September 4, 2026

Photo credit: Photo by Joe Doll/City Journal

In just four years, spending on data-center construction has grown by about seven times. Among the five biggest companies building the centers, total capital expenditures could reach nearly $700 billion this year.

With this exploding spending and construction has come heated opposition. It’s perplexing, Judge Glock argues, considering that data centers stand to bring in massive tax revenue and jobs, just like any other development project. And data centers pose lower fiscal costs than other projects and produce little pollution, making them “one of the better deals around,” he writes.

Read on.

In July, the New York City Council unanimously passed a law to make $10,000 supplemental payments to public school paraprofessionals (non-teacher aides), ostensibly to address a shortage in those roles.

Council Speaker Julie Menin argued that filling these roles will help the city reduce its ballooning costs relating to due-process claims and settlements of Carter cases, which arise when parents who believe the public schools can’t support their children’s special educational needs put them in private schools and ask the city to reimburse their tuition costs. The city currently spends $1.5 billion annually on these cases.

“A one-time $10,000 check for paraprofessionals won’t solve the city’s budget-busting Carter case costs,” writes Jennifer Weber. Nor will it do much to help fill open paraprofessional roles. But it will benefit the city’s powerful teachers’ unions, she argues.

Read here for more on how New York City can hire more paraprofessionals without lining union coffers.

Post-9/11, much of the Middle East and Asia has turned toward normalization, pragmatism, and acceptance of Western preeminence. In the West, however, Islam has become intertwined with postcolonial theory and Third-Worldism, which view Western imperialism as evil.

Examples abound. Anti-Israel sentiment, once limited to Islamist organizations, is now pervasive within progressive politics. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani appointed as the city’s chief counsel Ramzi Kassem, who represented Ahmed al-Darbi after his conviction for the al-Qaeda-linked MV Limburg bombing. Iranian-aligned networks in places like Dearborn, Michigan, firmly oppose American influence. University encampments promote decolonization.

“The version of Islam that has emerged within Western universities, activist groups, and progressive politics clashes with both the Western societies in which it operates and the Middle Eastern governments now abandoning revolutionary politics,” Zineb Riboua writes.

Read more.

Local government leaders across the country are rushing to address the problem of housing affordability. Unfortunately, as Adam Millsap notes, they frequently adopt “quick fixes” that fail to address the core problem—or even make things worse.

Consider Montgomery County, Maryland, where median home prices are five times the county’s median income. To address this problem, lawmakers are considering the Anti-Algorithmic Price Fixing Act, which would restrict landlords from using software to help them determine rental rates—a form of “collusion,” proponents argue.

“Price collusion is a legitimate concern, but it’s not the primary driver of high housing costs,” writes Millsap. “The real problem: years of underbuilding, caused by state and local policies.”

Read here to see how overregulation is suppressing new housing construction and keeping affordability out of reach.