Power Line

Joel Kotkin is one of America’s premier analysts of urbanism, urban economics, demographic change, and social trends. His brand new book, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class, turns upside down the conventional liberal narrative about why the middle and working classes are under pressure. It’s not capitalism and markets, but their perversions, especially in the hands... Source

When our cities start to come apart and people say it seems like 1968 all over again, that can only mean one thing: time to get in touch with Fred Siegel. Among Fred’s many fine books is The Future Once Happened Here: New York, LA, DC, and the Fate of America’s Big Cities, which explained the high cost of incompetent liberal rule of our major cities in the 1960s and 1970s... Source

Funny how the COVID-19 crisis has nearly disappeared from the news, after having been the subject of wall-to-wall media attention for three months. Riots have a way of doing that, though the mass rioting doesn’t seem to have concentrated the mind of New York Mayor Bill de Blasio very much, fueling further rumors that he really has shot his brains with his heavy reported dope-smoking. Source

“Decadence” is one of those familiar terms that is trivialized or rendered comic by overuse—perhaps you’d say from decadence itself. And while most people think decadent is mostly a synonym for “sumptuous,” it has a wider and deeper meaning, which is the subject of Ross Douthat’s new book, The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success. Douthat, a columnist for the New York... Source

John Ellis John M. Ellis, distinguished professor emeritus of German literature at UC Santa Cruz, is out with a terrific new book, The Breakdown of Higher Education: How It Happened, The Damage It Does, & What Can Be Done About It. This slim book makes for depressing reading indeed, covering the landscape of our ideologically corrupt colleges and universities. What needs to happen to change things? Source

Zachary Wood This episode flips the format, with my guest interviewing me for a change. Zachary Wood is a graduate of Williams College, where he was the president of a student group called “Uncomfortable Learning,” whose mission was to invite to campus outside speakers with a heterodox perspective (which is code for “conservative” for the most part). Invitees included Charles Murray... Source

Barack who? Is it just me, or is Obama the incredibly shrinking president, destined already to be remembered in the same league as John Tyler or Warren Harding? Charles Lipson, emeritus professor of politics at the University of Chicago, is out today with a terrific article at RealClearPolitics, “ Trump’s Methodical Destruction of Obama’s Legacy,” that walks through how President Trump is step-by... Source

Michael McConnell John Hinderaker joined me today to co-host this special edition of the show. Yesterday Facebook announced the creation of a 20-member oversight board that some media accounts describe as a “supreme court” to advise and in some cases rule on what kind of material can be taken down from the popular global site. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been talking about this... Source

Phil Magness When the news broke yesterday that the New York Times‘s egregious “1619 Project” had won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary, I knew the only thing to do was get Phillip W. Magness on the line. Magness, a senior research fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research, is the author of a brand new and indispensable book answering the factual errors and gross interpretive... Source

Joe Malchow The Wall Street Journal this morning includes an article from T.J. Rodgers, the retired founder and CEO of Cypress Semiconductors, with the provocative title, “Do Lockdowns Save Lives? In Most Places, the Data Say No.” Rodgers mentions in the first paragraph that much of the statistical work behind his article was done by our own Joe Malchow, who is Power Line’s Wizard of Oz behind the... Source