Spectator Life

While the fact that Zohran Mamdani had identified as black on his Columbia University application stole the headlines, the hack that exposed this information highlighted something much more insidious in the college admissions system.Admitting the accuracy of the leaked data, Mamdani claimed that he was simply trying “to capture the fullness of [his] background” by checking the “Black or African American” box in 2019. New Yorkers raised an eyebrow. But what would have alarmed them more was the revelation buried in the trove of hacked data: that affirmative action is alive and well in America. The leak of Columbia’s admissions data demonstrates that, even after the Supreme Court ruled affirmative action policies unconstitutional in SFFA v.

The University of Pennsylvania just reversed course on one of the most controversial sports decisions in recent memory. After a federal investigation, the university agreed to restore titles and records to biological female swimmers who were forced to compete against Lia Thomas – a transgender-identifying male athlete. In addition, Penn will send apology letters to the affected athletes and adopt sex-based definitions going forward, limiting women’s sports and facilities to biological females.It’s being hailed in some circles as a win for common sense and women’s rights. And it is. But let’s be clear: this was not a moral epiphany. It was a forced retreat.Penn, like many elite institutions, didn’t arrive at this outcome willingly.

Fifteen years ago, when Congress enacted the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare), Vice President Biden, at that time a man with full verbal faculties, indecorously stated to President Obama, “this is a big fuckin’ deal.” So it was, or so it seemed. Today however, Obamacare has become yet another reckless source of federal spending, significantly contributing to the inefficiencies and corporatist structure of American healthcare.Obamacare’s reinforcement of the healthcare status quo should lead us to think more deeply about what we want healthcare to be like in America. Should we not strive for the alignment of healthcare with the fundamental principles of democratic capitalism, ensuring that freedom and accountability for patients – i.e.

“Authoritarianism can be stopped,” Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, was saying, even though Weingarten was a prime mover, if not the prime mover, behind years-long Covid-era school closures that crushed education opportunity for an entire generation. But we’ll stop this particular round of authoritarianism, she said, with our voices and our bodies: “We have to be on the streets in a very, very public way.” This was on an AFT organizing call yesterday evening for No Kings, a massive nationwide protest taking place this coming Saturday, which had been scheduled long before last weekend’s Battle of Los Angeles.

President Trump’s proclamation, “Enhancing National Security by Addressing Risks at Harvard University,” pays a compliment to that crossroads of brilliance and turbidity. It treats Harvard as a serious educational institution, and one that in its misbehavior “presents an unacceptable risk to our Nation’s security.”    Trump was not referring to the risk of immersing some of America’s brightest and most ambitious students in a toxic soup of anti-Semitism, DEI and disdain for our republic. Nor were the “risks” he had in mind “everybody-gets-an-A" grade inflation or a curriculum that wastes the students’ intellectual talents on courses that sound more like entertainment (e.g.

Like Papal encyclicals, many statutes are known by the opening words of their Latin formulation. One that I just learned about is known as a “Qui tam” action. By itself, it is an enigmatic expression, since it just means “Who so” or “Who as.”   If you look it up, though, you will discover that “Qui tam” is shorthand for “Qui tam pro domino rege quam pro se ipso in hac parte sequitur,” which makes much more sense: “Who prosecutes in this matter both for the King and for himself.” That tam, as is often the case, is balanced with quam, “as x, so y.” Spinoza contains a famous example toward the end of the Ethics: “Sed omnia praeclara tam difficilia quam rara sunt”: “For all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.

As President Donald Trump trots the globe shopping for a new Air Force One and takes long-distance phone calls in a quest to end the “bloodbath” in Ukraine, a clear and present – and costly, in more ways than one – danger persists on his own country’s soil. A new, first-of-its-kind study from Avalere Health has found the annual average cost of each opioid use disorder (OUD) case in the US “is approximately $695,000 across all stakeholders analyzed.” Per the report’s executive summary:  The costs to the federal government, state/local government, private businesses, and society are driven by lost productivity for employers ($438 billion), employees ($248 billion), and households ($73 billion).

After speculating that President Biden’s medical team must have been aware of his prostate cancer at the time of his last physical examination in 2024, we are now learning from his spokesperson that he has not had a blood test for the prostate specific antigen or PSA since 2014. Let’s recall that year. It’s the summer of 2014. The West Wing is buzzing. Crises in Eastern Europe, unrest in the Middle East, and deep concern for a resurgent threat overseas. Joe Biden, then Vice President of the United States, is flying between continents, doing shuttle diplomacy, leading panels, briefing NATO.And quietly, behind the scenes, his medical chart records a final PSA test. A routine prostate-specific antigen screening. It would be his last.Why?The question isn’t rhetorical. It’s clinical.

The announcement of former president Joe Biden’s diagnosis for advanced prostate cancer is of course a sad event, as it would be with any president’s cancer diagnosis. For the human side, the prayers and sympathies of the nation should be with him and his family. But coming as it does after years of hiding the true nature of Biden’s health – including repeated lies told by his staff, family and those closest to him to the American people – it should lead to even more questions about the truth of his condition, and what we were not told as voters who deserve to trust our top institutions to be honest to us.

How does metastatic prostate cancer “suddenly” appear in someone like Joe Biden? It doesn’t appear overnight, it festers. In rare but dangerous cases, prostate cancer bypasses the usual slow growth and strikes fast, especially in older men. If he wasn’t screened regularly, or had an aggressive subtype that evaded PSA detection, it could have advanced under the radar. But how can we imagine that a President was not screened properly? Prostate cancer is the easiest cancer to diagnose. The PSA blood test shows the rate of cancer cell growth. Even with the most aggressive form, it is a 5-7 year journey without treatment before it becomes metastatic. Meaning, it would be malpractice for this patient to show up and be first diagnosed with metastatic disease in May 2025.

In Bentonville, Arkansas, far from the Beltway bubble, Ivanka Trump is talking about her latest venture. Her topic isn’t politics but produce – specifically, supply chain inefficiencies and supporting American farmers. “We launched Planet Harvest to reimagine how American produce moves,” she says, with her signature polished delivery. Gone are the West Wing offices and policy portfolios. Now it’s all about “reducing food waste, expanding access” and other wholesome buzzwords that perfectly capture the current moment in American food politics. This agricultural pivot isn’t just convenient timing, as Ivanka jumps on the MAHA bandwagon. It’s a masterclass in political repositioning.

Are contemporary faculty members at risk from false accusations made by supporters of Governor DeSantis? Or more generally President Trump? Has a crackdown begun that instills fear into the hearts of classroom teachers? Is there an epidemic of self-censorship that has gripped the campus?  Anna Peterson, professor of religion at the University of Florida, believes all this is true.  She presented her testimony in a New York Times guest essay last Sunday, “Did One of My Students Hate Me Enough to Lie to Get Me in Trouble?” I am among those naturally disposed to doubt pretty much everything in the Times that has a political slant – and few of its articles don’t. Nonetheless, I’m an assiduous reader of the newspaper.

Casey Means, President Trump’s nominee to become the next Surgeon General of the United States, describes herself on her stylish website as a “medical doctor, writer, tech entrepreneur, and aspiring regenerative gardener who lives in a state of awe for the miracle of existence and consciousness.” Big points to you if you had that on your Second Trump Era Bingo card, but it really shouldn’t be a surprise if you were paying attention during the campaign. Dr. Means is a close friend and ally of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and gave a series of extraordinary interviews during the campaign, most notably with Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson, where she talked about the “chronic disease epidemic” in America, particularly among children.