Hope for Struggling Florida Schools

A new law in Florida will expand its Schools of Hope program, which offers tax breaks and expedited approval for charter operators to open schools in areas with educational needs. “To receive the Schools of Hope designation, charters must meet a rigorous set of standards to ensure they provide a strong, viable alternative to traditional public schools,” Neetu Arnold explains. She argues that the program’s expansion “gives students in struggling districts a real chance to improve their academic—and life—outcomes.”

New York City’s closed primary system limits election participation to registered party members. Though reform advocates and organizations agree that closed primaries suppress non-Democratic voters and limit political competition, the city is stuck with them for the foreseeable future, John Ketcham writes. That’s because the chair of the New York City Charter Revision Commission recently announced that the body would not submit a proposal to reform city elections.

Read more about New York’s electoral system, and the proposal that could have been on the table, here.

Since his death in 2019, conspiracy theories about Jeffrey Epstein have spread ceaselessly online. And while some of them may be true, others seem to deflect from an even more disturbing reality. As Christopher F. Rufo observes, Epstein was “a depraved twist on an all-American archetype: the Jay Gatsby character.”

Like Gatsby, Rufo explains, Epstein gained his wealth through fraud and showered others with money in the hopes of being accepted into high society. “But the money, the parties, the islands, the brokerage accounts, and the snapshots with the rich were all empty symbols, bribes that temporarily masked the horror of a badly lived life,” he writes. “When it all came crashing down, no one attended Epstein’s funeral—as no one attended Gatsby’s.”

Read his analysis of what he calls the “dead man’s switch” here.

When Howard H. Fenn and Kurt Miceli did a keyword search of every article published in the JAMA Network between April 1 and May 31, they found that the phrase “diversity, equity, and inclusion” appeared more often than “atherosclerosis” and “osteoporosis.” Similarly, the word “inequity” appeared more often than “asthma” and “opioid use disorder.”

They also asked two AI chatbots to review the articles for political bias and found that all of them had a left-wing slant. “These findings reflect a broader leftward shift in medical research—one that has contributed to the scientific establishment’s erosion of rigor and objectivity,” they write. “This shift threatens the foundations of the profession, the integrity of research, and the quality of medical education.”

Read more about their analysis here.

“Between AI and optical advances in self-driving cars/trucks, mass transit will be safely computer-operated in a few years. The unions are fighting to remain relevant.”

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