May 16, 2026

AND THE ANSWER IS NONE. NONE MORE BAGEL: The world has officially reached peak bagel.

New York’s Citi Field has weathered its share of away-team blowouts over the years, but the crowd gathered on a brisk Sunday last fall was not prepared for the upset awaiting them.

At the sixth BagelFest, more than 2,000 devotees of New York’s most iconic breakfast food had lined up to try samples and schmears from local favorites and shops as far away as Denmark and Hawaii. When a panel of expert judges announced its pick for “Best Bagel,” the crowd erupted with a mix of elation and disbelief.

The winner? Starship Bagel, which is not based in New York—or even London or Montreal, cities with venerable bagel traditions of their own—but in Dallas, Texas.

For many bagel purists, the future should look like the past. True New York bagels today are made in much the same way they were when they were brought over by Jewish immigrants from Poland in the 19th century. Few had succeeded in replicating them outside the region until places like Starship Bagel came along and shattered New Yorkers’ long-held belief that great bagels could only come from their own backyard.

The View of the World from 9th Avenue strikes again:

Posted at 2:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

YES:

Posted at 1:36 pm by Stephen Green

WE’VE DESCENDED INTO SOME SORT OF BIZARRE HELL-WORLD IN WHICH BILL MAHER IS A VOICE OF SANITY:

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

OLD AND BUSTED: “Don’t Be Evil.”

The New Hotness? Google Maps Just ‘Unburned’ the Pacific Palisades — and Infuriated Angelenos Noticed.

Angelenos have been noticing something strange: the Google Maps satellite imagery depicting the Los Angeles areas of the Pacific Palisades and Altadena now shows pristine neighborhoods untouched by the devastating fires of January 2025.

Of course, as we all know, those neighborhoods are in ruins. Why would Google pretend otherwise?

On Reddit, user TinyPinkSparkles asked, “Why is Google maps back to showing old satellite images of Altadena?” She continued:

Not too long after the fire, Google updated the satellite imagery to reflect the fire and thousands of lost structures. Now it’s back to pre-fire images of houses and businesses that are no longer there. Why?

Live look at Google maps of the area:

Posted at 12:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

DECONSTRUCTING DECONSTRUCTION:

The virus is *non-falsifiable*. If you defend a norm, it’s because you’re the oppressor. If you deny being an oppressor, that’s proof of your unconscious privilege. If you cite facts, your facts are contaminated by the power that produced them. If you cite reason, reason itself is white, male, Western. There is no possible exit. The system is designed to make any objection inadmissible by definition. That’s exactly the structure of a cult.

And that’s exactly what has taken hold in universities, HR departments, media, administrations, and corporate boards for the past twenty years.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

YOUR OCCASIONAL REMINDER THAT ANYTHING THE LEFT CAN’T CONTROL, IT WILL DESTROY, AND IF IT CAN’T BE DESTROYED, THEY’LL DISCREDIT IT:

Posted at 11:59 am by Stephen Green

MADE IT, MA! TOP OF THE WORLD! The Coolest Video Ever Shot on Everest. Ma Chunlin has created one of the best videos we’ve ever seen come out of the Himalaya.

(Classical reference in headline.)

Posted at 10:45 am by Ed Driscoll

THE NEW VETTING: The broker standard of care after Montgomery. “The question is no longer whether brokers have responsibilities when selecting carriers. The question is what courts, juries, insurers, and the industry itself will consider reasonable in a modern transportation environment where enormous amounts of safety data are publicly available.”

Related: What’s next after Montgomery?

Posted at 10:36 am by Glenn Reynolds

PORTENT OF PROBLEMS FOR SOCIAL MEDIA: A recent survey of congressional aides working on Capitol Hill for senators, representatives and committees find a big portion of them have in the past year either significantly reduced their social media scrolling or stopped it altogether. Check it out on HillFaith this morning.

Posted at 8:40 am by Mark Tapscott

TRUMP, XI AND THE THUCYDIDES TRAP: Few Americans these days have read “The Peloponnesian War” by Thucydides, so the significance of Chinese dictator Xi Jinping’s two references to the “trap” associated with the great Greek writer is undoubtedly lost on most, including especially the journalists covering President Donald Trump’s Beijing visit.

That said, Rod Martin lays out the amazing changes in the U.S./China relationship on the world stage in the two years since the Biden administration closed and the second Trump term commenced. Read it and you will quickly forget what the talking heads of the MSM are saying about Trump’s alleged Beijing failures:

“Xi is very aware of his own problems. Two years ago, he was on the verge of controlling the approaches to North America. Today, America has flipped that script. So isn’t it at least possible that Xi is recognizing how we’ve kicked his butt out of the Caribbean, humiliated his armaments industry in Venezuela and Iran, and locked down Malacca, Sunda, and Lombok with our new Indonesian defense pact(s)?

“And that’s not even mentioning Japan’s reassertion as both a major power and arsenal to our allies, South Korea’s and Australia’s nuclear submarine deals with the U.S., the defensive implications of the Taiwan arms deals, the growing forest of missiles in Luzon, and the recently announced $1.5 trillion Trump defense budget, up from under $1 trillion. If we obsess about China’s strengths, do we really think they don’t obsess about ours?”

And speaking of Thucydides, here’s a reading project that will both entertain and instruct the inquiring mind: Read his book on the great conflict between Athens and Sparta, then sit down with Shelby Foote’s masterful three-volume “The Civil War.” So many similarities among the combatants in both conflicts and innumerable lessons to be learned from the character portraits each author provides of the men leading each side.

 

Posted at 8:12 am by Mark Tapscott