September 23, 2026

Photo credit: Tom Williams / Contributor / CQ-Roll Call, Inc. via Getty Images

Only 13.6 percent of Chicago voters want Brandon Johnson to run for reelection, but the mayor, determined to stay in office, announced his reelection bid on September 13. City Journal associate editor Aidan Grogan argues that Johnson is increasingly focusing on national and even international issues, such as immigration and the ongoing Middle East conflicts, to distract from his poor first-term performance. While Johnson has considerable leverage to frame mayoral frontrunner Alexi Giannoulias as a mainstream “machine” Democrat, the Chicago Teachers Union-backed mayor may ultimately prove too radical for Chicago.

“In just three years, Johnson has left his potential successors with a ‘financial ash heap,’ according to the Chicago Tribune editorial board, and only 23 percent of Chicagoans approve of his job performance,” Grogan writes. “It may be that, in 2027, Windy City voters prefer a revival of the old machine to the current CTU-backed mayor.”

Read more here.

The National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity (NACIQI) advises the Department of Education on accrediting bodies in higher ed. It determines whether these organizations should indeed be federally recognized as educational authorities in disciplines like psychology and law.

The NACIQI should take a hard look at the American Psychological Association (APA), Joseph Figliolia argues. Its accreditation standards require educational content to reflect peer-reviewed research so that clinicians work with the latest and best evidence. “The APA’s DEI accreditation standards and advocacy for youth gender medicine, however, call into question whether it upholds these categories in practice,” Figliolia writes. “Its refusal to acknowledge, or even demonstrate understanding of, the findings of systematic evidence reviews raises red flags about the integrity of the APA’s entire operation.”

Read more about the APA’s advocacy here.

California’s cap-and-trade program requires companies that emit large amounts of carbon to obtain allowances in exchange for doing so. Purchasing carbon credits from forest owners enables them to do just that, since the carbon can be locked away in trees for long periods.

But wildfires that ravaged parts of the West this summer show how ineffective, and even counterproductive, the program can be. In Oregon, for instance, more than 85 percent of the 14,000-acre forest-carbon project burned at Opal Mountain. Companies had purchased more than 500,000 carbon credits through the project. And in Washington, tens of thousands of acres were burned at the Colville forest-carbon site.

“Western forests need periodic thinning, brush removal, and controlled burns to maintain healthy conditions and reduce extreme fire risks,” Shawn Regan writes. “But forest-carbon projects often receive less active management because landowners can make more money if they grow more wood on each acre.”

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