Jessica Tisch Stays On at NYPD

NYPD commissioner Jessica Tisch and New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani disagree on just about everything when it comes to crime and policing. He wants to abolish the gang database. She has prioritized gang takedowns. He opposes expanding the police force. She has had to overcome staffing challenges. He wants to dismantle the Department’s Strategic Response Group. She wants to keep it. And so on.

So it was quite a surprise when Tisch accepted Mamdani’s offer to remain at the helm, leaving many to wonder how the two will be able to work together.

Read Rafael Mangual’s take on what Tisch’s decision will mean for the city and for the mayor-elect himself.

On the campaign trail, Zohran Mamdani pledged to address “repression” of pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses in New York City—especially “faculty members who are facing not just discipline but termination for the crime of expressing solidarity with the fight for Palestinian human rights.”

“Now militant faculty unions and New York City’s chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America are plotting to force his hand on this pledge by pressuring him to reinstate four fired City University of New York professors associated with the anti-Israel protest movement,” writes Stu Smith.

How he responds to that pressure could become Mamdani’s first test as mayor. Will he side with his radical base and reinstate the professors, or will he stick with the centrist pivot that characterized the waning days of the campaign?

Read Smith’s assessment.

If you’re the parent of a young child, you may have heard of Ms. Rachel, the playful persona of YouTuber Rachel Griffin-Accurso, whose whimsical, low-budget videos for little tykes have attracted a following numbering in the millions. Ms. Rachel has also emerged as an authoritative voice on all subjects even tangentially related to children—including Israel’s war with Hamas.

“There is nothing wrong with advocating for children suffering during wartime,” writes Tal Fortgang. “It’s the content of her advocacy that raises questions.” One-sided emotional appeals. Silence in the face of Hamas’s atrocities. Repeated selective blame of Israel.

Read here to see why anti-Israel groups have taken an interest in Ms. Rachel’s advocacy.

Over the past decade, activists and ideologues have published a flood of papers that purport to disprove one of biology’s most fundamental truths: only two sexes exist, male and female. These papers deploy sleights of hand that appear to undermine the reality of the sex binary. The author of one of these papers, published recently in a major life-science journal, suggests that because certain genes have similar expressions in tissues in both men and women, “there are no clear [sex] categories,” and that “[s]trictly separating male and female is therefore wrong.”

Colin Wright, an evolutionary biologist, says that this is just another example of fallacious reasoning from those who would deny the reality of the sex binary. “To claim that overlapping gene expression between males and females ‘defies’ a binary model of sex,” he writes, “is to rely on the very binary that makes such a comparison possible.” Read his full analysis here.

The Joseph Ratzinger Vatican Foundation awarded its 2025 Open Reason Prize to David Thunder for his book, The Polycentric Republic: A Theory of Civil Order for Free and Diverse Societies. The book outlines Thunder’s vision of a republic that spurns monism—the notion that the state can legitimately resolve irreducible pluralism. Thunder advances instead the notion of polycentrism, which considers the institutions of civil society essential to a successful polity.

Flavio Felice, a professor of history and political theory at the University of Molise, suggests in a review that Thunder’s embrace of subsidiarity—the principle that problems should be resolved at the most local level possible—“offers a way to order and manage the many institutional centers that no modern society can reduce to one.”

“In 1965, Democrats and LBJ passed the Immigration and Naturalization Act. Its lead supporter, Ted Kennedy, insisted that it would not flood our cities with immigrants, upset the ethnic mix of our society, relax the standards of admission, or cause American workers to lose their jobs.

It was all lies. And ever since, Democrats not only opened the floodgates to illegal immigrants as well but also told everyone coming to America to ‘celebrate their differences’ instead of assimilating.

This is what you get as a result.”

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