Nick Confessore
@nickconfessore
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Reporter for @NYTimes, staff writer at @NYTmag, @MSNBC political analyst. Also at @nickconfessore.bsky.social.
Joined February 2011
Oklahoma's schools superintendent, a Trump supporter, is trying to put Bibles in every classroom in the state. But under bidding rules released this week, the only published Bible that appears to meet the state's bid requirements is. the Trump bible.
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Jack Danforth, a Republican elder of the pre-MAGA era, says Trump is a "more profound" threat to democracy than Nixon was. "It's not just individual corruption, venality. It's a direct attack on the country to serve self. That’s what it is. It’s a direct attack on what makes us.
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The head of GLAAD, a leading gay-rights group, flies first class, stayed in a half-million-dollar-a-week chalet for Davos, gets an annual allowance for a Provincetown summer rental, and had the group spend $20K to remodel her home office, @emilysteel reports -- all on top of.
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“He brought with him to the firehouse Laura Loomer, a conspiracy theorist who posted on social media last year that 9/11 was an ‘inside job.’ Ms. Loomer stood outside, beside two wreaths that were fluttering in the breeze coming off the East River…She played around on her phone.
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The University of Michigan spent almost a quarter of a billion dollars to build the most ambitious D.E.I. program in higher ed. The school is more divided than before. What Michigan’s experiment can tell us about the D.E.I. revolution.🧵.
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"The top election official in one of the nation’s most politically important counties said Wednesday she was forced out of her role just weeks before the November presidential election, disputing an official statement that she asked for a leave after experiencing 'stress.
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Really an interesting look at how symbolic and impressionistic politics is in practice, and how people’s political views often don’t line up in a conventionally ordered way.
AOC asked her followers who split their ballots either for Trump/her or Trump/downballot Dem to explain why and posted the replies:
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Rachel Dawson, director of the U-M's office of academic multicultural initiatives, was said to have made the comments during a conversation at an academic conference earlier this year. She also said "Jewish people have no genetic DNA that would connect them to the land of.
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My colleague @ezraklein and his guest Michael Lind argue that the old Democratic machine, which connected the party to voters, was replaced in Obama years by a lattice of rich donors and non-profit groups that didn’t actually represent the views of the people they claimed to be.
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Meanwhile, for the rank and file folks: “employees said they faced scrutiny over minor violations of the group’s expense policy. One employee who expensed a cup of coffee was chastised for taking money away from the L.G.T.B.Q. cause and had to reimburse GLAAD, according to a.
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A lawyer for Dawson said she denied making the statements, which came during a conversation with two professors at a diversity conference. The lawyer said also said that it was "troubling that they would escalate the situation to termination based on one conversation in.
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“Mr. Ferraro said it was important for Ms. Ellis to summer in Provincetown so that she could meet with donors and activists and attend events.” 🤨.
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NEW: The University of Michigan -- long a leading proponent of "diversity statements" -- will no longer require them in job applications, promotions, and tenure decisions, following a protracted behind-the-scenes debate on campus.
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I pay for the @washingtonpost for great media reporting by @erikwemple, politics scoops from @jdawsey1 and @ashleyrparker, and cause @petridishes don't miss. #whyIsubscribe.
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"In the final weeks of the presidential campaign, the richest man in the world has involved himself in the U.S. election in a manner unparalleled in modern history." .Team @nytimes on how Musk is using money, his voice, and his control of Twitter to help Trump win.
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This kind of thing always gets underplayed as a factor in the veepstakes fever/gaming-out -- > ."Several people close to the decision-making process said that Ms. Harris simply connected the best with Mr. Walz.".
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It’s one of the most persistent misconceptions about money in politics in my experience — that the big donors are mostly centrist moderate types and the small donors are wild-eyed radicals.
Wow. This got a lot of traction. I have nothing to say beyond the fact that this has been studied quite extensively and in each case, top donors are less centrist. This is not a surprise. Donors are generally more educated, engaged, and partisan.
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They touch a bit in the role of labor. The decline of unions might be a bigger part of the puzzle. Unions are by definition multi-issue membership groups, not single-issue donor-driven groups; in many industries, they are also a mechanism for turning culturally conservative white.
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George Clooney, a major Dem fundraiser who was with Biden at the big Hollywood event last month, writes that "our party leaders need to stop telling us that 51 million people didn’t see what we just saw" at the debate.
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This comes from a longer interview Danforth did about Trump, American self-government, and the Constitution.
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This story gets at something interesting, which was that the Bowman-Latimer primary was sort of the inverse of the AOC-Crowley primary. Here the challenger working the distinct like an experienced incumbent — which he effectively was — while the newbie incumbent lost its pulse.
The easy explanation for Jamaal Bowman's defeat is that he alienated Jewish voters on Israel and AIPAC swamped his district with ads. That's true, but it's not the whole story:
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The school’s own data suggests that in striving to become more diverse and equitable, Michigan has also become less inclusive. Students and faculty members reported a less positive campus climate than at the D.E.I. program’s start and less of a sense of belonging.
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@AmnaUncensored Thanks to everyone who is reading and commenting. Here's a gift link if you are not a @nytimes subscriber.
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Elaborating on this point for a second, I want to recommend @glastris and Zach Marcus's writing on non-flagship state schools, which are both relatively under-resourced and tend to not to figure much in the campus culture wars -- for instructive reasons.
Tom, who did a Phd at Michigan, talked about how much more genuinely diverse the state university he went to — a lesser known institution in the South — was.
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Instead, I learned, Michigan has been consumed by rising conflict around identity. Students and faculty discovered there was power in framing their complaints and disagreements as crises of inclusion and "harm" -- claims that came to trump other university values.
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UPDATE: Dawson was fired "this week," according to her lawyer. She plans to sue U-M.
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Not one student I spoke to expressed any particular enthusiasm for Michigan’s D.E.I. initiative. Black students are cynical about the school’s unfulfilled promises to boost Black enrollment. Others find the school’s efforts stifling. They ignore the emails, roll their eyes at the.
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Musk "has even offered his own sperm to friends and acquaintances, including the former independent vice-presidential candidate Nicole Shanahan, according to two people familiar with his offer."
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"Nearly five million Lego pieces plunged into the sea in 1997. The pieces are still showing up — on England’s coast, in Ireland, Belgium, France and possibly at the beach near you."
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UPDATE: Dawson was fired "this week," according to her lawyer. She plans to sue U-M.
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As the historian @AmnaUncensored argues, modern D.E.I. in some ways a triumph of the corporatization of higher education, in which universities have tried to turn moral and political ideals into a system of formulas and dashboards. “They want a managerial approach to.
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Earlier this year, I began talking to faculty and students at U-M, one of the country’s top public schools. With D.E.I. under fire nationally, I wanted to closely examine a program that held itself out as a model for the country.
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NEW: “No one knew what they were supposed to be doing. And no one would tell us. But we had to show that we were doing something.”. My deep dive into the country’s most ambitious D.E.I. program – and what its struggles reveal about the D.E.I. revolution in higher ed.
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On Michigan’s largely left-leaning campus, few of the people I met questioned the broad ideals of diversity or social justice. Yet the most common attitude I encountered about D.E.I. during my visits to Ann Arbor was a kind of wary disdain.
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Michigan students are less likely to engage across gulfs of difference -- culture, race, religion, politics. Improving this kind of engagement is a big part the formal rationale for building out university D.E.I. programs in the first place.
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NEW: Regents at the University of Michigan are weighing changes in the school's ambitious -- and expensive -- D.E.I. program, one of the largest in the country, as higher ed braces for a likely Republican crackdown on government and academic D.E.I. 🧵.
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To take one measure: over roughly the same period during which it embarked on its D.E.I. expansion, Michigan saw an explosion in formal complaints of harassment and discrimination.
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U-M hoped to attract a more diverse faculty and student body, to integrate D.E.I. into every facet of school life – to enact a “cultural transformation” across campus. What it got wasn’t quite the transformation the school was after.
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One great privilege of working for @nytimes is our readers --thoughtful, engaged, curious. Many commented on our piece about D.E.I. at the University of Michigan. I want to take a minute to share some of their responses and reactions here. 🧵.
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There is -- as usual -- quite a lot of great journalism in the @washingtonpost this morning. Here's a story you can't find anywhere else today.
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This is consistent with what I’ve always experienced when doing “man-on-the-street” interviews, which is why they are useful even if anecdotal. You get complexifying insights into how people who are not professionally involved in politics actually think about it.
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Murdoch acknowledges that Fox hosts endorsed election conspiracies: The latest Dominion dump via @jwpetersNYT & @katie_robertson
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Part of the issue for U-M, and perhaps its peer institutions, is the intellectual mission creep of D.E.I. Under legal and political pressure, the earliest versions of D.E.I., including affirmative action policies, morphed from an instrument of racial justice into a program of.
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The University of Michigan’s provost announced early this morning that the school “will no longer solicit diversity statements as part of faculty hiring, promotion and tenure” — a major shift by one of the country’s top public research universities.
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What a time.
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To get a sense of what that means, take a look at U-M's extremely long "Defining DEI" page. Is it a program of racial justice in the liberal mold? A celebration of difference of all kinds? Can it really be both? (Some would argue: Yes.).
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Tom, who did a Phd at Michigan, talked about how much more genuinely diverse the state university he went to — a lesser known institution in the South — was.
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Marijuana, legal in much of the country, is widely seen as nonaddictive and safe. For some users, these assumptions are proving dangerously wrong. @mega2e @danielle_ivory @CarsonKessler on America's accidental national experiment in self-medication.
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“Rubin received $400,000 a month for 16 videos, plus a performance bonus and a $100,000 signing bonus — all for a series in which Rubin commented on dumb internet clips that often received just roughly 1,000 views per episode.” @willsommer reports:
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In May 2022, the chief financial officer of Boar’s Head, the processed meat company, was asked a simple question under oath. “Who is the C.E.O. of Boar’s Head?”. “I’m not sure,” he replied. @maureenmfarrell on the secretive dynasty that controls an iconic American brand.
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The swimsuit model Stacey Williams said Jeffrey Epstein brought her to Trump Tower, where the future president groped her. Mr. Trump’s campaign denied it. @MattGoldstein26 & @emilysteel report:
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For those curious to delve into the empirical debate around microaggressions, which feature significantly in many D.E.I. programs -- >.
Really excellent NYT article on DEI at UMich (by extension, and beyond). 3-tw 🧵.Bonus: It cites and correctly summarizes one of my articles on microaggression research:."The notion that microaggressions are not only real but ubiquitous in interracial encounters is widespread in.
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"Restaurants are turning into vending machines with chairs." @pete_wells on how dining out is losing its soul.
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NYT’s @anniekarni on the Democratic bulls being challenged for committee chairs by “slightly younger” colleagues. The slightly younger colleagues in question are almost all in their sixties.
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!!! "There is no indication that the case is related to any of the four separate federal corruption investigations swirling around Mayor Eric Adams, his campaign and some of his most senior aides." !!!.
NEW: 2 N.Y.C. Fire Department Chiefs Arrested on Bribery Charges . With @WRashbaum.
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U-M "was attempting to address an almost impossibly difficult and important task from within an ideological monoculture. It was doomed to fail. not because the D.E.I. bureaucracy is leftist. It’s because it’s full of human beings." .A perspective from my colleague @DavidAFrench.
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“The reversal of the years-old policy is a stark sign of how the company is repositioning itself for the Trump presidency in the weeks before it begins.” @nytimes reports on Facebook dropping fact checking as Trump prepares to enter office.(link ⬇️.
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This is really cool -- check it out.
CORMAC MCCARTHY—ANATOMY OF A PARAGRAPH:. This is one of my favorite passages from ALL THE PRETTY HORSES. Here’s what I see Cormac doing, technically:. 1. Starts with a short, physically-grounded sentence: “They rode out along the fenceline and across the open pastureland.”
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One note on the Heritage study, which my article cites solely for its comparison of the size of D.E.I. staff across large public universities. * Heritage puts U-M's D.E.I. staff at 163 people in 2021. * U-M itself puts the number at 162 in 2022.
@PsychRabble She argues the Heritage Foundation is a "primary" source showing "the failures of DEI.". @nickconfessore mentions Heritage twice. Once citing the only study of its kind on the growth of DEI; once illustrating what conservatives think about DEI. Therefore: Project 2025.
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Democrats have fled red neighborhoods in recent years while Republicans move out of blue ones, accelerating the country's political polarization. A great real estate-as-politics story from @rondakaysen & @ethanpsinger:
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@AlecMacGillis This comes from a @ppi study of the broader growth of administrative jobs in higher education. The main concern of the PPI report is that this growth is driving up the cost of college without any clear improvement in students' academic experience.
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"The vote was an indication that ordinary evangelicals are increasingly open to arguments that equate embryos with human life, and that two years after the overturning of Roe v. Wade, 'fetal personhood' may be the next front for the anti-abortion movement." @publicroad.
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Just how large was Eric Adams living? @sarahlyall tracks his journey through the first-class section, one room upgrade and complimentary glass of champagne at a time.
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But Jane, also a professor at Michigan, described the school’s D.E.I. culture as “suffocating.”
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U-M is not just another school. Beyond being a leading selective public university, U-M has long evangelized D.E.I. and diversity-oriented hiring practices in the American academy. The shift here is -- as DEI critic @JohnDSailer comments -- a "watershed."
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"Is he a tech accelerationist? A Dimes Square neo-trad fascist? A dirtbag anarchist? One subgroup seems to have come out on top." .Parsing the politics of the CEO killer.
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"The word almost never spoken was the name of Ms. Harris’s actual hometown: Berkeley, Calif." @hknightsf & @AlexandraBerzon on how Harris, has massaged her bio amid attacks from the right.
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"Underneath that veneer of Midwestern politeness, Mr. Walz had angled to improve his political prospects. In early 2023, his political staff began a concerted effort to hone his message and shine a light on his accomplishments. Aides pitched him relentlessly to podcasters,.
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A really thought-provoking package from the Monthly, examining new approaches to racial justice in higher ed in a post-affirmative action world.
The decades-long effort to push elite colleges to be more diverse has failed. Here’s a better strategy: demand more support for the underfunded colleges that already graduate most Black and Hispanic students, and plenty of white students as well. 🧵 (1/5).
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Jon, a professor at the school, finds that the faculty and students in my story don’t reflect the positive experiences he has had as a teacher.
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Jonathan, who applied for one of the equity-oriented fellowships referenced in my story, found that faculty at Michigan questioned his own ethnic identity because “I hadn’t used the supposedly correct term in how I identified” — and said he considered suing the school.
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More interesting reporting from my colleagues on the Walz pick, and on Shapiro, who was more hesitant about the veep job than his many outside boosters, and was demanding more assurances from Harris -- >
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Eg.
To summarize: 1/4 of pro choice women voted Trump; 1/4 of Latinos who opposed mass deportation; 1/3 of voters who said govt should do more to expand health coverage; 1/6 of voters who said he’d steer US to authoritarianism. All that’s in the maybe future: higher prices were now.
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"Nearly five million Lego pieces plunged into the sea in 1997. The pieces are still showing up — on England’s coast, in Ireland, Belgium, France and possibly at the beach near you."
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Chiqufru, who attended U-M in the early 1980s, discussed their own experience as a Latino student there.
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A fourteen-year employee of the last two New York governors was on the Chinese government payroll, prosecutors allege.
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Pharmacy benefit managers were supposed to reduce drug costs. Instead, @RebeccaDRobbins & @ReedAbelson found, they steered patients to "pricier drugs, charge steep markups on what would otherwise be inexpensive medicines and extract billions of dollars in hidden fees.".
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And Sasha, in our top-rated reader comment, describes academic D.E.I. as “one of the most pernicious things ever to happen to American higher education.”
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NYC’s top COVID response official “participated in sex parties and attended a dance party underneath a Wall Street bank during the height of the pandemic, even as he was instructing New Yorkers to stay home and away from others to stop the spread of Covid-19.” @SarahMaslinNir.
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The NYPD evicted a Times at 1 Police Plaza (as well as a NY Post reporter) for violating a non-existent rule against contacting department employees without official permission.
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A partial @ErikWemple list of the hundreds of stories media outlets across the board have written about "the stakes" of the 2024 election. "It’s robust enough to raise a question: Have the stakes of any previous U.S. presidential election been explored as deeply as this one".
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U-M joins public university systems in Missouri, Ohio and Wisconsin that have prohibited these requirements. Nine states have banned the practice legislatively. Harvard and MIT have adopted similar measures voluntarily.
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Notably, a campus survey conducted as part of these deliberations found that a majority of U-M faculty -- a generally pretty liberal bunch -- believed diversity statements placed pressure on professors to express specific moral, political and social views.
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UPDATE: At a public meeting this afternoon, regents and the school's president said U-M would also expand the school's popular scholarship program for low-income Michiganders. Some regents have indicated they are likely to seek future cuts to the school’s large D.E.I.
NEW: The University of Michigan -- long a leading proponent of "diversity statements" -- will no longer require them in job applications, promotions, and tenure decisions, following a protracted behind-the-scenes debate on campus.
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Fewer than half of Long Island high school students surveyed knew what happened at Pearl Harbor:
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Mark Bernstein, a Democratic regent, told me: “It is my hope that our efforts in D.E.I. focus on redirecting funding directly to students and away from a bloated administrative bureaucracy.".Dems have a 6-2 majority on the board, which is directly elected by Michigan voters.
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Anne, who works in higher education, said the changing culture of student complaint at Michigan — the growing reliance on formal institutional intervention — resonated with her own experience.
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Executives at the National Realtors Assn enjoy lavish perks — paid for with member dues funneled to the group thanks to its quasi-monopoly on home listing databases that most agents cannot compete without having access to. @debra_kamin reports:
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"He might not have wanted to admit it. But he knew. They were thanking him, yes, for what he accomplished during a lifetime in public service." @peterbakernyt on the many messages of Biden's farewell.
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Three decades ago, Van Gogh's "Portrait of Dr. Gachet” disappeared from public view. @PekingMike & co. follow the lost masterpiece from Manhattan to a lakeside villa in Switzerland -- and ponder whether great art deserves to be seen.
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“We called them campers,” said Zachary Spain, a manager at the Red Lobster in Times Square. “This one couple, they came in every Sunday, and I’d say they ate about 100 shrimp apiece, maybe 120."
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How China skirts the U.S. ban on high-speed computer chips — in part to design weapons that could be used against the U.S. or its allies in the future. @AnaSwanson reports:
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"There is no other quote-unquote medicine in the history of our country where your doctor will say, ‘Go experiment and tell me what happens,’” said Carrie Bearden, a clinical psychologist and neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles.".
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"Beijing is conducting espionage activities on what Western governments say is an unprecedented scale, mobilizing security agencies, private companies and Chinese civilians in its quest to undermine rival states and bolster the country’s economy."
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Gigi, from California, described debating D.E.I. with her husband. As a person of color, she sympathizes with the goals of D.E.I. but wonders whether such programs have real impact.
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