Generally Bans Political and Religious Discrimination by Financial Institutions.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The War at Stanford. “We’re only in our third week of college, and we’re afraid to be here.”

KAROL MARKOWICZ: Your Jewish friends have a side group chat: We didn’t want to burden you but now you don’t know how bad it’s gotten.

IT’S CALLED “MY TRUTH.”

I rhetorically asked the question: "What happens to intellectuals, when after rejecting God, they reject atheism? Where is there left to go?"

The answer? To a pre-rational state of being, a private internal world, the “life of feeling”.https://t.co/hYZkhlzkKp

— wretchardthecat (@wretchardthecat) March 28, 2024

BIDEN IS LBJ NOW, BUT WITH NO HUBERT HUMPHREY:

I love how Biden’s protests have more people than a Biden rally 😂😂

— Meme’nOnLibs (@MemeNonLibs) March 29, 2024

And RFK Jr. is playing the role of RFK Sr.

OPEN THREAD: Here we go again.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: China adds new moon base project partners, but struggles to attract national-level participation.

JOHN HINDERAKER: The Case for Secession. “Might a state like Texas legitimately decide that the federal government has so abandoned its duties under the Constitution that it has no alternative but to remove itself from the Union, and vindicate its citizens’ rights itself? I think such a decision, given the enormity of the issue of illegal immigration, would indeed be legitimate. Whether it would be well-advised is a question that should, in my view, be open for debate.”

Competent national leadership would never get us to a place where people are debating this, but our ruling class is happily playing Civilizational Jenga.

NOT BY ACCIDENT: The implosion of the ‘typical American family.’

Flashback: Why Team Biden might be purposefully grinding down the middle class.

GOOD FOR HIM: Dave Portnoy Raises $1.5M for Family of Slain NYPD Officer. A few years ago he would have been targeted for cancellation for this.

21ST CENTURY PROSPECTING: 5,000 comets now identified, thanks to European Space Agency’s SOHO spacecraft.

A WHIFF OF TENSION: Dogs can detect trauma stress by smelling humans’ breath, study shows.

A FAILURE THEY’RE DOING THEIR BEST TO MEMORY-HOLE: Pandemic school closures, 4 years later. “Cooper and Cohen relied heavily on CDC guidance, as did the Toolkit, yet that guidance would come into question a little under two years when a Congressional committee found the CDC had allowed the American Federation of Teachers to rewrite key portions of school reopening guidance that had kept most schools closed. In some cases, the CDC had used AFT’s suggestions nearly verbatim.”

Every institution has been corrupted.

I DON’T WANT TO KNOW: Driving along … and the roadway vanishes beneath you. What’s it like to survive a bridge collapse?

THEY’RE LIKE GERMANS IN WWII: Poll: 71% of Palestinians Support October 7 Massacre, Majority Wants Hamas Returned to Power in Gaza.

And Gaza is no more a “humanitarian crisis” than Hamburg or Schweinfurt were.

IT’S ALL JUST A LITTLE BIT OF HISTORY REPEATING: Vinyl records outsold CDs for the second year running.

BRIAN TRANSEAU, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Why some types of music make people want to dance more than others.

EVERY INSTITUTION HAS BEEN CORRUPTED, BUT NOT EVERY CORRUPTER GOES TO JAIL: Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years for defrauding FTX investors.

COLOR ME UNSURPRISED: Lack of adequate sleep may increase risk of blood pressure.

SHOCKING NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: People with genetic risk for obesity may have to exercise more to stay healthy.

MICHAEL WALSH: What’s Good For General Bullmoose. “Gerald M. Levin, who died last week at the age of 84, will be little noted nor long remembered by the American public, yet his name should live in corporate infamy. As the man who destroyed Time Inc. via a unique combination of ambition, pomposity, luck, greed, unctuousness, and stupidity, Levin is one of the great villains of 20th-century American and journalistic history and a now-deceased exemplar for everything that’s wrong with big business, Wall Street, and the grubby managerial class that controls the lives of millions of people. Look on his Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Don’t mince words, Michael. Say what you really mean here.

Plus: “As John Cassidy wrote in his 2013 post-mortem of the ongoing wreckage in The New Yorker: ‘About the only ones who consistently benefitted from Time Inc.’s transformation into part of a multimedia conglomerate were the bankers and lawyers who put the deals together.’ Not to mention the execs who profited from it. If you’re looking for a point when it all went wrong with the American economy, the murder of Time Inc. at the hands of Levin & Co. is a good place to start.”

Our nation is run by people who live by Rhett Butler’s observation that there’s as much money to be made in tearing down a civilization as in building one up.

WELL, THE READERS HAVEN’T BEEN BOUGHT OFF BY BIG TECH: The NY Times is Skeptical of Jonathan Haidt But Readers Think He Has a Point. “Despite the subtle shade directed at him, most of the readers seem to believe Haidt is on to something with his new book. This is the top comment, upvoted more than 1,800 times:”

I taught high school for nineteen years. I left in 2022. Number one reason: the phones. Students enter class looking at their phones, they walk down the halls looking at their phones, and they sit around the cafeteria and campus after school looking at their phones. It’s only because the handheld digital onslaught occurred over several years that we don’t see it for what it is. Now I teach at a middle school where students never have their phones available. The result? Eye contact, good cheer, lively conversation, laughter, playfulness, and a sense of camaraderie. I left the clouds behind, and now the sun is out again. I’m happy.

I believe it.

THOUGHTS ON the ugly art of Richard Serra. “The man just died, so I’ll keep this brief. I have been tired for decades of this version of the story — the grand artist against the office deplorables. Imagine the workers, wanting to enjoy ‘their precious open space.’ I worked in one of those courthouses for a year during the period when the sculpture bisected the space, and I know how it felt to people who spent their working hours in its vicinity.”

Public art, for basically the entirety of my life, has looked as if it was created in order to demoralize the public, rather than uplift it. Quoth Serra: “I don’t think it is the function of art to be pleasing. Art is not democratic. It is not for the people.”

Except to pay for it, of course. That’s their role. Know your place, peasants! Well, it was a good grift.

Plus, from the comments: “As usual the artist is an egomaniac with a crippling inferiority complex.”