‘Republicans wanted a crackdown on Israel’s critics. Columbia obliged.’
Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times
“You don’t have to like anti-Israel language or activism to be worried about congressional demands to suppress it,” says Michelle Goldberg. After Republicans on a House panel investigating campus antisemitism grilled Columbia University’s president, Nemat Shafik, about pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel activism, the university started “cracking down,” calling in police to arrest dozens at a “Gaza solidarity encampment.” Shafik emerged “largely unscathed” by the GOP’s newfangled McCarthyism. “All that’s been damaged is Columbia’s guarantee of academic freedom.”
‘Could fossil fuels re-elect Biden?’
The Wall Street Journal editorial board
President Joe Biden’s “biggest economic success is something he has done everything in his power to thwart,” says The Wall Street Journal editorial board. The “economy he touts” expanded by 2.5% last year, and states driving America’s record oil production “led the way” while growth remained “sluggish” in other parts of the country. “Privately financed fossil-fuel production is doing far more to boost the U.S. economy” than Biden’s big “spending on electric vehicles and green energy.”
‘Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese are in the WNBA now. Stop telling them to “play nice.”‘
Frankie de la Cretaz at CNN
Women’s basketball finally got the “kind of audience it deserves” this year, says Frankie de la Cretaz. The NCAA Championship Game, in which the undefeated South Carolina Gamecocks beat superstar Caitlin Clark’s Iowa Hawkeyes, drew a whopping 24 million viewers. But along with the attention came “harsh, undeserved” criticism of the players, including Clark and LSU’s Angel Reese, both WNBA-bound, for their trash-talking. “This criticism is sexist — how often do we expect men to play nice?”
‘It’s not just David Chang. Celebrity chefs are sellouts.’
Raj Tawney at Bloomberg
It’s good that David Chang apologized and dropped his company Momofuku’s effort to trademark the term “chili crunch,” says Raj Tawney. But this is “standard damage control for a popular chef” trying to protect a culinary “empire.” This debacle shows how the “wacky concept of a ‘celebrity chef'” hurts the “food industry.” The excessive commercialization has “caused what used to be the star — the food — to take a backseat” to the “sellouts” preening for the cameras.
Opinion, comment and editorials of the day
