July 25, 2026

QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: What Broke Black America? A Review of Howard Husock’s The Projects:

Speaking of painting, the genesis of the American movement to reconfigure big city housing—and soon enough small town and rural housing too, and heck, the entire enchilada of urban design—came in 1934 at, of all places, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, which in the Depression’s depths hosted a “Modern Housing Exhibition.”

The Picassos and Cubism and Dadas were on another floor. This unusual museum exhibition, writes Husock, had little to do with art, but a lot to do with “modern.” It “was the spearhead of a crusade; it made the economic, political, and even visual case that the federal government should finance the construction of housing for working families of modest means—not as an emergency measure but as part of the ongoing responsibilities of government.”

Why? A book accompanying the exhibition proved an exemplar of an empowered and eager progressivism, describing itself as:

a statement of the far reaching and varied social, financial, technological, administrative, legislative and political factors which have led to the present situation. It discusses the radical changes which must be made in our social philosophy and public policy in order to improve the housing condition of the masses of the American people.

But was it housing—or was it something else—that tempted the progressive social engineer? Something else gets the nod: The mission, writes Husock, was not truly “the mere provision of utilitarian housing.” Instead, the aspiration was “about building a new type of urban landscape, a city of tomorrow . . . organized by government and designed by architects.”

Actually, a motivating spirit for the exhibition and the forces it would unleash was a 1927 book, The City of Tomorrow, by Charles- Édouard Jeanneret, a Swiss-French architect known as “Le Corbusier,” whose vision—which detested streets—was the creation of “superblocks,” long now a reality for many American cities. Superblocks

were set projects with no cross streets for stores, cars, or small homes. Le Corbusier had already designed such a city in his 1922 plan for the Ville Contemporaine, which was to comprise sixty-story apartment buildings, all identical, surrounded by a zigzag of smaller buildings and a park. Le Corbusier asserted that whole urban scene “is one of wasted opportunities and inefficiency.” He proposes an alternative course, “which is a bold and drastic reconstruction of the entire machine.” Central to his vision was that of “skyscrapers set at immense distances from one another and surrounded by large open spaces or parks.”

Where to build this new city? The canvases for Le Corbusier and his acolytes were to be empty sites—or, sites that were to be emptied because they were decreed slums. Harvard professor James Ford was one of the moment’s leading, persuasive apostles of slum eradication, and Husock quotes him amply: “Wrote Ford, ‘The slum is a menace which cannot be overcome by piece meal modernization loans or random demolitions with the owner’s consent. . . . No solution will be found short of a comprehensive and intelligent policy actuated by one or more units of government, apply financed, which makes the neighborhood rather than the buildings the basis of operations.’”

What was to be the collateral damage of implementing utopia? “As for the shops,” writes Husock, “the churches and synagogues, the small businesses, street life, and so much more which slums were replete, Ford was silent.”

Within three years of the Depression-era exhibition, its patrons and the forces of “slum elimination” it effectively unleashed had successfully lobbied Congress to pass the National Housing Act and create the United States Housing Authority, tools embraced by big city mayors and in particular First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who was a major champion of slum clearance.

Corbusier, who would later align himself with Vichy France, only saw two buildings bearing his imprimatur completed in the US. He was part of the architectural committee which designed the UN building in New York in 1948, and he designed the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts building at Yale in 1962.  However, Corbusier’’s urban planning concepts were enormously influential on American urban renewal in the 1950s and ‘’60s, with invariably disastrous results. Jane Jacobs’’ influential book 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities is essentially a real-world rebuttal to his architectural and urban planning fantasies.

Posted at 1:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

JEFFREY BLEHAR: The Most Irresponsibly Stupid Column of the Year.

Because in [Nancy Armour of USA Today’s] moral world, the real threat here is not to Caitlin Clark’s right quadricep but rather to the dignity and safety of the black women who play against her. As Armour describes it, if Clark “flops” during a game . . . she’s apparently encouraging her white fans to take justice into their own hands and lynch the hated blacks. I’m not kidding about this, though I wish I were:

It shouldn’t need reminding this country has an awful history of Black people being harmed, even killed, in the name of “defending” white women. The irony of the WNBA’s All-Star Game is that it’s happening this weekend in Chicago, the hometown of Emmett Till, who became an icon of the civil rights movement after his tragic murder. The local art gallery is currently hosting an exhibit imagining his life if he hadn’t been lynched. While it’s incumbent on the WNBA to do more to protect its players, there also should be an expectation on Clark to recognize the broader implications of her actions being weaponized.

First off, marvel at that rhetorical stretch. Emmett Till was killed in Mississippi by Jim Crow racists in the Fifties, which is just like Caitlin Clark complaining after being fouled at next week’s All-Star Game . . . and it’s all connected because Chicago. (This one fact alone meant I had to write this. Somehow it’s always MAGA country’s fault.) Then step back further and gaze with disbelief upon the neo-Stalinist moral logic: because others might react badly to her public disapproval at being abused, she must remain silent (and take more abuse). It is howlingly, outrageously wrong — a complete inversion of all accepted principle.

Related: We’ve descended into some sort of bizarre hell-world in which Barack Obama is a voice of sanity:

Posted at 12:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

I INVENTED* NIXONMAXXING:

Instead of the Watergate legend raising the moral standing of the media, today deep distrust of the media has cast Watergate in a new light. So has the revelation that Bob Woodward’s and Carl Bernstein’s key insider source, “Deep Throat,” was a man who aspired to the power once wielded byJ. Edgar Hoover and brought down the president who refused to make him director of the FBI.

Hoover was a man above the Constitution, thanks to his ability to intimidate and blackmail members of the elected government – Congress was afraid to touch him. Mark Felt believed he was entitled to what Hoover enjoyed, and when Nixon defied him, Felt, through Woodward and Bernstein, showed the president who really had the power to destroy whom.

An unelected government within the government ought to be the subject, not the sponsor, of media investigations. The relationship between the media and those parts of government in agreement with the liberal-leaning news industry’s own biases is a scandal unto itself. Nixon’s reputational recovery is the flipside of the media’s dwindling authority. Rising esteem for Nixon is reciprocal with the plummeting of newspaper circulations.

“If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story. The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy,” Vance told an audience at the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California, in June. Yet the Nixon saga isn’t ancient history: “If you look at the story of how the Deep State took down Richard Nixon, it’s not all that different from what the same groups of people, the same institutions tried to do to Donald Trump in the first Trump administration,” the Vice President argued.

Nixon was a tragic figure – almost an American Macbeth. His story is human in a way that moves the young right, who have been subjected all their lives to stories that are mere ideological morality tales. It’s not Nixon’s ideology they admire; they admire him for not being easily reduced to inhuman “principles.”

* Family Ties producer Gary David Goldberg, and/or the NBC executives who likely told him that it might be a bit off-putting to ‘80s TV viewers if Alex P. Keaton was seen worshipping Ronald Reagan on a weekly basis might like a word here:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

TRUMP FINALLY GETS HIS WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENTS’ DINNER SPEECH: “Is this supposed to be fun? Am I supposed to be serious? Am I supposed to be a comedian?”

And here’s the joke I thought was the best: “Under my administration, a once-feared and powerful regime that relentlessly attacked America has finally been toppled. Their former leaders have been removed and they’re now being run by a gay dictator facing internal divisions. But I for one wish Bari Weiss all the best at CBS News. She’s a wonderful woman.”

Heh, indeed.

Meanwhile, at America’s Newspaper of Record:

Posted at 12:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

AWKWARD:

Posted at 11:40 am by Stephen Green

BRIAN WANG: SpaceX Starship Flight 13 Had a Miracle. “SpaceX Starship flight 13 had a miracle happen. The landing of Starship was so soft that the fires did not cause an explosion. Starship stayed intact. It did not explode. Every prior Starship was destroyed and exploded when they went into the ocean. The wealth of information from an intact 18000 tile heat shield and the pattern and amount of damage is going to help SpaceX learn a lot. This massively increases the likelihood that flight 14 will be completely successful for catching both the booster AND the Starship. Certainly flight 15 or 16 will be completely successful and we will enter an age of fully and rapidly reusable Starship by the end 2026.”

Posted at 11:38 am by Glenn Reynolds

LET’S HOPE: SOPHIE CUNNINGHAM IS THE ANGEL OF DEATH FOR CANCEL CULTURE. The subtext was clear to her aspirant cancelers: I hear you, I see you, and I don’t care. This is 2026, not 2016.

Related:

Posted at 9:59 am by Glenn Reynolds

ICYMI: NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG:

Posted at 8:00 am by Glenn Reynolds

ENSHITTIFICATION IS REAL:

Posted at 7:30 am by Glenn Reynolds

WHEN I WROTE FOR USA TODAY THEY PRIDED THEMSELVES ON FAIRNESS AND FACT-CHECKING. Of course they gave up on both, which is why I left.

Posted at 7:00 am by Glenn Reynolds

July 24, 2026

OPEN THREAD: Ring in the weekend.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds