‘These wouldn’t be playgrounds for billionaires’

‘California needs supercities — and we should build them now’

Zoltan Istvan at Newsweek

California “needs to lead the nation in constructing a new generation of supercities — planned urban centers built from scratch on farmland, empty coastal areas and stretches of desert,” says Zoltan Istvan. These would be “affordable, sustainable cities for workers, artists, teachers and young people who’ve been priced out of their hometowns.” California “could design them to be free from the regulatory gridlock that has paralyzed housing and infrastructure development across the state.”

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‘The dulling of America’s scientific edge’

The Washington Post editorial board

The U.S. is “still the world’s leading scientific research power, but competition is growing more fierce, and it’s a dangerous time to dull the country’s competitive edge,” says The Washington Post editorial board. Trump’s “effort to take down the wall that progressives built around U.S. academia” is “faltering due to overreach.” The “headwinds threaten to hold back the country’s intellectual might, just as China appears to build momentum in its application of AI-powered technologies.”

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‘Dick Cheney and the sanitizing of a war criminal’

Belén Fernández at Al Jazeera

People will remember Dick Cheney for “rather less warm and fuzzy things than love and fly fishing,” says Belén Fernández. Cheney “died with untold quantities of blood on his hands, particularly in Iraq.” His “fearmongering — and repeated lies concerning Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction — worked like a charm in paving the way for the infliction of ‘death on a massive scale.’” The “media can never bring themselves to call a spade a spade.”

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‘A victorious Mamdani will be forced onto the international stage’

Imran Bayoumi at Foreign Policy

The “focus of Zohran Mamdani’s whirlwind campaign for mayor of New York City was on what he would bring to the city,” says Imran Bayoumi. But New York’s “role as the center of the global economy means that as mayor, he will inevitably have to take on foreign policy.” Mamdani will “likely continue working with other cities across the United States,” and “may seek to build bridges between other left-wing political leaders and movements around the world.”

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