So according to Gallup, America has the least confidence in our national institutions of any G7 country and the largest increases in anxiety/depression among young people even tho govt statistics show we’re out-growing the G7 and income inequality is falling.

What’s going on?

'As scenes of campus turmoil play out across the country in the final days of the school year, the moment also carries political risk for a party that has harnessed promises of stability and normalcy to win critical recent elections.' Katie Glueck: nytimes.com/2024/04/28/us/…

Down, down, down.

Public school enrollment projections keep getting worse.

the74million.org/article/intera…

My profile of John Avlon, the former CNN pundit and Daily Beast editor running for Congress.

nymag.com/intelligencer/…

Again, this is *mostly* b/c smart people are funneled into corporate America where, at a minimum, center left politics are the price of admission to ride escalator of incremental wealth & influence

We’re ~15 yrs into this sorting so the dearth of “smart” Cons will only increase

Dispiriting story about college becoming an increasingly lonely experience. Would be fascinating to see how these measures of isolation correlate school-by-school with attendance at on-campus sports events.

The solution: send you kid to a party school.

Wesleyan President Michael Roth Michael S Roth does tend to consistently get stuff right in my experience.

This is very sad.

“College students today are lonelier, less resilient and more disengaged than their predecessors, research shows. The university communities they populate are socially fragmented, diminished and less vibrant. The pandemic bruised the psyche of a generation.”

I'm not sure how the 'Great Disengagement' & student atomization relates to the recent surge in campus protests. Might be a red herring. But this WSJ article is startling nonetheless & contains some troubling portents for US associational life & civil society in the near future.

Ridership on DC's Circulator bus system dropped from five million in 2019 to just over one million in 2021, and has barely rebounded since, with remote work levels still so high in DC. So the city is shutting the system down amid its big budget crunch.
washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/…