Briallen Hopper

Trump Just Ripped Out the QueensWay's Heart—And Maybe Saved the QueensLink? A transformative project that would bring a new subway line and a park to Queens just got a lifeline—and may have a champion in the next mayor of New York City.

A transformative project that would bring a new subway line and a park to Queens just got a lifeline—and may have a champion in the next mayor of New York City.

How many rust belt cities successfully halted if not reversed their declines because of their universities and academic institutions? Pittsburgh is the poster child, but Baltimore owes a lot to this too. This is going to be a completely man-made disaster for them.

Almost all of the Progressive Era amendments started as popular movements outside of Congress and were imposed via campaign. It is truly impressive what you can get people to coalesce around when you ask them directly instead of making it a partisan project.

I recently attended a funeral where an AI wrote and delivered a eulogy from the POV of the deceased and even used her voice, reading it aloud to mourners. It was profoundly unpleasant and the eulogy often made no sense.

“I managed to pass the course… but I realized that I couldn’t remember the last time I had written an essay by myself, which was my favorite activity. This was the catalyst for me to stop using the app.”

Look at what happens to male teacher salaries (blue line) v.s. female teacher salaries (red line) after collective bargaining laws expire.

IVF has always been an untenable question for the pronatalist movement. On the one hand, it alienates the Catholics and anti-choice Evangelicals in their ranks. On the other, IVF allows women to delay childbearing—which conflicts with pronatalism’s desire for a revival of societal misogyny.

The US could see a 30-40% decline in new international student enrollment, resulting in nearly $7 billion in lost revenue and more than 60,000 fewer American jobs. https://www.nafsa.org/fall-2025-international-student-enrollment-outlook-and-economic-impact

the USA built a system of higher education so good that smart/rich people from across the world came here, spending billions to learn here, subsidizing education for Americans while spending money to live in our cities and towns. our government arbitrarily decided we should stop doing that

Microplastics are here to stay; that's why we need to eat them responsibly in the classroom

I remember once astonishing a colleague’s husband when he naively asked why we (historians) couldn’t just look something up on the internet and we had to explain that WE are the ones who find the stuff and add it to the internet

tweet saying you can't read Proust because your brain is cooked by screens

No. Ignore this. You are capable of reading books again. The brain is highly malleable and you only need a few screen-free weeks to recover your focus. You will be amazed how quickly the hunger for reading returns. You will be inhaling words

New Mexico made childcare free. It lifted 120,000 people above the poverty line The state, which has long ranked worst in the US for child wellbeing, became the first and only in the country to offer free childcare to a majority of families

What's the best thing you can do for families? Elect. Women. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

I Know Exactly What They Are Doing Rural foresight

I hear people all around me saying, “They are going to crash the economy. Surely they don’t mean to crash the economy.”

I beg to differ. This is curated failure open.substack.com/pub/jesspipe...

This thread (and the multiple quotes) remind me of something: it is a lot harder to build something than it is to break it down.

There is no “Democratic Stephen Miller” because turning off a hundred switches takes one person, but turning on one hundred programs is going to take thousands.

new millennial just dropped

Why the US is burning $10m worth of birth control | Moira Donegan With action after action, the Trump administration has made clear it does not value women’s health, their dignity, their aspirations

Why the US is burning $10m worth of birth control | Moira Donegan

Almost none of the things authors are encouraged to do (have a social media presence! Publish regularly online! Do readings/events!) have a measurable impact on sales individually. But all together they add up to being visible, and making connections with people—and those things do sell books.

Forged signatures found on Mayor Adams’ petitions to run as an independent The Adams campaign said it is conducting a review after Gothamist found signatures that were fraudulently obtained or outright forged.

NEW: Mayor Eric Adams’ re-election campaign submitted faked and fraudulently obtained petition signatures in his effort to secure a spot on the November ballot as an independent candidate, a Gothamist investigation has found.
gothamist.com/news/forged-...

NYC subway riders climb out of a flooded station, via @washingtonpost.com:

I spent decades at Columbia. I’m withdrawing my fall course due to its deal with Trump | Rashid Khalidi The university’s draconian policies and new definition of antisemitism make much teaching impossible

This might just be a case where the Columbia administration is using the Trump deal to get what it already wanted

Utterly incredible.

My dad worked on weaponizing the immune system against cancer before pivoting to epidemiology, but I vividly remember him telling me that someday we’d be able to fight disease using the body’s own tools and a bit of help.

Just a bit. Absolutely amazing stuff.

I'm just glad someone's making money off all this

Extremely risky place to live for these doctors and anyone who wants to bear children. There are more OBGYNs than in the whole state of Idaho not only in New York City, but at the *single hospital* where I had my first baby

Maris’s newsletter is so good to subscribe to if you’ve ever read a book or aspired to read a book!

The hall of mirrors at Versailles is about 8,000 sqft; the largest room in the palace, the Gallery of Great Battles, is like 16,000 sqft.

Great things can be done, but not by automatically assuming the party's base is stupid and complicit.

Use the Mamdani/Tlaib playbook with the base of the party, which is middle aged and senior Black voters. Start now.

Wall Street Journal headline and deck: "New York Shooting Puts Mamdani on the Spot Over Policing Views: The killing of four people in a Midtown office building rattled a city where mass attacks are rare and violent crime has declined."

It's really weird to demand accountability from a NYC mayoral candidate for a deadly NYC shooting rather than the current NYC mayor, an ex-cop who campaigned on a "tough on crime" platform and promptly got indicted for crimes

People make this point about art a lot, about how trying to skip "the grunt work" in writing hampers "the creative parts", because ideas develop and evolve as you go, and your understanding of the shape of a story will be shaped by the process and reshape the story as you go along.

Brown is acceding to government oversight of course evaluations, where they can investigate anyone they want for "antisemitism" based on student complaints.