Chicagos ill omens for Mamdani, let the kids play and other commentary

“Today’s kids want to spend their childhood in the real world,” report Lenore Skenazy, Zach Rausch & Jonathan Haidt at The Atlantic: “Let’s give it back to them.”Thinking that “smartphones and social-media platforms are addicting” the nation’s youth “misses a key part of the story.”In a national survey, most children said “they aren’t allowed to be out in public at all without an adult.”“Fewer than half of the 8- and 9-year-olds have gone down a grocery-store aisle alone; more than a quarter aren’t allowed to play unsupervised even in their own front yard.”But this overprotective parenting is just hysteria, and “kids will always have more spare hours than adults can supervise — a gap that devices now fill.”Wake up: “Even this generation of digital natives still longs for what most of their parents had: time with friends, in person, without adults.” “To evaluate the merits” of Zohran Mamdani’s vows such as “ending mayoral control of city schools” and “hiring ‘thousands more teachers,’” just “look 800 miles west,” argue Santiago Vidal Valvo & Esme Vroom at City Journal.Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson “embraced a union-first approach to education.”His school board extended a “no-closure pledge” — stopping shutdowns of underperforming schools — and hiked spending to “nearly double the national average.”The “alarming” results: Only “one in three elementary school students can read at grade level, and barely one in five is proficient in math.”Chicago’s lesson is clear: “Allowing unions to drive education policy” produces “failing schools — and thousands of children failing to reach their potential.”“Israel is not starving Gaza,” explain Erez Winner & Gadi Taub at Tablet, despite much “mendacious propaganda.”Since March, it has tried to counter Hamas’ strategy of “increasing its own population’s suffering” by “breaking its control of the ...