Since Trump’s rejection of Iran’s offer, Iranian sources report Tehran has sharply escalated in Hormuz, targeting roughly 20 vessels over two nights, including with cruise missiles and drones. If confirmed, it marks an escalation in Iran’s Hormuz disruption campaign.

A week later, I'm still thinking about NHJ's article on NYC schools. It was courageous but a huge missed opportunity to call for real reform. She blames school choice, inequality, segregation, the wealthy and herself. But she seems reluctant to criticize the actors and policies implicated by the failures she documents, perhaps because those conclusions would be uncomfortable for many of her ideological allies. - She describes absentee teachers, poor instruction, unresponsive administrators, and students who graduate without mastering the material. But she never calls for greater accountability at the district, school, principal, and teacher levels. - She documents teachers failing to fulfill basic responsibilities but doesn't explore whether tenure and other employment protections allow chronic teacher absenteeism and poor performance to persist. - She laments the concentration of disadvantaged students but doesn't consider whether NYCPS should consolidate under-enrolled schools, thus allowing more resources towards instruction and increasing socioeconomic diversity. - She describes her daughter earning As in honors classes despite substantial gaps in her knowledge. Yet she doesn't consider the value of standardized testing as a check on grade inflation and identifying learning gaps before they compound. - She describes how experienced teachers choose to work in better schools but doesn't salute the districts that have had “reform superintendents” like DC, Dallas, Denver, and Houston that have used cash bonuses to incentivize the best teachers to work in the most disadvantaged schools. - She notes that eliminating homework harmed her daughter, but doesn't examine how the movement against homework is largely driven by equity advocates who argue that it can turn unequal home circumstances into unequal academic outcomes. - She condemns school choice yet uses it to secure a better school fit for her daughter, without noting it’s the only realistic escape valve for families who can’t move or afford private school. - She describes the “impossible balancing act” of teaching students at vastly different levels but doesn't explore how academic tracking can help students at both ends of the academic spectrum. - She describes disruptive students who harm the classroom environment but doesn’t ask for stronger disciplinary actions to protect other students. - She documents a school that lowered academic expectations in pursuit of equity but doesn't acknowledge how doing so perpetuates the very achievement gaps those policies seek to eliminate. Hannah-Jones’ story was powerful. She supplied the evidence for a broad examination of why schools are failing disadvantaged students. It could have been the strongest call in a generation for urban school district reform. Segregation and poverty are real obstacles. But they cannot become explanations that absolve everyone else of responsibility. We can’t wait to solve all societal issues before demanding higher performing schools.

ExxonMobil has confirmed its Joliet, IL refinery is fully back online after a successful restart: “11 million gallons per day of diesel and gasoline production capacity are back online.”

RGV. lots of seats in play there.

#OnThisDay in 1940, the philosopher, literary critic, and essayist Walter Benjamin died by suicide in the Spanish border town of Portbou whilst on the run from the Nazis. Here's Anca Pusca on the relevance of Benjamin’s oeuvre in a digital age: publicdomainreview.org/essay… #otd

Death, taxes, and another Rahm story followed by complaining on twitter about another Rahm story A tradition unlike any other

This is key: « Naval and air blockades that weaken Iran's economy and SoH flows that erode its leverage mean the initial MoU tradeoff of easing dueling blockades does not hold the same incentive it had in June for the U.S. (and be met with mixed reviews from U.S. allies). » The result: transit through the Strait remains severely impeded, at enormous cost to countries worldwide, but the cost to the US itself has at least for now been blunted, giving Trump room to wait and push for a tougher bargain. That leaves Iran with a difficult set of choices: hold firm, and endure open-ended economic pain; offer a concession on the nuclear file that it appears determined to avoid; or escalate against its neighbors’ energy infrastructure to try to deepen the economic crisis, risking massive counter-escalation and further antagonizing those neighbors…

Opposition leaders agree to decide who will lead next gov't after elections haaretz.com/israel-news/elec…

💥Netanyahu to New York Times: "As the elections approach, we are witnessing a flood of false reports by partisan leftist journalists aimed at toppling the Right and installing a Leftist-Muslim Brotherhood government that would capitulate on every front. Despite denials from the United Arab Emirates, [no such denials– ed] and despite the Prime Minister's Office proving that no such conversation ever took place, [no proof provided– es] they continue to spread the lie. This time, they are relying on the anti-Zionist *New York Times*—a newspaper that has published blood libels claiming Israel trains dogs to rape Palestinians and ran a front-page photo of a "starving child in Gaza" who turned out to suffer from a genetic disorder, and which daily disseminates Hamas's claims that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza." The public is smart and stopped buying into these lies long ago.

Great question. Our model is built on a lot of polling — including our own — and it really bothers me how absurdly different the dropoff white respondents are in our polling. Whites who completed our polls swing 10% to the left, and whites who don't....barely swing at all. I'm guessing this is not unique to our polling. If the model whiffs badly, it'll probably whiff on whites, and it would mean that far more low-propensity Rs showed up to vote. And it means that the ones who didn't respond to polls were attitudinally very different and shifting far less than the ones who did respond, but were underrepresented in polling, meaning that we way over-project the swing. I don't think this is the case, though, because those people really hate Trump too — and I don't expect them to show up in a midterm like this. But it nags at me.

It's a heavy subject, but I'd really encourage people to read this from my colleague Dorothy Slater, who spends her days working as a nurse in an oncology ward in Louisiana's cancer alley. Data centers are the latest addition to the miasma of pollution slowly killing her patients

⚠️will be watching Great Lakes spot gasoline and diesel prices today- some pressure will ease with change to winter gasoline- but BP Whiting, IN refinery partially down for maintenance, and ExxonMobil Joliet, IL reporting a power outage that sounds significant...