If you live in one of the gray states, your governor has blocked scholarships from the new Trump federal scholarship program from being given to kids in your state. And I would recommend upgrading to a better governor.

On my way to the office this morning, I passed a group of young people protesting, a Palestinian flag draped over their shoulders. And I asked myself a question I can't shake: why does this generation always fall into the same trap? No matter the history. No matter the context. Even the ones from wealthy families, who went to the best schools, who were dealt every good card. Always the same trap. I don't think it's stupidity. I think it's a mechanism. And a mechanism can be taken apart, piece by piece. A. The observation: everything the state touches becomes unaffordable. Look at economist Mark Perry's famous chart, the one people call "the chart of the century." It tracks US prices since 2000. At the top, what explodes: hospital services, college tuition, textbooks, childcare, housing. Increases of +100%, +150%, up to +250%, far above general inflation. At the bottom, what collapses: TVs, software, phones, toys, clothing. A TV today costs a fraction of what it did in 2000, for an infinitely better product. Look at what separates the two groups. It isn't technology. It isn't complexity. It's one variable: how much the state is involved. At the top, sectors that are subsidized, regulated, shielded from competition, where the state funds demand and blocks supply. At the bottom, sectors where companies fight every single morning to serve you better and cheaper. B. The mechanism: why it's systematic. When the state subsidizes demand without freeing supply, prices rise. Every time. Guaranteed student loans, and universities raise tuition. Housing aid plus blocked building permits, and rents skyrocket. Administered healthcare, and bureaucracy eats the budget before it ever reaches the patient. In France it's even more vicious, because the price doesn't disappear: it hides. You never see the hospital bill, you pay it through payroll contributions. You never see the cost of school, you pay it through taxes. Public spending at 57% of GDP, one of the heaviest tax burdens in the world, more than €3.4 trillion in debt. And the result? Overflowing ERs, falling PISA scores, young people who can't afford to live in the city where they work. The market didn't fail in these sectors. It was never allowed in. C. Suffering demands a culprit. A 22-year-old lives all of this in their bones. They can't find a place to live. Their degree either buries them in debt or opens no doors. The future feels blocked. That suffering is real, and I don't deny it for a second. But human beings can't stand suffering without a culprit. They need a face. A scapegoat. And this is where everything is decided: who taught them how to read the world? D. Whoever tells the story picks the villain. Schools are public. Universities are public. Culture runs on grants. Film goes through funding committees. Public broadcasting shapes the narratives. The people handing down the interpretive framework are, overwhelmingly, paid by the very system that creates the problem. Do you really think that system is going to name itself as the culprit? No. It names the capitalist. The boss. The landlord. "The rich." The multinational. The commercial West. Same role, same casting, every time. E. One lens, a thousand causes. And this brings me back to that flag. A generation taught to read every situation through a single lens, oppressor on one side, rich, Western, capitalist, oppressed on the other, will apply that lens everywhere. To housing. To climate. To conflicts on the other side of the world. The cause changes, the lens stays. That's why the trap is always the same: it's not the cause that draws them in, it's the way of thinking that was installed in them. F. The perfect inversion. Here's the irony. Capitalism is the force that drove down the price of almost everything it touched. The state is the force that blew up the price of almost everything it captured. And young people blame the first for the crimes of the second. It's like blaming the firefighter for the fire because you saw him at the scene. G. The ballot box confirms it. In the US, a few weeks out from the midterms, a large share of urban young voters is getting ready to vote Democrat for more state, more spending, more regulation. New York elected a self-described socialist mayor, carried by young voters, on promises of rent freezes and city-run grocery stores. Rent freezes, the policy that has made housing scarcer everywhere it's been tried. The cure that worsens the disease. In France, it's the same play in two acts. Part of the youth votes for the radical left, which promises more state. Another part votes for the center, which promises to "manage" the state well, and has dug the debt deeper than ever. Two different ballots, one shared assumption: the problem is the market, the solution is the state. H. The way out. These young people aren't stupid. They're right to be angry. They're just aiming at the wrong target. The day they understand that their rent, their tuition and their hospital are expensive precisely because the state runs them, their anger will change direction. They'll stop protesting against those who create. They'll start protesting against those who capture. That day, the greatest intellectual scam of our time will be over.

“They will make a fire with your beautiful oak door.”

Thank God for Americans like Michael and Susan Dell!

"Ms. Whitmer repealed Michigan’s right-to-work law in early 2023. The state has since lost 36,200 manufacturing jobs, and its unemployment rate (5%) is the fourth highest in the nation." wsj.com/opinion/gretchen-whi…

JUST IN: SpaceX completes 3 Falcon launches, 4 first-stage landings, & docks a Dragon spacecraft with the International Space Station — all in under 13 hours.

For 2 years, I’ve been trying to explain how the entire Dem/DSA ticket corruption scandals are linked and my friend Charlie LeDuff just did it in under 2 minutes. The hour is late, this is serious, Michigan.

Low effort take. No one is banned, they just don’t get subsidized.

Legitimately incredible!

The figures match official data. Slotkin won the 2024 Michigan Senate race; the 20,217 margin was from 99% reporting, with certified final results showing a 19,006-vote edge (2,712,686 to 2,693,680). Michigan's 2024 EAVS data lists 8,440,236 total reported registered voters and a CVAP of 7,646,222.

This is the most insane cancer story I've ever read. A Croatian virologist's breast cancer beat surgery and chemo, came back at stage 3B and started eating into her muscle. She decided to cure her own cancer with an insane method. And she did it successfully: (1/17)

Speaks for itself

MIT published a brutally honest report on what AI is doing to students. A committee of professors and students spent five months studying how AI changed learning on campus, and the findings read like a warning to every university on the planet. Study groups are disappearing. Office hours are emptying out. Problem sets and take-home exams no longer prove anything, because AI can produce credible solutions to almost any written assignment in the undergraduate curriculum. Students who lean on chatbots lose mastery and confidence, and some slip into what the report calls cognitive surrender, reaching for AI at the first hint of struggle. The numbers are rough. 46 percent of surveyed MIT undergrads use LLMs daily. 90 percent worry about their own overreliance. Undergrads who feel AI makes them replaceable now outnumber those who feel it makes them capable. The committee's answer surprised me. They refused to fight AI with surveillance. The report calls AI detectors unreliable, says lockdown browsers feel like spying, and warns that policing students builds a classroom atmosphere of mutual distrust. Instead, MIT wants to rebuild education around the things AI can't replace. That means oral exams, semester portfolios, in-person project work, and a required social component in every subject. The report even floats the idea of rethinking grades entirely, since without a GPA to optimize, much of the incentive to cheat with AI evaporates. The committee warns professors against replacing undergrad research assistants with AI agents just because they're cheaper, because a university exists to grow people, not output. The most famous tech school on earth admitted the machines broke its way of teaching. Its answer is more humans, not more software.

They keep doing the Norm Macdonald bit

Go on…

No way…

Remembering the late, great Dolly, who brought joy, comfort and inspiration to so many - including the millions of children given free books through her Imagination Library. We will always ❤️ you.

Abdul El-Sayed's mom worked for 'global terrorist' group accused of funding bin Laden, Hamas and Taliban: report trib.al/ZFn6oEJ

BREAKING: Equity options on specific assets will begin trading at 7:15 ET starting this Monday. Here are the full requirements for eligibility for pre-market options trading: -the option class has an average daily volume of 150,000 contracts or higher -the underlying equity to the option has a $50 billion or higher market capitalization, and -the underlying equity to the option has an average daily traded volume of 10 million shares or higher.

Congrats to @spacexai on one more amazing model: Grok 4.6. We benchmarked it as an orchestrator on our Wide-And-Deep-Research benchmark using the Perplexity Computer harness, and it neatly sits on the Pareto frontier of performance vs cost. Available to all Pro and Max users on Perplexity!