Dear Commons Community,

There was a great hockey game last night played by Team Canada and Team USA that the Canadians won 3-2 in overtime.  With the win, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took the outcome to score a direct political hit on Donald Trump.  As reported by The Independent.

“You can’t take our country — and you can’t take our game,” vowed Trudeau just minutes after the win, referring to Trump’s repeated demeaning taunts that Canada would become the 51st state in America.

Trump, who has been needling Trudeau for weeks, said in a post on Truth Social earlier that he was going to call Team USA to urge them to victory over the nation that will “someday, maybe soon, become our cherished, and very important, Fifty First State.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt piled on, telling reporters: “We look forward to the United States beating our soon-to-be 51st state, Canada.”

Earlier in the week Trump mocked Trudeau with an invitation to the Republican Governors Conference Thursday. The president said in an address to the governors that he would allow Canada to keep its national anthem even when it becomes merely a state.

While some hockey fans from both sides insisted before Thursday night’s competition that they wanted to keep politics out of the game, some Americans booed while the Canadian national anthem was sung at Boston’s TD Garden Arena. Canadians had booed the Star Spangled Banner in Montreal the previous week before Team USA won that faceoff.

Canadian Grammy award-winning singer Chantal Kreviazuk confirmed to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. yesterday that she had slightly altered the lyrics of her nation’s anthem O Canada before the game to make a point about continued independence and to protest the bullying Trump.

Kreviazuk, who is from Winnipeg, said she changed the words of the lyric “True patriot love, in all of us command” to “that only us command.“

She wrote about the lyric change on Instagram: “In this very peculiar and potentially consequential moment I truly believe that we must stand up, use our voices and try to protect ourselves.”

Kreviaszuk added: “We should express our outrage in the face of any abuses of power.”

Congratulations to players on both teams who gave their all in an exceptional game.

Tony

Kirsten Baesler

Dear Commons Community,

President Trump has tapped North Dakota’s Kirsten Baesler—a former school leader and technology integration coach and the nation’s longest-serving state superintendent, with a record of working across the political aisle—to a key post overseeing K-12 policy at the U.S. Department of Education.

If confirmed by the U.S. Senate as assistant secretary of elementary and secondary education, Baesler would be one of two nationally respected officials from the state chief ranks to serve in the department during Trump’s second term. She would join Penny Schwinn, who led schools in Tennessee and has been nominated to the post of deputy secretary.

Baesler’s would-be boss, Linda McMahon, a former wrestling executive and head of the federal small business administration, had her confirmation hearing last week and is heading for confirmation by the full Senate.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

I have just finished reading A Crack in Everything:  How Black Holes Came in from the Cold and Took Cosmic Centre Stage by Marcus Chown.  The author is a science writer, broadcaster and former radio astronomer at the California Institute of Technology. As the title suggests, Chown sets out to establish that black holes rather than some cosmic anomaly are at the center of how galaxies and our universe operate.   He clarifies several important aspects of them. For instance:

• they are not black but colorful;
• they are abundant in our universe and probably exist in all galaxies;
• Albert Einstein correctly predicted the existence of black holes but his theory of general relativity is not universal and does not apply to a black hole’s singularity.  

Chown also gives due credit to the individuals both well-known and less well-known who have made significant contributions to our understanding of black holes.

An astrophysicist will have no problem reading this book. Others may struggle with parts of it.  The book could have also used some photos or illustrations.

Below is a review that appeared in The New York Times.

Tony

———————————————————

The New York Times

Want to Get Sucked Into a Black Hole? Try This Book.

Marcus Chown’s “A Crack in Everything” is a journey through space and time with the people studying one of the most enigmatic objects in the universe.

By Katrina Miller

Katrina Miller is a science reporter at The Times.

Jan. 19, 2025

A CRACK IN EVERYTHING: How Black Holes Came In From the Cold and Took Cosmic Centre Stage, by Marcus Chown

When writing about the complexities of our universe, the astronomer turned author Marcus Chown goes straight to the deep end. His book, “A Crack in Everything,” tells the stories of scientists on the quest to demystify black holes, and it starts with Albert Einstein’s counterintuitive description of gravity.

That gravity is a force — some invisible pull attracting your pencil to the floor — is an illusion, Einstein suggested. What we perceive as gravity is instead the warping of space and time around a massive object, like how plopping a bowling ball onto a soft mattress will curve the sheets surrounding it.

It was a revelation that completely upended the way physicists thought about the universe. But, Chown explains, it also led to a horrifying realization. If that massive object was squeezed small enough, like a star that has run out of fuel and collapsed under its own weight, the warping around it would grow so steep and so powerful that the object would simply cease to exist. Einstein’s new theory of gravity, known as general relativity, gave birth to a monster that he never escaped: the black hole, a cosmic entity with the mass of millions or billions of suns that will devour anything in its wake.

“They are the stuff of physicists’ nightmares,” Chown writes, the afterlives of too-big, burned-out stars swallowed by their own gravity, creating an infinitely dense pit of who-knows-what, because in the belly of a black hole, the laws of physics just stop making sense. As the author concludes, “No wonder Einstein never believed in black holes.”

Chown’s book is primarily a chronicle of the researchers who helped make black holes believable, not just for the Einsteins but for everyone else. He has plumbed the historical record and conducted interviews with pioneers like the New Zealand mathematician Roy Kerr and the British astronomer Paul Murdin, weaving into the stories of their lives and work the uncanny mechanics of the invisible bête noire they helped reveal.

At times, Chown’s writing is downright poetic. Two black holes “locked in a death spiral,” he writes, “launched a tsunami of tortured space-time” — gravitational waves that reverberated across the cosmos and, notably in 2015, into the detectors of eagerly awaiting astronomers on Earth, direct proof that black holes exist. But elsewhere, Chown’s scientific descriptions are difficult to follow, even dizzying. How does the average reader comprehend, for example, that inside a black hole, “space and time become so distorted that they effectively swap places”?

The best parts of “A Crack in Everything” lie between the passages of scientific flair, where Chown brings the heroes of physics past alive. We see Karl Schwarzschild of the Schwarzschild radius, the equation describing the size of a black hole, making his discovery while suffering from painful, chronic skin blisters as a soldier in World War I. Years later, we glimpse Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar of the Chandrasekhar limit, a way to identify the stars that might someday become black holes, doing his calculations by starlight on the deck of a steamship bound for Cambridge, his mind ranging “freely among the embers of dying suns.”

Each chapter in the first half of the book introduces one or two protagonists to root for on their way to the next big discovery. But as the knowledge develops, so too do the scientific instruments and methods, and the number of people needed to push the science forward balloons. By the 1990s it is impossible to keep track of all of the players involved, and Chown mostly abandons his main-character strategy. That does not, however, impact his ability to set up the stakes for each new breakthrough and detail all of the magic and mishaps that come with doing science.

It may be difficult to relate to the genius required to ponder cosmic enigmas. But Chown makes sure you empathize with the rush to get to publication first; the utter exhaustion of consecutive 16-hour night shifts at the observatory, piecing together the first picture of a black hole; and the despair that astronomers felt when the first images from the Hubble Space Telescope came back blurry.

Chown wants us to think a little more tenderly of black holes, too. They are not destructive monsters gobbling up everything in their vicinity, but rather passive predators, waiting for prey to fall their way. Nor are they always ominously black, but often “the most brilliant beacons in creation,” stirring up some of the brightest light in the universe as they feed. By the time you finish “A Crack in Everything” you will see black holes for what they really are: vibrant, spinning hearts around which star matter whirls, coaxing the growth of galaxies and forming a path for the emergence of planets, even life itself.

Eric Adams and Kathy Hochul

Dear Commons Community,

The major story in New York City is whether Mayor Eric Adams will be removed from office. For a moment, it looked like he might walk away scot free. But as pressure mounts amid concerns that his ability to govern is compromised, Governor Kathy Hochul said Monday she would weigh whether to remove the Democratic mayor from his office in what would be an unprecedented action in New York State history.  She held a series of meetings on the matter on Tuesday.

On Feb. 10, the Justice Department ordered federal prosecutors to drop corruption charges against Adams on the basis that the case “unduly restricted” Adams’ ability to execute President Donald Trump’s agenda to crack down on illegal immigration. The news was followed by a series of resignations from high-ranking Justice Department officials as well as the city’s four deputy mayors.

Now, more and more Democratic politicians are joining calls for Adams to resign—or for Hochul to remove him if he doesn’t. Here’s what to know about how that would work—and what might come next courtesy of Time.

How could Adams be removed from office?

The governor of New York is empowered to remove the New York City mayor from office by both state law and the City Charter. In accordance with the City Charter, Hochul can remove Adams from office after providing him with a “copy of the charges and an opportunity to be heard in his defense.”

In that case, Adams would be suspended from his post for up to 30 days, during which Adams would need to present his defense. Once Adams has had a chance to make a case for himself, the governor could either restore him to his office or permanently remove him as mayor.

What these proceedings might look like isn’t entirely clear, primarily because this has never happened before. Adams is the first New York City mayor to face criminal charges while in office, and if Hochul discharges him of his duties, he would be the first to be removed from office. Two former mayors—Jimmy Walker in 1932 and William O’Dwyer in 1950—resigned.

After Adams’ indictment in September, Hochul and her office reportedly began to examine her power to remove the mayor, before she expressed support for him in October. But on Feb. 17, she signaled her calculus may have changed.

There’s also another path to removing Adams: the City Charter says that an “Inability Committee”—consisting of the corporation counsel, the comptroller, the City Council speaker, a deputy mayor designated by the mayor, and the borough president who has served for the longest consecutive period of time—could convene to vote on whether the mayor is temporarily or permanently unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.

If four of five members of the committee declare that the mayor is unable to carry out his duties, then a panel consisting of the 51-member City Council will have 21 days to vote on whether or not to remove the mayor, which requires a two-thirds majority. Until that vote, the mayor can remain in office if he declares within 48 hours of the five-member committee’s declaration of his inability that he believes he is able to carry out his duties.

The provision for the “Inability Committee” was established in 1987 after former Mayor Ed Koch had a stroke. But in the wake of Adams’ indictment last September, City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams said she believed the removal process wouldn’t apply in Adams’ case because precedent suggested it was reserved for physical inability.

Who would replace Adams?

If Adams is removed from office, or if he resigns, Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, the official next in line of succession, would become acting mayor. Williams has already indicated that he is prepared to serve.

The office, however, would officially be vacant, and Williams would need to call a special election within 80 days to elect a new mayor for the rest of Adams’ term, which runs through the end of the calendar year. Such a scenario would not logistically impact the mayoral election in November to elect Adams’ successor for a new four-year term.

Tony

Mackensie Scott.  Bloomberg via Getty Images.

Dear Commons Community,

USA Today has a featured article on MacKensie Scott, entitled, “MacKenzie Scott has donated $19 billion. The impact? ‘Transformational.” It references The Center for Effective Philanthropy which released a study that analyzes Scott’s donations of more than $19.25 billion to more than 2,450 nonprofits domestically and abroad over a three-year period. In 2019, Scott, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezo’s ex-wife, received approximately $38 billion through her divorce settlement and pledged to donate at least half of her wealth to charity.

The study looked at seven nonprofits that have received donations from Scott. Through data collection and interviews, the center’s study found that each of the organizations were able to expand their annual operating budgets, make necessary equipment and programming purchases, and hire and fairly compensate staff, among other improvements. Below is an excerpt.

Scott has become a beacon in the philanthropic world and a shining example for other billionaires such as Bill Gates to emulate.

Tony

———————————————————————-

“The financial contributions that billionaire MacKenzie Scott has made to more than 2,000 nonprofits over the past six years have proven to have a “transformational effect,” a new study says.

Here’s how Scott’s donations have affected organizations in the U.S.

Expanding a mission at Kaboom!

Kaboom!, a nonprofit founded in 1996 that creates playgrounds in areas where they have been historically denied, received $14 million from Scott in 2021, according to the study. Before the donation, the nonprofit’s annual operating budget was $9 million. As of summer 2024, Kaboom!’s operating budget was $21.5 million.

Kaboom! CEO Lysa Ratliff told USA TODAY that Scott’s donation was the “fuel in the tank that allowed us to turn the ship around.”

Before Scott’s donation, the nonprofit relied on corporate funding and service to complete one build project at a time, specifically in areas that offered free and reduced lunch programs or met the organization’s income standards. This “unhealthy” funding method, Ratliff said, kept the organization in a “perpetual trap.”

After Scott’s donation, Kaboom! was able to reorganize its infrastructure and create an inequity priority index, which has expanded the organization’s ability to assess where work is needed and complete projects in more areas than before.

Pre-2020, Kaboom! completed about 150 build projects each year, Ratliff said. This year, the organization expects to complete 85 to 90 projects. Though a smaller number, the playgrounds are larger in scale and of higher quality. On average, a pre-2020 Kaboom! playground was about 2,500 square feet, Ratliff said. Now, the organization is constructing playgrounds closer to 10,000 square feet in size with more unique features.

Scott’s donation also enabled Kaboom! to launch its 25 in 5 Initiative to End Playspace Inequity, which seeks to eliminate playspace inequity in 25 municipalities in five years. Kaboom! also has created a public policy and advocacy department with the donation, allowing the nonprofit to hone in on legislation to help their cause. Last year, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore signed legislation into law that was drafted with Kaboom’s help and prohibits the use of toxic chemicals on playground surfaces.

Providing higher quality resources to community, staff

The South Texas Food Bank is another organization that benefited from Scott. The billionaire donated $9 million in 2020 to the nonprofit that serves eight counties and one tribal nation in southern Texas, according to the study.

Scott’s donation allowed the South Texas Food Bank to provide higher quantities and a higher quality of items to its benefactors and raise staff compensation, the study said.

In 2019, the food bank distribution about 14 million pounds of food throughout eight counties. In 2020, with the help of Scott’s donation, that rose to 26 million pounds of food, according to the study.

Following the height of the pandemic, these numbers have decreased slightly but remain higher than before. In the fiscal year 2021-2022, the food bank distributed 19 million pounds, followed by 20 million pounds in 2022-2023 and 21 million pounds in 2023-2024, South Texas Food Bank CEO Alma Boubel told USA TODAY.

For the first time in decades, the food bank was able to prioritize staff, too, Boubel added.

Forty-two staff members received $1,000 bonuses, the nonprofit began providing free healthcare coverage for all staff and eight new staff members were hired, the study said. Since the donation, around 20 employees, who make less than $16 per hour or have a spouse out of work, have also earned $75 stipends every other week, Boubel said.

The food bank also used $1 million of the donation to purchase new equipment, including two generators and two tractor trailers for carrying perishables, and has spent about $3 million on improving the food bank’s facility in Laredo, Texas.

What other organizations has MacKenzie Scott donated to?

A full list of the 2,450-plus nonprofits Scott has donated to is available on the Yield Giving website at yieldgiving.com/gifts. Established by Scott, Yield Giving asks other wealthy people to give back to charities.

The five other nonprofits analyzed in The Center for Effective Philanthropy study were:

• Big Brothers Big Sisters of America: Received $25 million in 2022
• Pastoral Women’s Council: Received an undisclosed amount in 2022
• Goodwill Industries of East Texas: Received $5 million in 2020
• Equal Opportunity Schools: Received $8 million in 2021
• 317 Main Street Community Music Center: Received $1.5 million in 2021

Who is MacKenzie Scott?

Scott, 54, is both a philanthropist and author. She was married to to Bezos from 1993 to 2019 and contributed to Amazon’s success in the company’s early days.

As part of her divorce settlement, Bezos retained 75% of the couple’s Amazon stock, in addition to her voting control in the company, per previous USA TODAY reporting.

Jake Auchincloss

Dear Commons Community,

Ezra Klein podcaster and contributor to The New York Times, had an extensive interview with Democratic Congressman Jake Auchincloss, who makes several important comments on the state of the Democratic Party.  Here is an excerpt.

“After the election, I (Ezra Klein) started asking congressional Democrats I had talked to the same question: If they had won a trifecta, what would their first big bill have been? What was going to be their priority? In almost every case, they said, they didn’t know. That’s a problem.

Democrats are in the opposition now — that means fighting the worst of what Trump is doing. But it also means providing an alternative, creating another center of gravity in American politics.

So one thing I’m going to do on the show this year is talk to Democrats who sound like they are trying to find that alternative — crafting an agenda that is alive to this moment, not just one carried over from the past.

One Democrat who has interested me is Jake Auchincloss, a congressman from Massachusetts. Among the Democrats talking about the abundance agenda, he has had particularly interesting things to say.

It’s not that I agree with every idea he offers here. I don’t. But when I hear him, I hear someone wrestling with the questions I posed to other Democrats: What is your alternative? What did people need to hear from you over these last few years that they didn’t?

This conversation was recorded at the end of January. So you won’t hear the latest Trump news discussed. But that’s also not the point of this. The country needs a resistance. But it also needs an alternative.

Ezra Klein: Congressman Jake Auchincloss, welcome to the show.

Jake Auchincloss: Thanks for having me on Ezra.

After the election, a lot of Democrats have responded to Donald Trump’s particular form of populism by offering what you call a Diet Coke version of it. Tell me about your Diet Coke theory of the Democratic Party.

I’m concerned that boldface-name Democrats have been leaning into populism. They have said: Boy, Donald Trump has done what we dreamed of — which was building a multiethnic working-class coalition.

The biggest city in my district, Fall River, Mass., is the exemplar of a multiethnic working-class city and voted for a Republican in 2024 for the first time in 100 years. And Democrats across the country have been looking at cities like Fall River and have said: Well, if they’re doing populism, we’ve got to do populism, too — whether that’s immigration or trans issues or the culture wars.

And my view on that is that voters who ordered a Coca-Cola don’t want a Diet Coke. There are two different parties. We have to start by understanding who our voters are not and then understanding who our voters could be — and go and try to win them over. If you’re walking to the polls and your No. 1 issue is guns, immigration or trans participation in sports, you’re probably not going to be a Democratic voter. That’s OK. There are two parties.

But if you are a voter who went Obama, Trump, Biden, Trump, and you’re walking to the polls and your No. 1 issue is cost of living — boy, we’d better win you back.

Democrats used to have a multiracial working-class coalition. They won voters making less than $50,000 by significant margins. They won nonwhite voters by significant margins. That was their coalition. What is your explanation of what broke it?

I think we were seen as taking our eye off the ball on both kitchen-table and front-porch issues. The notorious ad “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you” was not just about the particular salience of trans issues in this election but about a broader cultural thesis: that Democrats have taken their finger off the cultural mainstream.

Between the time when Bill Clinton played saxophone on live TV and peaking, I think, with Obama’s election in 2008 but persisting all the way through 2018, Democrats broadly were winning the culture wars. And MAGA’s big idea was: Maybe we can win the culture wars.

To a certain extent, they did. And I think Democrats now have to make very clear that has been a mask for an agenda that is not actually going to help people.

What you’ve seen in Donald Trump’s first week in office is that he’s siding with cop beaters and tech oligarchs. He’s not doing anything on housing, health care and taxes for the typical American family. We’ve got to drive that cost of living message home.”

The entire interview should be read and reread by the Democratic leadership.

Tony

Mayor Eric Adams is resisting calls for his resignation. Credit…Dave Sanders for The New York Times

Dear Commons Community,

Earlier this week, four New York City deputy mayors resigned due to the growing calls for Mayor Eric Adams’ resignation as a result of  recent events involving his relationship with Donald Trump and a judicial pardon. 

Yesterday, Governor Kathy Hochul  presided over a series of meetings to discuss one of the most consequential decisions of her tenure: whether to remove Mayor Adams from office.  As reported by The New York Times.

Gov. Hochul solicited opinions from Brad Lander, the city comptroller, and Adrienne Adams, the City Council speaker. She shared coffee and tea with the Rev. Al Sharpton and talked to others over the phone or video chat.

She gave no indication that she would come to a quick decision on the mayor, who was only a dozen blocks away, declining to answer questions about his future. He brushed aside reporters as again he has found himself in a state of crisis.

The Justice Department’s move to drop his five-count federal indictment probably eliminated the prospect of a trial while he seeks re-election, but it may have deepened the mayor’s political damage.

The prosecutor overseeing the mayor’s case accused Mr. Adams late last week of agreeing to a quid pro quo with Trump administration officials. In exchange for leniency in the criminal case, she said, the mayor would help the president with immigration enforcement.

The suggestion that Mr. Adams would do Mr. Trump’s bidding, which the mayor has denied, brought widespread condemnation. Calls for his resignation or for the governor to remove him have escalated. Talk of empaneling a committee of mayoral inability has surfaced.

And on Monday, Mr. Adams’s first deputy mayor, Maria Torres-Stringer, and three other well-respected deputy mayors announced their resignations. The deputies did not directly cite the mayor’s cooperation with the Trump administration but alluded to “the extraordinary events of the last few weeks.”

The officials were government veterans who served as the backbone of the administration, leading a vast bureaucracy of roughly 300,000 city workers and key initiatives to build urgently needed housing and to improve public safety. Gov. Hochul said that the four officials’ resignations raised “serious questions about the long-term future of this mayoral administration.”

“This is an unmitigated disaster,” said Mark Levine, the Manhattan borough president, on X. “Each one of these leaders is a seasoned, talented professional. Their loss will leave New York City government in a truly precarious position.”

Their departures raised alarm over who was running the city and whether Mr. Adams could attract qualified candidates given the chaos surrounding him and his re-election campaign.

To say the least, it will be difficult for Adams to continue as mayor.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Maureen Dowd, in her column on Sunday in The New York Times, entitled, “Who Will Stand Up to Trump at High Noon?” uses the  metaphor of 1950s Western movies that pitted the good guys against the bad guys. In her column, the bad guys and bullies are Donald Trump and Elon Musk.  Here is an excerpt: 

“…it’s disorienting to have the men running America, Donald Trump and Elon Musk, relish bullying people who can’t fight back and blurring lines between good and bad.

They should be working for us, but we suspect they’re working for themselves.

After Elon met with Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India on Thursday, Trump admitted that he wasn’t sure if Musk was there as a representative of the U.S. government or as an American C.E.O. “I don’t know,” he said. “They met, and I assume he wants to do business in India.”

Trump and Musk see government workers as losers for devoting themselves to public service rather than chasing dollars.

Axios called their aggressive approach “masculine maximalism.”

“Trump and Musk view masculinity quite similarly: tough-guy language, macho actions, irreverent, crude — and often unmoved by emotionalism, empathy or restraint.”

The two are freezing programs, firing federal workers en masse, ripping apart the government and decimating agencies with no precision, transparency or decency.

Republicans are cowering, and Democrats are frozen like the townsfolk in westerns when the bad guys take over.”

There is a glimmer of hope in Dowd’s conclusion:

“I hope, as President Trump and Elon Musk exercise their “masculine maximalism,” they remember the words of John Wayne in the 1972 western, “The Cowboys”: “A big mouth don’t make a big man.”

Her entire column is below.

Tony

———————

The New York Times

Who Will Stand Up to Trump at High Noon?

Feb. 15, 2025

By Maureen Dowd

Opinion Columnist, reporting from Washington

When I was a teenager, my older brother took me to see “Shane.”

I wasn’t that into westerns, and the movie just seemed to be about a little boy running after Alan Ladd in the wilderness of the Tetons, screaming “Sha-a-a-a-ne, come back!”

I came across the movie on Turner Classic Movies the other night, and this time I understood why the George Stevens film is considered one of the best of all time. (The A.F.I. ranks “Shane, come back!” as one of the 50 top movie lines of all time.)

The parable on good and bad involves a fight between cattle ranchers and homesteaders. Ladd’s Shane is on the side of the honest homesteaders — including an alluring married woman, played by Jean Arthur. Arriving in creamy fringed buckskin, he is an enigmatic golden gunslinger who goes to work as a farmhand. Jack Palance plays the malevolent hired gun imported by the brutal cattle ranchers to drive out the homesteaders. Palance is dressed in a black hat and black vest. In case you don’t get the idea, a dog skulks away as Palance enters a saloon.

It’s so easy to tell the good guys from the bad guys, the right thing to do versus the wrong. Law and order wasn’t a cliché or a passé principle that could be kicked aside if it interfered with baser ambitions.

The 1953 film is also a meditation on American masculinity in the wake of World War II. A real man doesn’t babble or whine or brag or take advantage. He stands up for the right thing and protects those who can’t protect themselves from bullies.

I loved seeing all those sentimental, corny ideals that America was built on, even if those ideals have often been betrayed.

So it’s disorienting to have the men running America, Donald Trump and Elon Musk, relish bullying people who can’t fight back and blurring lines between good and bad.

They should be working for us, but we suspect they’re working for themselves.

After Elon met with Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India on Thursday, Trump admitted that he wasn’t sure if Musk was there as a representative of the U.S. government or as an American C.E.O. “I don’t know,” he said. “They met, and I assume he wants to do business in India.”

Trump and Musk see government workers as losers for devoting themselves to public service rather than chasing dollars.

Axios called their aggressive approach “masculine maximalism.”

“Trump and Musk view masculinity quite similarly: tough-guy language, macho actions, irreverent, crude — and often unmoved by emotionalism, empathy or restraint.”

The two are freezing programs, firing federal workers en masse, ripping apart the government and decimating agencies with no precision, transparency or decency.

Republicans are cowering, and Democrats are frozen like the townsfolk in westerns when the bad guys take over.

Trump’s glowering mug shot even hangs outside the Oval, like an Old West “Wanted: dead or alive” poster. And Musk, giving a news conference with his son X Æ A-Xii on his shoulders, mirrored Palance with his black outfit, including a Dark MAGA hat.

It’s bizarre to have the White House accusing judges who pause Trump’s depredations for a constitutional review of provoking a constitutional crisis.

Trump and Elon are turning our values upside down. The president demands fealty, even if he is asking his followers and pawns to do something illicit or transgressive. Loyalty outweighs legality.

He immediately purged federal prosecutors who worked on Jan. 6-related cases. He ordered a McCarthyesque probe of thousands of F.B.I. agents who investigated a bloody sack of the U.S. Capitol that endangered police officers and lawmakers. So now the agents are the scofflaws, and the scofflaw is the dispenser of “justice”?

Trump is even making it easier for American companies to bribe foreign governments — something that’s not exactly an American ideal.

Danielle Sassoon, the acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, whose office was prosecuting the corruption case against Mayor Eric Adams of New York, resigned on Thursday before she could be fired, after Trump’s Justice Department ordered her to drop the case against the mayor. Trump seemed willing to let Adams, his latest sycophant, off the hook if he cooperated with the administration’s deportation efforts. On Thursday, Adams granted immigration officers access to the city’s jail.

On “Fox & Friends” on Friday, Adams sat with Tom Homan, Trump’s monomaniacal border czar, who didn’t mince words.

“If he doesn’t come through, I’ll be back in New York City,” Homan said. “And we won’t be sitting on the couch. I’ll be in his office, up his butt, saying, ‘Where the hell is the agreement we came to?’”

Sassoon is a conservative legal star with Harvard and Yale degrees who clerked for Antonin Scalia and is a contributor to the Federalist Society — and is, by the way, going through all this mishegoss with a baby due in mid-March.

She is the heroine of the story, and Adams is the miscreant. But Trump and his former lawyer, now the acting No. 2 at Justice, Emil Bove III, are trying to brand her as incompetent and insubordinate and Adams as politically persecuted (like Trump).

Six more Justice Department officials quit after Sassoon, including the lead prosecutor on the Adams case, a former Brett Kavanaugh clerk named Hagan Scotten. Scotten wrote to Bove: “If no lawyer within earshot of the president is willing to give him that advice, then I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me.”

R.F.K. Jr., our new secretary of health and human services — as hard as that is to believe — is hailed by Trump as a health savior, when he’s a dire threat to America’s children with his dismissal of vaccines.

Most of the world sees Volodymyr Zelensky as a hero and Vladimir Putin as a villain. I feel queasy when I hear President Trump talking dotingly about Putin, a K.G.B.-trained thug. I’m sure that dogs skulk away from Putin as he walks by.

But Putin has made it his business to seduce the president, so the easily flattered Trump sees Zelensky as the inevitable loser in his bid to keep Ukraine intact. As the Pentagon chief, Pete Hegseth, put it, Zelensky needs to get with it and understand “hard power realities,” like the reality that he’s not getting all of his territory back.

On Ukraine joining NATO, Trump sounds like a Putin spokesman, asserting that “Russia would never accept” that.

In a speech in Brussels on Thursday, Hegseth, said, “We can talk all we want about values. Values are important. But you can’t shoot values. You can’t shoot flags. And you can’t shoot strong speeches. There is no replacement for hard power.”

But if we lose our values and abandon what those before us have fought for, are we the same America? Our heroes preserved the Union and liberated Europe from the Nazis. We’re supposed to be the shining city on the hill. It feels as if we’re turning our country into a crass, commercial product, making it cruel, as we maximize profits.

I hope, as President Trump and Elon Musk exercise their “masculine maximalism,” they remember the words of John Wayne in the 1972 western, “The Cowboys”: “A big mouth don’t make a big man.”

Christopher Jencks in his Harvard office in 1972.  Credit…Joyce Dopkeen/The New York Times

Dear Commons Community,

I was sad to read of the passing of Christopher Jencks, a giant among sociologists doing research on education and social inequality.  I started referencing him decades ago when he followed up on James Coleman’s study (Coleman Report) on factors influencing education achievement. Jencks, in what was perhaps the most extensive study to that time (3 year longitudinal study), attempted to refine maybe even refute the Coleman Report, came to essentially the same conclusions as Coleman. In his report/book, Inequality: A Reassessment of the Effect of Family and Schooling in America (1972), he stated:

“children seem to be more influenced by what happens at home than what happens in school. They may also be more influenced by what happens on the street and by what they see on television. Everything else, the school budget, its policies, the characteristics of teachers is either secondary or completely irrelevant.”

His 1972 research in still pertinent today in 2025.

Below is an obituary that appeared in The New York Times.

May he rest in peace!

Tony

The New York Times

Christopher Jencks, a Shaper of Views on Economic Inequality, Dies at 88

His clear prose, illuminating data and novel arguments, transformed debates around issues like public education and welfare reform

By Clay Risen

Feb. 12, 2025

Christopher Jencks, a highly regarded sociologist who helped transform public and expert opinion on complex policy issues like homelessness, income inequality and racial gaps in standardized testing, died on Saturday at his home in Lexington, Mass. He was 88.

His wife, the political scientist Jane Mansbridge, said the cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease.

Mr. Jencks had an unconventional background for an academic social scientist: He had an undergraduate degree in English literature, followed by a stint as an opinion journalist, and despite holding an endowed chair in sociology at Harvard, he never earned a doctorate.

If anything, that background seemed to help him. In books and articles, he wrote clear, concise sentences backed by finely honed data, presenting arguments that cut to the quick of policy debates, often in novel ways that defied traditional left-right divisions.

His 1994 book, “The Homeless,” is a case in point. In a mere 176 pages, including endnotes, he offered a dramatically lower estimate of the country’s homeless population than what was assumed at the time: less than 300,000, versus the accepted estimate of up to 3 million, a number, he said, that had been inflated to draw attention to the issue.

He then walked through the reasons homelessness was rising — including cuts to social services and the closing of mental institutions — following this explanation with a suite of often surprising prescriptions, including bringing back “Skid Row” neighborhoods.

In a 1972 report, Mr. Jencks and seven associates at Harvard found that education reform was limited in what it could do to reduce inequality.

Mr. Jencks also proved refreshingly willing to change his mind when the situation changed. By the 1990s, he had shifted his position on education somewhat; as manufacturing jobs declined and the demand for skilled workers grew, the benefits of education, he said, had become more pronounced.

Though he joined Harvard as a lecturer in 1967 and spent the rest of his career in academia, he kept a foothold in journalism. In 1973, he helped found Working Papers for a New Society, a wonky periodical dedicated to sifting through the successes and failures of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society.

In 1990, he and several other journalistically inclined social scientists founded The American Prospect, a left-of-center magazine; with Kathryn Edin, he wrote one of its first feature articles.

That article, “The Real Welfare Problem,” was vintage Jencks. It grew out of an observation by Dr. Edin, who had been his graduate student, about the large number of aid recipients who worked under the table to make ends meet.

As the writers showed through meticulous analysis, the problem was not greedy welfare cheats but a pernicious aspect of the system: It paid too little, and cut that support further as soon as people looked for other means of income. That insight did much to frame the debate over welfare reform in the 1990s.

“Most people assume that low benefits just force recipients to live frugally,” they wrote. “But low benefits have another, more sinister effect that neither conservatives nor liberals like to acknowledge: they force most welfare recipients to lie and cheat in order to survive.”

Christopher Jencks was born on Oct. 22, 1936, in Baltimore. His parents initially chose to forgo a middle name for him, then changed their minds and gave him “Sandys,” a pluralized version of a childhood nickname.

His father, Francis, was an architect, and his mother, Elizabeth (Pleasants) Jencks, oversaw the household. The Jencks were wealthy, and Christopher was educated at expensive private schools, including Phillips Exeter, from which he graduated in 1954.

He earned an English degree from Harvard in 1958 and a master’s degree in human development from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1959.

Moving to Washington, he wrote for and helped edit The New Republic and was a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, a left-leaning think tank.

His first two marriages ended in divorce. In addition to Dr. Mansbridge, whom he married in 1976, he is survived by their son, Nat; their grandson; and a brother, Stephen.

Mr. Jencks moved to Northwestern University in 1979 and returned to Harvard in 1996. He retired in 2016.

Though he retained a willingness to buck liberal orthodoxies where the data demanded it, Mr. Jencks remained at heart a believer in the need for large-scale government interventions to alleviate inequality.

He insisted that, in the main, the War on Poverty had worked, even as many liberals in the 1980s and ’90s were turning against such programs.

The problem, he said, was one of perception: People expected wealth-transfer programs, like Medicaid and Aid to Families With Dependent Children, to solve a host of social ills, not just eliminate income disparities — something they were unable to do.

“The remedies for crime and family breakdown lie much deeper, requiring changes in the fundamental character of our society, not just a few innovative government programs,” Mr. Jencks said in a 1996 speech at the American Enterprise Institute. “But that is a story for another time.”

Dear Commons Community,

Today we honor and remember our presidents especially George Washington and Abraham Lincoln who led our country during perilous times.

We hope and pray that our current president does not have to lead us in perilous times again!

Tony