It’s His Turn | Alex Bronzini-Vender Gavin Newsom’s memoir will leave you with a nagging suspicion that he isn’t entirely persuaded by his own pitch.

Gavin Newsom is revving up for a presidential run—and bent on repeating the losing strategies of the center-leaning Democrats who came before him.

It’s His Turn | Alex Bronzini-Vender Gavin Newsom’s memoir will leave you with a nagging suspicion that he isn’t entirely persuaded by his own pitch.

As is customary for those eyeing the Oval Office, Gavin Newsom has delivered unto the public a memoir, “Young Man in a Hurry.” @alexbronzini.bsky.social writes on this vacuous self-promotion effort—and Newsom’s curious lack of ideas.

Opinion | Harvard’s Anti-Woke Era Has Arrived. It’s Even More Stifling. Wasn’t this supposed to be the golden era of free expression on college campuses?

“Under federal pressure, Harvard and other universities around the country now police academic inquiry according to murkier standards of fairness,” writes Alex Bronzini-Vender. “The result is a new orthodoxy even more stifling than the last.”

ICE should switch to “we’re actually wearing masks to prevent the spread of long COVID” and instantly watch the opposition collapse into vicious factional infighting

Reports of Western Civilization’s Death at Harvard Are Greatly Exaggerated Claims that Harvard no longer teaches Western civilization are wrong. The real threat to the humanities is collapsing student demand.

No, Harvard hasn’t abandoned the study of “western civilization.” By @alexbronzini.bsky.social

washingtonmonthly.com/2026/01/06/h...

Thanks!

Reports of Western Civilization’s Death at Harvard Are Greatly Exaggerated Claims that Harvard no longer teaches Western civilization are wrong. The real threat to the humanities is collapsing student demand.

A great response to Hankins: washingtonmonthly.com/2026/01/06/h.... Correctly notes that the collapse of faculty hiring and humanities' enrollments as structurally key to all these "debates."

I’ll take it

Opinion | Harvard’s New Campus Orthodoxy Is Even More Stifling Than the Old

As some of us have been arguing for a long time: “the idea that speech should be judged by how it feels to protected groups, rather than by its truth or falsehood, is exactly the standard the right spent a decade railing against.”

www.nytimes.com/2025/12/29/o...

Thanks, truly

Opinion | Harvard’s New Campus Orthodoxy Is Even More Stifling Than the Old

This is not breaking news to most of us, but I appreciated this opinion piece from current Harvard undergrad @alexbronzini.bsky.social making concrete some of what the new regime of campus speech restriction looks like.

We need more of this, especially students describing their direct experience.

No, America Doesn’t Hate Harvard | Opinion | The Harvard Crimson It’s a neat narrative, though it doesn’t fit the facts. Yes, Americans are less confident in institutions like Harvard than they used to be. But the drop isn’t as steep as declinists say — and it’s no...

If universities require urgent reform to regain public trust, then so too do the medical system, organized religion, banks, and the Supreme Court—all of which fare worse than universities in Gallup polls measuring public confidence. @alexbronzini.bsky.social

www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

Thanks!

Affirmative action for milquetoast liberalism!

Come One, Come All!* | Alex Bronzini-Vender All were welcome at WelcomeFest 2025—except for the “groups.”

We sent @alexbronzini.bsky.social to WelcomeFest, where everyone from “abundance” advocates to David Shor to Senator Elissa Slotkin have fresh ideas about how to save the Democratic Party, like “appeal to the centrist soccer mom” and “take your base for granted.”

Come One, Come All!* | Alex Bronzini-Vender All were welcome at WelcomeFest 2025—except for the “groups.”

Earlier this month, @thebaffler.com sent me to WelcomeFest, America’s “largest gathering of centrist Democrats” thebaffler.com/latest/come-...

A Graduation Speaker Gets Canceled Commencement addresses used to make audiences squirm. Now you get in trouble for doing that.

Commencement speakers used to make audiences squirm in their seats. But if you make them squirm at NYU, warns Corey Robin, you might be punished. chroni.cl/3Swt2rX

Beyond the administrative bloat theory of everything Many critics of higher education have long seen <a href="https://academic.oup.com/book/5108/chapter-abstract/147691963?redirectedFrom=fulltext#:~:text=Hyperventilated%20talk%20about,and%20amenity%20co...

Good piece by @alexbronzini.bsky.social about the insufficiency of the “administrative bloat” critique of higher ed. www.columbiaspectator.com/opinion/2025...

good argument about why democrats seriously shouldn't embrace crypto from @alexbronzini.bsky.social
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Abundance Mindset | Alex Bronzini-Vender Jared Polis could define the future of the Democratic Party. That’s a bad thing.

Colorado governor Jared Polis could very well be the future of the Democratic Party. That is not a good thing. @alexbronzini.bsky.social describes his crypto-friendly, Koch-adjacent, deregulatory liberalism.

Abundance Mindset | Alex Bronzini-Vender Jared Polis could define the future of the Democratic Party. That’s a bad thing.

As the governor of Colorado, Jared Polis has declared over one thousand state holidays. He’s also resisted organized labor, cut regulations, and slashed taxes. @alexbronzini.bsky.social writes on the strangest Democrat in America.

More likely, by some point next year, investors will balk and demand higher interest rates or a demonstration of fiscal discipline, triggered perhaps by an even larger deficit or ever bigger auctions of Treasuries. Those demands will wean the US off its dependence on government spending, at least temporarily, and in turn undermine economic growth and corporate profits.

It’s remarkable how confident people are about the imminent arrival of the bond vigilantes, no matter how many times these predictions have been wrong in the past. on.ft.com/4fji5mn

Via @rajakorman.bsky.social , here is Michael Pettis' critique of China's development strategy boiled down to a sentence. carnegieendowment.org/posts/2009/1...