A Mass Shooting in New York City

Good morning:

On Monday evening, a gunman shot and killed four people, including NYPD Officer Didarul Islam, in the heart of New York City’s financial and cultural life. NYC is our home, and we are committed to making the city and the people who live here safe, prosperous, and free. We reject lawless and civil terrorism in all its forms. As we wrote immediately after the event, “For too long, New York’s political class has flirted with fantasies of defunding or disarming the very institutions that stand between order and chaos. That experiment in posturing has cost us too much already.”

We extend our deepest condolences to Officer Islam’s family and friends, and the family and friends of the other victims of this senseless, nihilistic attack. At the Manhattan Institute, we will continue to press forward, defending our city and civilization and forcing the specter of lawlessness into retreat.

This week, senior fellow Nicole Gelinas wrote in the New York Times that mayoral candidate Zohrab Mamdani’s “city-owned grocery stores” proposal is so light on details that it raises broader questions about the practicality of an assertive socialist agenda.

Senior fellow Gregory Conti takes a closer look at the coalition behind the Mamdani victory and what it means for wokeness, in First Things. Wokeness may have peaked generally, but it lives on among “squeezed strivers”—creatives, professionals, and knowledge-workers who do not believe their social and economic standing reflects their value. Mamdani’s vision of culture and economics flatters an aspirant clerical class’s moralism, and validates their financial complaints.

At City Journal, director of education policy John D. Sailer published the results of his investigation into how faculty search committees at George Mason University, Virginia’s largest public university, modified their search processes to make what they called “diversity hires.”

And Paulson policy analyst Carolyn D. Gorman writes that President Trump’s recent executive order cracking down on homelessness, especially among those with severe mental illness, must be paired with the repeal of a Medicaid provision known as the “Institutions for Mental Diseases (IMD) exclusion,” which barred federal reimbursement for care provided in psychiatric hospitals.

This week, the Research team at MI published a new report by senior fellow Andy Smarick that explains why affinity bias may be responsible for so many top jobs going to graduates of the same few elite schools. Public universities and public law schools produce top talent, but many of the people making hiring decisions for elite institutions stick with what they know, the Ivy League schools and the circles that they come from themselves.

Finally, check out our latest episode of MI’s “Tech in the City” series, with fellow Danny Crichton. He discusses the national security threat posed by North Korean IT workers who are infiltrating U.S. companies through remote work.

Continue reading for all these insights and more.

Kelsey Bloom

Editorial Director

Changing the Choosers: Expanding Opportunity by Diversifying Leadership Selectors

By Andy Smarick | Manhattan Institute

Why are some elite professional positions—like Supreme Court clerkships and White House Fellowships—disproportionately held by graduates of a handful of elite private schools?

In a new Manhattan Institute report, Andy Smarick argues that the answer lies not just with the candidates—but with the choosers.

Drawing on decades of data, Smarick shows the stark concentration of Ivy+ graduates in these roles. Since 1980, 63% of Supreme Court clerks came from just four law schools (Harvard, Yale, Chicago, and Stanford), and more than a third of clerks held undergraduate degrees from just three colleges: Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.

This disparity isn’t just about merit. Public law schools enroll many top-scoring students and produce numerous state supreme court justices—yet they are almost entirely absent from the ranks of SCOTUS clerks.

One reason: educational “affinity bias.” Selectors with Ivy+ degrees are significantly more likely to pick candidates with similar backgrounds. Justices who attended Ivy+ law schools, for example, hire 18% more clerks from Ivy+ schools than their non-Ivy+ peers—and from a much narrower set of institutions.

To open up leadership pathways for talented young people of all backgrounds, Smarick argues, we must stop looking only at applicants’ résumés—and start examining the résumés of those doing the choosing.

The Problem with Grocery Stores Isn’t Profits. It’s Reality.

By Nicole Gelinas | The New York Times

“He wants to give New Yorkers capitalist consumer-brand choice at socialist prices. Mr. Mamdani’s brand of socialism is not collective, cooperative sacrifice but individualist, no-cost, no-tradeoff socialism. …

“Government can appear to solve any problem temporarily by throwing money at it. So it’s conceivable that Mr. Mamdani will succeed in opening a few pilot supermarkets but probably only with large government subsidies. The larger risk for New York City, though, is that this glib superficiality would infect other aspects of urban governance with a socialist flair.”

Mamdani and the New Phase of Wokeness

By Gregory Conti | First Things

“All in all, though some sharp edges have been smoothed, Mamdani still operates by the late-2010s academic-radicalism-escaped-from-campus playbook that we call wokeism. He demonstrates the approach we can expect to see from the far left of the Democratic party in a post-peak-woke age: in some ways softer in presentation, more capable of retailing an economic message, but still laced with a cultural radicalism that clashes with American traditions. …

“No longer the official credo of most mainstream institutions or the heights of the American economy, and certainly not a cry of despair from the downtrodden, wokeness has found its level as the authentic expression of a set of squeezed strivers: creatives, professionals, and knowledge-workers who feel that their compensation and social standing do not reflect their education, abilities, and moral insight. “

Trump’s Mental-Health Executive Order Targets Urban Chaos

By Carolyn D. Gorman | City Journal

“An executive order signed by President Trump last week … declares that ‘vagrancy, disorderly behavior, sudden confrontations, and violent attacks’—often a function of untreated serious mental illness—be addressed through civil commitment and humane treatment in long-term institutional settings. For this effort to succeed, the most urgent priority is expanding the number of available inpatient psychiatric beds. The U.S. currently has a significant shortage. …

“As long as the IMD exclusion remains in place, states face a powerful fiscal disincentive to expand public psychiatric bed capacity. Congress must repeal the IMD exclusion and allow Medicaid to cover psychiatric hospitals as it does nearly every other medical setting. Anything less will blunt the impact of the executive order and leave the nation’s most vulnerable without the care they need.”

George Mason Prioritized “Demographic Diversity” in New Hires

By John D. Sailer | City Journal

“At George Mason University, one faculty search committee assessed each job candidate’s contribution to ‘diversity’—including, according to an official memo, ‘demographic diversity.’ Another committee scored candidates on, among other factors, his or her interest in ‘diversity.’ A third boasted that it had carefully crafted a job advertisement to signal its desire to make ‘a diversity hire.’ …

“Through a public records request, I’ve acquired a trove of these plans. The documents, created between roughly 2020 and 2023, reveal university departments’ fixation on race and other identity categories throughout the hiring process. They also shed light on GMU’s hiring practices amid various ongoing legal battles.”

Tech and the City

By Danny Crichton | Manhattan Institute

“While supply chain security has been a hot topic in DC for many years, there is increasingly concern about might be dubbed ‘labor security.’ Who is working these critical IT jobs that have access to the most sensitive information that our companies possess?”

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