We hired a 27-year-old associate a few months ago, and he uses Claude Cowork all day.
I don't have the words to describe what is happening to our productivity.
Things that would have taken months are now getting done in hours - it's changing the entire way we run our business!
Dear New York Times Forum, I never thought it would happen to me… but it turned out letting my wife get banged by another dude wasn��t as much fun as I expected! Who would have guessed?
Now I’ve decided to trash the few remaining shards of my manhood by writing you about it…
An Open Letter to the Brown University Board of Trustees
Hold President Christina Paxson accountable for the deaths of Ella Cook, Mukhammad Aziz Umurzakov, and Nuno Loureiro
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Dear Trustees of the Brown Corporation,
One month ago on December 13, Brown students Ella Cook and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzakov were killed at a final exam review session on campus. Two days later on December 15, the same man who took their lives murdered MIT Professor Nuno Loureiro at his home in Massachusetts. President Christina Paxson failed them as a leader - will you hold her accountable as stewards?
The President and Corporation’s most important duty is to keep Brown’s campus secure for the community. Brown has a $8 billion endowment, $2 billion annual budget, and 1,000+ surveillance cameras funded by charging students $80,000/year in tuition. Paxson earns a $3 million salary while employing ~4,000 administrators and ~100 public safety officers. Yet for five harrowing days, the Brown administration could not give the public any helpful descriptions of the suspect’s appearance, whereabouts, or clear video and photo footage.
Regardless of what you discover in your after-action report, the world has witnessed institutional level failure at Brown. The publicly known facts are embarrassing. In the weeks leading up to the attack, a janitor alerted campus security multiple times about the suspect. He was ignored and no precautions were taken. Two Brown police unions issued votes of no confidence against the police chief in August and October, yet nothing changed. The perpetrator claimed to have planned his attack for several semesters.
Brown never provided a list of witnesses to Providence Police while the suspect was on the loose. A homeless man living in the building cracked the case because he remembered the getaway car’s license plates. He deserves an award, but his heroism accentuates Brown’s incompetence. This was a man-made mistake, not a natural disaster. A travesty on top of a tragedy.
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One month later, many critical questions around Brown’s response remain unanswered. Were any cameras disabled due to pressure from activist groups? Thousands of traumatized students are returning to campus for the spring semester. Tens of thousands of prospective students are reevaluating whether they should apply or enroll at Brown. Many have lost trust that Brown’s current leadership will keep them safe. You must make courageous decisions to restore the tarnished brand once great university.
The only action taken thus far is that the Chief of the Department of Public Safety was placed on paid administrative leave. That is nowhere near enough. The buck stops with President Paxson. As Trustees of Brown, you are the only people who can hold her accountable. Firing her is the critical first step towards righting your sinking ship. The longer you protect her, the more the blame will spread to you. Will your names be written in the case study on why “elite” college campuses that obsess over safe spaces have become the most dangerous places in America?
As Trustees, you serve as the ultimate fiduciaries for Brown. The lawsuits will cost many millions. However, if you fail to take proper action the reputational damage you will do to a 262-year-old university is incalculable. Your charter states that trustees are responsible to “make good-faith decisions in Brown’s best interests, including but not limited to protecting the long-term institutional assets of the University and its reputation, and in compliance with Brown’s mission and the law… exercise the care an ordinarily prudent person in a similar position would exercise under similar circumstances, the foundation of which is being well-informed with regard to the issue(s) under discussion and consideration…”
Are you an ordinarily prudent person who will make good-faith decisions in Brown’s best interests? Over the past few years, several of your Ivy League peers have made difficult choices about their failed presidents. Harvard, Columbia, UPenn, and Cornell all appointed new leaders. While Claudine Gay, Mioouche Shafik, Liz Magill, and Martha Pollack ostensibly resigned, there is no transparency behind the real decisions and reasons. The Brown Corporation’s charter has sworn you to confidentiality as well.
Will you force Christina Paxson to resign for the deaths of two students? If you do not by the end of your next meeting in February, your names and affiliations will be amplified to be as stained in blood as hers.
Choose wisely.
Who Will Build NYC if Builders Are the Enemy?
As a New Yorker Jew, I'm surrounded by people who have been in real estate their entire lives. I am not trying to feed a stereotype, but that's my reality. They aren't activists or online commentators. They are people who bought their first buildings with all their savings, carried debt through rate hikes, fixed things themselves when there was no money to hire, and stayed in New York through high crime, recessions, 2008, COVID, rising taxes, insurance increases, and an ever-expanding book of laws and codes. None of them were promised fairness before they started, and none of them were protected from risk. They succeeded very slowly, and painfully, but with responsibly.
That experience is exactly what is missing from the worldview of Zohran Mamdani, and it shows in every part of his housing agenda. Mamdani has never built anything. He never signed a personal guarantee, never met payroll, never carried a mortgage through a rough month, never had to choose between fixing a boiler now or hoping it survives another winter because there is no cash. He has only operated in a political world where consequences are abstract and other people absorb the risk. When you have never operated in the real economy, it becomes easy to believe that shortcuts are solutions.
It is also why his message resonates with a certain type of voter. The people demanding “housing reforms” are not bad people. They are frustrated renters who feel like the system is rigged against them. I understand the frustration. But frustration doesn't change math. Housing is hard. Ownership is a very slow process. Building anything meaningful in this city takes years of stress, and debt. The people calling for "landlord policies" often want the outcome without the grind, the stability without the risk, and the reward without the years of sweating that every responsible adult who succeeded here had to endure. But it does not work like that.
NYC is in housing crisis. Citywide vacancy sits around 1.4 percent, a level economists consider an emergency. Median rents keep rising anyway, with Manhattan near $4,800 and Brooklyn around $3,800, even under an already thick layer of regulation. The reason is obvious. Supply has not kept up. In a good year, New York adds roughly 30,000 units. The city needs hundreds of thousands more over the next decade just to stabilize prices. At the same time, construction costs here are among the highest in the country, financing is extremely difficult, and insurance is wildly expensive
Mamdani’s proposals take that fragile situation and make it worse. When you cap upside while leaving downside unlimited, rational people stop participating. Developers do not argue on X. Lenders do not protest. They simply reallocate. Projects stop coming up. Renovations are postponed. New construction dies before a shovel hits the ground. The people I know in real estate are not angry. They are disengaging. Some are buying elsewhere. Some are sitting on cash. Some are done entirely. And when that happens, tenants do not win. Buildings deteriorate, supply tightens further, and rents rise anyway.
What Mamdani offers is emotional satisfaction, not solutions. He tells voters that prices are high because someone else is greedy, not because the city has spent decades making housing harder and almost impossible to build. He frames landlords as villains instead of participants in an ecosystem that only works when incentives align. That framing feels good, but it does not produce housing. It produces resentment, fear, and withdrawal.
Everyone I know who made it in this city did it the same way. Slowly, without shortcuts. Policies written by people who never did that do not create fairness or affordability. They create shortages. NYC doesn't have a landlord problem. It has a confidence problem. And a city that teaches people to hate the builders while demanding more building is a city sabotaging its own future.
@Suhelseth@realDonaldTrump Imagine gloating that a man who actually brokered historic peace deals didn’t get a politicized prize. Says more about the prize — and your reading of the world — than about Trump.
(Warning: long rant)
My liberal friends are completely oblivious about how radicalizing the last week has been for tens of millions of normal Americans. Zero clue.
I’m not talking about people who are “online”; I mean regular, everyday Americans. “Normies.” People who scroll through Facebook posts and Instagram reels from the Dutch Bros drive thru line. Political moderates who have water cooler chats about Mahomes touchdowns and Bon Jovi concerts, not Twitter threads or Rachel Maddow monologues.
Millions of them. Tens of millions. They’re logging on, they’re engaging, and they’re furious.
And I’ll be candid: They blame you guys. They blame the left.
Regardless of whether you believe it to be justified, they think you’re the bad guys here. And they are reacting accordingly.
I can already hear some of you racing toward the comments to start screeching in moral indignation, so I’m going to be blunt: Shut up and listen to what I’m telling you. Your movement will lose any semblance of relevance if you don’t develop some small measure of self-awareness, and—absent someone force-feeding you bitter medicine—you guys collectively lack the humility to do this on your own.
Here are the facts:
Fact 1. Tens of millions of Americans started the week seeing a 23-year-old blonde woman—a young woman in whom virtually every parent watching pictured their own daughter—stabbed in the neck by a career criminal. These people then found out the murderer had been released from jail 14 times over.
Fact 2. Two days later, tens of millions of Americans watched a video of Charlie Kirk get murdered speaking to college students. Millions of these people knew who Charlie was; millions of them didn’t. Upon seeing the video, however, these normal Americans from across the land and across the political spectrum agreed that he was the victim of a terrible, fundamentally unjustifiable crime, and their hearts broke in sympathy for his family. Good people who had never even heard the name Charlie Kirk before wept.
Fact 3. Immediately after seeing the footage of a peaceful young man get shot in the neck, these same people logged onto Facebook and Instagram (remember, we are talking about regular Americans, not perpetually online Twitter or Bluesky users) and saw some of their local nurses, school teachers, college administrators, and retail workers celebrating this horrific crime. Not just defending it, but cheering it.
These are all facts. You may not like the implications of these facts, and we can certainly debate the underlying causes thereof, but, indisputably, they are nevertheless factual statements.
Here’s what it means for you, the Democrats reading this:
These normal, middle-of-the-road, non-political citizens just become politically active. They realized that politics cares about them, even if they don’t particularly care about politics. After watching Iryna Zarutska and Charlie Kirk both bleed out from the neck, they think their lives and the physical safety of their families—the bedrock of human society, the foundation of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs—depend on political activation, whether they desire it or not.
These people are now sprinting—not jogging, not walking, but racing—to the right. Because they blame you guys for everything that just happened.
When they see footage of Decarlos Brown stabbing a Ukrainian refugee to death, they don’t see just one demon-possessed man. They picture every university administrator, HR bureaucrat, and DEI apparatchik that ever lectured them about systemic racism, the “carceral state,” or the need to release violent crime suspects without bail in the name of social justice.
They then think back to conversations they’ve had with their cop friends—their buddy from high school who quit the force after getting tired of being called a racist, their friend at the local YMCA who vents about having to release career criminals because Soros-funded prosecutors aren’t willing to file charges—and they realize everything the left has told them over the last five years has been utter bullshit.
And they blame you. Because, even if you count yourself as a moderate Democrat, your party supported the district attorneys, city council members, and mayors that let fictitious concerns about mental health and racial justice supersede very real concerns for their family’s safety.
When these Americans see blood erupt from the side of Charlie Kirk’s neck, they don’t see just a martyred political activist. They think of every extreme leftist they’ve ever met who (1) calls anyone to the right of Hillary Clinton a fascist and (2) constantly jokes—“jokes”—about punching Nazis and “bashing the fash.”
They realize that there really do exist people who wish to see them dead for their moderately conservative political beliefs, their Christian faith, and even the color of their skin. They ask themselves if the violence visited upon Charlie might one day show up on their own doorstep.
And they blame you. Because, even if you’re just a center-of-the-road liberal, you lacked the courage to police your own ranks. You let modern-day Maoist red guards run loose across every facet of society, and what started with social-media struggle sessions has now turned to 30-06 bullet holes.
When these Americans log onto social media and see their neighbors justifying, celebrating, glorifying murder, they realize that some who walk among them are soulless ghouls at best, literally demon-possessed at worst. These people—whether they faithfully attend church every Sunday or only attend with relatives once a year, on Christmas Eve—start talking about things like spiritual warfare. They implicitly understand that no normal human casually celebrates the mortal demise of a peaceful person.
And they blame you. Because, even if you condemned Charlie Kirk’s murder, they probably haven’t seen you condemn those in your own movement who cheered it on. They view you as complicit in allowing heartless fellow travelers to celebrate death, and it repulses them.
For all of these situations, what has your response been? Nothing but bullshit.
In response to Iryna Zarutska bleeding out on the floor of a train, you post bullshit statistics about reductions in reported crime, when everyone who’s ever been to a major urban center in the last decade knows that actual crime has skyrocketed, only for victims not to waste their time reporting it to cops that don’t have the manpower to respond and prosecutors that seek to downgrade as many felonies as possible to misdemeanor citations.
In response to a 31-year-old man taking a bullet to the neck in front of his family, you post nothing but bullshit whataboutism.
> “What about January 6th?” (Honest answer: After you let Liz Cheney spend two years operating a star chamber in the House, combined with countless other failed attempts at “lawfare” against Trump, no one cares anymore.)
> “What about Mike Lee making a dumb joke on Twitter about some guy in a mask in Minnesota?” (No one outside of Utah, DC, or Twitter knows who Mike Lee even is.)
> “What about Paul Pelosi?” (That’s not comparable to Charlie Kirk getting shot, and we all know it. And, again, Paul who?)
> “What about regulations on assault rifles?” (That’s not going to get you very far when one of these killers used a knife and the other one used a common hunting rifle.)
In response to teachers, healthcare workers, and thousands of other liberals cheering on Charlie’s murder, it’s nothing but more bullshit and misdirection.
> “It’s not THAT many people celebrating!” (Yes, it is. Everyone has seen it on their Facebook and Instagram feeds.)
> “I thought you guys didn’t support cancel culture.” (We don’t cancel people over their opinions; we’re more than happy to see people lose their jobs—especially their taxpayer-funded jobs—for actively cheering on murder, though. If you can’t see the difference, that’s your own shortcoming.)
All bullshit. Not even smart bullshit, but stale, mid-grade, low-IQ bullshit. Ordinary Americans see right through it, and they don’t like how it smells.
You probably don’t like hearing this. But you need to hear it.
Because I’m right, and, as you reflect on this, you know I’m right. The ranks of my political movement gained millions of righteously angry new members this week. We have a mandate to ensure these crimes never happen again, and that’s exactly what we are now going to do.
If you want to keep a seat at the table as we do so, you’d better clean house and start policing your own.
Charlie Kirk was an unapologetic advocate for his Christian faith, his values, his country - and Western Civilization.
He used his voice and his talent for debate to engage millions of young people to become invested in their country’s future. His legacy will be felt for decades. I’m sick. And I’m gutted for his family.