August 7, 2026

Photo credit: Los Angeles Times / Contributor / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Last month, the Manhattan Institute convened two focus groups in Los Angeles to explore how voters there were feeling ahead of the elections later this year. One group consisted of nine registered Democrats; the other consisted of ten voters with no party preference. The participants represented a range of ages, races, and occupations.

When asked to grade how well city officials were doing, most gave them a C or worse. Among their frustrations: the cost of living, with many complaining about the city’s high taxes; crime; and homelessness, including the encampments that have taken over public spaces.

But rather than pointing to the size of government or stressing the importance of public order and safety, they believed public spending was simply reaching the wrong people, that crime was an unfortunate part of urban life, and that the homeless needed more compassion.

“Voters know that the status quo is failing, but many believe that the answer is to move further in the direction the city has already been traveling,” Jesse Arm and Christopher F. Rufo write. “They blame establishment progressives for failing to deliver progressive governance, leaving an opening not for reformers but for socialists who promise to finish the job.”

Read what the participants had to say.

Ideological bias in academia is undeniable. When the Manhattan Institute’s James Manzi used AI to classify roughly 600,000 social-science abstracts from 1960 to 2024, he found that about 90 percent of politically relevant research leaned left. National Science Foundation grants with abstracts containing DEI terms rose more than tenfold from 1990 to 2020. And before the 1990s, liberals in psychology outnumbered conservatives about four to one; today, they outnumber them by about 14 to one.

“Remedying this problem would require no extra government funding but only a reprioritization of which studies get funded,” Andrew Hartz and Eric Kaufmann argue. “Significant bias could be corrected if just one-half of 1 percent of the NIH’s budget were directed toward heterodox research. The same is true for the National Science Foundation and every other government organization that allocates research grant funding.”

Read more.

Every year, there are thousands of cases of parents killing their children or of children dying from caregiver abuse or neglect. In many instances, custody courts have access to records detailing these adults’ histories of domestic violence or child maltreatment, but they order children back in their care anyway. “They may simply assume,” Naomi Schaefer Riley explains, “that parents will reform themselves, or that children’s testimony is unreliable.”

Thankfully, some states are considering legislation that would require courts to stay on top of any warning signs and keep children away from dangerous adults.

Read more.