July 29, 2025

Now, on to the news…

Not long ago, the city of Detroit was a mess: rising crime, fleeing businesses and residents, abandoned homes. It was the definition of urban decline.

Then, in 2013, former county official and hospital executive Mike Duggan was elected mayor. Twelve years later, the city has seen a major rebound. For the first time since 1957, the population is growing. Unemployment is falling. The city’s budgets have been balanced for 11 years in a row. Crime has plummeted.

Detroit still faces challenges, to be sure. “The most imposing challenge of all is finding a successor to Duggan who will build on his reforms,” Judith Miller writes in our summer issue. “Will the long-entrenched political culture of racial politics reassert itself and roll back the progress that the city has made?”

Time will tell, but Duggan is optimistic. “Nothing stops Detroit,” he told Miller during an interview. Read more about Detroit’s resurgence here.

Last week, President Trump signed an executive order directed at treating mental illness: “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets.” The order states that “vagrancy, disorderly behavior, sudden confrontations, and violent attacks” should be addressed through treatment in long-term institutional settings.

It’s the right move, but for the effort to be successful, Carolyn Gorman writes, the U.S. will need to expand the number of available inpatient psychiatric beds. Read more about it here.

The New York Times’s recent podcast series, The Protocol, features interviews with big names in pediatric gender medicine, including clinical psychologist Laura Edwards-Leeper. A thoughtful and candid critic of these practices, she’s a controversial figure to some in the field. “Many of her colleagues regard her as a dangerous heretic who helped fuel a backlash to medically necessary and life-saving care,” Leor Sapir writes.

But Sapir has known Edwards-Leeper for some time and sees her as someone who genuinely wants to help her patients. He sat down with her to discuss the podcast and some of the most pressing questions facing the industry. You can read the Q&A here.

Despite the distance in geography and culture, the French Riviera town of Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat and Palm Beach bear a striking resemblance, Paul du Quenoy writes. He points out that both towns have only a few thousand residents and are “nestled on a few hundred acres of sun-drenched, high-priced coastline.” But how much longer Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat can maintain its quiet and tranquility remains to be seen.

Charles Fain Lehman, Jesse Arm, Tal Fortgang, and John Ketcham discuss President Trump’s executive order on homelessness and mental illness, redistricting in Texas and partisan gerrymandering, and professional wrestling.

“The continued misuse of injunctions will result in widespread disregard of the federal judiciary. ‘The governed’ will revoke their consent for judicial review and demand that the executive branch implement the policies it was elected on. Justice, as they say, will be served—one way or another—marauding legal maneuvers be damned.”

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Paul Scofield, commenting on universal injunctions

Photo credit: Carlos Osorio/AP Photo