April 27, 2026

Photo credits: picture alliance / Contributor / picture alliance via Getty Images

On a recent New York Times podcast episode, host Nadja Spiegelman and guests Hasan Piker and Jia Tolentino discuss feeling justified about “microlooting”—stealing small things from big companies.

The whole thing sounds like satire. Piker endorses stealing from Whole Foods and the Louvre. Tolentino appears to support blowing up pipelines. Spiegelman laughs. Never mind that Piker lives in a $2.7 million mansion and Tolentino’s family is well-off. They “present themselves as stalwart defenders of the poor and downtrodden engaging in ‘radical’ action against a ‘violent’ system,” Charles Fain Lehman writes.

But stealing isn’t a bold political move. “It’s a way of making sure that the rest of society gets a little poorer just to defend itself against your antisocial behavior,” Lehman notes. “There’s nothing noble about that.”

Earlier this month, Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger signed a law that directs the state to make recommendations for universal mental health screenings for public school students in grades six through 12. While the legislation doesn’t mandate such screenings yet, that is clearly the intention.

The move could backfire, Chris Evans and Carolyn D. Gorman write. “High-quality research over several decades has failed to find mental-health or academic benefits from universal screening programs,” they point out. “Widespread screening does, however, produce alarmingly high rates of false positives, leading to harmful misdiagnoses.”

Read more about the practice and the consequences of misidentification.

Earlier this month, a mob took over an intersection in Queens, New York, driving turbocharged vehicles around a ring of fire in the middle of the road. At least one car nearly hit the crowd.

Asked about the incident, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said that it was “unacceptable for drivers to be acting in this manner.”

He should go further, Nicole Gelinas writes. “Why not hold a press conference at the site and explain to residents how the NYPD prevents street takeovers, and what they’ve learned from this episode to do better? Why not convince the city’s five independent district attorneys to appear together and make clear that anyone else caught engaging in such behavior will face felony charges—and lose his, or his family’s, vehicle?” Mamdani didn’t even consider the mob worthy of a mention on social media.

Read more from Gelinas on what the mayor should do to crack down.

In her new book Poisoned Ivies, Representative Elise Stefanik argues that even after years of academic rot, universities can once again become great institutions.

The decline, Stefanik notes, has been driven by DEI, billions in foreign funding, and the proliferation of student visas. “And she outlines a formidable policy agenda,” Danielle Shapiro writes in her review, “to halt ‘the revolving door of a broken higher education system.’” It includes “capping foreign student attendance, freezing billions in research grants to schools that refuse to cooperate with federal law, and invoking Title VI to strip accreditation from schools that foster hostile environments for Jewish students.” 

Read more.