Casinos in New York City?

Manhattan neighborhood committees recently rejected all three proposals for new casinos: one near the United Nations, one in Times Square, and one in Hudson Yards. By the end of this month, similar committees must decide whether to approve casinos in Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx.

“Manhattan’s landslide downvotes are a lesson to outer-borough locales still weighing whether to reject or accept their own casinos in the next few days,” Nicole Gelinas writes. “Gambling halls are such nuisance uses—like highways or power plants—that communities with real economic and political power reject them. They are emblems not of success but of desperation.”

Read more about the Manhattan committees’ rejection of the casinos and the financial struggles of casinos upstate.

Public transit systems around the nation have struggled to recover from the Covid-19 lockdowns. Ridership is still down from pre-pandemic levels, and many cities face billions in expenses. While some states have implemented tax hikes, others have sidestepped the issue.

“With all these struggles, there’s been too little talk about reforming and restraining spending, especially employee costs,” Steven Malanga writes. “The nation’s biggest transit systems operate in overwhelmingly Democratic-run cities and states, and local politicians have consistently granted their unionized workforces generous pay and benefits packages.”

Read about some of the controversial efforts Democratic governors have considered to bail out their transit systems.

Critics are right that it’s too easy to game America’s H-1B immigration system. Intended to attract the best and brightest, the visas often go to workers with midlevel skills.

President Trump’s recently announced changes to the system—including a $100,000 visa fee and a new prioritization scheme—will only make things worse. “The changes barely raise the skill level of recipients, give outsourcers an advantage, and make it harder to hold on to top graduates from U.S. universities,” Jeremy Neufeld and Santi Ruiz write. “The administration is right to want tougher standards for H-1B use. But to curb outsourcing firms and reserve visas for the most skilled immigrants, it must rethink the details.”

Read their suggestions here.

Paul Kingsnorth’s new book, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity, portrays “the Machine,” our digital-industrial society, as disastrous for the human race. Kingsnorth “romanticizes the peasant and the gypsy,” Corbin K. Barthold writes. “He rhapsodizes about going without engines or supermarkets. He flirts with endorsing ‘indigenous ways of knowing.’” Kingsnorth’s “implicit economic program,” Barthold argues, “would leave everyone at the mercy of guilds of local craftsmen. He is making an aesthetic pitch for poverty.”

Read Barthold’s review.

“It is just an extension of the poverty industrial complex. Keeping people dependent on government by deterring individual responsibility.”

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