IT”S ABOUT TIME: Second Thoughts in New York. Facing community pressure, some progressive black leaders are reevaluating their soft-on-crime positions.

LOCAL HERO: On the Rocks: The Primadonna Story. I just finished reading the fascinating saga of Joe Costanzo, a mailman turned restaurateur turned prisoner. Joe was a classmate of mine and a basketball star at Central Catholic School in Pittsburgh. Against the advice of his family, he gave up his secure job with the Postal Service and opened an upscale restaurant in a very down-and-out place, McKees Rocks, a blue-collar town outside Pittsburgh that had fallen on hard times with the collapse of the steel industry.

It was a struggle to survive at first, but in the 1990s his Primadonna restaurant became a hot spot thanks to Joe’s family recipes for Italian food, his personality (he’d been the friendliest guy in our high school, greeting everyone by name as he walked down the halls), and his indefatigable marketing efforts. The place got rave reviews from restaurant critics, had two-hour-long lines of customers waiting for a table, and inspired visiting pro athletes and celebrities to make the trek down the Ohio River to sample the wares of Joe and his wife, Donna. Then Joe tried going into politics, spending too much money on a losing campaign for county commissioner. His financial woes led to trouble with the IRS (for tax evasion) and a stint in prison — where Joe again made friends with everyone. The book, written by Joe’s daughter, Maria Costanzo Palmer, and Ruthie Robbins, is an inside look at the restaurant business — and a well-told story of American entrepreneurship.

FOR BETTER OR WORSE: Remote Work Is Here to Stay. Rising office vacancies reflect the new reality.

VERITAS? THEY CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH: Harvard’s Unscientific Consensus. My podcast with Martin Kulldorff, the eminent scientist fired by Harvard Medical School after he questioned Covid orthodoxy on lockdowns and vaccine mandates. (Transcript provided.)

ONE MORE SCANDAL FOR CLAUDINE GAY’S SUCCESSOR TO CONFRONT: Harvard Tramples the Truth. When the Covid pandemic began, Martin Kulldorff was a professor at Harvard Medical School and one of the world’s leading experts on vaccines. He had helped design the system used by the CDC and other agencies to monitor adverse effects from vaccines. But instead of drawing on his expertise, Harvard proceeded to fire him. Now, for the first time, Kulldorff reveals how he lost his job after co-authoring the Great Barrington Declaration and (correctly) challenging the Covid orthodoxy on lockdowns, natural immunity, and vaccine mandates (including “the science” promulgated by Rochelle Walensky, the Harvard professor who was a disaster as the CDC’s director during the pandemic).

If the school’s next president is serious about repairing Harvard’s reputation — and eliminating its notorious double standard on free speech — then he or she should force the medical school to rehire Kulldorff.

OUR COUNTRY IS IN THE BEST OF HANDS: I’m instituting a 30-day review . . . Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, having violated the law by not informing the president and other officials that he was in the hospital, has boldly announced a 30-day review to determine how to improve the procedures for transferring power when there is a break in the chain of command. Ann Coulter suggests that we all follow his example:

True, I failed to pay my taxes; therefore I’ll be instituting a 30-day review to recommend procedures to pay my  taxes.

As a result of my getting drunk at your wedding, heckling the ceremony and knocking over the wedding cake, I have commissioned a 30-day review to recommend procedures not to get drunk at weddings, heckle the ceremony and knock over the wedding cake.

Having been informed I was going 70 miles per hour in a 30 mph speed zone, I will be undertaking a 30-day review to recommend procedures not to go 70 miles per hour in 30 mph speed zones.

Of course, you have to be careful in appointing the members of your review committee.

CARL CANNON: Cause of Journalism’s Woes? Tech Changes, Yes, But Partisanship Too. Mainstream journalists have not only become shills for the progressive agenda, but they’ve also abandoned the First Amendment in their efforts to censor other journalists.

THE REST OF THE STORY: What to the Conservative is Black History Month? Progressives monopolize the concept, but conservatives could use it to celebrate black achievement.

NATE SILVER: Google abandoned “don’t be evil” — and Gemini is the result. Don’t believe Google’s excuses. The political bias isn’t a glitch. It was built in.

MONEY FOR NOTHING: R.I.P. for Welfare Reform in New York. The welfare rolls shrank dramatically during the Giuliani and Bloomberg administrations, but they’re rising again at the fastest rate in decades, and it’s not just because of illegal immigrants. The city’s emphasis on “equity” and “benefit access” over jobs and self-sufficiency will produce chronically dependent and dissatisfied residents.

BAD THERAPY: When Every Day is a Mental Health Day. Abigail Shrier, whose last book was banned by Target to placate transgender activists, now offers an astute and impassioned analysis of the mental-health crisis afflicting American adolescents raised by permissive parents and overtreated by therapists.

GET WOKE, GO EXTINCT: “Livelier Than You Are, Whoever You Are.” Thirty years, ago the Yale literary critic Harold Bloom presciently feared that the canon of Western works was endangered. In The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, he foresaw the rise of what he called the School of Resentment, “a cult of gender and racial cheerleading” by “Feminists, Afrocentrists, Marxists, Foucault-inspired New Historicists [and] Deconstructors.” But while he was correct about the immediate future, he may have been too pessimistic about the long term.

Bloom, who died in 2019, believed that the battle was lost. Those of us who aspire to be “individual readers and writers” will still read the Canon, he concluded, while “the others, who are amenable to a politicized curriculum, can be abandoned to it.” Looking at the state of my alma mater, I can see why Bloom felt as he did. But is despair so warranted? Why should not the new Puritans eventually go the way of the old? We hear a lot these days about the (woke) moral arc of the universe. But Shakespeare is interesting, and scolds are not. For all we know, time is still on the Canon’s side.

Read the whole thing (and the Canon).

STEVEN MALANGA: The Dead-End Left. Amid the surging success of GOP states, political shifts make course corrections hard for Democratic enclaves because of the “Curley Effect.”

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: Department of Incorrections.  Rather than inform its readers about the potential pitfalls of New York City’s proposed open-ended debit-card program for migrants, the New York Times prefers to attack Nicole Gelinas’ reporting in the New York Post on this boondoggle.

REFUGES FROM PUBLIC SCHOOL WOKERY: An Atmosphere of Joy. Dale Ahlquist is the most effective education reformer you’ve never heard of. His network of  Catholic high schools, the Chesterton Schools Network, will open its 69th school next fall, offering students affordable access to a rigorous classical curriculum.

CHRISTOPHER RUFO: Exeter Under Ideology. Left-wing race and gender theory devour the once-prestigious boarding school.

NO, PUBLIC SCHOOLS ARE NOT “UNDERFUNDED”: Correct the Record. School districts need to debunk the misleading talking points from teachers’ unions.

ALEXEI NAVALNY: Martyr for Democracy. The death of Alexei Navalny is an unequivocal revelation of the true nature of the Russian regime

NICHOLAS WADE: Unlocking Antiquity. New technology permits the deciphering of ancient scrolls without opening them—and the rush is on to expand our knowledge of these materials while we still can.

HEATHER MAC DONALD: The Decadence of Identity Politics. Gender studies comes to policing.

GOODER AND HARDER, NYC: Outrageous–But Not Surprising. The Times Square assault of two NYPD officers, and the release of several of the suspects, are predictable outcomes of destructive policies on migrants and public safety.

UNEXPECTEDLY: A Border Crisis By Design. Most Americans still don’t understand what is happening at the border, but it is unequivocally the intended result of Biden administration policy.

HE WAS ALWAYS WAY AHEAD OF EVERYONE ELSE: Adam Smith on the Negativity Effect. Long before psychologists and economists documented the negativity effect — “Bad is stronger than good,” as Roy Baumeister and I summarized it in The Power of Bad — Adam Smith recognized its many manifestations (like loss aversion — we fear losses more than we appreciate gains) and offered lucid explanations, as Yahya Alshamy and Daniel Klein explain in a new paper.

THE SMOKING GUN: New Documents Largely Confirm That Covid Was Created in Wuhan Lab. Nicholas Wade, the veteran science journalist who forced the mainstream media to stop pretending that a Covid lab leak was a crazy conspiracy theory, describes newly unearthed documents that are being called definitive evidence the virus was created in a lab. In 2022, researchers noted an unusual symmetric structure in the virus that was highly unlikely to be natural, and theorized the procedure for creating this structure in the lab.  The new documents show that in 2018 other researchers, including one from the Wuhan lab, had submitted a proposal to use this exact procedure to synthesize a virus.

ANOTHER DOOMSDAY AVERTED: The Retirement Crisis That Wasn’t. Experts predicted that baby boomers would be broke in their old age — prompting endless media alarms and and calls for the government to intervene.  Instead, the boomers are now one of history’s richest generations.