You read a lot of nasty stuff about higher education and a lot of tragic things about the youth these days, but then there's this dang excellent writing from the youths still in higher education –– @alexbronzini.bsky.social & @tab-delete.bsky.social –– and the world gets a tad brighter.

At a quiet conference at Yale, Palantir and its allies sketched a vision for AI, state power, and how to mix the two.

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.

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.

“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

No, Harvard hasn’t abandoned the study of “western civilization.” By @alexbronzini.bsky.social washingtonmonthly.com/2026/01/06/h...

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

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...

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.

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...

Affirmative action for milquetoast liberalism!

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.”

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

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

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...

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.

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.

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...