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Dear Commons Community,

Three Senate Democrats are raising concerns with companies that develop online degree programs for universities over whether their recruiting tactics and tuition-sharing arrangements are contributing to high student debt loads.

The senators, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Tina Smith of Minnesota, sent a letter Friday to eight of the largest online program management, or OPM, companies — including 2U, Academic Partnerships and Pearson — raising concerns about their business practices.

“We continue to have concerns about the impact of OPM partnerships on rising student debt loads,” the senators wrote. “The responses to our previous letters confirmed that OPMs often have tuition-sharing arrangements with universities, which commit an ongoing percentage of tuition revenue to the OPM to finance the start-up and ongoing costs of operating online degree programs.”

The tuition-sharing model, they said, “also creates incentives for aggressive recruitment practices.”

The companies often receive 50 percent or more of students’ tuition upon each agreement, which in turn may create a disincentive to lower costs, the senators said.

Millions of dollars in financial student aid go to online degree programs every year. But there is no consistent public disclosure of how much of the money is directed to recruiting, advertising and profit, rather than instruction.

The senators asked the companies for information about the scale and logistics of online program operations and tuition-sharing agreements, the demographics of the students they serve and breakdowns of their expenditures and their use of federal aid dollars by no later than Jan. 28.

The senators first questioned the companies in a letter sent in January 2020. Since then, the Covid pandemic has significantly increased the need for online education, the senators said in a statement.

In separate statements, 2U, Academic Partnerships and Pearson said they intend to continue dialogue with policymakers.

Pearson “welcomes the opportunity to engage with policymakers and officials about the benefits of online degree programs,” a company spokesperson said.

2U “welcomes continued discussions about the important role that we play in helping non-profit colleges and universities make quality online education more accessible and affordable,” a company spokesperson said.

Academic Partnerships “will continue our differentiated strategy focused on regional public universities across the country and continue our open dialog with all stakeholders,” a company spokesperson said.

Student loan advocates and some congressional Democrats, including Warren, have continued to put pressure on the Biden administration to cancel student debt and grant greater financial relief during the pandemic. More than 44 million people owe about $1.7 trillion in student loan debt.

The administration announced last month that a moratorium on federal student loan payments would be extended through May 1 because of the rise in cases of the highly transmissible omicron variant of the coronavirus.

An investigation into OPMs is most appropriate!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Over the weekend, several news outlets posted stories about Donald Trump becoming nervous about the possible presidential candidacy of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.  It makes sense that someone like DeSantis would seek the Republican nomination.  Philosophically he is very close to Trump but he is not obsessed with spreading lies about the 2020 election.  DeSantis would be a formidable opponent for Trump.  I suspect we will see other Republicans coming forward by 2024.  Below is a synthesis of Trump’s reactions courtesy of several news outlets.

After I posted the above, I came across an analysis of the Trump/DeSantis feud on NBC News that points a finger at Mitch McConnell.

Tony

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Donald Trump is reportedly growing annoyed with one potential 2024 rival for the Republican presidential nomination: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

“He says DeSantis has no personal charisma and has a dull personality,” one unnamed source told Axios.

While several potential 2024 Republican candidates have publicly said they won’t seek the nomination if Trump runs for a third time, DeSantis isn’t one of them.

“I wonder why the guy won’t say he won’t run against me,” Trump has reportedly said to associates, according to the New York Times.

That lack of deference seems to have led to Trump’s attack on “gutless” politicians last week that many believe was a thinly veiled attack on DeSantis.

That moment came during an interview with far-right One America News in which the former president said he got a booster shot for the coronavirus and called out GOP pols who have also gotten the shot but won’t admit it,

“They don’t want to say it because they’re gutless,” Trump said. “You got to say it — whether you had it or not, say it.”

DeSantis is among those who’ve ducked the question.

The Times said Trump is especially unhappy as he believes his early endorsement helped DeSantis win the governorship in 2018, and that DeSantis “didn’t have a chance” in the race without the help of the then-president.

Trump allies have warned DeSantis not to test the former president.

Roger Stone said last year that he could spoil DeSantis’ reelection bid this year by running against him as a Libertarian candidate … but will back off if DeSantis pledges not to run against Trump in 2024.

Trump himself has publicly said he’s not worried.

“If I faced him, I’d beat him like I would beat everyone else,” he told Yahoo News last year, adding that he didn’t expect DeSantis to run in the end: “I think most people would drop out, I think he would drop out.”

DeSantis has not said if he intends to run for president.

Dear Commons Community,

New York Times columnist and CUNY Graduate Center colleague, Paul Krugman, considers the main issues facing New York City as it tries to bounce back economically from the pandemic.   Entitled, Why a Blue City Is Feeling the Blues, his column focuses on the dominance of the financial sector in fueling the City’s economy.  Specifically, he points to Wall Street and other financial services that he describes as follows:

“…what Wall Street has stopped doing, for now at least, is going to the office — because finance turns out to be one of those industries in which a lot of work can be done remotely. This in turn means that financial workers aren’t buying lunch, shopping downtown, going out to eat and so on.“

He also provides important insights on housing and construction.  The entire column is below.

Important reading for those of us who care and want to understand more about how the Big Apple is fairing in 2022.

Tony

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The New York Times

Why a Blue City Is Feeling the Blues

Jan. 17, 2022

By Paul Krugman

Opinion Columnist

Remember when New York City was doomed? The first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic hit the city like a hammer, killing more than 20,000 New Yorkers over the course of a few months. And many commentators asserted that it was New York’s lifestyle — in particular, its uniquely high population density and reliance on mass transit — that made it so vulnerable.

As it turned out, however, this was all wrong. New York suffered badly at the beginning because it’s still America’s leading gateway to the world, so it got heavily infected first, at a time when we didn’t know much about how to protect ourselves from the coronavirus. Since then the city has done pretty well on the health front.

It has not, however, done nearly as well on the economic front. And thereby hangs a tale that’s relevant not just to New York, but to blue America in general.

About the pandemic: During the Delta wave, the combination of high vaccination rates, widespread mask-wearing and public health precautions — you can’t do much indoors in the Big Apple without showing your vaccine card — helped make New York one of the safer places in America, suffering a far lower Covid-related death rate than rural counties or sprawling, car-dependent cities like Dallas. The Omicron wave also hit New York first but appears to be receding fast.

And soaring rental rates, which appear to be more or less back to their prepandemic level, suggest that New York is once again seen as an attractive place to live. Sorry, but I can’t resist quoting the investment manager who declared, “The main problem with moving to Florida is you have to live in Florida.”

Indeed, New York is a great place to live — if you can afford the cost of housing. That last point, however, is a problem, and it lies behind the city’s lagging economic recovery.

All of America suffered steep job losses in the early months of the pandemic. New York City’s job losses, however, were much bigger in percentage terms than the national average, and as the national economy has recovered New York hasn’t made up the lost ground.

What’s behind this underperformance? Some of it reflects the effects of the pandemic on tourism and business travel — Times Square was just starting to become intolerable again (normally nobody goes there because it’s too crowded) before Omicron hit. But the larger issue, I’d argue, is New York’s lack of economic diversity.

That may seem a strange thing to say about a city that is incredibly diverse in so many ways — including the jobs people have. But a city’s economic fortunes are largely driven by its “export base” — the things it produces that are sold elsewhere. This base normally has a large “multiplier”: Much of the money earned in the base is spent locally, supporting restaurants, shops, gyms and more. But the base is what drives the city’s growth.

And New York’s base is remarkably narrow for a city its size. As Harvard’s Ed Glaeser has pointed out, in economic terms the city is pretty much a monoculture: It sells financial services to the rest of the world and not much else.

Just looking at employment numbers can be misleading: Only about 8 percent of New York’s workers are employed in finance and insurance. But their incomes are so high compared with everyone else’s that they account for about 20 percent of the city’s economy and most of its export base.

And the trouble with having a one-industry economy is that bad things happen if something undermines that industry. Think of coal in West Virginia or cars in Flint, Mich.

The odd thing about New York’s troubles is that in some ways the city’s export base has been holding up fine; Wall Streeters aren’t decamping en masse. But what Wall Street has stopped doing, for now at least, is going to the office — because finance turns out to be one of those industries in which a lot of work can be done remotely. This in turn means that financial workers aren’t buying lunch, shopping downtown, going out to eat and so on. The problem, in other words, is less a shrinking base than a reduced multiplier.

But why has New York lost its economic diversity? The answer, surely, is that the immense purchasing power of Wall Street and those who serve it has collided with a housing stock limited by zoning and regulation, making the city too expensive for everyone except financiers and those who, directly or indirectly, cater to their needs. And the solution is obvious: Allow more housing to be built.

Which brings me to the question of what’s wrong with blue America — with New York just one example (California is worse). Conservatives will tell you that people are moving to Texas and Florida for the low taxes; but while New York’s taxes are indeed high, there’s not much evidence that they’re driving high-income residents away. What people are really doing is moving to places where housing is affordable, because governments don’t block new construction.

And in the case of New York, NIMBYism is ultimately the reason a great global city has become a one-industry town, leaving it unusually vulnerable to pandemic-driven economic dislocations.

Dear Commons Community,

Today we remember and honor the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., a man of peace who did so much for others!

Tony

St. James AME Church, founded in 1868

Dear Commons Community,

Lilly Endowment Inc., which supports religious, educational and charitable causes, contributed $20 million to the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund as seed funding for the Preserving Black Churches Project.

This project to preserve historic Black churches in the United States will help  help congregations including the St. James AME Church that was slammed during the tornado that killed more than 20 people in Mayfield, Kentucky, last month.

The announcement about the donation from the Lilly Endowment was timed to coincide with the Martin Luther King Jr. national holiday today.  As reported by the Associated Press.

Rather than simply replacing broken windows or straightening rafters, the project will provide assistance with things including asset management and helping historic churches tell their own stories, said Brent Leggs, executive director of the Action Fund.

St. James AME Church, founded in 1868 just three years after the Civil War and crumpled by the Mayfield twister, will receive $100,000 as the first recipient of the project’s special emergency funding, Leggs said.

With its sanctuary virtually destroyed and only 15 or so active members, all of whom are older, St. James AME needs all the help it can get, said the Rev. Ralph Johnson, presiding elder of a church district that includes the congregation. Black churches served a vital role after the war ended and Black people no longer were considered the property of white people.

“Once the slaves were freed one of the things they wanted to start was a church home. They wanted to work out their spiritual salvation and have a place to congregate, and they also were used as schools and other things,” he said.

Black churches have been a key element of the African American community through generations of faith and struggle, and preserving them isn’t just a brick-and-mortar issue but one of civil rights and racial justice, Leggs said in an interview.

“Historically Black churches deserve the same admiration and stewardship as the National Cathedral in Washington or New York’s Trinity Church,” he said. Trinity, where Alexander Hamilton and other historic figures are buried, was near Ground Zero and became a national touchstone after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

In all, the project plans to assist more than 50 Black churches nationwide over the next three years, including some that are vacant or set for demolition or are struggling with inadequate funding, aging members and dwindling membership. While active congregations are the main priority, funding can also go to old church buildings that now house projects like community centers or treatment programs, Leggs said.

“It still stewards the legacy of the Black church but for a new purpose,” he said.

The Action Fund previously has assisted congregations including Mother Emmanuel AME Church, where white supremacist killed nine parishioners during a Bible study in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, and Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham, a stalwart of the civil rights movement which was bombed in the 1950s.

The Action Fund, which has raised more than $70 million, has assisted with more than 200 preservation projects nationally. It was started by the National Trust for Historic Preservation after clashes between white supremacists and protesters during the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.

The fund calls itself the largest-ever attempt to preserve sites linked to African American history.

Great cause!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Maureen Dowd has advice for President Biden in her column this morning – you need more mojo. Here is an excerpt:

“Biden is too in the weeds on process. He’s so lost in the snows of yesteryear that he is continuing his Amtrak Joe nearly-every-weekend commute to Delaware, albeit with better wheels, trading in the train for Marine One.

We want the president to rise above it and be an inspirational figure. We don’t want the incremental updates of his negotiations with Joe Manchin.

We want to see Covid under control. We want to see the sacred right to vote protected. We want the grocery shelves stocked with affordable milk and meat. We want a president who tells us that we will get through this and we will be stronger for it.

Joe Biden better Build Better or he won’t be Back. If he doesn’t turn it around, he has cleared the way to a Republican rout in this fall’s midterms. And in 2024, who knows how bad it can get?”

YES!

Dowd’s entire column is below.

Tony

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The New York Times

More Mojo, Joe!

Jan. 15, 2022

By Maureen Dowd

Opinion Columnist

Oh, the tribulations of Job Biden! Kyrsten Sinema humiliated him. Mitch McConnell disrespected him. The Supreme Court blocked him. Vladimir Putin scorned him. Inflation defied him. Covid stalked him. Even Stacey Abrams stiffed him.

There are any number of sentiments to feel about what the president is enduring right now, and we should feel all of them. Pity, anger, disappointment, embarrassment — and hope that he can get it going, because the alternative is really bad.

As hapless as Biden and his coterie are, we can’t give up on the president because he’s all that stands between us and the apocalypse at the hands of Trump, DeSantis, Pence, Kristi Noem and future Chief Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

President Biden fancied himself another Master of the Senate. Unfortunately, he was thinking about the Senate of 1984. He was supposed to be Mitch McConnell’s equal in senatorial cunning. But, so far, McConnell — the Einstein of obstruction — has been astonishingly successful in ruining Biden’s agenda.

Biden’s one big accomplishment, infrastructure, was achieved with McConnell’s support because there was enough home-state pork in the bill to fix the potholes on Kentucky’s Bourbon Trail.

When President Biden went up to the Senate on Thursday to have lunch with the Democrats, after being publicly stabbed in the heart by Sinema, he couldn’t help but lapse into the gauzy mists of the past, the good old days when he could reason with Webster, Clay and Calhoun. (Maybe not with Calhoun.)

In the private meeting in the Kennedy Caucus Room, Biden said how much it meant to him when he was newly elected to the Senate and Ted Kennedy took him out to lunch, according to some in attendance. The president noted with melancholy that he had seen the Senate dining room empty, where once all the senators hobnobbed and worked out deals in a hive of bipartisan collegiality. Reiterating a point he made in his big voting rights speech in Atlanta, he said that even Strom Thurmond — the onetime segregationist presidential candidate — had become more supportive of voting rights than Republicans are now.

But slurping navy bean soup with McConnell and John Thune isn’t going to break the fever. No matter how many times Biden mentions Strom Thurmond, he’s not coming back.

“Strom Thurmond?” Nancy Pelosi said after Biden brought Thurmond up in the voting rights speech in Atlanta. “None of us have a lot of happy memories about Strom Thurmond.”

The problem has been the same from the start. It’s not the Senate, country or world that Biden longingly remembers. Republicans aren’t open to persuasion. Their goal, as it was with Barack Obama, is to make Biden’s presidency a failure.

One of the many fallacies of zany/creepy Sinema’s tremulous logic in her Senate speech about why the filibuster must be preserved is that she faults the Democrats for not working harder and striving more to bring Republicans on board for protecting voting rights.

Psst! Senator Sinema. That’s the whole point. Republicans don’t actually want everyone to vote, unless they’re rural or white. And they don’t want to help Biden. This is all to their advantage. McConnell is not a sucker.

The Republicans know that making it easier to cast ballots during the pandemic helped elect two freshman Democrats from Georgia and made Chuck Schumer, not McConnell, the leader of the Senate. And McConnell doesn’t want that to happen again. Even though Schumer is such a pushover that he backed down from his promise of a voting rights showdown by Martin Luther King Day because winter weather threatened.

But Sinema feels more talking is required. “We need robust, sustained strategies that put aside party labels and focus on our democracy,” she declared. Yeah, like that’s going to happen. She’s as delusional about the Senate as Biden is.

Biden was elected to be Not Trump, to be a comfortable old shoe. He overpromised and underdelivered. People wanted competence and stability and instead we get incompetence and instability.

Biden is running the White House like a Senate office with his familiar white-guy innermost circle from the old days.

But the real problem is the president himself, who can’t shake the cobwebs of the Judiciary Committee that held its biggest hearings in the same ornate caucus room where he met with Democrats on Thursday.

He is too in the weeds on process. He’s so lost in the snows of yesteryear that he is continuing his Amtrak Joe nearly-every-weekend commute to Delaware, albeit with better wheels, trading in the train for Marine One.

We want the president to rise above it and be an inspirational figure. We don’t want the incremental updates of his negotiations with Joe Manchin.

We want to see Covid under control. We want to see the sacred right to vote protected. We want the grocery shelves stocked with affordable milk and meat. We want a president who tells us that we will get through this and we will be stronger for it.

Joe Biden better Build Better or he won’t be Back. If he doesn’t turn it around, he has cleared the way to a Republican rout in this fall’s midterms. And in 2024, who knows how bad it can get?

Richard Macksey’s home library. Credit…Will Kirk/Johns Hopkins University

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times has an article  this morning for those of us who love our home libraries.  It focuses on a photograph (above) of  the home library of Johns Hopkins professor Dr. Richard Macksey in Baltimore, who passed away in 2019. Dr. Macksey’s book collection clocked in at 51,000 titles.  The image goes viral on Twitter annually. Here is an excerpt from the article.

“The author and political activist Don Winslow tweeted a photograph of an avid reader’s dream library. Bathed in the buttery glow of three table lamps, almost every surface of the room is covered with books. There are books on the tables, books stacked on mahogany ladders, and books atop still more books lining the shelves of the room. “I hope you see the beauty in this that I do,” Mr. Winslow wrote in the tweet, which has been acknowledged with 32,800 hearts.

If you spend enough time in the literary corners of Twitter, this image may look familiar. It rises again just about annually, and the library has been attributed over the years to authors including Umberto Eco and buildings in Italy and Prague. As with other images featuring beautiful bookshelves, people go absolutely bananas for it. Mr. Winslow’s post received 1,700 comments, including one from a professor at Pace University who has been using the photo as his Zoom background.

“It’s clearly the home of a person who loves and collects books,” Mr. Winslow said in an email through his agent, Shane Salerno. “For me, I think that photo is as stunning as a sunset. I could spend days and days locked in that library examining each book.” He noted that there’s something comforting about the image, since “it’s a room you could happily get lost in.”

I would have loved to have spent time in Macksey’s library but I will settle for one (see below) of the two that are in my home.

Tony

Highlights of Navient Settlement

Dear Commons Community,

Tens of thousands of people who took out student loans over the past 20 years could see their loans canceled or receive a small check as part of a nationwide settlement with Navient, a major student loan collecting company, over allegations of abusive lending practices.

Proposed settlements were filed Thursday in courts around the country.

The agreement, if approved by a judge, cancels $1.7 billion in private loan debt owed by more than 66,000 borrowers across the U.S. and distributes a total of $95 million in restitution payments of about $260 each to approximately 350,000 federal loan borrowers.

The proposed settlements were filed in court in each participating state and will require court approval.

Navient said it did not act illegally, and it did not admit any fault in the settlement.

Here’s a closer look at the proposed settlement courtesy of the Associated Press:

WHO DOES THIS AFFECT?

Borrowers who will receive restitution or debt cancellation span all generations, officials say. They include students who went to colleges or universities right after high school and mid-career students who dropped out after enrolling.

The loans were taken out primarily between 2002 to 2014, officials say. Private loans often came with a variable, rather than fixed, interest rate and a shorter window than federal student loans to make payments before defaulting.

Many borrowers who were struggling to make payments were not told about a federal “income driven” program that could lower their payments. Others were not told about a federal program that forgives some debt for public-sector workers. 

HOW WILL YOU FIND OUT IF YOU BENEFIT?

Borrowers who will see their private loan debt canceled will be notified by Navient by July 2022, along with a refund of payments they made on the loan after June 30, 2021, according to state officials. Private loan borrowers don’t need to take any action to qualify.

Borrowers who are eligible for a restitution payment of approximately $260 will receive a postcard from the settlement administrator this spring, state officials say. Checks are expected to go out in mid-2022. 

Federal loan borrowers who qualify need to update their studentaid.gov account, or create one, to ensure the U.S. Department of Education has their current address.”

Good news for these students!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

My colleague Fred Lane passed on to me an  opinion piece written by conservative columnist David Brooks, entitled, “America is Falling Apart at the Seams.”  It is sober commentary on the rise of hostility that Americans are showing to each other.  Here is an excerpt:

“…something darker and deeper seems to be happening as well — a long-term loss of solidarity, a long-term rise in estrangement and hostility. This is what it feels like to live in a society that is dissolving from the bottom up as much as from the top down.

What the hell is going on? The short answer: I don’t know. I also don’t know what’s causing the high rates of depression, suicide and loneliness that dogged Americans even before the pandemic and that are the sad flip side of all the hostility and recklessness I’ve just described.

We can round up the usual suspects: social media, rotten politics. When President Donald Trump signaled it was OK to hate marginalized groups, a lot of people were bound to see that as permission.

Some of our poisons must be sociological — the fraying of the social fabric.”

Mr. Brooks has hit on an issue of growing concern for the country as a whole that might be manifesting itself differently depending upon where we live and local culture.

The entire column is below. 

Good read!

Tony

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The New York Times

America Is Falling Apart at the Seams

Jan. 13, 2022

By David Brooks

Opinion Columnist

In June a statistic floated across my desk that startled me. In 2020, the number of miles Americans drove fell 13 percent because of the pandemic, but the number of traffic deaths rose 7 percent.

I couldn’t figure it out. Why would Americans be driving so much more recklessly during the pandemic? But then in the first half of 2021, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, motor vehicle deaths were up 18.4 percent even over 2020. Contributing factors, according to the agency, included driving under the influence, speeding and failure to wear a seatbelt.

Why are so many Americans driving irresponsibly?

While gloomy numbers like these were rattling around in my brain, a Substack article from Matthew Yglesias hit my inbox this week. It was titled, “All Kinds of Bad Behavior Is on the Rise.” Not only is reckless driving on the rise, Yglesias pointed out, but the number of altercations on airplanes has exploded, the murder rate is surging in cities, drug overdoses are increasing, Americans are drinking more, nurses say patients are getting more abusive, and so on and so on.

Yglesias is right.

Teachers are facing a rising tide of disruptive behavior. The Wall Street Journal reported in December: “Schools have seen an increase in both minor incidents, like students talking in class, and more serious issues, such as fights and gun possession. In Dallas, disruptive classroom incidents have tripled this year compared with prepandemic levels, school officials said.”

This month, the Institute for Family Studies published an essay called “The Drug Epidemic Just Keeps Getting Worse.” The essay noted that drug deaths had risen almost continuously for more than 20 years, but “overdoses shot up especially during the pandemic.” For much of this time the overdose crisis has been heavily concentrated among whites, but in 2020, the essay observed, “the Black rate exceeded the white rate for the first time.”

In October, CNN ran a story titled, “Hate Crime Reports in U.S. Surge to the Highest Level in 12 Years, F.B.I. Says.” The F.B.I. found that between 2019 and 2020 the number of attacks targeting Black people, for example, rose to 2,871 from 1,972.

The number of gun purchases has soared. In January 2021, more than two million firearms were bought, The Washington Post reported, “an 80 percent year-over-year spike and the third-highest one-month total on record.”

As Americans’ hostility toward one another seems to be growing, their care for one another seems to be falling. A study from Indiana University’s Lilly Family School of Philanthropy found that the share of Americans who give to charity is steadily declining. In 2000, 66.2 percent of households made a charitable donation. But by 2018 only 49.6 percent did. The share who gave to religious causes dropped as worship service attendance did. But the share of households who gave to secular causes also hit a new low, 42 percent, in 2018.

This is not even to mention the parts of the deteriorating climate that are hard to quantify — the rise in polarization, hatred, anger and fear. When I went to college, lo these many years ago, I never worried that I might say something in class that would get me ostracized. But now the college students I know fear that one errant sentence could lead to social death. That’s a monumental sea change.

It has to be said that not every trend is bad. Substance use among teenagers, for example, seems to be declining. And a lot of these problems are caused by the presumably temporary stress of the pandemic. I doubt as many people would be punching flight attendants or throwing temper tantrums over cheese if there weren’t mask rules and a deadly virus to worry about.

But something darker and deeper seems to be happening as well — a long-term loss of solidarity, a long-term rise in estrangement and hostility. This is what it feels like to live in a society that is dissolving from the bottom up as much as from the top down.

What the hell is going on? The short answer: I don’t know. I also don’t know what’s causing the high rates of depression, suicide and loneliness that dogged Americans even before the pandemic and that are the sad flip side of all the hostility and recklessness I’ve just described.

We can round up the usual suspects: social media, rotten politics. When President Donald Trump signaled it was OK to hate marginalized groups, a lot of people were bound to see that as permission.

Some of our poisons must be sociological — the fraying of the social fabric. Last year, Gallup had a report titled, “U.S. Church Membership Falls Below Majority for First Time.” In 2019, the Pew Research Center had a report, “U.S. Has World’s Highest Rate of Children Living in Single Parent Households.”

And some of the poisons must be cultural. In 2018, The Washington Post had a story headlined, “America Is a Nation of Narcissists, According to Two New Studies.”

But there must also be some spiritual or moral problem at the core of this. Over the past several years, and over a wide range of different behaviors, Americans have been acting in fewer pro-social and relational ways and in more antisocial and self-destructive ways. But why?

As a columnist, I’m supposed to have some answers. But I just don’t right now. I just know the situation is dire.

H. Holden Thorp, Editor-in-Chief of Science

Dear Commons Community,

H. Holden Thorp, Editor-in-Chief of Science, has an opinion piece in this week’s edition reviewing the recent case against Elizabeth Holmes, the former CEO of Theranos.  The main theme of his commentary is that the culture of science innovation contributed to the problems surrounding Holmes downfall.  And that “fledgling companies promoting technological and scientific advances have relied too much on style and not on substance.”  He comments that the Holmes case exemplifies relying on hype!

Thorp’s entire piece is below.

Tony

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