Dear Commons Community,

New York Attorney General Letitia James filed a lawsuit yesterday against Donald Trump for padding his net worth and habitually misleading banks and others about the value of his assets like golf courses, hotels and his Mar-a-Lago estate.  She dubbed his behavior as “The Art of the Steal.”

The lawsuit, filed in state court in Manhattan, is the culmination of the James’ three-year civil investigation into Trump and the Trump Organization. Trump’s three eldest children, Donald Jr., Ivanka and Eric Trump, were also named as defendants, along with two longtime company executives. As reported by the Associated Press.

In its 222 pages, the suit struck at the core of what made Trump famous, taking a blacklight to the image of wealth and opulence he’s embraced throughout his career — first as a real estate developer, then as a reality TV host on “The Apprentice” and later as president.

It details dozens of instances of alleged fraud, many involving claims made on annual financial statements that Trump would give to banks, business associates and financial magazines as proof of his riches as he sought loans and deals.

For example, according to the lawsuit, Trump claimed his Trump Tower apartment — a three-story penthouse replete with gold-plated fixtures — was nearly three times its actual size and valued the property at $327 million. No apartment in New York City has ever sold for close to that amount, James said.

Trump applied similar fuzzy math to his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, the lawsuit alleged, by valuing the private club and residence as high as $739 million — more than 10 times a more reasonable estimate of its worth. Trump’s figure is based on the idea that the property could be developed for residential use, but deed terms prohibit that.

“This investigation revealed that Donald Trump engaged in years of illegal conduct to inflate his net worth, to deceive banks and the people of the great state of New York,” James said at a news conference.

“Claiming you have money that you do not have does not amount to the art of the deal. It’s the art of the steal,” she said, referring to the title of Trump’s 1987 memoir, “The Art of the Deal.”

James said the investigation also uncovered evidence of potential criminal violations, including insurance fraud and bank fraud, but that her office was referring those findings to outside authorities for further investigation.

Trump, in a post to his Truth Social platform, decried the lawsuit as “Another Witch Hunt” and denounced James as “a fraud who campaigned on a ‘get Trump’ platform.”

Trump’s lawyer, Alina Habba, said the allegations are “meritless” and that the lawsuit “is neither focused on the facts nor the law — rather, it is solely focused on advancing the Attorney General’s political agenda.”

In the lawsuit, James asked the court to ban Trump and his three eldest children from ever again running a company based in the state.

She is also seeking payment of at least $250 million, which she said was the estimated worth of benefits derived from the alleged fraud. And she wants to bar Trump and the Trump Organization from entering into commercial real estate acquisitions for five years, among other sanctions.

James’ lawsuit comes amid a whirlwind of unprecedented legal challenges for a former president, including an FBI investigation into Trump’s handling of classified records and inquiries into his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

While James’ lawsuit is being pursued in civil court, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has been working with James’ office on a parallel criminal investigation.

Trump cited fear of prosecution in August when he refused to answer questions in a deposition with James, invoking his Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination more than 400 times.

The odds of a criminal prosecution have been seen as falling in recent months after Bragg allowed a grand jury to disband without bringing charges. Bragg said again Wednesday, though, that the criminal investigation was “active and ongoing.”

A criminal prosecution would have a far higher burden of proof than a civil lawsuit. And in a criminal case, prosecutors would have to prove that Trump intended to break the law, something not necessarily required in a civil case.

“Generally in criminal cases you have to prove intent. In civil cases, just negligence or intentional misrepresentation give rise to liability,” said Neama Rahmani, a former federal prosecutor in San Diego who now practices law at a Los Angeles firm.

The U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan said it was aware of James’ referral of potential criminal violations, but otherwise declined comment. The Internal Revenue Service’s criminal investigation division said it “doesn’t confirm the existence of investigations until court documents are publicly available.”

The Trump Organization is set to go on trial in October in a criminal case alleging that it schemed to give untaxed perks to senior executives, including its longtime finance chief Allen Weisselberg, who alone took more than $1.7 million in extras.

Weisselberg, 75, pleaded guilty Aug. 18. His plea agreement requires him to testify at the company’s trial before he starts a five-month jail sentence. If convicted, the Trump Organization could face a fine of double the amount of unpaid taxes.

Weisselberg and another Trump Organization executive, Jeffrey McConney, were also named as defendants in James’ lawsuit.

At the same time, the FBI is continuing to investigate Trump’s storage of sensitive government documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, and a special grand jury in Georgia is investigating whether Trump and others attempted to influence state election officials.

All of the legal drama is playing out ahead of the November midterm elections, where Republicans are trying to win control of one or both houses of Congress.

Trump’s previous refusal to answer questions in testimony could be held against him if a lawsuit ever reaches a jury. In civil cases, courts are allowed to draw negative inference from such Fifth Amendment pleadings.

“If Trump wanted to argue that some accounting decision was harmless instead of malicious, he might have already passed up the opportunity when he decided to stay silent,” said Will Thomas, an assistant professor of business law at the University of Michigan.

In a previous clash, James oversaw the closure of Trump’s charity for alleging misusing its assets to resolve business disputes and boost his run for the White House. A judge ordered Trump to pay $2 million to an array of charities to settle the matter.

James, who campaigned for office as a Trump critic and watchdog, started scrutinizing his business practices in March 2019 after his former personal lawyer Michael Cohen testified to Congress that Trump exaggerated his wealth on financial statements provided to Deutsche Bank while trying to obtain financing to buy the NFL’s Buffalo Bills.

This lawsuit is long overdue.  Donald Trump has been known as a scam artist in New York City for years. Former Mayor Michael Bloomberg stated it best in 2016 on national television during the Democratic Convention:

“I’m a New Yorker, and I know a con when I see one…Throughout his career, Trump has left behind a well-documented record of bankruptcies, thousands of lawsuits, angry shareholders and contractors who feel cheated, and disillusioned customers who feel ripped off. Trump says he wants to run the nation like he’s run his business. God help us.”   

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The centerpiece of the student debt-relief plan that President Biden announced last month is his decision to cancel up to $20,000 per borrower in federal loans. But the more far-reaching — and, over time, more expensive — element of the president’s strategy is his blueprint for a revamped income-linked repayment plan, which would sharply reduce what many borrowers pay every month.

It could, however, have unintended consequences. Unscrupulous schools, including for-profit institutions, have long used high-pressure sales tactics, or outright fraud and deception, to saddle students with more debt than they could ever reasonably hope to repay. By offering more-generous educational subsidies, the government may be creating a perverse incentive for both schools and borrowers, who could begin to pay even less attention to the actual price tag of their education — and taxpayers could be left footing more of the bill.  As reported by The New York Times.

“If people are taking out the same or more amount of debt and repaying less of it, then it’s just taxpayers bearing the brunt of it,” said Daniel Zibel, the chief counsel at the National Student Legal Defense Network, an advocacy group.

Experts are particularly concerned about how the new subsidies could be manipulated by for-profit colleges, many of which have a record of persuading people to take on high debt for degrees that often fail to deliver the kind of earnings boost the schools advertise.

The Times article goes on to describe a student’s experience at the University of Phoenix which  is on a list of 150 schools that the Education Department said showed strong signs of “substantial misconduct.” (The list is included in a legal settlement the department reached in June that will, if made final, cancel $6 billion in federal student loan debt for 200,000 borrowers. The school is among more than a dozen on that list that are still operating. It remains eligible for federal student loans, and relies on them for nearly all its revenue.

The entire article is worth a  read and paints a less than rosy picture of what might lie ahead for students lured by unscrupulous colleges.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Fox News host Bret Baier tried to persuade the right-wing network to rescind its decision to call Arizona for Joe Biden in the 2020 election, according to a new book.

Fox News was the first major network to declare Biden’s victory in Arizona, but the network’s lead evening news anchor “was ready to give into” pressure from then-President Donald Trump’s team to influence the calls in his favor, according to Insider, describing excerpts from “The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021” by New York Times reporter Peter Baker and New Yorker writer Susan Glasser.  As reported  by various media.

Baier sent a concerned email about the Arizona call to Fox News President and executive editor Jay Wallace, according to the excerpts.

“The Trump campaign was really pissed,” Baier reportedly wrote in his email to Wallace. “This situation is getting uncomfortable. Really uncomfortable. I keep having to defend this on air.”

Journalists on the network’s decision desk ― which makes race calls during the election ― thought there was “no serious question about Arizona,” according to the book, but Baier’s email accused the desk of “holding on for pride.”

“It’s hurting us,” Baier wrote to Wallace, the book reportedly said. “The sooner we pull it ― even if it gives us major egg ― and we put it back in his column the better we are in my opinion.”

Biden won Arizona by less than 1 percentage point in 2020, making the state a target of Trump’s election lies and conspiracy theories about voter fraud.

Baier responded to the allegations by telling The Washington Post that the book did not include the full context of his email and that he “fully supported our decision desk’s call.”

“This was an email sent AFTER election night. In the immediate days following the election, the vote margins in Arizona narrowed significantly and I communicated these changes to our team along with what people on the ground were saying and predicting district by district,” the host wrote in a statement to the Post. “I wanted to analyze at what point … would we have to consider pulling the call for Biden.”

While Wallace did not cave to Baier’s reported pleas to change the Arizona call, he did reportedly fire two members of the decision desk. According to the excerpts reported by Insider, the network delayed the firings for months because “executives did not want the embarrassment of publicly owning their decision to push out journalists for making the right call.”

One of the employees, former political editor Chris Stirewalt, has alleged that he was fired from Fox News after the decision desk correctly called Arizona for Biden.

“I’m getting tweets sent to me, and then a U.S. senator is on a radio show calling for me to be fired, and I’m going, ‘What is going on here? What is wrong with you people?’” Stirewalt told Australia’s “Four Corners” news show last year in a documentary that investigated the role Fox News played in promoting Trump’s election lies.

Chris Stirewalt testifies during a hearing by the House Jan. 6 committee on June 13. Saul Loeb via Getty Images

“There’s this river of hate over this call, like I made Arizona vote for Biden,” he added.

The ex-employee said the network had an opportunity to use its influential position “to tell the truth for the good of the country and failed to use the power and resources that it had to stand up to Donald Trump.”

Stirewalt said his former employer’s motive for pushing a far-right agenda is more about profit than it is about helping the conservative movement, according to excerpts from his book reported by The New York Times. Trump-friendly hosts like Sean Hannity intentionally overstated the chances of some trailing Republican candidates just to “juice the network’s ratings,” he said.

“They wanted it to be true because they wanted Republicans to win, but keeping viewers keyed up about the epochal victory close at hand was an appealing incentive to exaggerate the G.O.P. chances,” he wrote. “It was good for them to raise expectations, but it wasn’t good for the party they were rooting for.”

Bret Baier has been outed as another one of the Republican lackeys on Fox as unfair, unbalanced, and afraid!

Tony

Herschel Walker and Raphael Warnock

Dear Commons Community,

Georgia Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate, Herschel Walker, was quoted as saying: “I’m a country boy. I’m not that smart. He’s a preacher. He [Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.)]  is smart and wears these nice suits,”, according to the Savannah Morning News. “So, he is going to show up and embarrass me at the debate Oct. 14th, and I’m just waiting to show up and I will do my best.”

It’s rare to see a candidate declare openly that they aren’t as smart as their opponent. The comments are likely intended to lower expectations for Walker’s showdown against Warnock, a longtime pastor known for his oratory skills.

The race is one of the key battles in the upcoming election that could determine control of the Senate. Warnock, who won his election bid in a 2021 runoff, is seeking his first full term in office.

Walker has faced numerous negative stories about secret children he has fathered, allegations of domestic violence and questions about his credentials, among other things. His own campaign staffers have reportedly described him as a “pathological liar.”

Walker, who has the endorsement of former President Donald Trump, has also made several awkward comments, including his criticism of President Joe Biden’s climate and health law. “Don’t we have enough trees around here?” Walker asked last month.

Despite these gaffes, polls show the former football star trailing only slightly behind Warnock, according to the FiveThirtyEight polling average.

Thank you for your honesty, Herschel!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Mr. Wilkinson, the author of A Divine Language: Learning Algebra, Geometry, and Calculus at the Edge of Old Age, has a guest essay in today’s New York Times, commenting on the mysteries of mathematics and where it came from. He considers questions such as what are numbers and how did they originate.  No one knows!

He concludes: 

“Mathematics is one of the most efficient means of approaching the great secret, of considering what lies past all that we can see or presently imagine. Mathematics doesn’t describe the secret so much as it implies that there is one.

The entire essay is below.

Fun reading!

Tony

————————————————————

The New York Times

Math Is the Great Secret

Sept. 18, 2022

By Alec Wilkinson

As a boy in the first weeks of algebra class, I felt confused and then I went sort of numb. Adolescents order the world from fragments of information. In its way, adolescence is a kind of algebra. The unknowns can be determined but doing so requires a special aptitude, not to mention a comfort with having things withheld. Straightforward, logical thinking is required, and a willingness to follow rules, which aren’t evenly distributed adolescent capabilities.

When I thought about mathematics at all as a boy it was to speculate about why I was being made to learn it, since it seemed plainly obvious that there was no need for it in adult life. Balancing a checkbook or drawing up a budget was the answer we were given for how math would prove necessary later, but you don’t need algebra or geometry or calculus to do either of those things.

But if I had understood how deeply mathematics is embedded in the world, how it figures in every gesture we make, whether crossing a crowded street or catching a ball, how it figures in painting and perspective and in architecture and in the natural world and so on, then perhaps I might have seen it the way the ancients had seen it, as a fundamental part of the world’s design, perhaps even the design itself. If I had felt that the world was connected in its parts, I might have been provoked to a kind of wonder and enthusiasm. I might have wanted to learn.

Five years ago, when I was 65, I decided to see if I could learn adolescent mathematics — algebra, geometry and calculus — because I had done poorly at algebra and geometry and I hadn’t taken calculus at all. I didn’t do well at it the second time, either, but I have become a kind of math evangelist.

Mathematics, I now see, is important because it expands the world. It is a point of entry into larger concerns. It teaches reverence. It insists one be receptive to wonder. It requires that a person pay close attention. To be made to consider a problem carefully discourages scattershot and slovenly thinking and encourages systematic thought, an advantage, so far as I can tell, in all endeavors. Abraham Lincoln said he spent a year reading Euclid in order to learn to think logically.

Studying adolescent mathematics, a person is crossing territory on which footprints have been left since antiquity. Some of the trails have been made by distinguished figures, but the bulk of them have been left by ordinary people like me. As a boy, trying to follow a path in a failing light, I never saw the mysteries I was moving among, but on my second pass I began to. Nothing had changed about math, but I had changed. The person I had become was someone whom I couldn’t have imagined as an adolescent. Math was different, because I was different.

The beginner math mystery, available to anyone, concerns the origin of numbers. It’s a simple speculation: Where do numbers come from? No one knows. Were they invented by human beings? Hard to say. They appear to be embedded in the world in ways that we can’t completely comprehend. They began as measurements of quantities and grew into the means for the most precise expressions of the physical world — E = mc², for example.

The second mystery is that of prime numbers, those numbers such as 2, 3, 5, 7, 11 and 13 that can be divided cleanly only by one or by themselves. All numbers not prime are called composite numbers, and all composite numbers are the result of a unique arrangement of primes: 2 x 2 = 4. 2 x 3= 6. 2 x 2 x 2 = 8. 3 x 3= 9. 2 x 3 x 3 x 37 = 666. 29 x 31 = 899. 2 x 2 x 2 x 5 x 5 x 5 = 1,000. If human beings invented numbers and counting, then how is it that there are numbers such as primes that have attributes no one gave them? The grand and enfolding mystery is whether mathematics is created by human beings or exists independently of us in a territory adjacent to the actual world, the location of which no one can specify. Plato called it the non-spatiotemporal realm. It is the timeless nowhere that never has and never will exist anywhere but that nevertheless is.

Mathematics is one of the most efficient means of approaching the great secret, of considering what lies past all that we can see or presently imagine. Mathematics doesn’t describe the secret so much as it implies that there is one.

On my second engagement, whenever I encountered a definition of mathematics, I wrote it down. Among those I liked best was that mathematics is a story that has been being written for thousands of years, is always being added to and might never be finished. Such a thought would have appealed to me deeply as a boy and might have made mathematics seem maybe not welcoming, but at least less forbidding than it appeared.

(AP Photo/Kathy Willens, File)

Dear Commons Community,

“The Phantom of the Opera” — Broadway’s longest-running show — is scheduled to close in February 2023.  It is the biggest victim yet of the post-pandemic softening in theater attendance in New York City.

The musical — a fixture on Broadway since 1988, weathering recessions, war and cultural shifts — will play its final performance on Broadway on Feb. 18, a spokesperson told The Associated Press on Friday. The closing will come less than a month after its 35th anniversary. It will conclude with an eye-popping 13,925 performances.  As reported by the Associated Press.

It is a costly musical to sustain, with elaborate sets and costumes as well as a large cast and orchestra. Box office grosses have fluctuated since the show reopened after the pandemic — going as high as over $1 million a week but also dropping to around $850,000. Last week, it hit $867,997 and producers may have seen the writing on the wall.

Based on a novel by Gaston Leroux, “Phantom” tells the story of a deformed composer who haunts the Paris Opera House and falls madly in love with an innocent young soprano, Christine. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s lavish songs include “Masquerade,” ″Angel of Music,” ″All I Ask of You” and “The Music of the Night.”

“As a producer you dream that a show will run forever. Indeed, my production of Andrew’s ‘Cats’ proudly declared for decades ‘Now and Forever.’ Yet ‘Phantom’ has surpassed that show’s extraordinary Broadway run. But all shows do finally close,” producer Cameron Mackintosh said in a statement.

The first production opened in London in 1986 and since then the show has been seen by more than 145 million people in 183 cities and performed in 17 languages over 70,000 performances. On Broadway alone, the musical has played more than 13,500 performances to 19 million people at The Majestic Theatre.

The closing of “Phantom” would mean the longest running show crown would go to “Chicago,” which started in 1996. “The Lion King” is next, having begun performances in 1997.

Broadway took a pounding during the pandemic, with all theaters closed for more than 18 months. Some of the most popular shows — “Hamilton,” “The Lion King” and “Wicked” — have rebounded well, but other shows have struggled. Breaking even usually requires a steady stream of tourists, especially for “Phantom” and visitors to the city haven’t returned to pre-pandemic levels.

We will miss “The Music of the Night”

Tony

A young man who was part of a group of migrants flown to Martha’s Vineyard at the Florida governor’s direction.  Credit…Ray Ewing/Vineyard Gazette, via Reuters

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times columnist, Maureen Dowd, has a piece this morning entitled, “How Low Can They Go,” commenting on the boorish template that Republicans are using in seeking reelection.  She uses the recent tactics of Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott sending immigrants from their states to the northern cities and towns.  To quote:

“…there’s something exceedingly creepy — and blatantly opportunistic — about DeSantis chartering two planes to send some 50 migrants, mostly Venezuelan, from San Antonio to Martha’s Vineyard. The lawyers for some migrants said that they were deceived about their destination, and Martha’s Vineyard officials said they had no notice. Abbott sent two busloads of migrants to Vice President Kamala Harris’s home at the Naval Observatory.”

Her conclusion:

“But the contentions of Republicans about geographical unfairness and Democratic inaction are undercut by their meanspirited behavior.

They are willing to make life worse for vulnerable, exhausted people who are already in a terrible position — and chortle while they’re being cruel.

As Blake Hounshell noted in The Times, DeSantis is courting Trump donors by adopting the racially charged playbook of Trump, who “made frequent and aggressive political use of Latino migrants during his run for the presidency in 2016 and long thereafter, casting many of them as ‘criminals’ and ‘rapists’ during his presidential announcement at Trump Tower.”

The callousness of DeSantis’s manipulations is clear.

Ugliness is what the G.O.P. is wearing this fall.”

Dowd’s entire column is below.

Tony

————————————————————

The New York Times

“How Low Can They Go?”

Sept. 17, 2022

By Maureen Dowd

WASHINGTON — Donald Trump will be remembered for many things.

He injected obscenities into The New York Times’s White House coverage. He turned conspiracy theory into Republican orthodoxy. And he cut out the middleman on ugliness, happily doing the political wet work himself.

The Bush family had retainers, like Lee Atwater, who would hand off the dirty tricks and the scaremongering Willie Horton stuff to outside groups, and use direct mail and radio ads.

Trump dispensed with the idea that the candidate was above it all. He was excited to show he was beneath it all — the naked id of the Republican Party.

His soulless followers, like Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott, are happy to mud-wrestle and perform Grand Guignol as well.

In some ways, it’s easier to battle racism, sexism, xenophobia and fakery when the principals are gleefully spewing it. You can fight back on the record and in real time.

In other ways, however, having it all out in the open sends a foul stench through American politics, intensifying the brutish and bleak mood of the country.

Politicians who purport to be guardians of American “values” are rewarded for being inhumane. The nastier, the better. Republican pols have gone from kissing babies and rope-line handshakes to full-on viciousness.

I asked Trump during the 2016 campaign why he had gone so dark. “I guess because of the fact that I immediately went to No. 1,” he replied, “and I said, why don’t I just keep the same thing going?”

As it turned out, he was spinning up the mob, laying the groundwork for a violent attack on the Capitol. Trump riled up the mob again on Thursday in an interview with radio host Hugh Hewitt. If he’s indicted on a charge of spiriting away classified documents to his Mar-a-Lago estate, the former president said, there will be “problems in this country the likes of which perhaps we’ve never seen before. I don’t think the people of the United States would stand for it.”

Trump created the cynical and boorish template for other presidential hopefuls on the right.

It can be amusing to mock elites. But there’s something exceedingly creepy — and blatantly opportunistic — about DeSantis chartering two planes to send some 50 migrants, mostly Venezuelan, from San Antonio to Martha’s Vineyard. The lawyers for some migrants said that they were deceived about their destination, and Martha’s Vineyard officials said they had no notice. Abbott sent two busloads of migrants to Vice President Kamala Harris’s home at the Naval Observatory.

It was reported that a woman who said her name was Perla offered the migrants in Texas three months of rent and work in Boston. But then they ended up, as one put it, “on this little island.”

This caper to expose the hypocrisy of Democratic elites ended up being compared to human trafficking. The Republicans are exploiting people’s misery for a political game. The migrants simply want to work, which a bunch of Americans don’t want to do anymore.

With their pre-midterm publicity stunts, as with their draconian push to outlaw abortion, the Republicans are increasingly letting politics take precedence over people.

The argument that migrants coming across the border have a more severe impact on border states is obviously valid. You can’t have a nearly unchecked flood of people coming in — an average of 8,500 a day, according to Axios.

It is also a valid criticism that Democrats — both in the White House and Congress — are going out of their way to avoid what they see as a third rail with progressives. The border is just the tip of the spear. Democrats are too afraid of angering the base to bear down and overhaul the system, including tackling the backlog of court cases and fixing how those cases are adjudicated.

President Biden ignores the border, giving it to Kamala Harris to get under control. We all know that’s not happening. Republicans like Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham who once tried to work on solutions have now just degenerated into using the border issue to bash Democrats as flaccid.

But the contentions of Republicans about geographical unfairness and Democratic inaction are undercut by their meanspirited behavior.

They are willing to make life worse for vulnerable, exhausted people who are already in a terrible position — and chortle while they’re being cruel.

As Blake Hounshell noted in The Times, DeSantis is courting Trump donors by adopting the racially charged playbook of Trump, who “made frequent and aggressive political use of Latino migrants during his run for the presidency in 2016 and long thereafter, casting many of them as ‘criminals’ and ‘rapists’ during his presidential announcement at Trump Tower.”

The callousness of DeSantis’s manipulations is clear.

Ugliness is what the G.O.P. is wearing this fall.

Dear Commons Community,

The U.S. Supreme Court in a 5-4 vote declined on Wednesday a request from Yeshiva University to block a lower court order that requires the university to recognize a “Pride Alliance” LGBTQ student club.

In an unsigned order, the Supreme Court noted that the New York state courts had yet to issue a final order in the case, and that Yeshiva could return to the Supreme Court after the New York courts have acted.  As reported by The New York Times and CNN.

“The application is denied because it appears that applicants have at least two further avenues for expedited or interim state court relief,” the court said.

Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, dissented from the court’s order, noting that the lower courts could take “months to rule.”

“I see no reason why we should not grant a stay at this time,” he said.

Noting that the school objected to recognizing a group that would have implications that are not consistent with the Torah, Alito said, “The First Amendment guarantees the right to the free exercise of religion, and if that provision means anything, it prohibits a State from enforcing its own preferred interpretation of the Holy Scripture.”

“The upshot is that Yeshiva is almost certain to be compelled for at least some period of time (and perhaps for a lengthy spell) to instruct its students in accordance with what it regards as an incorrect interpretation of Torah and Jewish law,” Alito continued.

He said that a state’s imposition of its “own mandatory interpretation of scripture is a shocking development that calls out for review,” and added that “it is our duty to stand up for the Constitution even when doing so is controversial.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor — who has jurisdiction over the lower court — had temporarily blocked the order last week, a move meant to give the full court more time to act.

The court’s order is a rare loss, for now, for supporters of religious liberty at the Supreme Court.

Last term, the court’s conservative majority ruled in favor of religious conservatives in two cases. In addition, in 2021, the court sided with a Catholic foster care agency that refused to consider same-sex couples as potential foster parents.

Alito has repeatedly called for greater protections for the free exercise of religion including during a July speech in Rome. “Religious liberty is under attack in many places,” Alito said.

In ruling against Yeshiva, a trial judge focused on whether the university qualified as a religious corporation within the meaning of the New York City Human Rights Law (NYCHRL), a public accommodation regulation that bars discrimination based on sexual orientation. The law expressly excludes certain religious corporations and Yeshiva argued that it fell under the exception.

The court noted, however, that according to an amendment to the school’s charter that was adopted in 1967, the university is considered an “educational corporation.”

“Yeshiva’s organizing documents do not expressly indicate that Yeshiva has a religious purpose,” Judge Lynn R. Kotler said in holding that Yeshiva is not exempt from the law.

The court also rejected the school’s claims that the NYCHRL violates Yeshiva’s First Amendment Rights, holding that the public accommodations law is a neutral law with general applicability to all parties.

“It does not target religious practice, its intent is to deter discrimination, only, and it applies equally to all places of public accommodation other than those expressly exempted as distinctly private or a religious corporation organized under the education or religious law,” Kotler wrote.

The judge said that the challengers sought “equal access” and that the school “need not make a statement endorsing a particular viewpoint” and also noted that some of Yeshiva’s graduate schools allow LGBTQ groups, undercutting the university’s arguments.

In court papers filed with the Supreme Court, the school argued that the lower court opinion represents an “unprecedented intrusion into Yeshiva’s church autonomy” and argues that as “a deeply religious Jewish university, Yeshiva cannot comply with that order because doing so would violate its sincere religious beliefs about how to form its undergraduate students in Torah values.”

Lawyers for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, representing Yeshiva, said that the lower court’s order is an “unprecedented” intrusion into the university’s religious beliefs and a clear violation of Yeshiva’s First Amendment rights.

“The Torah guides everything that we do at Yeshiva—from how we educate students to how we run our dining halls to how we organize our campus,” Ari Berman, president of Yeshiva University, said in a statement before the court acted. “We care deeply for and welcome all our students, including our LGBTQ students, and continue to be engaged in a productive dialogue with our Rabbis, faculty and students on how we apply our Torah values to create an inclusive campus environment. We only ask the government to allow us the freedom to apply the Torah in accordance with our values.”

A lawyer for the current and former students behind the challenge — who won in the lower court — argued that it was premature for the Supreme Court to step in now because New York appellate courts have yet to rule on the merits and the state law issue has not been fully resolved.

“Not only do Applicants leapfrog the entire state appellate process, but they also press the Court to address both novel and weighty First Amendment questions on a rocket docket without the benefit of full briefing or oral argument,” lawyer Katherine Rosenfeld told the justices in court papers.

Rosenfeld said that the lower court ruling “simply requires” the university to grant the “Pride Alliance” access to the same facilities and benefits as its “87 other recognized student groups.”

“This ruling does not touch the University’s well-established right to express to all students its sincerely held beliefs about Torah values and sexual orientation,” Rosenfeld said.

Jillian Weinberg, a student at Yeshiva’s Ferkauf Graduate School of Psychology, told CNN in an interview that that Ferkauf recognizes LGBTQ groups, even if Yeshiva’s undergraduate school does not.

She said that Ferkauf’s faculty and students “are concerned about the harm that President Ari Berman’s actions will cause to the mental health and well-being of LGBTQIA+ students and faculty.”

The New York Court of Appeals has agreed to hear an appeal to the ruling this fall but refused to put the trial court’s ruling on hold, prompting school officials to petition the high court.

We have not seen the end of this!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Francis Sanzaro, a climber, a mountain athlete and the author of “Zen of the Wild: A Philosophy for Nature,” had a beautiful guest essay yesterday in The New York Times on the gift of walking.  Entitled, “The Next Walk You Take Could Change Your Life” provides his personal insights into the pleasure of going for a walk especially in one’s own little neighborhood.   Here is an excerpt: 

“I started walking around my neighborhood more. Compared with those wild places, this was unremarkable: pacing down a sidewalk of 10-year-old maples, across cracked squares of pavement, alongside a ditch bursting with spring runoff. But I turned it into a practice of sensation. I listened. I felt. And in a remarkable way, the neighborhood came alive — alive in a way that those mountaintops or the wildflower-strewn rivulet in the valley below never had. My senses, once atrophied, came to life, and with them, so did the world around me.  My experience, which took me from the rugged wild to a tamer, humbler landscape outside my front door, went against the grain of a few hundred years of traditional nature writing, but so be it.”

I have been a lifelong walker.  As a toddler growing up in the South Bronx, my father, Amadeo,  took me for Sunday morning walks over the 153^rd Street bridge that spanned the New York Central railroad yards.  When my children, Michael and Dawn Marie were youngsters, I took them for walks throughout our North Bronx neighborhood.  When my grandchildren, Michael and Ali, would visit my wife and I for a few weeks each summer,  we would go for walks in the  community. Even now, in my senior years, a walk after supper is how I finish my day.  If you haven’t tried it, I highly recommend a stroll in the evening to connect to  all the sensations that surround us. 

Below is Mr. Sanzaro’s entire essay.

Tony

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The New York Times

“The Next Walk You Take Could Change Your Life’

By Francis Sanzaro

September 15, 2022

Barry Lopez, nature writer extraordinaire, once remarked that one of the first things he did when arriving in a new landscape was lace up his shoes and have a stroll. But Mr. Lopez didn’t walk the way most of us walk. Open ended, without rush, bird books in his suitcase and his entire body tuned like the stiffened ears of an arctic fox, he felt the dirt crunch under his toes, ran his fingers through dew on the leaves, noticed what’s growing in the nooks, listened to what birds were yapping and — I’m speculating here on this last one — welcomed notes of sunset-mud up his nostrils, as from a ’96 bottle of Chateau Margaux.

Study after study after study has proved what we feel, intuitively, in our gut: Walking is good for us. Beneficial for our joints and muscles; astute at relieving tension, reducing anxiety and depression; a boon to creativity, likely; slows the aging process, maybe; excellent at prying our screens from our face, definitely. Shane O’Mara, a professor of experimental brain research in Dublin, has called walking a “superpower,” claiming that walking, and only walking, unlocks specific parts of our brains, places that bequeath happiness and health.

I have no beef with any of this, but I believe we have it backward. We are asking what we can get out of a walk, rather than what a walk can get out of us. This might seem like a small distinction, a matter of semantics. But when we begin to think of walking in terms of the latter, we change the way we navigate and experience — literally and figuratively — the world around us.

To understand the difference, we need to ask more about what Mr. Lopez explained is the purpose of all this sensory input. “The purpose of such attentiveness is to gain intimacy, to rid yourself of assumption,” he wrote in his essay “A Literature of Place.”

When I first read that line, I’ll be honest, I didn’t get it. What does intimacy have to do with assumption? And what does walking have to do with intimacy? And what does “assumption” mean?

I pulled out the dictionary. “Assumption” is a knot of a word, meaning both an act of taking on, such as a new job, or taking control. It also means you believe something to be such: “I assumed that was the case.” When you give the word “assumption” a kick, the shell cracks and you can see the yolk of possession. Ownership. Responsibility. Taking on. Anticipation. Judgment.

I came to truly understood the power of Mr. Lopez’s observation when I was on the edge of something. I’m a climber, skier and trail runner, but each time I went out, I felt oddly disconnected to those very same places I pined after. I sought them feverishly, yet when I arrived, I felt like a foreigner, a squatter even, never at home or at peace. The mountains had lost their joy. In truth, I was lonely, and a bit desperate.

And so, I tried ways of throwing myself into the wild. I ran deep into the Rocky Mountains while on 24-hour fasts, used exhaustion (as well as some mind-altering drugs) to loosen the grip of reality. I put myself in front of the most gorgeous places on earth. I climbed frozen waterfalls and remote desert towers. I ran at night, during hurricanes, and bobbed face up, in the middle of lakes, in the middle of the night, in my birthday suit. I was searching and searching — for what, I did not know — and in the process I was failing and failing, powerless to pry the lid and taste nature’s mysterium tremendum.

Then I read Mr. Lopez and he called me out.

I was neither attentive nor meeting the wild on its own terms. I was merely trying to pry something from the wild for my own benefit. Which means I wasn’t seeing the wild at all.

I started walking around my neighborhood more. Compared with those wild places, this was unremarkable: pacing down a sidewalk of 10-year-old maples, across cracked squares of pavement, alongside a ditch bursting with spring runoff. But I turned it into a practice of sensation. I listened. I felt. And in a remarkable way, the neighborhood came alive — alive in a way that those mountaintops or the wildflower-strewn rivulet in the valley below never had. My senses, once atrophied, came to life, and with them, so did the world around me.

My experience, which took me from the rugged wild to a tamer, humbler landscape outside my front door, went against the grain of a few hundred years of traditional nature writing, but so be it.

My strolls taught me that walking truly is a discipline and an art. The discipline of removing assumption — thinking that something is going to be beautiful does as much damage to a place as thinking it will be ugly. It is an art of attention. There was no satori, or breakthrough moment. I had the kind of experience young lovers do when, after hanging out every day for two months, it finally occurs to them they’re in love. They smile, but they can’t remember the precise moment their love began.

I realized the main thing preventing a more intimate connection to the natural world was concept — the mysterious filters our mind lodges between us and the world, at every turn, at every second, in just about every interaction. Concepts can be good: We get the concept of “mortal danger” when a car is hurtling toward us. But concepts, also a form of assumption, can neuter experience because pure sensations become impure when we judge them. Concepts are what we deploy when we ask what we can get out of a walk, rather than the opposite.

Researchers who study our brain activity while we walk use the term “automaticity” to describe how our body behaves on a stroll. Automaticity is defined as “the ability of the nervous system to successfully coordinate movement with minimal use of attention-demanding executive control resources.”

We should leverage the gift of walking to stop thinking and start doing, apparently, what walking is asking us to do — pay attention to the stuff of place, the place itself. To arrive at that point takes time, and discipline, but when it does, delight bubbles up, a “praising of the mysterious and tender touching we are so often in the midst of,” according to Ross Gay, poet and author of “The Book of Delights.” Place comes to life, any place, from the life we gave it, from attentiveness.

When I walk, I say, “Now I’m walking.” I ring a bell in my mind to get prepared. It doesn’t matter if I’m going to the store or for a lunchtime stroll to catch a glimpse of a sexy tree — I know I’m walking. I breathe. I swipe left on everything that tries to lodge itself between me and the world. Pebbles crunch underfoot. Leaves smile in my eyes. Sounds emanate from bottomless wells. The world gets younger, exalted. I see, smell, hear and feel things I didn’t before. It’s not profound, not magic, but it is impossible to tie a ribbon around.

Not everyone can walk. That capacity may be denied to us at birth, or we can lose mobility over time. But walking is, in the end, a metaphor for being, a place and time — a place-time — gifted to us.

We could all use that gift.

Francis Sanzaro is the author of “Zen of the Wild: A Philosophy for Nature,” “Society Elsewhere: Why the Gravest Threat to Humanity Will Come From Within,” and other books.

In a photograph released by Russian state media, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and President Xi Jinping of China meeting in Uzbekistan.  Credit…Pool photo by Alexandr Demyanchuk

Dear Commons Community,

President Vladimir V. Putin acknowledged yesterday that China had “questions and concerns” about Russia’s war in Ukraine, a notable, if cryptic, admission that Moscow lacks the full backing of its biggest, most powerful partner on the world stage.

Mr. Putin met China’s leader, Xi Jinping, on Thursday in their first in-person meeting since Russia invaded Ukraine, and as Mr. Xi traveled abroad for the first time since the start of the pandemic. But rather than put on a show of Eurasian unity against the West as Russia struggled to recover from last week’s humiliating military retreat in northeastern Ukraine, the two leaders struck discordant notes in their public remarks — and Mr. Xi made no mention of Ukraine at all.  As reported by The New York Times.

“We highly appreciate the balanced position of our Chinese friends in connection with the Ukrainian crisis,” Mr. Putin said in televised remarks at the start of the meeting. “We understand your questions and concerns in this regard.”

It was a moment, on the sidelines of a regional summit in Uzbekistan, that showed the daunting political straits Mr. Putin finds himself in nearly seven months into his invasion of Ukraine. On the battlefield, Russia has lost more than 1,000 square miles of territory this month, rendering the prospect of a decisive victory over a Western-armed Ukraine as remote as ever. At home, Mr. Putin is facing unusual criticism from some supporters over his slow military progress.

And internationally, as the West continues to ratchet up sanctions against the Kremlin, the Russian president on Thursday saw Mr. Xi — who had pledged a friendship with “no limits” just three weeks before Russia invaded — conspicuously withhold any public support for Mr. Putin’s war.

Instead, in a statement issued after their meeting, China said it was “willing to work with Russia to demonstrate the responsibility of a major country, play a leading role, and inject stability into a turbulent world.” To scholars who study the between-the-lines messaging of the Chinese government’s public remarks, it sounded like an implicit rebuke.

Sergey Radchenko, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, said the statement appeared to telegraph “a reproach to the Russians, that they’re not acting like a great power, that they are creating instability.” Shi Yinhong, a longtime professor of international relations at Renmin University in Beijing, said it was “the most prudent or most low-key statement in years on Xi’s part on the strategic relationship between the two countries.”

Accentuating the dissonance, even as Mr. Xi said nothing on camera about Ukraine, Mr. Putin at Thursday’s meeting backed Beijing in its confrontation over Taiwan, where tensions rose last month amid a visit by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to lend support for Taiwan’s resistance to pressure from Beijing, which claims the self-ruled island democracy.

Still, China continues to represent a critical lifeline for Russia as Moscow looks for new export and import markets amid the crush of Western sanctions over the war. China has increased its purchases of Russian energy, while selling Russia more cars and some other goods. That support is “very important for Russia,” said Alexander Gabuev, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, adding that he believed the Kremlin was “cleareyed” about the limits of China’s backing.

Putin is painting himself into a smaller and narrower corner!

Tony