How Trump Killed Conservatism: The president has cultivated and encouraged the ugliest passions within the GOP, dousing the embers of hate with kerosene. [ed. note: a conservative write a paean to conservatism, yawn]
How the Midwest Became the Place to Move: It’s (mostly) about affordability.
The Death of Millennial Feminism: Lindy West has unwittingly written the obituary for an era. - "Adult Braces is many things: a paean to the varied landscapes of America, an advert for #vanlife, a reminder to be grateful that your partner hasn't talked you into a throuple with a much thinner woman. It is also the tombstone for Millennial Feminism - that swirling brew of Media Twitter, blog snark, the Great Awokening, whaling on Lena Dunham, fat positivity, and boring straight people identifying as queer through accounting tricks."
Why I Stopped Forcing My Kid to Share: True generosity can’t be coerced.
Suicidal Bootlicking as a Method of Governance: Education and extraction in the cannibal South. - "Ken Griffin goes to Harvard, makes a fortune, builds his business in New York and Chicago, and then finally deigns to move his hedge fund down to Florida in order to not pay taxes, builds a private school, and then watches the kids of all his associates go back to Harvard. Do you think these masters of the universe are going to send their kids to the University of Florida or the University of Texas to learn some halfhearted religious bullshit? Hell no! They want the best educations for their kids. They will not be utilizing the educational systems that have been degraded in order to redirect more wealth into their own bank accounts. Harvard and Yale will educate a crop of imperial capitalists, grow their fortunes, deploy them down to desperate Southern states that they can plunder, and then accept their children back again in order to repeat the process. Notice what the Southern states themselves get out of this process: Less than nothing. They are making the ambient education levels of their own residents lower in order to be better exploited by out-of-state wealth. They are ensuring that their own residents will be less competitive with the Harvard cutthroats of the future. They are locking themselves into a perpetual cycle of having to offer ever more extravagant enticements for out-of-state rich people to come on down, because they robbed themselves of the ability to build their own ladder upwards by giving it all away to attract the last generation of out-of-state wealth. This deranged and suicidal cycle, at least, explains how this stupid system has gone on for so long. The way it is able to extract from the normal residents of a state in exchange for absolutely no positive return is a marvel to perceive."
2028 Dem hopefuls scramble for distance from AIPAC Democrats eyeing: White House bids are distancing themselves from the powerful pro-Israel group amid slumping support for Israel within the party’s base. - "'There are Iranian Americans that bundle money. There are Turkish Americans that bundle money. There are a lot of ethnic groups that bundle money, and often for things that I don’t agree with. But somehow AIPAC seems to be drawing a lot of attention, and that’s problematic to me,' Booker said. '[AIPAC] is not the problem in America. The problem in America is money in politics.'"
Decades after a Florida canal project was abandoned, advocates are trying to reunite 3 rivers
How to get Big Tech to pay your energy bills: The most overlooked U.S. power plant isn’t a gas turbine or solar farm. It’s your house (and thousands of others), and firms are paying to use them to power data centers. - "Your home offers another solution to the energy shortage. The concept is simple. When thousands of homes are coordinated together by software into what are known as distributed or virtual power plants (VPPs), they can deliver or free up a power plant’s worth of electricity for the grid by dialing down consumption from smart appliances like electric water heaters or dispatching electricity from home batteries. This approach can bring hundreds of megawatts online in months, not the years it can take to build a new power plant."