Minnesota has a better-than-average unemployment rate and per capita GDP. It also has a top-tier employment-to-population ratio and the third-lowest rate of poverty.
We don’t know how to talk to each other these days, and that includes those who are paid to do the talking. The current generation of late-night talk show hosts, supposedly professional conversationalists, fail miserably at the job. Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show is awkward, giggly, and forced in his enthusiasms, while Stephen Colbert on The Late Show is stern, plodding, and ponderous. Credit Jimmy Kimmel for at least having a sense of joie de vivre, but his joie is strictly from the Jackass school of extroversion: The man is no great communicator but merely a back-slapping post-post-adolescent.
If you live in Seattle and want to take your child to the playground near the beach, you are out of luck, thanks to pressure from the city's gay community, which wants to use the area for nude sunbathing.
Like yours, my first glimpses of the Sphere in Las Vegas were online ones. I’d seen pictures and videos crop up in social media posts showing the glowing orb on the outskirts of the Vegas skyline and in the banner images atop a rash of recent stories in the press by writers in places such as the Atlantic and the Paris Review who, I noticed, had more dazzled reactions than I would have expected. In fact, they seemed to be more dazzled than they had expected. So when a recent road trip out west occasioned a stopover in Sin City, I was looking forward to seeing it in the steel.
It’s tiresomely fashionable these days to complain about New Year’s Eve. It always seems forced, people say. It’s too close to Christmas. It’s too expensive to go out. It’s noisy and fake and inconvenient. To which I say: All the more reason to throw a really fun party and give your far-flung and disparate friends someplace to go. Those who want to stay home can stay home. Those who want to dress up and drink and meet new people and perch on the arm of a sofa can come to my house and mix it up in a happy and convivial way.
Former Harvard President Claudine Gay’s resignation caused quite an uproar on social media among many left-wing acolytes. These people, who often consider themselves enlightened, espouse such things as diversity, tolerance, and inclusion. Yet they are among the most exclusive, intolerant, and homogeneous of people. They seek power, authority, and wealth for themselves and those like them. They have contempt for anyone who is different. They have fear and loathing for anyone who opposes them. Hell hath no fury like the social media scorn of people who supported Gay and her left-wing ideology.
Pro-Hamas activists mobbed the California legislature and shut down the state Assembly, and yet it seems California Democrats are OK with some forms of lawlessness in a capitol building to subvert the legislative process and not others.
Claudine Gay’s demotion from the presidency at Harvard University is being painted by liberal media (and Gay herself) as part of a conservative attack on liberal institutions and our elitist betters. In reality, it is Gay and her fellow liberals who are destroying the respect those institutions crave.
The U.S. is riding another wave of rising COVID-19 infections, as holiday gatherings and a new variant are driving increased transmission. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the wastewater viral activity level for COVID-19 is the highest it’s been since the omicron surge in 2022. At the same time, a new variant...