Alan Jacobs

As part of the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act expected later this year, Congress should require universities with endowments in excess of $100 million to spend at least 8 percent of the endowment each year. Universities could avoid this rule by shrinking assets to $99 million, but only by spending the endowment on educational purposes, which is exactly the goal.

Eight percent is not as scary as it might sound. Remember that endowments benefit from new gifts as well as investment returns. The average endowment, small or large, has grown by 9.2 percent per year over the last 20 years, even after accounting for annual spending of about 4 percent. Last year, only 14 of the 447 university endowments with assets over $100 million failed to net at least 8 percent growth.

Under my proposal, endowments would grow, only at a slower pace. They would shrink when markets crash, but recover, and then some, when the market rebounds.

Think about it this way. In 1990, Yale’s endowment was worth about $3 billion. If my suggested spending rule had been in place, it would be worth about $10 billion today, instead of $24 billion.

But under my proposal, the sky-high tuition increases would stop, and maybe even reverse themselves. Faculty members would benefit from greater research support. University libraries, museums, hospitals and laboratories would have better facilities. Donors would see the tangible benefits of philanthropy. Only fund managers would be worse off.

By encouraging mothers, who are the still the primary parent at home, to bond with their baby for a long period of time with the expectation they’ll return to work at the end of the year means the baby will become even more attached to his mother, and separation may become intolerable.

Same goes for the mother. Her attachment to her baby, or her re-thinking of her priorities during this time, may make her even less likely to return to work—thus negating the whole point of the policy, which is to get her attention back on work and off of baby.

When the Iranians developed their nuclear capability to the fullest — Thanks, Obama — and dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, our only consolation was that Donald Trump knew all along that it was a stupid idea, as he told Jon Stewart in wrapping up that last great episode of The Daily Show before Stewart was replaced by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

If nothing else of value comes from this Planned Parenthood fiasco, I am at least moderately helpful for one thing: that more of my liberal friends will understand why we pro-lifers get so agitated about this issue. I don’t know whether many, or any, of them will change their minds, but maybe — just maybe — the pro-life cause won’t seem to them quite so inexplicably retrograde. 

Tell me anything but this, liberals: Tell me that you aren’t just pro-choice but pro-abortion, tell me that abortion is morally necessary and praiseworthy, tell me that it’s as morally neutral as snuffing out a rabbit, tell me that a fetus is just a clump of cells and that pro-lifers are all unhinged zealots. Those arguments, as much as I disagree with them, have a real consistency, a moral logic that actually makes sense and actually justifies the continued funding of Planned Parenthood.

But to concede that pro-lifers might be somewhat right to be troubled by abortion, to shudder along with us just a little bit at the crushing of the unborn human body, and then turn around and still demand the funding of an institution that actually does the quease-inducing killing on the grounds that what’s being funded will help stop that organization from having to crush quite so often, kill quite so prolifically – no, spare me. Spare me. Tell the allegedly “pro-life” institution you support to set down the forceps, put away the vacuum, and then we’ll talk about what kind of family planning programs deserve funding. But don’t bring your worldview’s bloody hands to me and demand my dollars to pay for soap enough to maybe wash a few flecks off.

— Ross Douthat, speaking truth and trying to get himself fired. God bless him.

Realistically, though, it is hard to imagine a state as innovative as California simply allowing the pride of its fields to disappear. More than a third of the Central Valley's agriculture is in grapes and tree crops—almonds, walnuts, pistachios, citrus—that represent an enormous investment than can take as long as seven years after planting to pay off. Farmers are already turning to a vigorous high-tech industry that makes GPS-equipped irrigators, weather-based irrigation, soil-moisture sensors and other agroelectronics designed to reduce water use. Even more radically, in June the state took the unthinkable step of placing water restrictions on California's agricultural royalty—those who hold Gold Rush–era riparian water rights in the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys that have long been considered inviolate. It is easy to get the sense, traveling around California, that the pain—but also the creative thinking—has only begun.

The drought is transforming California in almost every conceivable way—meteorologically, geologically, biologically, agriculturally, socially, economically and politically. The combination of low moisture and high temperature most likely will be the condition of the future. Even when sporadic wet years occur, the inexorably warming climate assures that precipitation will fall not as heavy snowpack that parcels out water slowly but as crashing torrents of rain. That is why last November Californians voted for Proposition 1—more than $7 billion for water infrastructure, almost half of which will go to building new dams and reservoirs—a public works project of massive proportions. And therein lies the silver lining in the California drought: one person’s cost is another’s opportunity.

The week TNR imploded, I shipped hundreds of advance review copies that Leon had opted not to review to New York, to serve as showpieces on the shelves of Hughes’s swanky new office. The same week, I helped Leon pack up his library. He had something to say about each of his hundreds of books. This juxtaposition paints a portrait of my chosen industry that will haunt me for a long time.

Seasteading’s been and gone for the second (third?) time, the secession and Six-State-California guys have been and gone.  It is that time in the cycle where the Libertarian App Future Brothers start living off the grid, buying guns and getting good and weird out there alone in the dark.  I wonder how we’ll look back at this whole period of the last five or ten years.  At how the digital gold rush and the strange pressures of a new, yet accelerated, period of cultural invention cooked a whole new set of mental wounds out of the people swept up in it.  Yes, sure, it gave us sociopaths who prefer humans to be drones and believe that everything is rotting.  But I think, reviewing the era, that we will be sad.  I think we may look back and consider that, one more time, we saw the best minds of our generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves after an Uber that isn’t actually there because Uber fake most of those little cars you see on the Uber app map.

— Warren Ellis

When I saw that N. T. Wright had reviewed Wesley Hill’s new book Paul and the Trinity, I thought, “I know what he’s going to say: that Hill’s main claims are correct but that he doesn’t get to them by way of scrupulous and ample citation of the works of N. T. Wright.” And indeed, so it came to pass.