SACRED COWS | FROM OUR GENERATION #70

Ryan Reynolds has built a brand on 1980s nostalgia, calling the decade “brutal” and painting it as some kind of survivalist upbringing. He was born in 1976. He was four when the decade started and fourteen when it ended. The 80s he’s selling never happened to him.

Success Academy, the charter school network serving 22,000 students across 59 locations in New York, is suing the state for suppressing its AP test scores. The network spends roughly $17,000 per student, half of what New York City public schools spend, and educates a population that is 80 to 90 percent Black and Hispanic. Every student takes AP classes, including calculus and physics. The state’s refusal to report those scores isn’t an oversight. It’s a political decision to bury results that embarrass the public school monopoly.

The House held a procedural vote condemning socialism. It split along party lines, except for two Democrats who broke ranks. One, from a Trump-plus-seven district in Maine, quit the party. The other, from Washington’s coast, now faces internal sanctions. The Democratic caucus isn’t debating socialism. It’s enforcing silence about it.

In Massachusetts, Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial has exposed the state’s inverted insanity defense law. Every other state in the country places the burden of proof on the defendant to prove insanity. Massachusetts requires the prosecution to prove the defendant was not insane. The jury split 11 to 1. The legal architecture of that state made the outcome almost inevitable.

Michigan’s Democratic Senate nominee, Abdul El-Sayed, has a documented record of statements supporting Sharia law. The primary electorate chose him anyway. Whether voters were informed or indifferent is the more uncomfortable question.

A data center leak in Oklahoma spilled three million gallons of water, and the headlines wrote themselves. What didn’t make the headlines: New York City loses 155 million gallons per day from aging pipes. Texas cities lose 240 million gallons per day. California lets 740 billion gallons of runoff escape annually into the ocean. The outrage over tech’s water use is a rounding error next to decades of public infrastructure neglect.
Jason Arday became Cambridge University’s youngest Black professor at 37, a story celebrated worldwide. It ended in allegations of fabricated research and his suicide. The institutions that elevated him are now scrambling to distance themselves.

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