Courtney McLain

Ninth Circuit Court Judge Milan Smith interjected during attorney Daniel Ortner’s remarks with a jest on the state of higher education in America, as seen in a recent clip uploaded to X.

An attorney for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), Ortner is seen presenting an oral argument defending conservative students’ free speech rights against California’s Clovis Community College.

“This court, and the Supreme Court, have repeatedly said that universities are bastions for free speech. They are important places for freedom of expression and debate …” states Ortner 

“Does it matter if that’s not true anymore?” Judge Smith jokingly interrupted.

Jeremy Grantham:

The long, long bull market since 2009 has finally matured into a fully-fledged epic bubble. Featuring extreme overvaluation, explosive price increases, frenzied issuance, and hysterically speculative investor behavior, I believe this event will be recorded as one of the great bubbles of financial history, right along with the South Sea bubble, 1929, and 2000.

These great bubbles are where fortunes are made and lost – and where investors truly prove their mettle. For positioning a portfolio to avoid the worst pain of a major bubble breaking is likely the most difficult part. Every career incentive in the industry and every fault of individual human psychology will work toward sucking investors in.

But this bubble will burst in due time, no matter how hard the Fed tries to support it, with consequent damaging effects on the economy and on portfolios. Make no mistake – for the majority of investors today, this could very well be the most important event of your investing lives. Speaking as an old student and historian of markets, it is intellectually exciting and terrifying at the same time. It is a privilege to ride through a market like this one more time.

“The one reality that you can never change is that a higher-priced asset will produce a lower return than a lower-priced asset. You can’t have your cake and eat it. You can enjoy it now, or you can enjoy it steadily in the distant future, but not both – and the price we pay for having this market go higher and higher is a lower 10-year return from the peak.”1

Micki Wagner:

“From my standpoint, the marketing is great, but we have to actually convince people,” Entwistle said. “There’s the process, and there’s benefits to doing it, but we’ve got to make that happen because what I’m seeing just socially is people who have lived in New York for a long time are literally giving up their apartments in the city, and they’re moving to the suburbs right now. There’s a mass exodus that can be damaging unless we can turn that around, and when people leave the city, and when companies don’t have their employees coming into buildings, then the revenues start to go down…It’s a big challenge but there’s ways to work through it over time and, again, if you have that ability to draw from other resources, even the government, even the State of New York, for the time being, if there’s a place to access that liquidity to get through this rough patch, everybody will be fine in six or 12 or 24 months, I would imagine. That would be my bet.”

“I think we need to make our cities wonderful places to live,” Butler-Adams added. “They need to be amazing; they need to be free. They need to be gorgeous. You need to open the door and the children charge out. You need to make the people live in it. At the moment, the people are getting out of the city because they’ve been stuck in a tiny flat for three months, and this isn’t the end of the coronavirus…We need to rethink how we live our cities and make them wonderful places to live, vibrant, interesting, artistic and draw people in, draw the young in, draw the talent in and make people feel welcome. Stuffing a city full of metal boxes, stress, anger, air pollution, that’s not the way to have a city. They’re where most of us live. Cities need to be the most beautiful places to live, full of culture and diversity and richness, and that’s what we need to think.”

Brett Scott:

After much consideration, I’ve decided to break one of my key rules when talking about money, which is:

‘Never use substance metaphors to talk about money’

I have this rule because, while it may be printed upon physical objects (‘cash’), money is not a substance: it’s not ‘blood flowing through the veins of the economy’, or whatever other substance metaphor you may wish to use.

But, in this instance, I’m going to break the rule and use the metaphor of water to show you that bank deposits are never deposited into banks.

Depositing water deposits

The glass pictured above stores liquids. If I take a jug of water and pour water into this glass, I’m depositing water into it. After I’ve done that, I might say there is a ‘water deposit’ in the glass.

Admittedly we don’t often use that phrase to talk about water, but think for example of a geological metal deposit: in the beginning of the earth asteroids crashed and ‘deposited’ debris all over the planet, while volcanos ‘deposited’ lava, which nowadays leads us to discover ‘cobalt deposits’, ‘gold deposits’ or ‘iron ore deposits’.

Notice that the verb ‘deposit’ creates a noun of the same name: the exploding volcano ‘deposits iron deposits’, or the jug ‘deposits a water deposit’ into the glass.

Mark Johnson:

‘Something we’ve never seen before’: Scientists still trying to understand baffling, unpredictable coronavirus

ProPublica:

Two Coasts. One Virus. How New York Suffered Nearly 10 Times the Number of Deaths as California.

John Diedrich, Devi Shastri ,  Madeline Heim ,  Daphne Chen:

What we’ve learned about how to protect yourself from coronavirus in reopened Wisconsin

Mara Hvistendahl:

The story is a familiar one by now: When a mysterious virus cropped up in the Chinese city of Wuhan in December 2019, a 33-year-old opthamologist named Li Wenliang took to WeChat to sound the alarm. “7 cases of SARS have been confirmed in the Huanan fruit and seafood market,” he wrote in a private message to a group of his medical school classmates. “They were isolated in the emergency department of our Houhu District hospital.”

Someone posted Li’s messages online. Soon afterward, local police reprimanded Li for spreading rumors and forced him to apologize. But their efforts to muzzle him backfired. Li eventually contracted the virus. On January 30, 2020, as his condition worsened, he posted publicly about his run-in with the authorities on the Twitter-like platform Weibo. What happened next reveals a great deal about the dynamics of state control and popular dissent on China’s internet.

The metaphor most often used by Western observers for the Chinese internet is a wall. The slew of controls enacted by the state to regulate internet traffic is the “Great Firewall,” and using a VPN or other tool to circumvent these controls is called pa qiang, or “climbing the wall.” But this metaphor tends to obscure what is happening on the other side of the barrier. There we find people who respond to state controls with creativity and spunk. While some spend their days trawling cat videos, others create oases of subversion within the reality that they’ve been dealt.

Catherine Nixey:

In the spring of 1822 an employee in one of the world’s first offices – that of the East India Company in London – sat down to write a letter to a friend. If the man was excited to be working in a building that was revolutionary, or thrilled to be part of a novel institution which would transform the world in the centuries that followed, he showed little sign of it. “You don’t know how wearisome it is”, wrote Charles Lamb, “to breathe the air of four pent walls, without relief, day after day, all the golden hours of the day between ten and four.” His letter grew ever-less enthusiastic, as he wished for “a few years between the grave and the desk”. No matter, he concluded, “they are the same.”

The world that Lamb wrote from is now long gone. The infamous East India Company collapsed in ignominy in the 1850s. Its most famous legacy, British colonial rule in India, disintegrated a century later. But his letter resonates today, because, while other empires have fallen, the empire of the office has triumphed over modern professional life.

The dimensions of this empire are awesome. Its population runs into hundreds of millions, drawn from every nation on Earth. It dominates the skylines of our cities – their tallest buildings are no longer cathedrals or temples but multi-storey vats filled with workers. It delineates much of our lives. If you are a hardworking citizen of this empire you will spend more waking hours with the irritating colleague to your left whose spare shoes invade your footwell than with your husband or wife, lover or children.

Or rather you used to. This spring, almost overnight, the world’s offices emptied. In New York and Paris, in Madrid and Milan, they ready themselves for commuters who never come. Empty lifts slide up and down announcing floor numbers to empty vestibules; water coolers hum and gurgle, cooling water that no one will drink. For the moment, office life is over.

Even before coronavirus struck, the reign of the office had started to look a little shaky. A combination of rising rents, the digital revolution and increased demands for flexible working meant its population was slowly emigrating to different milieux. More than half of the Ameri­can workforce already worked remotely, at least some of the time. Across the world, home working had been rising steadily for a decade. Pundits predicted that it would increase further. No one imagined that a dramatic spike would come so soon.

Superhighway98:

Between 1998 and 2003, searching for something on Google was magical. I remember inputting a vague notion like “oil mother’s milk,” and being directed to an interview with Thomas Gold, an astrophysicist who postulated that hydrocarbon deposits refilled themselves because of geological pressure.

Today, if you’re looking for something that is technical, specific, academic or generally non-commercial, good frigging luck. The world’s best information retrieval system has devolved into something reminiscent of 2006-era Digg: A popularity index that’s controlled by a small number of commercially motivated players. They call themselves “SEOs.”

Technical search-engine optimization specialists get a pass: They generally make the web faster, safer and more accessible. “Black hat” SEOs are obvious villains. They boost their own web rankings by breaking the law (e.g. hacking into a website to add links back to their own). But, black hats are the petty criminals of the SEO world. It’s the “white hat” SEOs, the supposed good guys, who are the wolves in sheep’s clothing.

These web marketers have a simple strategy: to squelch competition by concentrating authority. They march behind a banner of legitimacy and self righteousness, and like a totalitarian regime, they believe their end justifies their means. Here are some of the tactics they use: