Senator Lindsey Graham. Credit…Will Crooks for The New York Times

Dear Commons Community,

Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who served in the State Legislature and the U.S. House of Representatives before being elected to the Senate four times, has died, his office announced this morning. He was 71.  As reported by The New York Times.

He died of a “brief and sudden” illness on Saturday evening, his office said in a statement, without providing details.

Mr. Graham was first elected to the House of Representatives in 1994, before being elected to the Senate in 2002. He was re-elected to the Senate in 2008, 2014 and 2020.

Last month, Mr. Graham won the South Carolina Republican primary in his bid to serve a fifth term in the Senate, fending off five challengers.

“Senator Graham’s family appreciates prayers at this time and asks for privacy during this incredibly difficult period,” his office said in a statement.

Gov. Henry McMaster of South Carolina, a Republican, said in a statement that Mr. Graham was “the fiercest of fighters for South Carolina and America.” Mr. McMaster can immediately appoint a temporary replacement to fill Mr. Graham’s Senate seat through January. According to South Carolina law, an election for a full-term successor would be held in November.

Mr. Graham, who sought the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, built a reputation in Washington and abroad as one of the Senate’s most forceful advocates for an interventionist U.S. foreign policy. Throughout his career, he consistently argued for the use of American military power overseas, including most recently supporting aggressive military action against Iran. He also maintained close ties with Israel, making numerous visits there during his time in Congress.

Over his Senate career, Mr. Graham led two influential committees, Judiciary and Budget.

As head of the Judiciary Committee, he oversaw the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court following the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. He also was a key figure in the 2016 fight over President Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the court, aiding in Republicans’ success in blocking the pick.

More broadly, Mr. Graham was instrumental in advancing Trump’s effort to reshape the federal judiciary. During his tenure at the helm of the committee, the Senate confirmed more than 200 federal judges, including Ms. Barrett, cementing one of the defining conservative judicial legacies of the Trump era.

As chairman of the Budget Committee, Mr. Graham played a central role in translating Trump’s domestic agenda into legislation. He oversaw a budget resolution that allowed Republicans to advance much of the president’s sweeping tax, immigration and spending package without support from Senate Democrats.

The effort required months of negotiations among warring factions within his party before the tax package became law last year. Mr. Graham, along with Republican leaders and the Trump administration, embraced budget reconciliation as the party’s primary vehicle for enacting  Trump’s agenda at a time when Republicans lacked the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster.

Once one of Trump’s sharpest Republican critics during the 2016 campaign, Mr. Graham later underwent a political transformation, becoming one of the president’s most steadfast and outspoken allies.

May he rest in peace!

Tony

Shutterstock

Dear Commons Community,

Every conversation about artificial intelligence in schools asks the same question: How do we keep up? Districts buy tools, write acceptable-use policies, and train teachers on prompts. The race is to ensure students can use the technology. Almost no one asks what matters more: What is it doing to the minds we are educating? Education Week had an article on Friday asking these questions.

The early evidence is not reassuring. At the MIT Media Lab, researchers used EEG to monitor brain activity while students wrote. Students who composed essays with ChatGPT showed measurably weaker neural connectivity than those who wrote on their own, and most could not quote a line from work they had finished minutes earlier. The researchers called the pattern “cognitive debt,” the bill that comes due when a machine does the thinking.

A Wharton field experiment with nearly 1,000 high school math students found the same trap. With AI tutors, students sailed through practice. When the tools were removed, those who had leaned on them scored 17 percent worse than peers who never used them. Most striking: They believed AI had helped them learn.

AI does not feel like it is hurting learning; it feels like progress. The erosion remains invisible until the tool is gone and the skill is gone.

These findings add to an attention crisis we have not solved. Psychologist Gloria Mark, who has studied human focus for two decades, found that the average time a person spends on a single screen before switching fell from 2.5 minutes in 2004 to 47 seconds in 2023. It is likely worse today. We ask children to do the slow, effortful work of learning in an environment built to interrupt them every 47 seconds. AI, with its instant answers, pushes in the same direction.

So what is education’s real job now? It is not to keep students away from AI; that ship has sailed, and these tools will shape their working lives. It is to ensure that when a student picks up the most powerful cognitive shortcut ever invented, a strong mind is at the controls, capable of sustained attention, working memory, reasoning, and discernment to recognize when the machine is wrong.

That means treating human cognition as core infrastructure, not a byproduct of covering content. The capacities AI erodes, such as focus, memory, metacognition, and tolerance for productive struggle, are trainable. One of the most direct ways to train them is daily mindfulness practice: Decades of neuroscience show that brief, consistent mindfulness strengthens attention and self-regulation and increases gray-matter density in regions tied to learning and memory. It is not a wellness trend but exercise for the exact mental muscles AI invites students to stop using.

The case is strongest in the early years. Attention, impulse control, and the capacity to sit with difficulty are laid down in childhood and adolescence, when habits of mind take hold for life. A few minutes a day of training in focus and self-regulation is not time taken from learning; it is what makes learning possible, and the earlier it starts, the deeper it takes root.

This is not theoretical. Thousands of schools have already built a few minutes of mindfulness practice into the day, no new subject required, and watched attention and self-regulation improve. But it remains the exception. At the very moment AI pulls hardest on young minds. The practice proven to strengthen them reaches less than 10% of students and is missing for the rest and belongs in every school, not a fortunate few.

The people building AI seem to grasp the point. Sam Altman, who runs OpenAI, says intelligence and awareness seem to go together. If the architects of these systems believe awareness must scale alongside machine intelligence, educators cannot treat it as optional.

Consider the irony. While schools turn to AI to support student mental health, AI researchers and developers have turned to mindfulness to steady the machines: A 2025 study found that calming, meditative prompts reduced ChatGPT’s anxious, biased responses to disturbing inputs. We are teaching the bots to regulate; we might do the same for the children using them.

We can keep optimizing for output and raise a generation fluent with AI but unable to think without it. Or we can build the cognitive muscle to use it well, beginning with a few minutes of daily mindfulness in every classroom, from the earliest grades.

The next race in education is not about better algorithms. It is about the minds that direct them. Districts that train attention and self-regulation as deliberately as they teach reading and math will graduate the students who lead in an AI world, not the ones it leaves behind.

Important commentary.

Tony

Credit…MacRumors.

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday, Apple filed a lawsuit accusing OpenAI of stealing secrets about products still in development, setting up a legal face-off between two of the world’s biggest tech companies.

In the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, Apple said OpenAI, a leader in artificial intelligence that has a new hardware business, had asked job candidates from Apple to share details about secret projects and to bring device components and prototypes to their interviews.  As reported by The New York Times.

Apple also accused an OpenAI employee of downloading internal documents from a laptop owned by the iPhone maker. That employee and OpenAI’s top hardware executive were named as defendants in the suit. Both used to work at Apple.

OpenAI used the confidential information to approach Apple’s manufacturing partners, including asking one partner to demonstrate Apple’s technique for finishing metal on its devices, the lawsuit said.

Apple sent a letter to OpenAI in February to raise concerns that confidential information could be “making its way to OpenAI’s business improperly,” according to the suit. OpenAI did not respond, Apple said.

“OpenAI’s nascent hardware business now rests on the shakiest of foundations, rotten to its core by its illegal reliance on misappropriated trade secrets,” Apple wrote in its lawsuit.

OpenAI pushed back against the accusations in a statement. “We have no interest in other companies’ trade secrets,” a spokesman, Drew Pusateri, said. “We remain focused on building innovative technology that empowers people everywhere.”

(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied those claims.)

Apple’s lawsuit against OpenAI sharply escalates tensions between the two tech titans, whose high-profile partnership had already begun to unravel.

Apple remains largely on the sidelines of A.I., even as other technology giants spend hundreds of billions of dollars building A.I. models and data centers and as start-ups push the envelope on the technology.

To help catch up, Apple struck a deal with OpenAI in 2024 to use the A.I. start-up’s technology to overhaul its products, including its digital assistant, Siri. But OpenAI grew disappointed by how Apple integrated ChatGPT, and has even considered legal action. In January, Apple said it was teaming up with Google to power Siri and its other A.I. products.

Adding to the tension, OpenAI, which has confidentially filed for an initial public offering, is creating a new family of hardware products itself.

Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, has long held ambitions to produce A.I.-powered devices. The nascent technology can be worn like jewelry or placed in a pocket — offering users features like audio and video recording, or responses to voice commands.

Mr. Altman previously backed a now defunct start-up called Humane, which built an A.I. device that users pinned to their clothing.

Last year, OpenAI paid $6.5 billion to buy IO, which at the time was a one-year-old design studio founded by Jony Ive, Apple’s former longtime design head. During his 27 years at Apple, Mr. Ive developed Apple’s minimalist aesthetic and worked with the company’s co-founder Steve Jobs to revolutionize the smartphone.

Before the acquisition, Mr. Altman worked with Mr. Ive to develop wearable devices that could run the start-up’s A.I. technology. The two men have previously declined to discuss what such devices could look like or how they might work.

The deal brought Mr. Ive, who is not named in the lawsuit, and his team of roughly 55 engineers and researchers inside OpenAI. That group included Tang Tan, a former Apple executive and IO co-founder. Mr. Tan had spent 24 years at Apple, leading design for the iPhone and Apple Watch before his departure. He is now OpenAI’s chief hardware officer.

In its lawsuit on Friday, Apple accused Mr. Tan of coaching his hires from Apple on how to evade Apple’s security processes for departing employees.

Engineers and designers have steadily departed Apple for OpenAI since it acquired IO. More than 400 former Apple employees now work for OpenAI, according to the lawsuit.

Mr. Tan did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Apple accused another former employee, Chang Liu, of using a former colleague’s Apple-owned laptop to gain access to and download technical documents while working at OpenAI. Mr. Liu told the Apple employee what information about unannounced products she should study before job interviews, Apple said.

Mr. Liu also planned to get access to internal documents through an Apple-owned laptop that he didn’t return when he left the company, according to the lawsuit.

Mr. Liu did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

OpenAI had misled the manufacturing company it approached to learn about the metal finishing technique to believe it had Apple’s permission to view it, according to the lawsuit.

Apple is seeking an injunction that would prevent OpenAI from possessing, using or sharing Apple’s trade secrets, as well as an order requiring OpenAI to return Apple’s intellectual property.

Apple has previously sued former employees turned rivals. In 2019, the company sued Gerard Williams III, its former chief chip architect, for breaking his employment contract as he worked to create a chip start-up, Nuvia. Apple dropped that lawsuit in 2023.

Trouble in big tech world!

Tony

Courtesy of NASA.

Dear Commons Community,

This posting is a reprint of an article that appeared yesterday in Science.

For decades, elementary students learned the same tale of the Solar System: first come rocky terrestrial planets such as Earth, followed by gas giants such as Jupiter and ice giants such as Neptune, with lovable Pluto bringing up the rear. Then 20 years ago, planetary scientists downgraded Pluto to a “dwarf planet.” And now, they say, it’s time to revisit our idea of Neptune and Uranus, too—for the so-called ice giants likely contain very little ice.

The term is “a little bit misleading,” says Ravit Helled, a planetary scientist at the University of Zürich. “We really don’t know what these planets are made of.” She and her colleagues do, however, have ideas, ranging from magma oceans to soups of icy methane.

Uranus and Neptune were first called ice giants because they orbit past the Solar System’s so-called ice lines: the points beyond which water, ammonia, carbon monoxide, and other volatile molecules exist as solids rather than gases. If this region abounded with frozen water during the early Solar System, then Uranus and Neptune’s interiors might consist mostly of water, squeezed by the pressure of the planets’ gravity into a hot “supercritical” soup.

But the only measurements of Uranus and Neptune from up close happened 40 years ago during NASA’s Voyager 2 mission, and those data are too sparse to confirm the picture. More recently, studies of Pluto and other small bodies beyond Neptune’s orbit showed their interiors hold far less “ice”—supercritical mixes of compounds such as water and ammonia—than scientists expected, at most one-half of the worlds’ rocky content.

The evidence that Uranus and Neptune must be icy is “all indirect, it’s all circumstantial,” says Jonathan Fortney, a planetary astrophysicist at the University of California (UC), Santa Cruz. “This was always in the back of people’s minds: that the planets could be more complicated.

” Knowing what our outermost planets consist of could reveal which materials were present in the Solar System’s earliest days and farthest reaches. And it could hold clues to worlds beyond the Solar System, because planets slightly smaller than Neptune are the most common kind in the galaxy, Helled says. “We have these representatives in our own Solar System, and we realize that we don’t know what they are made of.”

As a result, researchers have come up with a smorgasbord of ideas about what’s inside our outermost planets. The newest, posted as a preprint last week and currently in review at The Astrophysical Journal, suggests that Uranus and Neptune hold oceans of molten rock.

Studies of exoplanets inspired the idea, explains Edward Young, a planetary scientist at UC Los Angeles. When he modeled so-called sub-Neptunes as having an iron core, a rocky mantle, and a gaseous hydrogen envelope, the materials began to mix, lowering the rock’s melting point and forming worlds of molten magma. Even though sub-Neptunes orbit their host stars more closely than Uranus and Neptune, “we thought, well, why should the formation of the ice giants and the sub-Neptunes be fundamentally different?” Young says.

So he and his colleagues tweaked their models to match Uranus’s and Neptune’s observed gravities and densities. Indeed, worlds with soupy magma oceans resulted—no ice required. This kind of magma would be nothing like what oozes from Earth’s volcanoes: Instead, it would be a fluid pent up under extreme pressure, with huge amounts of hydrogen and some helium dissolved within it. This mélange could stay hot for billions of years, insulated by the planets’ thick, hydrogen-rich atmospheres.

This conception of Uranus and Neptune, Young says, amounts to ” rethinking of the astrophysics and the settings in which they were formed,” wherein the outer planetary disk might have had much less ice than once thought.

Young’s theory isn’t an outlier. Roberto Tejada Arevalo, a recent astrophysics Ph.D. at Princeton University, modeled the interiors of Neptune and Uranus to explain why Neptune emits more internal heat than Uranus does. He found that a supercritical magma interior with water, ammonia, methane, and helium mixed in could match the outer planets’ heat measurements and other observed properties. Both his scenario and Young’s require rock, ice, and gases to blend well, like vinegar and oil shaken into salad dressing, at the extreme pressures and temperatures inside Uranus and Neptune. That’s far from certain, he says. “There are so many mysteries with these planets.”

Uri Malamud, a planetary scientist at the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology, thinks the planets’ interiors may still be rich in ice—but ice mainly of methane, not water. When he and colleagues simulated the formation of hundreds of thousands of Neptune-like worlds while varying the amounts of the chemical building blocks present in the early Solar System, the best matches to Uranus and Neptune, in radius and mass, emerged when large amounts of soot mixed with hydrogen-based atmospheres. The carbon and hydrogen reacted to form methane that ended up in the planets’ innards in a liquid state. Magma oceans didn’t form because the planets’ materials weren’t set up to mix well, leaving any rock in a more stratified layer. “They’re just different ideas about what might be possible,” Malamud says.

In her own modeling, Leiden University astronomy Ph.D. candidate Vanesa Ramírez found that Uranus and Neptune should be more than 60% rock, which she also envisions as a more stratified outer layer. But recent measurements of Uranus with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array telescope show high carbon monoxide levels indicative of an interior chockfull of the gas. Many internal makeups, Ramírez says, could explain the observation. “We are still discovering these planets,” she says.

The only way to solve the mystery is to visit them, researchers say, and measure their gravity and magnetic fields and atmospheres up close. Indeed, in a priority-setting decadal survey published by the National Academies in 2023, planetary scientists put an orbiter and probe mission to Uranus at the top of their wish list. “We really need a flagship mission,” Helled says, “to put all these pieces of the puzzle together.”

In the meantime, researchers can tinker with these planets’ misnomer. Young prefers “miscible giants,” after the way he thinks the planets’ materials mix. Malamud, Ramirez, and Helled offer “subgiants,” “minor giants,” and “outer giants,” respectively, after the planets’ sizes and distances. And Arevalo proposes “metal giants” because the planets abound with “metals”—astronomy-speak for all elements heavier than hydrogen and helium.

Yet agreeing on a new term for the planets may prove as hard as sending spacecraft there. A few years back, Fortney served on a group brainstorming future ice giant missions. “There were 10 of us in a room for a week,” he says. “We didn’t agree on any better names.”

We learn something everyday!

Tony

Omar Yaghi. Credit…Sophie Park for The New York Times

Dear Commons Community,

Omar Yaghi, an immigrant to the United States who shared last year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry, has left his faculty post at the University of California, Berkeley, for one in China, where he will lead an institute using artificial intelligence to accelerate the discovery of new materials.

Dr. Yaghi’s move comes amid the Trump administration’s continuing disruptions of U.S. science funding and China’s efforts to woo international scientists with hefty budgets.  As reported by The New York Times.

Last week, Tsinghua University in Beijing welcomed Dr. Yaghi in an appointment ceremony, calling him one of the world’s foremost chemists. The university said he saw his new post as an opportunity “not to slow down, not to repeat what has already been done, but to do science with more energy, more intensity, and more ambition than ever before.”

“China is increasing its investment in science overall, including chemistry,” said Alessandra Zimmermann, a budget analyst at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a scientific group based in Washington, D.C. The best measures of scientific accomplishment, she added, show that China “has been outperforming the U.S. in top chemistry papers.”

Last year, three of America’s six winners of science Nobels were born outside the country. In this century, overall, the émigré fraction for U.S. Nobels in physics, chemistry and medicine now stands at 40 percent.

In an interview, Ram Seshadri, a professor of chemistry and materials science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said Dr. Yaghi’s move to China shed light on a fast-emerging dynamic between the two nations. “They’ve overtaken us in many areas of materials science and chemistry,” he said, referring to China. “They’re willing to invest very large sums of money to attract new talent.”

A subfield of chemistry, materials science is the underlying force behind many of the innovations that define modern life, from the silicon chips in smartphones to the carbon fibers in racing bikes to the biomaterials of medical implants. By nature, it’s an interdisciplinary field that investigates the relationship between the structure of materials at an atomic or molecular scale and their macroscopic properties.

Dr. Yaghi was born in Amman, Jordan, to Palestinian refugees whose one-room home lacked electricity and running water. Early on, he became fascinated with a schoolbook’s depiction of atomic building blocks. When he was 15, his father, a butcher, sent him to the United States.

Last year, before flying to Stockholm to receive his Nobel Prize, Dr. Yaghi in an interview with The New York Times voiced concern about Mr. Trump’s immigration policies, saying that they endanger the nation’s system of universities, companies and governments that promote scientific excellence.

“I think it’s regrettable,” he said of Mr. Trump’s nationalism.

“We have to know that people coming from different backgrounds improve the level for everybody involved,” he added. “That’s an amazing story. Great thinkers can improve not only the U.S. but the world.”

Dr. Yaghi joined the University of California, Berkeley, in 2012, and while there earned many awards for his scientific advances.

He received his Nobel Prize for helping discover a world of chemistry in which molecular building blocks are assembled into structures that possess vast internal surface areas — the largest of any known substance. His porous structures can act like sponges that readily absorb, store and release gases and vapors.

He named them metal-organic frameworks. The metal atoms form an adjustable framework that can hold chemicals associated with life — carbon atoms in particular. While deeply theoretical, the frameworks are so radical, innovative and flexible in nature that materials experts and companies foresee many commercial uses for them.

The frameworks can, for instance, harvest water from desert air. In 2018, Dr. Yaghi’s students at Berkeley tested the idea in the Mojave Desert in California, finding that a small passive harvester could each day produce nearly three cups of pure, drinkable water. The device is now nearing commercialization.

In the interview with The Times, Dr. Yaghi credited the invention to his boyhood efforts to secure water for his family. The municipal pipes worked for only a few hours every week or two. That hardship, he added, shows how the diverse experiences of émigrés can lead to unexpected breakthroughs.

Dr. Yaghi has longstanding ties with Tsinghua University. In 2022, the Beijing school appointed him as an honorary professor and in that role he closely followed its work in chemistry, materials science and related disciplines.

Now, on joining Tsinghua full time, Dr. Yaghi is being named as the head of a new A.I. institute for science research that will focus on the design and synthesis of new materials.

Its underlying aim, the university said, is to “overcome the efficiency bottlenecks of traditional trial-and-error approaches” and shorten the usual cycles of discovery.

Congratulations to Dr. Yaghi on his new position!

Tony

Click on to enlarge.

Dear Commons Community,

Education Week has provided an analysis with a map (above) showing where critical race theory is under attack.  The movement to discuss how teachers discuss race, gender, and other such potentially controversial topics in schools has slowed—and changed—since Republican state lawmakers began proposing those bills in 2021.

Even so, other challenges to materials and lessons—from local book challenges to state measures aimed at diversity, equity, and inclusion programs—continue to mount. And most laws enacted over the last few years that target teaching of “divisive concepts” or “critical race theory” remain on the books.

Between January 2021 and June 2026, 44 states introduced bills or took other steps that would restrict teaching critical race theory or limit how teachers can discuss racism and sexism, according to an Education Week analysis. Twenty-one states imposed these bans and restrictions either through legislation or other avenues.

The trend has proved to be an ongoing minefield for teachers and school districts, some of whom have already faced challenges to lessons and professional development courses in states where these laws have passed.

State lawmakers initially drew inspiration from a September 2020 executive order, signed by then-President Donald Trump, which banned certain types of diversity training in federal agencies after the murder of George Floyd in 2020.

Bills aimed at K-12 schools in the 2021 and 2022 legislative sessions targeted anti-bias training and other efforts educators were making to diversify curricula and materials, arguing that schools placed too much emphasis on the most difficult chapters of American history and were intentionally causing white children to feel guilty about their race.

They labeled these kinds of activities critical race theory, a reference to a decades-old academic idea that has been appropriated by its opponents to refer to anything that makes race or gender salient in conversations about history, current events, or literature.

More recently, legislation has focused on prohibiting “diversity, equity, or inclusion” teaching or training.

Education Week also provided details on each state in its analysis.

Good info!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Adweek is reporting that the cable news ratings for June 2026 are in, and while Fox News remained comfortably in the No. 1 spot in total viewers,  the network was down significantly compared to the same period last year.

According to AdWeek, citing Nielsen big data + panel numbers, Fox News averaged 2.26 million total viewers in primetime and 197,000 viewers in the coveted Adults 25-54 demographic for the month of June. In total day, the network averaged 1.451 million total viewers and 133,000 demo viewers.

Fox News was down 5 percent in total viewers and down 6 percent in the demo during primetime compared to May 2026. And it was a similar story across total day, with a 5 percent drop in total viewers and a 6 percent drop in the key demo.

The year-over-year declines were even more noticeable, with the network dropping 19 percent in total viewers and a massive 43 percent in the demo during primetime compared to June 2025. In total day, Fox News was down 15 percent in total viewers and 40 percent in the demo.

It should be noted that all networks faced strong sports competition in June, including the NBA and NHL finals and the start of the FIFA World Cup. However, despite this, one network actually grew its primetime numbers in both total viewers and the key demo. In June last year, Fox News and CNN ratings were likely boosted by reporting of the first major wave of US and Israel military strikes on Iran.

MS NOW, which ranked second, averaged 1.015 million total viewers and 96,000 demo viewers in primetime in June. During total day, the network averaged 636,000 total viewers and 61,000 demo viewers.

Compared to last month, MS NOW was up 8 percent in total viewers and up 3 percent in the demo during primetime. Across total day, the network gained 7 percent in total viewers and was flat in the key demo.

Year over year, MS NOW grew 6 percent in total viewers and 1 percent in the demo during primetime compared to June 2025. It was also up 7 percent in total viewers and 2 percent in the demo during total day, making it the only network with growth in this yearly comparison.

CNN, meanwhile, averaged 610,000 total viewers and 97,000 demo viewers in primetime for the month of June. In total day, the network averaged 436,000 total viewers and 61,000 demo viewers.

Compared to May 2026, CNN was down 4 percent in total viewers and down 12 percent in the demo during primetime. The network also dropped 5 percent in total viewers and 14 percent in the demo across total day.

CNN was also down compared to June 2025, with a 5 percent decline in total viewers and a 28 percent decline in the demo in primetime. In total day, it was down 2 percent in total viewers and 27 percent in the demo.

Across the other networks, NewsNation averaged 130,000 total viewers and 12,000 demo viewers in primetime, with Cuomo as the network’s top show with 222,000 total viewers and 22,000 demo viewers.

Varney & Company landed in the top spot in total viewers for Fox Business with 283,000 and tied with Kudlow for the number one spot in the demo with 12,000 viewers.

CNBC’s Fast Money Halftime Report was the network’s most-watched program with 283,000 total viewers and 70,000 demo viewers.

Meanwhile, Rob Schmitt Tonight was Newsmax’s most-watched show in total viewers with 298,000, while Carl Higbie Frontline landed the top spot in the demo with 17,000 viewers.

As the reporting indicates, I believe that June sports televising attracted a lot of viewers.

Tony

Graham Platner. Credit…Sophie Park for The New York Times.

Dear Commons Community,

Graham Platner, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Maine suspended his campaign yesterday under intense pressure from all corners of his party after a woman accused him of rape.

His departure upends one of this year’s most important Senate races and creates enormous uncertainty about his party’s outlook in Maine, where Democrats believe that defeating Senator Susan Collins, a Republican, is crucial to their efforts to reclaim a Senate majority.

The Maine Democratic Party will hold a convention to choose a new nominee by July 27, the state-mandated deadline. An array of Maine politicians, including several who ran in primaries for other offices this year and lost, have expressed interest in running.

In a video posted on social media last night, Mr. Platner said that the allegations against him were false but that he was suspending his campaign and would file paperwork to withdraw.  As reported by The New York Times.

“We believe that for the movement to continue, it can’t be me,” Mr. Platner said. “We are suspending campaign operations. This is incredibly difficult, because I know that some will think it’s an admission of guilt, and it most certainly is not. We’re not doing it because of the allegations, we’re doing it because of the structures that are being taken away from us by those in power.”

He said that he hoped the process to replace him would take into account the wishes of voters who backed him last month.

“The process needs to assure that what comes next is reflective of the Mainers who on June 9 turned out and showed that they are desperate for a different kind of politics,” he said. “It needs to be driven not from back rooms, but by the will of the people, and the decisions that come next must come from that.”

His exit is the culmination of a rapid fall from grace after he sailed to political prominence last year, only for his campaign to be upended by scandal after scandal. He confronted revelations that he had a tattoo that resembled a Nazi symbol, the surfacing of offensive old Reddit posts, and reports that he had sent sexual messages to women outside his marriage and that several women who dated him years ago recalled that he had acted in unsettling ways.

The final blow for Mr. Platner’s bid came on Monday, when a Politico report detailed how Jenny Racicot, 41, a Democrat who had dated him, accused him of raping her in 2021. Mr. Platner called allegations of nonconsensual behavior “categorically false” in a video on social media on Monday.

Asked by CNN if Mr. Platner had raped her, she replied, “By definition, yes, absolutely.”

No prominent Democratic groups or officials stepped up to defend him. Within hours, Democrats who had previously vouched for Mr. Platner dropped their support, including Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Representative Ro Khanna of California and Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona.

By Monday night, so had the Senate Democratic campaign arm. Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, who lead the group, said it would not invest in the Maine Senate race if Mr. Platner remained on the ballot, effectively choking off any remaining hopes that he could win in November. His last prominent supporter, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, called for him to step down on Tuesday.

But Mr. Platner delayed his exit in hopes of influencing who would replace him, telling his campaign team in a private call that he wanted to see a nominee who shared his progressive economic agenda.

In the video announcing he would suspend his campaign, Mr. Platner painted himself as a victim of the Democratic establishment that initially opposed him.

“Those in power who have the ability to do so are using these allegations as an excuse to take away all of the things that we need to run a campaign,” he said, citing funding, voter data and other resources to which he would lose access.

Maine Democratic voters nominated Mr. Platner by a landslide in the June 9 primary. He won 72 percent of the vote, running effectively unopposed after Gov. Janet Mills, a moderate backed by party leaders in Washington, suspended her Senate campaign in late April as she struggled to match Mr. Platner in fund-raising or voter enthusiasm. She remained on the ballot and received nearly 20 percent of the vote.

The leading candidates to replace Mr. Platner could include several Democrats who ran for governor and did not win the primary.

They include Shenna Bellows, the Maine secretary of state, and Troy Jackson, a former president of the Maine Senate, who had both endorsed Mr. Platner. They placed third and fourth in the primary for governor. Nirav Shah, a former director of Maine’s public health agency, finished second in the primary and has said he is evaluating whether to run.

Ms. Mills is seen as less likely to be selected. She has not responded to messages.

Mr. Platner, 41, a retired Marine combat veteran, won the support of the left wing of the Democratic Party with his ordinary, workingman image and his promises to challenge the party establishment.

But he was trailed by scandals nearly from the start of his campaign.

He denied the most serious allegations, insisted that any troubling behavior in his past did not reflect who he was today and urged Mainers not to judge him for “the worst thing I said on the internet on my worst day 14 years ago.”

He spoke openly about his struggles with post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and drinking after his military service, casting his candidacy as a vote for change — not only political change, but also personal re-evaluation.

But Ms. Racicot’s account proved too serious for fellow Democrats to ignore. Her accusation that Mr. Platner raped her in 2021 was first reported by Politico, which cited emails Ms. Racicot had sent to her therapist and an acquaintance about the encounter and interviewed a man she had dated and confided in during the years afterward.

Ms. Racicot had described some of what happened that night to The New York Times this spring, saying that he had arrived at her house drunk after she had asked him not to come over. At the time, she declined to share further details of that encounter on the record, but she said that she had found his behavior “reckless” and “unsettling” and that she had cut off contact with him soon after that episode.

She told Jake Tapper of CNN in an interview on Monday that she had hesitated to speak out against Mr. Platner because she “felt really uncomfortable with the responsibility of and the weight of my story and what that might do,” given that she agrees with his politics.

“I understand why people want someone like him in office, and I felt like me coming forward would essentially potentially take that away,” she said. But once the story came out and she was named in it, she said, “I kind of just made the decision that I’m going to say my piece and get it out there.”

In private, some Republicans had hoped that a damaged Mr. Platner would stay on as the Democratic nominee past a July 13 deadline to drop out. But Republicans were also publicly denouncing him after the latest accusation.

Attention will now shift to the nomination process for a replacement, which was determined by a vote of the Maine Democratic Party’s 113-member executive committee on Wednesday night. Whoever is chosen in the convention will have to overcome an abbreviated timeline to have a chance of ousting Ms. Collins, a well-known lawmaker who has long dashed Democrats’ hopes of defeating her.

“The one thing in a situation like this that you can never get back is time, and the clock is ticking toward that July 27 deadline,” David Farmer, a Democratic consultant in Maine, said in an interview on Wednesday.

Of Mr. Platner’s run, he added, “It is a wasted year in what was always going to be a very difficult race.”

Mr. Platner did the right thing.  Good luck to him as he moves on!

Tony

John R. Thelin, a professor emeritus at the U. of Kentucky.  Eric Sanders, University of Kentucky

Dear Commons Community,

John R. Thelin’s A History of American Higher Education has for two decades served as essential reading for those who want to understand the sector’s evolution, twists, and turns. A fourth edition that extends into the 2020s is due out next month from the Johns Hopkins University Press.

The Chronicle of Higher Education conducted an interview with Thelin to discuss the state of American colleges and universities.   Below is the entire interview. 

Tony

Why a new edition, and why now?

If you go back to February or March of 2020, with the start of Covid, a number of things coagulated that suggested the recent past and the present are a very important and interesting time. There’s always a tendency to overestimate the present. But the events of the last five, and maybe 10, years really are significant. They warrant some thoughtful attention.

What’s particularly notable to you about higher ed’s recent history?

What surprises me is the erosion. Not only the financial decline, but more importantly a lack of emotional and spiritual support for what Clark Kerr had introduced around the early ’60s: the prestigious American research university, truly the envy of the world, accommodating undergraduate and advanced graduate education, the combination of federal research and private foundations.

If there’s one image, it was the letting go of the federal civil-service scientists — marching them out of their offices, carrying shoeboxes full of things, this kind of public humiliation. Top-level civil-service personnel being let go ties directly to the role of the research universities in this complex university-federal-state research partnership. I think we’re going to see repercussions for a long, long time.

Let’s go back to higher ed’s early days in this country. It’s striking how many struggles and reinventions your book documents for America’s colleges since the colonial period.

In the early decades and centuries, even for the prestigious institutions, there really has been something of a year-by-year existence. It’s really not until after World War II, and really not until the ’60s and ’70s, that federal money is substantial in the annual operating budgets.

Look at what they called the “new depression” in higher education — that was the term in the early ’70s. It was just fascinating how many powerful, prestigious institutions were financially at risk.

We inherit, in recent years, the interlocking fabric of the sectors — federal, state, institutions both private and public — intertwined in what has been a mutually beneficial way. That is why I think the unraveling is all the more painful and surprising.

Might today’s college leaders take any lessons from those of past eras?

The other day, President Trump made an aside that the one president to whom he did not wish to be compared was Herbert Hoover. The irony is, Hoover is one of the most underappreciated figures in American history. If you look at higher education, the greatness of Stanford University largely rests with his business background, his philanthropy, his very classic conservative values, and his entrepreneurial values.

He, more than anyone, galvanized Stanford into transforming itself from a really pretty-sleepy Northern California resort. This strategy was for Stanford to seek out alliances in either the private or commercial sector. Silicon Valley, if you go back 50 or 60 years, their major product was fruit. There was very little industry. And so there was an example of a private university using something of an intelligent commercial model.

Now let me make one more comment. A president of several universities, and he was also a professor of higher education, Robert Birnbaum, wrote this book called Management Fads in Higher Education. What he would see is that higher-education advocates, the board of trustees, or sometimes the president, would borrow, superficially, some practice or concept from business and belatedly transfer it to the university. By and large, what he said is that transplant was too late, and they didn’t really understand it, and they also didn’t understand the organizational culture of the university, of why it would and would not work.

Colleges arguably borrow business fads after business is done with them.

What’s the failure rate of new businesses?

Colleges and universities — regard them as stodgy, tradition-bound, and everything, but it’s big news when one fails or closes. There’s an endurance and resilience that I think is sometimes underappreciated. Universities need to learn and adjust, but I wouldn’t necessarily embrace the slogans from the business sector.

We often hear from faculty members and college leaders who feel besieged today.

I finished my Ph.D. in 1973, but in 1972 the bottom dropped out of the academic job market. It was so bad that if a university advertised a tenure-track position in something like the social sciences or history, they would probably get 300 applicants, of which 280 were well-qualified.

We used to have contests among unemployed graduate students: Who could get the best rejection letters? I quit applying for faculty positions. I applied for president and provost, and lo and behold, instead of postcards with nasty notes, I’d get letterhead with embossed seals on it.

On a serious note, the most important change in the academic profession is the move toward reliance on adjuncts. In many ways, arguments over academic freedom or tenure are increasingly moot, because instructional faculty and researchers, they’re not on the tenure track. They’re expendable.

If someone starting undergraduate studies asked, “Should I consider becoming a professor?” I, in good conscience, would not encourage them. And that rips out my heart to say. I just don’t see, in most fields, the prospect of a realistic professional and personal life — teaching, with some writing and research. It just seems increasingly unobtainable. I hope I’m wrong.

Your story from the ’70s adds levity to a serious topic, but maybe it can also be a reminder that the good old days weren’t always so good.

The difference was in some earlier decades, things were in the formative stage. It’s different to be at a college or university when things are starting to build and they’re uncertain. Being in an era of downslide is just a very sad situation.

We’re focusing on professors, but my take is that all learned professions, not just faculty, in recent years have been reduced in terms of their rights and autonomy. Try being an M.D. today. That’s got to be one of the most reductionist, bureaucratically controlled positions. I’m sure that the level of frustration and unfulfillment is increasing. I think there’s something in the fabric of professional life in the United States that is cutting across many professions.

What do you think about higher ed and the semiquincentennial?

This coincides with the founding of Phi Beta Kappa. And yes indeed, colleges and universities in what was America and then the United States really have been a distinctive and a very American institution, with their own formal and informal culture and organization. So yes, they should be part of it.

What I don’t know is, What is the legacy from the celebration? Where do we go from here?

The institutions that got hauled before the congressional hearings, like Harvard, Columbia, Penn, MIT, or whoever — those institutions are historic; they had strong legal protections, they had a lot of autonomy, and boy, they took it on the chin. I’m still amazed at that. I thought our charters and structures and culture were going to give a little bit better protection.

(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Dear Commons Community,

The US Supreme Court has been especially busy this past year and has drawn the ire of conservatives and liberals over its rulings.  A new poll by the The Economist provides insights into how the American people feel about the Court and individual justices.  As reported by Newsweek.

The American public’s perception of several conservative Supreme Court justices has turned more negative over the past year, a new national poll shows, as the High Court’s overall approval rating is underwater.

The survey by YouGov/The Economist found that the net favorability ratings of Justices Clarence Thomas, Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh all soured compared to a similar poll conducted a year earlier, reflecting a shift in Americans’ opinions of the court.

Among the three, Barrett saw the biggest drop, with an uptick in “very unfavorable” ratings year over year. Thomas and Kavanaugh also posted deficits, though Kavanaugh’s is a swing of -2 year over year, alongside Chief Justice John Roberts. The changes come amid a decline in the share of Americans expressing approval for the Supreme Court overall, according to the survey.

Amid the deterioration in favorability for nearly all the conservative justices, the court continues facing significant skepticism. Public opinion remains sharply divided along partisan lines, with Democrats viewing the court’s conservative justices far more negatively than Republicans, who continue to rate them favorably.

What the Poll Shows

According to the poll released on Tuesday, the Supreme Court’s approval rating is 36 percent compared to a 50 percent disapproval rating. The poll also shows that 9 percent say it is “too liberal” versus 44 percent find it “too conservative.”

The poll comes on the heels of several high-profile decisions surrounding birthright citizenship and presidential power. When asked if the High Court’s rulings have given the president too much, too little or about the right amount of power, 45 percent said too much, 29 percent said about the right amount and 9 percent said too little. The survey notes that 17 percent were not sure.

The poll surveyed 1,603 U.S. adults from July 3 to July 6 and has a 3.3 percent margin of error.

 Justices’ Favorability

Roberts, appointed by former President George W. Bush, saw favorability in the new poll at 25 percent compared to a 36 percent unfavorable rating. In a poll taken in July 2025, the chief justice’s favorability was 27 percent compared to an unfavorable mark of 36 percent. His net approval this year is -11 percent compared to a net approval last year of -9 percent.

Kavanaugh’s favorability this year is 27 percent compared to an unfavorable rating of 37 percent. Last year, the appointee of President Donald Trump had a favorability mark of 31 percent compared to a 39 percent unfavorable score. His net approval this year is -10 percent compared to -8 last year.

Justice Neil Gorsuch, also a Trump appointee, landed a 23 percent favorability rating this year versus a 30 percent unfavorable rating. Last year, his favorability was 25 percent compared to 33 percent unfavorable. His net favorability this year is -7 percent versus -8 last year, marking the only conservative justice with an improving net favorability, according to the polls.

Justice Elena Kagan, appointed by former President Barack Obama, has a 30 percent favorable rating this year compared to a 24 percent unfavorable rating, making her net favorability 6 percent. Last year, she had a favorable rating of 26 percent versus an unfavorable mark of 30 percent, and, according to the poll, her net favorability was -3 percent.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, also appointed by Obama, has a 37 percent favorability rating compared to a 26 percent unfavorable rating this year, with a net favorability of 11 percent. Last year, Sotomayor’s favorability rating was 36 percent versus an unfavorable mark of 31 percent. According to the poll, her net favorability last year was 4 percent.

Justice Samuel Alito’s favorability rating this year is 25 percent compared to a 32 percent unfavorable rating, making his net favorability rating -7 percent. Last year, Alito, also appointed by George W. Bush, saw his favorability rating hit 28 percent versus a 33 percent unfavorable rating. According to the poll, his net approval last year was -6 percent.

Barrett’s favorability rating, according to the July 2026 poll, is 23 percent versus a 38 percent unfavorable rating. Last year, the Trump appointee’s favorability was 28 percent compared to an unfavorable rating of 37 percent. Her net favorability this year is -15 percent versus last year’s -9 percent.

Thomas’ favorability this year is 29 percent versus a 41 percent disapproval rating. Last year, his favorability was 31 percent versus a 39 percent unfavorable rating. The approval this year for the George H.W. Bush appointee is -12 percent compared to last year’s -9 percent, the poll shows.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, appointed by former President Joe Biden, saw her favorability this year at 34 percent compared to a 26 percent unfavorable rating. Last year, her favorability was 33 percent versus a 31 percent unfavorable rating. Her net favorability this year is 8 percent compared to 2 percent last year.

Last year’s poll was conducted from June 30 to July 2, 2025, among 1,043 U.S. adults, with a 4.3 percent margin of error.

Analyst Says Barrett Has Upset Both Sides

Former Palm Beach County State Attorney Dave Aronberg told Newsweek that “The large drop in favorability isn’t tied to just one ruling or one President. It’s the cumulative weight of an activist Court that many Americans increasingly see as political. Overturning Roe v. Wade, dismantling the Voting Rights Act, and granting unprecedented presidential immunity have fundamentally disrupted public trust. Justice Barrett, meanwhile, has upset both sides of the aisle with her rulings, which is why her numbers are worse than the others.”

Tony