"At California’s Yosemite National Park, the Trump administration fired the only locksmith on staff on Friday. He was the sole employee with the keys and the institutional knowledge needed to rescue visitors from locked restrooms." And at other parks: Link: washingtonpost.com/climate-enviro…

"As we emerge from our most restrictive covid precautions, the tables have turned: I find myself in a world in which many have become more introverted. And I hate it." Great column by @rebeccamakkai: washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/… Key graf:

This is a v sharp Janan Ganesh column noting how similar Britain and France have come to be: same size, same hyper-dominant capital region, same post-imperial wistfulness. Some quotes follow.
ft.com/content/beff18… "Each nation has a monstrously dominant capital. Politics, media, finance and culture are concentrated in one city. No European nation of comparable size--not Spain, not Italy, not Germany--does that. Nor does the US, Australia or Canada..."

Hospitals are closing at disprortionately high rates in Mississippi and the other nine red states that have refused to accept Obamacare's Medicaid expansion, even though the fed gov't picks up 90 pct of the cost and has further sweetened the pot recently.
nytimes.com/2023/03/28/us/… "Expanding Medicaid would uncork $1.35 billion a year in federal funds to [Mississippi] hospitals and health care providers...And it would guarantee coverage to 100,000 uninsured adults making less than $20,120 in a state whose death rates are at or near the nation’s highest..."

Wow. Boeing is arguing that it is not liable for victim suffering claims in Ethiopian Airlines 737 MAX crash because "victims died painlessly because the airplane crashed into the ground so fast that their brains didn’t have time to process pain signals."
wsj.com/articles/boein… For background, my 2019 piece for @propublica and @NewYorker: propublica.org/article/i-will…

Kids "are learning to hate the subject [of English] well before college. Both in terms of what kids are assigned and how they are instructed to read it, English class in middle and high school is often a misery."
nytimes.com/2023/03/09/opi… This.

Stunning: "More than one-third of all stores that opened in the United States in 2021 and 2022 were dollar stores. Dollar General alone opened 2,060 locations during those years, far more than any other retailer."
nytimes.com/2023/03/01/bus… But the bipartisan backlash has arrived: "Since 2019, at least 75 communities have voted down proposed dollar stores, while roughly 50 have enacted moratoriums or other broad limits on dollar store development, according to a new report by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance."

Late to this lament. It's as great as everyone says.
freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/its-so-sad-w… Especially this part

Amid a surge in gun violence, the Biden admin has committed hundreds of millions of $$ to "community violence intervention" programs. Here, for @propublica & @newyorker, is my exploration of an overlooked realm that is under pressure to prove its worth. propublica.org/article/are-co… At the story's core is the conflicted interventionist: “When I first put this shirt on, the whole city knew, and it was hard, but I didn’t take it off. I would go up, like, ‘Yo, what’s up,’ and you walk away. I’m usually in but now you all walk away, you leave. It’s hard on me.”

"Violence among children has soared across the country since 2020, a stark reversal of a decadeslong decline in juvenile crime. Homicides committed by juveniles acting alone rose 30% in 2020...while those committed by multiple juveniles increased 66%." wsj.com/articles/viole… "Police, prosecutors and community groups attribute much of the youth violence to broad disruptions that started with the pandemic and lockdowns. Schools shut down, depriving students of structure in daily life, as did services for troubled children."

This is a really powerful, insightful conversation between @drmoore and @ahc about the isolation and disconnection produced by tech and the pandemic. It touches on so much I got at in FULFILLMENT and other recent reporting. I will excerpt some quotes here:
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/and… "When we did some research...the number one thing, when we asked [teenagers] what do you wish you could change in your relationship with your parents, they said, I wish my parents would spend less time on their screens and more time talking to me."

"'When you look at Americans born after 1995,' Mr. Haidt says, 'what you find is that they have extraordinarily high rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, suicide and fragility.' There has 'never been a generation this depressed, anxious and fragile.'”
wsj.com/articles/the-n… "compare and despair"

Welcome to Union Station in Washington DC, the city with the highest remote-work rates on the East Coast, where Metro subway and commuter-rail ridership remain well below half of pre-pandemic levels. This is the Starbucks. (1/n) This is another coffee shop, which used to be a convenient place to meet with sources. 2/n

"One after another, films for grown-ups have failed to find an audience big enough to justify their cost....'Tár' cost at least $35 million; ticket sales total $5.3 million. Universal spent $55 million [on] 'She Said,' which also took in $5.3 million." nytimes.com/2022/12/09/bus… Older audiences are back, one studio exec suggested, but sophisticated older audiences are not—in part because some of their favorite art house theaters have closed and they don’t want to mix with the multiplex masses. (“Too many people, too likely to encounter a sticky floor.”)

Quite a trend line here. This can't be good for us.
washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/… And then there is this, from today's NYT. Just as striking:
nyti.ms/3gKRmGZ

Your Sunday night geography quiz: in 1790, the five largest cities in the US were Philadelphia, NY, Boston, Charleston and Baltimore. As you might expect.

But four of the next five stayed small, and today have populations below 50K. What are they?

No Google! Answer at 9:30 ET. Going to extend deadline til 10 pm ET. Realize this is a tougher one than my norm. Whoever guesses the most of the four wins.

It was good to see the NYT devote this special section today to the state of American downtowns in this post-pandemic moment. It's something I've been thinking about a lot on reporting trips around the country, seeing how much things have regressed. 1/n
nyti.ms/3TLnKYn So many downtowns had made such strides in recent years. Even those that still had a long way to go were headed in the right direction. But it was stunning to see how empty things were, well after the Omicron peak, this past spring. In Oakland: 2/n

As evidence piles up for the benefits of later start times, Baltimore city has moved high school starts *earlier*, as early as 7:30, in a city where many rely on city buses. "Every day, less than half the class arrives to my first period before 7:40 a.m."
baltimoresun.com/opinion/reader… (Context: the start times were moved up in large part to accommodate bus schedules for the small # of students who do receive school-bus transportation services. There's a shortage of school bus drivers and it was decided that early starts were needed to make the schedules work.)

BREAKING: Jared Kushner's property mgt company has agreed to pay a $3.25 million fine and uncapped restitution on claims of mistreatment filed by any of the 30,000 tenants who lived at the Baltimore-area complexes owned by the company.
Where it all began:
propublica.org/article/the-be… Former tenants will be able to start filing claims in three months, and will then have a year to do so. The claims will be for rent they had to pay despite major maintenance issues. Separately, tenants assessed excessive late fees and court fees will be automatically reimbursed.

It's gotten a lot harder to find places open late in NY. Good story. nytimes.com/2022/09/17/nyr… “'We also don’t want [workers] coming in late at night anymore,' Mr. Leung said. 'Not that many of them actually live in Chinatown. So they’d be going home to Brooklyn and Queens by mass transit.' With the recent anti-Asian attacks, he said, 'We were worried for their safety."”

Today's lead story in the Washington Post.
washingtonpost.com/education/2022… "Test scores in elementary school math and reading plummeted to levels unseen for decades, according to the first nationally representative report comparing student achievement from just before the pandemic to performance two years later."