The happy ending to this story is that technological change has made pie crust easier — not as easy as cake, maybe, but still something a competent beginner can master with a small amount of effort. Food processors simplify the laborious process of cutting fat into flour, and chef J. Kenji Lopez-Alt has developed not one but two foolproof pie crust recipes for novices who own such a machine. I’d encourage readers who think pies are too difficult to give one a try, roll them out (videos on the internet will show you how to do this), then put them in the freezer to await Thanksgiving morning.
But I’d also ask them to think about how technology might be used to recapture other things they miss. Childhood foods you’ve lost, for example. At the end of my father’s life, I managed to reproduce his beloved snow pudding, a now-forgotten lemon dessert that turns out to be delicious and easy to make with an electric stand mixer. Then think bigger: Could safer self-driving cars revive the once-common sight of children playing in the street? Could a productivity boom driven by artificial intelligence give us more time to invest in our communities? Could manufactured housing make it easier to form families, or might robots reverse our demographic decline by taking over the dreary housework that kids generate?
Rent control offers an immediate political payoff. The new mayor can be viewed as helping renters. The long-term consequences — shrinking supply, deteriorating buildings and hindering construction — are delayed and spread out amongst the population of New York City. They are noticed years down the road, when we come back and it’s even harder to find an affordable apartment. Simply put, it allows Mamdani to claim victory and praise in the short run, while the worst effects will only be realized long after he’s out of office.
With Khan’s influence, we can expect the future Mamdani mayoral administration to get creative and, perhaps, unconstitutional—in its application of existing laws and authorities to enact Mamdani’s agenda, which includes things like city-run grocery stores, free child care and bus rides, nearly doubling the minimum wage, and a freeze on raising rents.
Paul Moreno reviews G. Edward White’s new biography of Robert Jackson. A slice:
Jackson’s unhappy career on the Court resulted from his inability to fuse or completely separate the roles of advocate and judge. Though brought up in the world of progressive “Legal Realism,” which conflated law and politics, he retained some sense of the classical belief that law could be separated from politics—the “natural law” belief that law was discovered, not made, which White has called the “oracular” view of judging. White notes that before he was on the Court, Jackson was “not a committed ideological partisan in the same manner as many who served with him in the Roosevelt administration … but he was a team player.” He was as political as Roosevelt needed him to be, ardently denouncing New Deal opponents as plutocrats and fascists. But he knew that the Court was different, and many of his Roosevelt-appointed fellow Justices did not.
