Jalen Brunson and Victor Wembanyama. Credit: Gregory Shamus/Getty.

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Knicks are NBA champions. The team won the Larry O’Brien Trophy for the first time in 53 years

Led by game MVP, “Captain Clutch” Jalen Brunson, who scored 45 points, the long-suffering franchise is bringing back the Larry O’Brien Trophy to New York City. The Knick defense stifled the Spurs especially in the 4^th quarter. Josh Hart led the team in rebounds and made several important three-pointers.

Despite Karl-Anthony Towns being hampered by foul trouble and Game 4 hero OG Anunoby limited to 11 points, the team found yet another way to win, after losing for most of the game for a fifth consecutive time.

In the intense defensive game, points were hard to come by in the first half. At the half, the Spurs led, 42-37. In a similar pattern to the first four games, the Spurs led for most of the game. The Spurs’ Victor Wembanyama was more physical from the start, but finished with only 19 points.

This year, the NBA Finals have made their mark with physical play on the court, exorbitantly expensive seats at both venues (but especially in New York) and high ratings. The game on Monday, June 8, was the most-watched Finals Game 3 in 28 years.

The Knicks and Spurs faced off after a lockout-shortened season in 1999, in which Avery Johnson’s three-pointer won the Texas team the title in Game 5 at Madison Square Garden.

Many of those now-retired players from both teams, including former Knicks star Patrick Ewing and Spurs alums David Robinson and Tim Duncan, have been in attendance at this year’s NBA Finals games, as have a sea of celebrity faces. Knicks iconic legend, Walt Frazier, was also in attendance throughout the series.

Celebrities including Timothée Chalamet, Tracy Morgan, Spike Lee, John Turturro, Sydney Sweeney and Ben Stiller were among the Knicks faithful who traveled to Frost Bank Center to take in what could have been a deciding game in the championship series between New York and the San Antonio Spurs.

In the end, the game belonged to the players.

Congratulations to both teams for providing a thrilling week plus of professional basketball.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

President Donald Trump’s name was removed from the Kennedy Center building in the early hours of Saturday morning, six months after it was added to the nation’s marquee cultural center, which Congress had designated as a living memorial to John F. Kennedy. As reported  by Time.

Workers spent Friday evening erecting scaffolding in front of the building as crowds gathered below to watch. The workers then covered the scaffolding with plastic to obstruct the view of the giant letters being removed.

The removal of Trump’s name came after a federal judge ordered the Kennedy Center to restore its original name by Friday. In recent days, Trump’s name had been removed from the center’s official website, phone voicemail, as well as YouTube channel. Last Thursday, an internal memo from the center’s Office of General Counsel and obtained by Politico directed staff to begin removing references to Trump from everything, from communication and promotional materials to signage. 

In December, the Kennedy Center’s Board of Trustees, which was packed with Trump’s allies, voted “unanimously” to rename the cultural center to the Trump-Kennedy Center. The move drew immediate backlash and a lawsuit from Rep. Joyce Beatty of Ohio, one of the board’s ex officio members, who was stripped of voting power on the board. Beatty was reportedly spotted in the plaza next to the Kennedy Center among crowds waiting for the removal to begin on Friday.

“Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it, ” District Judge Christopher R. Cooper said in a 94-page decision in May, while adding that the decision made by the Board of Trustees violated “Congress’s unequivocal mandate.” Judge Cooper rejected a last-minute appeal from the board to keep the name, finding it unlikely to succeed.

Judge Cooper also reversed the board’s decision to shut down the center for two years beginning on July 5, but the internal memo disputed the judge’s ruling, saying the court “did not rule that the Center must stay open during the renovations” and that it would provide further guidance “shortly.”

Norman Eisen, one of the attorneys representing Rep Beatty, said in the latest motion filing that there is “serious reason for concern” that the center is “not undertaking a good faith effort to comply with the Court’s order.”

“It appears that Defendants’ General Counsel has told all staff that Defendants need not do anything to ensure the Center remains meaningfully operational after July 5, 2026, and can instead implement a total closure via inertia.” 

The restoration of the iconic Kennedy Center’s name is perhaps the most visible example of the courts pushing back on Trump’s aggressive efforts to reshape wide swaths of the federal government and Washington, D.C. life. 

In his second term, Trump has attached his name or image to U.S. passports, battleships, social welfare programs, and multiple federal buildings. Trump’s signature is set to appear on future U.S. paper currency, the first living president to choose to do so. The President also reportedly sought to name Washington Dulles International Airport and New York’s Penn Station after him, although neither transportation hub has changed its name yet. 

Eisen tells TIME the fight to keep the Kennedy Center’s original name is about defending the rule of law and putting a check on Trump’s corruption, while also paying respect to the building’s namesake.

“What this also means to me is the protection of a memorial to a fallen president, someone who our nation mourns and misses, and the restoration of the building for artists and audiences alike, who fled when Donald Trump’s name was slapped on there, and it was politicized,” he added. 

Along with restoring the center’s name, Judge Cooper also reversed the board’s decision to shut it down for two years beginning on July 5. But the internal memo from the center’s Office of General Counsel disputed the judge’s ruling, saying the court “did not rule that the Center must stay open during the renovations” and that it would provide further guidance “shortly.”

Eisen, who also fought and successfully blocked Trump’s $1.8 billion anti-weaponization fund in court, points out that the center’s prior plan for renovation was to keep the center open while necessary maintenance is made, and that the judge has made it clear that the center must remain open.

“There’s no need to close it, as far as we can tell, except to spare Donald Trump of the embarrassment that his name is toxic with artists and audiences,” Eisen says. 

Good riddance to the Trump name. It defiled a respectful memorial to one of the country’s great presidents.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Republican-led Congress has been a “bitter disappointment,” the Bloomberg Editorial Board argues. It points to the body’s “lackluster effort,” its “ham-handed” cuts to medical coverage, and how it dropped much of its agenda “in favor of writing big checks.”

“After two years in charge of a unified federal government, what has the Republican Party accomplished? If current polling is any indication, not enough,” the Editorial Board writes. It points to the Senate’s $70 billion budget reconciliation bill — which passed the House of Representatives — “that will mostly add to a glut of immigration funding.”

This GOP Congress has “fattened the budgets of immigration authorities while doing little to fix the broken incentives that lure unauthorized migrants in the first place (let alone to rationalize the legal immigration system).”

The Board accuses Congress of pledging to fight inflation, while standing “aside as the president has imposed a costly global tariff regime. After coming into office promising ‘massive reform’ to the health-care system, they’ve mostly cut coverage in ham-handed ways.”

Saying Congress “has done nothing to rein in long-term liabilities,” the Board calls the trajectory of the federal government’s debt “unsustainable.”

“More egregiously, the party that flatters itself as fiscally responsible hasn’t lifted a finger to rein in budget deficits,” it writes. “Last year’s tax cuts alone increased projected deficits by $4.7 trillion over the next decade. For all the turmoil engendered by the Department of Government Efficiency, the country’s spending problem has worsened decisively.”

The Board warns that the midterms are just months away, and Congress shouldn’t “congratulate themselves prematurely” — but it could take several steps.

Among them, it could “commit to respecting the Federal Reserve’s independence under new Chairman Kevin Warsh,” and promote permitting reform “to slash red tape, reduce costs, and accelerate energy and infrastructure projects.”

Congress could work on expanding housing supply and medical transparency, or “remind the president that his tariffs are harming workers and inflating consumer prices.”

And in an apparent rebuke, Bloomberg writes, “With federal spending threatening to slow income growth and drive up interest rates — or indeed prompt a fiscal crisis — they could take the minimum step of empaneling a commission to ponder the problem.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Today’s edition of Science has a guest editorial by Pierre Azoulay, an International Programs Professor of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, that focuses on the application process of research grants. His concern is based on the views of a growing coalition of reformers who have  commented that the research project grant (RPG) approach used by many science funders in the United States and based on competitive, investigator-initiated, and peer-reviewed proposals cannot support transformative science.  

His conclusion:

‘One ought to be wary, not opposed. But the moment is hard to ignore: an administration proposing deep cuts to the NSF, the National Science Board dismissed, universities pressed by immigration restrictions and a new endowment tax—a conjunction that should sober anyone weighing a reform that risks hollowing out the institutions producing most US basic science. The RPG embodies a distinctively American policy instinct: decentralization, competition, bottom-up initiative. Its virtues are structural; its vices are accretions of practice. The first would be diluted by major reallocation toward institutional funding; the second can be addressed by deliberate reform. Yet in a tight budget, even modest experiments redirect scarce dollars from a strained system. With bipartisan legislation introduced to extend the X-Labs model to NIH, the scientific community should be asking whether the grass is truly greener on the institutional side, and what safeguards would prevent it from browning over time.”

Important commentary.

Below is the entire editorial.

Tony

——————————

Science

In (qualified) defense of the research project grant

Editorial

Pierre Azoulay

In a debate that has been building for years, a growing coalition of reformers has concluded that the research project grant (RPG) approach used by many science funders in the United States and based on competitive, investigator-initiated, and peer-reviewed proposals cannot support transformative science. Crystallizing this debate, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) has just committed $1.5 billion over the next decade to X-Labs, independent and milestone-driven research organizations meant to bypass not only the RPG but also the universities that have long been its principal recipients. Although the reform impulse may warrant sympathy, the X-Labs prescription merits skepticism.

Criticisms of RPGs cluster around several legitimate themes. Peer-review committees demand preliminary data so extensive that applicants must essentially complete their experiments before being funded to attempt them. Applications that were once a few pages can now be hundred-page compliance exercises. Success rates for federal research grants have fallen by half or more over the past half-century, forcing investigators into endless cycles of writing, rejection, and revision—a treadmill that crowds out contemplative thought. These are real pathologies. They diminish the attractiveness of scientific careers and skew the funded portfolio toward the incremental and the safe.

The reformers’ solution is elegant in theory. Rather than forcing scientists to write grants, give them stable institutional homes; rather than funding projects, fund people and organizations. Create a network of 10 or 20 institutes, each empowered by block funding (longterm, unrestricted institutional support) to pursue research programs the RPG cannot support. The promise is Bell Labs redux: the industrial lab that gave society the transistor, information theory, and the laser, none from a grant application.

The central confusion is that Bell Labs was not a government program, but the research arm of a regulated monopoly, AT&T, funded by captive ratepayers, accountable to no appropriations committee, free to operate on a time horizon no public agency could sustain. The true parentage of X-Labs is not Bell Labs but the continental model: Germany’s Max Planck Institutes (MPIs), France’s Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), and the US Department of Energy (DOE) national labs.

MPIs operate on the Harnack principle: build an institute around a small group of exceptional scientists granted near absolute autonomy. On paper, scientific paradise; in practice, junior scientists live entirely at the director’s pleasure. CNRS researchers become civil servants for life in their early 30s—freedom from fundraising, paid for by an institution slow to adapt when priorities shift. DOE labs are block-funded, stable, and ossified by the safety and compliance apparatus that public funding inevitably brings. At $18 billion a year, they already do at scale much of what X-Labs propose to invent, a fact the X-Labs discourse has somehow overlooked. Block funding does not eliminate bureaucracy; it relocates it. The reformers compare the messy actual RPG to a platonic ideal of institutional science that has never existed under public auspices.

What the RPG gets right is easily overlooked because it is built into the mechanism, not into the wisdom of any administrator. The grant follows the investigator; a scientist treated badly can leave and take their funding with them, giving the scientist real bargaining power vis-à-vis their institution. The system also offers multiple doors—NSF, DOE, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and other agencies and private foundations—so that a paradigm out of favor at one agency may find support at another. NIH alone makes roughly 40,000 RPG awards a year, a portfolio that could support randomized experimentation and rigorous self-evaluation if agencies were so inclined, and that a handful of X-Labs could not. The bundling of research with graduate education that the RPG sustains is the commons from which any new institution would draw the scientists it proposes to redeploy.

One ought to be wary, not opposed. But the moment is hard to ignore: an administration proposing deep cuts to the NSF, the National Science Board dismissed, universities pressed by immigration restrictions and a new endowment tax—a conjunction that should sober anyone weighing a reform that risks hollowing out the institutions producing most US basic science. The RPG embodies a distinctively American policy instinct: decentralization, competition, bottom-up initiative. Its virtues are structural; its vices are accretions of practice. The first would be diluted by major reallocation toward institutional funding; the second can be addressed by deliberate reform. Yet in a tight budget, even modest experiments redirect scarce dollars from a strained system. With bipartisan legislation introduced to extend the X-Labs model to NIH, the scientific community should be asking whether the grass is truly greener on the institutional side, and what safeguards would prevent it from browning over time.

Image credits: expensivethrift/X

Dear Commons Community,

Pope Leo surprised crowds in Madrid by using the 6-7 hand gesture.

Dear Commons Community,

My wife, Elaine and I, will be traveling to the beautiful city of Seattle today to visit my daughter and her family.

Tony

Harmeet K. Dhillon assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. Andrew Harnik/Getty Images News.

Dear Commons Community,

The U. S. Justice Department is investigating a program at City University of New York that offers support for men from underrepresented backgrounds for alleged racial discrimination.  As reported by Inside Higher Education.

Trump officials said in a Tuesday news release that the Justice Department received reports that CUNY’s Black Male Initiative “provides educational benefits to minorities, particularly black males, on the basis of race.” The university says on the program’s website and in other materials that while the initiative is geared toward Black, Caribbean and Hispanic men, its activities are open to all students.

As part of the initiative, students receive “additional layers of academic and social support,” such as peer-to-peer mentoring, according to the website.

Harmeet K. Dhillon, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, said in a statement that “race can never play a role when deciding how to distribute educational resources or opportunities.” The DOJ release noted that the Civil Rights Division hasn’t reached any conclusion about the investigation.

The Justice Department has declared a range of diversity, equity and inclusion practices unlawful and opened several investigations into allegations of racial discrimination at universities.

I searched, but as of early this morning, have not have not seen any official response from CUNY about this investigation.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Last month, I posted  on a book entitled, Beyond Belief:  What evidence shows what really works by Helen Pearson. It was a good read which examines issues of social science research, several of which I was quite familiar.  My colleague, Chuck Dziuban, read it and suggested I read Fluke: Chance, Chaos and Why Everything We Do Matters  by Brian Klaas, which covers some of the same ground but takes a far more critical view of structured research especially quantitative studies. His main focus is the phenomenon of chance and the chaos it can sow. He posits that every detail matters and draws on social science, physical sciences, history, and philosophy to engage the reader. He also includes excellent examples and stories to introduce his topics. 

Both of the above books go into the weeds a bit but if you are someone who engages in social science research, I would give them especially the Klaas book, a try.

Below is a review of Fluke that appeared in the New Humanist.

Tony

—————————–

Left: Senator Susan Collins . Right: Graham Platner.  Courtesy of Newsweek

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday was primary day for several states.  One of the more closely races was in Maine where Republican Senator Susan Collins and Democrat Graham Platner are set to face off in a competitive election campaign for the U.S. Senate race in November after securing their parties’ nominations yesterday.  As reported by Newsweek.

The Maine race presents Democrats with perhaps their best opportunity to flip a Senate seat in the 2026 midterm elections in a state that backed former Vice President Kamala Harris by about seven points in 2024. But recent scandals involving Platner have upended the race, raising concerns among some Democrats about his electability.

Collins has managed to win reelection in challenging environments in the past due to her personal popularity and bipartisan credentials, but Democrats believe she may face her toughest reelection yet because of President Donald Trump’s declining approval rating.

Collins ran unopposed for the Republican nomination, while Platner won the Democratic nomination with 75 percent of the vote at the time the race was called. He defeated candidates David Costello and Governor Janet Mills, who suspended her campaign in April but remained on the ballot.

Mills said in a statement obtained by Newsweek that she has always been inspired to “never stop fighting” for the people of Maine and that she was “incredibly proud” of what her administration has accomplished.

“I will continue to fight with everything I have to improve the lives and livelihoods of Maine people,” Mills said.

What Do The Latest Polls Show?

Early polling points to a close race, with some recent surveys showing a dead heat between the two candidates. Platner has presented himself as a political outsider and change candidate at a time when Democrats are fired up—but Collins is likely to rely on her personal popularity to win, while also calling attention to Platner’s personal scandals.

Notably, Maine uses a ranked-choice system, where voters rank candidates in order of preference. If no candidate wins an outright majority, the candidate with the lowest support is eliminated, and their voters are reallocated to their second choices. No independents have made the ballot, so either Collins or Platner is likely to win a majority, barring a major write-in campaign.

The latest poll from Tavern Research, which surveyed 1,642 adults from June 5-8, showed Platner up two points on 51 percent, compared to Collins’ 49 percent. A Fabrizio, Lee & Associates poll, which surveyed 800 likely voters from June 1-3, showed Collins and Platner tied at 46 percent.

Earlier polls gave Platner a more sizable advantage.

A Public Policy Polling survey showed Platner up four points on 49 percent, while Collins received 45 percent. It surveyed 670 registered voters from June 2-3.

A University of New Hampshire poll, which surveyed 1,250 likely voters from May 21-25, showed Platner up nine points, at 51 percent, to Collins’ 42 percent.

Meanwhile, a Pan Atlantic SMS Group poll, which surveyed 827 likely voters from May 8-18, showed Platner with 48 percent and Collins with 41 percent.

Collins’ supporters have pointed out that she trailed 2020 Democratic candidate Sara Gideon in nearly every poll in her last reelection bid but went on to win by just under 51 percent of the vote.

The Maine senate race will be one of the most closely watched contests in November.

Tony