‘City leaders must recognize its residents as part of its lifeblood’

‘New York City is killing homeownership and no one cares’

Jason Mendez at The Hill

New York City is “becoming unsettlingly uniform in one uncomfortable way: nearly all are renters, hardly ever owners,” says Jason Mendez. For “decades, owning a home in New York was a difficult but attainable aspiration,” but “today, those opportunities are fast disappearing.” The result is a “city with a shrinking supply of homes to buy, and where the few left costing millions, unattainable for most New Yorkers; an irresistible scenario for landlords who know they have a captive audience.”

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‘Trump is right in putting pressure on Venezuela, but his solo act is a mistake’

Andrés Oppenheimer at the Miami Herald

There are “three myths about President Trump’s escalating pressure campaign against Venezuela’s dictator Nicolás Maduro that have been echoed by major international media in recent days,” but “all three are flat-out wrong,” says Andrés Oppenheimer. Instead of “threatening to depose Maduro because he is a brutal dictator who has forced more than 8 million people into exile, Trump says he wants to depose him because of Venezuela’s alleged fentanyl shipments to the United States.”

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‘Young people are getting dumber. Here’s why.’

David Scharfenberg at The Boston Globe

Young people are “getting dumber. Like, shockingly dumber,” says David Scharfenberg. The “pandemic certainly bears some of the blame. But the problem runs deeper than that.” We are “in the midst of a worldwide decline in academic achievement that predates the Covid-19 outbreak — going back a decade or more.” It “may have taken the shock of the pandemic to focus our attention on what had been a quiet academic crisis,” but “it would be foolish now to look away.”

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‘The slop of things to come’

Matt Alston at The Nation

A “bitter chorus of criticism and online vituperation ensued” over an AI-generated McDonald’s ad, says Matt Alston. The “wariness and fear around AI may be galvanizing into something like a collective immune response to AI slop.” The “labor economy Armageddon isn’t likely to descend on what are euphemistically known as the creative industries if the end product is as repellent as the McDonald’s spot.” It is “little more than the crudest imaginable simulacrum of human experience.”

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