I really really hate the entire world of “election reforms” to “give people more choices.” They are, to me at least, a classic example of “let’s get the politics out of politics” moves that end up serving special interests, along the lines of term limits, as one egregious examples. They also suffer from not recognizing that the average American voter is a moron and so pretend to believe that if you just give people more choices, the people will consider all the options and make the right choice for them and that’s democracy and is good.

Instead, you risk what actually could happen in California if all these big egos don’t get out of their own way, which is the foolishness of the jungle primary leading to this very blue state having a final choice between two Republicans for governor this fall.

And yet, despite this huge partisan tilt, there’s a very real chance that the state will elect a MAGA Republican governor this November. Not that the two Republicans seeking that office are in any way popular: The RealClearPolitics polling average shows one favored by only 15 percent of voters, and the other by 13 percent. But every one of the eight Democrats also seeking the office is polling lower than that in the most recent surveys.

The culprit here is the state’s absurd jungle primary, a measure California adopted in 2010. Partisan primaries in the state have been condensed into a single June primary in which candidates of all parties (or no party) appear on the same ballot, with the top two proceeding to a November general election, where no write-in votes for other candidates are permitted.

The reason for that switch is that in 2009, state budgets required two-thirds majorities in each house of the legislature (they now require just a simple majority), and the Democrats—not yet commanding the level of support they’ve secured since—were one vote shy of that total in the Senate. They needed the vote of Abel Maldonado, the one moderate Republican in that body. But Maldonado, who was eyeing a future gubernatorial run, demanded they put a measure on the 2010 ballot that would scrap party primaries for the jungle. Maldonado and the state’s moderate Republican governor at the time, Arnold Schwarzenegger, calculated that this would lead to more moderate elected officials, though in the years since every moderate Republican in the state, including Schwarzenegger, has been driven from the party’s ranks.

Still, the idea sounded unobjectionable to voters at that time, and only a handful of pundits opposed it. I was one of those opponents, writing here and in the Los Angeles Times that the jungle might condemn the state to an elected leadership that’s hugely out of sync with state voters, if only two members of one party ran for an office that a passel of members of the other party were also seeking. After all, as California is an overwhelmingly Democratic state, more Democrats invariably run for statewide office than Republicans do.

That’s Harold Meyerson writing this and he’s right about almost everything, so of course he was right about this too. Fundamentally, the problem is ego, the great problem of all politicians:

In fact, the field is still in flux. For a long time, the leading candidate has been former Rep. Katie Porter, who won a reputation as a feisty progressive during her tenure in Congress. But Porter has been out of Congress, and largely out of the news, for several years now, and had some rocky personal appearances during her gubernatorial rollout. In the most recent polls, she’s running slightly behind the two Republicans, and in a virtual tie with Bay Area Rep. Eric Swalwell, a frequent cable news guest who is little known in Southern California.

Two former elected officials lag behind them: onetime Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, out of office for the past 13 years, during which his politics have moved decidedly rightward; and Xavier Becerra, who was Joe Biden’s secretary of health and human services and, before that, California’s attorney general. Two other statewide elected officials are lagging even behind them, reinforcing the notion that the down-ticket statewide offices guarantee almost total obscurity: former state Controller Betty Yee and current state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond, each of whom commands a level of support in the low single digits. Yee’s almost universally unknown record situates her, along with Porter, in the party’s progressive wing. Along with Thurmond—and none of the other candidates—she supports the wealth tax on the state’s billionaires that may come before voters on November’s ballot if it collects the requisite number of signatures.

Every big California political player, starting with the former Mr. Kimberly Guilfoyle in the governor’s mansion, needs to sit down with everyone but Swalwell and Porter and do whatever is necessary for them to drop out. Villaraigosa is so 20 years ago, Becerra is hopeless, the others have just enough support to help elect a Republican. Honestly, Porter has become ridiculous herself. Policywise, she’d be great, but she’s actively mean to a lot of her own staff and that has spilled into her relationships with journalists. Whatever it takes, clear all but two people out of here. Any Democrat is going to win this race. But one of them has to be in the top two.

“Good government liberals” love things like electoral reforms of all stripes and they are both a waste of time and counterproductive. Kill the jungle primary everywhere.

The post The Impending California Disaster appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

Manhattan started extending its land mass back in the colonial era, using construction debris, sunken ships, ashes, ballast, and other waste to reclaim land and enlarge the island.

Pearl Street used to be the southern boundary; Greenwich Street was at the edge of the Hudson River. Manhattan continued to grow in the 19th century, but by the early 1900s—with almost all of Manhattan urbanized—civil engineers were considering new ways to create more real estate.

Enter a highly esteemed and successful engineer of bridges and skyscrapers named T. Kennard Thomson.

His proposal, popularized in a nationally syndicated newspaper article in June 1911, was to extend Manhattan four miles into New York Harbor, adding 4,100 acres to New York City’s most populated borough.

“The method of reclamation to be followed is extremely simple,” he told a reporter. “I would merely erect concrete seawalls from the Battery toward Staten Island for the desired length, and then fill them in.”

Thomson made his case by focusing on the taxes that could be collected on the additional land. But he was especially concerned with the journey ships took from the harbor to the docks in Manhattan.

Extending the island into the harbor while preserving a narrower ship canal above Staten Island would make it easier for ships to complete their voyage, he believed. The more ships that dock in Manhattan, the more enriched city coffers become.

Part of his proposal involved building a “six-track subway all around Manhattan Island, including the new extension. The subway would be built underneath the present dock line of the city.”

Visionary or pipe dreamer, Thomson was grounded enough to know that he needed city officials to get on board with his plan. The article states that his proposal was “under consideration, and other engineers who have looked into the matter regard it as entirely feasible.”

You can imagine what City Hall must have thought of this massive, likely quite expensive plan. But Thomson wasn’t finished coming up with new ideas for enlarging Manhattan.

In 1916, he published a proposal in Popular Science not only to build into New York Harbor but to fill in the entire East River (third image), which would reclaim 50 square miles and create “a really greater New York.”

You know the end of this story. Like so many other fantastical ideas that never came to pass, Thomson’s second proposal never came to fruition.

[Top image: The Atlanta Journal; Second image: Geographicus.com; third image: Popular Science; Fourth image: New York Tribune]

Looks like somebody else will have the CEO title at the “Washington Post” in its post-journalism phase:

Will Lewis, the embattled chief executive and publisher of The Washington Post, has stepped down, the company announced Saturday, days after the newspaper came under widespread criticism for laying off hundreds of its journalists.

Mr. Lewis said in a statement that he had made the decision “in order to ensure the sustainable future of The Post.” His email, which was terse, thanked only Jeff Bezos, the owner of The Post, and did not mention journalists at the newspaper.

Mr. Lewis left three days after the company, facing years of financial losses, undertook a significant round of layoffs that cut 30 percent of the staff — more than 300 journalists — decimating The Post’s local, international and sports coverage. Marty Baron, the celebrated former editor of The Post, called it one of the “darkest days in the history of one of the world’s greatest news organizations.”

In a news release announcing Mr. Lewis’s departure, Mr. Bezos said that The Post has “an essential journalistic mission and an extraordinary opportunity.” He added, “Each and every day our readers give us a road map to success.” He did not mention the cost-cutting in his statement.

Meanwhile, this story makes it clear that this has become a catch-and-kill operation for the owner:

Last month, just ahead of the devastating layoffs at The Washington Post, a group of wealthy D.C. locals approached Post publisher and chief executive Will Lewis with a proposal: Would the Jeff Bezos–owned paper consider spinning off its local and sports sections and selling to them? Perhaps some type of deal could have been worked out where the property was jointly branded and operated, such as when CNN partnered with Fortune and Money magazines on CNNMoney.

The interest was there, but the group never received a response, Status has learned. A spokesperson for The Post did not comment, but Bezos has repeatedly ignored interest from would-be buyers while the newspaper disintegrates under his watch. Most notably, as Status first reported in 2024, Kara Swisher expressed serious interest in leading a group of investors to purchase the paper as it continues to make deep cuts to its newsroom under the oversight of Lewis and Bezos.

The sweeping cuts this week that axed crucial reporting teams on the foreign, local and sports desks, eliminated all staff photographers and most of the video team, raised the prospect that The Post is on the brink of a death spiral as subscribers flee and advertisers walk away under Bezos’ ownership.

To be sure, Bezos’ own actions have led to the destruction of the great civic institution that once brought down a sitting U.S. president, exposed covert NSA surveillance programs, and revealed Donald Trump’s assault on democracy that led to the January 6 attack—earning dozens of Pulitzer Prizes along the way. But in recent years, the paper’s very survival has been stymied by Bezos’ clear conflicts of interest, and general disinterest, as an owner.

“The formulaic billionaire white knight press baron doom cycle,” as Josh Marshall puts it. The power to purchase a media outlet is the power to destroy it, to paraphrase another Marshall.

The post Will Lewis to no longer get paid for not doing any work appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

Most in-garage bicycle storage solutions are fixed: You have a hook you hang it from, or maybe a pulley system to get the bike out of the way. Installing one of these requires commitment, with you effectively dedicating the space, which may be in short supply, to the bike.

In contrast this Flip object, by British industrial designer George Laight, offers the convenience of a rack with the added benefit of portability.

The bike can be stored vertically, saving space, and the entire thing can be wheeled around, making garage clean-ups and reorganizing sessions easy.

Additionally, the units can be folded flat.

The $175 units are in production by Laight's company, BikeStow.

The Atlantic is announcing that David Brooks, who for years has contributed memorable Atlantic cover stories and essays on political and societal issues, is joining the magazine as a staff writer beginning next month. The Atlantic will be the home for all of David’s writing, and he will also host a new weekly video podcast that will launch later this spring. David worked as an opinion columnist at The New York Times for 22 years.

In a note to staff, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, writes: “David’s work––his columns, his stories for us, and his many books––have made him known and acclaimed around the world. He is, among other things, America’s best pop sociologist, someone with a reporter’s curiosity and a writer’s grace. He is an unparalleled diagnostician of the faults and weaknesses of governments, institutions, and social structures, as our readers know from such stories as “The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake,” “Confessions of a Republican Exile,” and “How the Ivy League Broke America.”

The forthcoming podcast will explore the moral, social, and philosophical underpinnings of human decency—with a particular focus on the role that institutions play in shaping communities and ideologies. The podcast is produced by The Atlantic and made possible by support from Yale University, which is also announcing today that David will be a presidential senior fellow at Yale University’s School of Global Affairs.

The Atlantic has been rapidly growing its podcast network, and this new video podcast will be the fourth to launch in the past 12 months. Last year, The Atlantic launched Galaxy Brain with Charlie Warzel and The David Frum Show, and is developing a new show with Adam Harris. The third season of Autocracy in America with Anne Applebaum is out now; The Atlantic’s flagship show is Radio Atlantic, hosted by Hanna Rosin.

Press Contact: Anna Bross | press@theatlantic.com

Late last year, industrial designer Adam Miklosi embarked on a self-directed project, creating primitive cars out of aluminum extrusions.

Here in the new year, he's seeking a role for the leftover extrusions. After spying DesignWanted's Rethink the Coat Rack competition, Miklosi came up with an idea:

"After the first ideation rounds, I made some early 3D-printed prototypes before diving deeper into render visualizations. Testing proportions, attachment logic, and the character of the hooks on real aluminium profiles."

"I'm genuinely happy with how these turned out. A bit rough, very early-stage, but already showing the balance I'm aiming for: industrial structure + playful, customizable elements. Also couldn't resist arranging them into a small, fun composition."

Competition aside, I think Miklosi could easily get a side hustle going by selling these. They remind me of something you'd see from Alessi in the '90s, back when design was fun!