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'Dear Jay': Jefferies strategist writes an apology letter template for all the 'haters' who doubt the Fed Chair and his inflation fight

Jerome Powell has taken a lot of abuse over the past few years. The Federal Reserve chairman was blamed for mischaracterizing the rise of inflation as transitory in 2021, a move that led him to keep interest rates near-zero well into the post-COVID recovery. And even after Powell admitted he had miscalculated inflations trajectory, leading him to walk back that transitory line and turn to interest rate hikes to fight consumer price increases in March of last year, he couldnt get the critics off his back. A new group emerged who argued the Fed chair was being too aggressive with his rate hikes and could end up sending the economy into recession. But now, Jefferies chief market strategist David Zervoswho has stood by Powell over the past 18 monthsis taking a victory lap amid the economys resilience, branding the Feds critics Jay-haters and Armageddonistas. Hes even composed a Dear Jay apology letter template for their convenience.

Criticism of Powell was especially pointed earlier this year after regional bank instability, headlined by the collapse of both Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank in March. University of Pennsylvania Professor Jeremy Siegel, along with Yales Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Steven Tian, argued in a March Fortune op-ed that shrapnel from the Feds rate hikes killed SVB and may send the economy into recession in the process.

But despite the consistent warning from Fed critics, the recession hasnt comeat least just yetand inflation is now down more than 4 percentage points from its June 2022 year-over-year peak of 9.1%, while the unemployment rate remains at a 54-year low. Zervos saw this coming back in April, when he published a market commentary titled Armageddon Fail ripping consistent recession predictions from economists and what he described as discredited and vitriolic critiques of the Feds rate hikes.

The former advisor to the Federal Reserve Board, who boasts decades of Wall Street experience, says he believes the central banks rate hikes have had their desired effect, lowering inflation without sparking a recession. Powell has maintained the Feds credibility, kept the dollar strong, and valiantly fought inflation even in the face of potential economic pain, according to Zervos, who called the strategy tough love.

Cue the victory lap.

Beating up on haters more generally is still one of my favorite pastimes, he wrote in a Monday note. And when I look at the bigger macro picture, away from the debate on regional bank stresses, those who have been relentlessly criticizing Fed actions for the last 18 months are in desperate need of a fresh beatdown.

The critics

When it comes to Powell critics, the list is long and full of household names, including the billionaire investor and CEO of Starwood Capital Group Barry Sternlicht, who told Fortune last October that Powell and his merry band of lunatics were leading the economy towards catastrophe as they raised rates in the face of fading GDP growth.

I think maybe theyre just not up for the task, he said of the current slate of Fed officials. Maybe theyre not smart enough to understand the impact of their actions. This is kind of like, and Im not kidding here, the inmates running the asylum.

Howard Universitys William Spriggs also admonished Powells aggressive inflation-fighting stance, comparing the economy to a plane with failing engines that rate hikes threatened to turn off entirely last August.

I think if they come to their senses [and pause rate hikes] before September, we might be able to eke out having a recession, but it would be hard because things are already slowing down in the labor market, Spriggs told Fortune.

On Monday, Zervos argued there wasnt much new to say to these critics on the macro front given inflations downward trend and the economys resilience, unless he wanted to continue his victory lap. Instead, the strategist offered an apology letter template in his sarcastic commentary.

Today I thought I would remind everyone of just how deluded those critics have been by publishing an apology letter template for them to utilize as they come to grips with their misguided ways, he wrote. I sincerely hope a few of those folks, especially the ones with the highest profiles, can employ something like this to come clean. Its time for them to make heartfelt amends with Jay.

Of course, some might argue that Zervos is celebrating too soon. A number of investment banksincluding Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Nomura, and morebelieve a recession is still coming this year. And even the Federal Reserves own staff still has a mild recession as their base case for the economy. Nick Brooks, head of economic and investment research at the private equity firm Intermediate Capital Group, also told Fortune Monday that despite recent economic resilience many of traditional recession indicators are flashing bright red.

Zervos letter highlights the age-old debate, now renascent, in economics between monetarists from the line of Milton Friedman, who promote a more laissez-faire approach to policy and believe that inflation is caused by excess growth in the money supply, and Keynesians, who are named after the British economist John Maynard Keynes, and point to labor or capacity shortages as the key driver of inflation.

Zervos, a monetarist, stands by his view that Fed Chair Powell has done the right thing by quickly raising rates since March of last year, arguing there is nothing more important than reducing the money supply to ensure price stability for the economy. And he has a request: Please feel free to forward this apology letter template to any of your friendly neighborhood Fed critics. I am sure you can find more than a few out there.

Heres that template:

Dear Jay,

I am truly sorry for doubting you since the summer of 2021. I incorrectly applied faulty Keynesian demand-side theories to rebuke your monetary policy decisions. Clearly, the post-COVID shocks that have hit the global economy came predominately from the supply side. If I had just looked more closely at the inflation experience in Europe, where labor market slack was much greater than in the US, the supply-side storyline would have been much clearer.

I am also deeply sorry for having compared you to the late Arthur Burns. You correctly saw that this adverse supply shock, which persisted much longer than initially anticipated, generated a serious risk of de-anchoring long-run inflation expectations. You then engaged in an aggressive tightening campaign to ensure that the hard work of credibility rebuilding over the last 40-plus years by the Federal Reserve was not undermined. The tough love of slowing aggregate demand was the only choice in response to this supply shock. And unlike Arthur Burns (or his predecessor Bill Martin), you did not acquiesce to partisan calls to pull back on the tightening efforts late last year. In the end, your policies made sure that the ghost of Burns never returned to those hallowed halls at 20th and Constitution Ave. And there is no doubt in my mind that Paul Volcker is currently looking down from his perch at the pinnacle of central bank heaven with an approving smile.

You should also be extremely proud that your policy efforts have kept long-run inflation expectations in check, the dollar strong, and term premiums low throughout this entire unpleasant inflationary experience. It now even appears that short-run inflation expectations, after initially spiking, have come back to target levels. Every measure of Fed credibility has remained fully intact over the last 18 months as you fought back against this supply side storm that brought us to a peak of 9% inflation. All I can say is, bravo, Jay!!

After realizing my misguided economic ways, I wanted to share with you that I will be spending the next few years retooling. It certainly appears that I have underestimated the important neoclassical/supply-side work of economists such as Lucas, Sargent, Wallace, and so many other freshwater macro theorists. Sadly, I got hung up on old-school Keynesian demand-side IS/LM-based theories that coveted things like Halls consumption function and the Phillips curve. These concepts are clearly failures. My economics training requires a complete pivot now. Thank you for helping me see the light.

I sincerely hope you can forgive me. I was completely wrong. Your efforts were truly Herculean during this difficult period. Thank you for your tireless efforts to keep long-run inflation expectations anchored. There is nothing more important for creating maximum sustainable long-run growth potential than low, stable, and anchored long-run inflation expectations. The American people are deeply indebted to you for keeping at it during this epic inflation battle.

With the deepest of both regret and sincerity,

[Insert a Jay-hater name here.]

Ice Cube, a musician who became famous rapping over samples, says A.I. is 'demonic' for doing a very similar thing

Hip-hop revolutionized pop culture almost exactly 50 years ago, and as it celebrated a half-century it suddenly looks old enough to get disrupted itself. Its an art form famously based on preexisting material, as the earliest rappers would rhyme over pastiches of vinyl records with certain breaks repeated on a loop. The emergence of generative A.I. is making songs based off unauthorized reproductions of famous artists voices and musical styles. Sound familiar? To Ice Cube, the Compton-born rapper who is one of the forefathers of modern hip-hop, this is downright demonic. He doesnt want to hear that the two scenarios are comparable.

The rise of creative artificial intelligence is starting to threaten musicians and artists, who are finding themselves in the crossfire of machines capable of generating text, sound, and images. Drake and The Weeknd are just some of the rappers who have had to listen to uncanny replicants of their voice generated by A.I., and even if computers havent produced a viral fake of his voice yet, Ice Cube already has a verdict on the age of A.I. in rap.

I think A.I. is demonic, he said on the Full Send podcast in an interview published last week. I think theres gonna be a backlash because of A.I. I think people are gonna want things organic and not artificial.

A.I. has become all the rage over the past six months, and scammers are taking full advantage. Synthesizing someone elses voice used to be a difficult technological hurdle, but modern A.I. systems only need a few audio samples to create voice clones of anybody, even celebrities. It gave rise to a spate of musical deepfakes, where even famous artists like Rihanna could find their vocals being used in a song they never recorded.

It sounds a lot like the common practice of sampling in hip-hops golden age in the 1970s, 80s and 90s. Sampling is a common practice in the music industry, when one artist completes their work with a digital piece of another sound recording, or a sample, which can be produced by a different artist.

Sampling was foundational to hip-hop in particular, as it allowed artists who maybe didnt know how to play an instrument but had an ear for a good beat to generate a hit song. Early hip-hop artists created the genre by pulling together samples from jazz, rock, and funk songs. New York Citys Beastie Boys, working with the master-samplers the Dust Brothers, released their second album in 1989, Pauls Boutique, an enduring cult classic that is 95% samples, according to Rolling Stone. The album would likely cost millions under todays sampling rules, and the flurry of lawsuits it generated turned other artists off wide uses of sampling.

Ice Cube is no stranger to sampling, as his hip-hop group N.W.A. notably sampled several oldie funk and soul songs in its debut album Straight Outta Compton. Sampling rules have become stricter over the past few decades after several lawsuits accusing artists of infringing copyright laws. The Beastie Boys were targeted by the Beatles who alleged unauthorized use of samples in their work. In the 90s, even Ice Cube was involved in a surprising legal fight over his debut solo album with none other than Mister Rogers, who claimed that one of Ice Cubes songs, A Gangstas Fairytale, used without permission a sample of the educational childrens show Mister Rogers Neighborhoods opening.

Sampling, A.I. and their intersection with the law are a live issue. A Supreme Court decision this month ruled that artist Andy Warhol infringed on copyright laws when he reworked a photograph of the late musician Prince, a precedent experts say will make it more difficult for artists to borrow others work in the future.

But many samplings are still acquired with permission from copyright holders, while even several instances where short samples were taken without permission have been deemed acceptable under fair use laws. In his podcast interview, Ice Cube perhaps surprisingly revealed himself to be a supporter of litigation over unauthorized sampling, and applied this to A.I.

Its like a sample. I mean someone cant take your original voice and manipulate it without having to pay, he said. If I dont pay for it, that is stealing.

Ice Cube said that if he were to be targeted by an A.I. voice replicant, he wouldnt hesitate to sue whoever programmed the A.I. and whoever played his illicitly borrowed voice. Other artists have been on board with A.I.-generated content using their voiceas long as they get paid for it. Pop musician Grimes tweeted last month that she supported killing copyright and invited A.I. to use her voice without penalty, setting out terms for 50% royalties on any successful A.I.-generated song that uses my voice.

But even a royalty windfall might not be enough to get Ice Cube on board with the technologizing music industry, as he set aside time in his interview to criticize artists increasingly resorting to digital crutches in their work.

The artists are getting lost in Autotune, and now that they have A.I., he said. I think people dont want a computerized rapper no more. They want to hear their voice. I dont hear any rappers by their voice no more.

You may soon have to pay more to ride New York's subways, trains, and buses under the first proposed price hike since 2019

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is planning to boost its fares and tolls in late August as the largest US transit provider looks to collect more revenue to help close budget deficits.

The MTA, which operates New York Citys transit network, is considering boosting the cost of a single subway or bus ride to $2.90, up from $2.75. A seven-day unlimited pass would cost $1 more at $34, according to details presented Monday to MTA board members during a finance committee meeting.

Commuter rail fares would go up by as much as 4.6%, with monthly passes costing no more than $500.

The farebox increases would be the first since 2019 as the MTA avoided boosting such fees during the pandemic. Toll crossings would increase by as much as 10% without an E-ZPass or as much as 7% with an E-ZPass.

Its something we dont necessarily want to do, but it has to be done because thats what organizations like ours do, Neal Zuckerman, who chairs the finance committee, said during the meeting about the anticipated fare and toll increases.

MTA expects the new charges to bring in $305 million of additional revenue each year. It needs the extra cash as ridership has yet to match pre-pandemic levels. Weekday subway ridership is about 70% of what it was in 2019. Systemwide ridership may only reach 80% of pre-pandemic usage by the end of 2026, the MTA estimates.

The MTA anticipates holding public hearings in June on the fare hikes, with the agencys board potentially voting on the increases in July. Drivers and riders may start paying the higher tolls and fares in late August, Jai Patel, the MTAs deputy chief financial officer, said during the meeting.

State lawmakers last month agreed to increase the payroll tax on the citys largest businesses to raise $1.1 billion annually for the MTA and to direct a one-time $300 million in aid to the agency. That additional revenue along with the fare and toll increases and $400 million of annual operating efficiencies will help resolve budget gaps that were expected to grow to $3 billion by 2025.

The transit agency would also begin receiving in 2026 as much as $700 million a year in gaming revenue from three potential downstate casino developments.

This region is so fortunate to have a transportation system like we have and we cannot let it fall down, Andrew Albert, an MTA board member, said during the meeting. We must keep it going. We must improve the service.

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Gen Z is 'caught in a whammy between COVID and ChatGPT'

Managers have spent the past few years airing their frustrations about their Gen Z workers, lamenting that theyve been leading the pack in the Great Resignation, quiet quitting, and flexible work demands unheard of in pre-pandemic times. But theres a lot more to the situation than the seemingly apathetic and disloyal young worker meets the eye.

Gen Z workers are caught in a whammy between COVID and ChatGPT, Melissa Swift, transformation leader at consulting firm Mercer, recently told the Financial Times. Graduating into the pandemic, she said, left them in the wilderness. At the time, the unemployment rate was the highest it had been since the Great Depression, leaving new grads struggling to gain a foothold in their careers.

While the unemployment rate has since rebounded (it hit the lowest its been since the 1970s last year) and the generation was able to get back on the career path, many Gen Zers have only worked in a remote world; their vastly different entry points have created a deep disconnect, resulting in a lack of mentorship opportunities, mismatched expectations, and even more granular things like difficulties deciphering tone and context over Slack.

It doesnt help that artificial intelligence like ChatGPT threatens to undermine many entry-level tasks and rolesthat upends much of the work early career professionals used to do as they learned the tricks of the trade, Swift said. No wonder about 40% of workers who are familiar with ChatGPT are concerned the chatbot will replace their jobs completely, per a March 2023 Harris poll.

As a result of these compounding factors, Swift said Gen Z has developed a slate of unusual needs of extra support and deeper mentorship, setting them apart from any prior generation of workers. Its created a perfect storm for discordance with their tired managers, she added. Indeed, Gen X and millennial managers are facing historic levels of burnout, which has left them with vanishingly little free time to train their direct reports, much less take a full audit of what their early workplace experience looks and feels like.

Thats a shame, because they actually have a lot in common with their Gen Z reports. Gen Xers, who began their careers during the dot-com bubble often leaned towards work that aligned with their values, much like Gen Z is doing now. It marked a generational shift in how we view work that remain with us in the present, Jeffrey Arnett, a psychologist and senior research scholar at Clark University, told Fortunes Hillary Hoffower. That means Gen Zs attitude toward work isnt just shaped by generational identity and their experiences, but by their life stage.

But middle managers are missing a critical moment to recognize and relate to such common gripes because their hands are full trying to manage persistent labor shortages raise demands during high inflation and raise demands during high inflation, all while implementing the C-suites return-to-office mandates.

The ensuing burnout is having real ripple effects: Nearly half (46%) of middle managers say its likely theyll quit their jobs within a year because of work-related stress, according to a 3,400-person survey by the Workforce Institute at UKG.

The chronic anxiety that comes from working through one global crisis after another is wearing on employees, Jarik Conrad, executive director of The Workforce Institute, said at the time. Being overwhelmed consumes human energy and impacts retention, performance, innovation, and culture.

Indeed, middle managers often serve as an organizations shock absorber, equally impacted byand responsible forthe newest workers needs and the most senior workers demands. The O.C. Tanner Institutes 2023 Global Culture report found that bosses consistently report worse work experiences than that of their direct reports.

While a pay bump wouldnt hurt the matter, higher salaries dont compensate for a lack of appreciation, Gary Beckstand, O.C. Tanners VP, wrote for Fortune. Non-monetary recognition is essential, he said. It creates a lasting impact when its personal, sincere, and tied to ones efforts or achievements. Middle managers are often asked to recognize each of their team members unique contributions, Beckstand went on. They, too, should be on the receiving end of thoughtful recognition.

Thats an idea Gen Z can get behind; for all the hand-wringing over their insistence on bucking tradition, they actually want to go into the officeand receive that recognition, mentorship, connection, and hands-on educationmore than anyone. Who knows; maybe over an in-person coffee, those young workers and their older bosses will get talking, and realize they have more in common than they couldve guessed.

Scientists can now measure the intensity of chronic pain using your brain signals

Pain is one of the most important and basic subjective experiences a person can have. While there is plenty of evidence that perception of pain takes place in the brain, there is also a major knowledge gap regarding where and how pain signals are processed in the brain. Even though pain is universal, there has not been a way to objectively measure its intensity.

Most prior studies on the brain signals responsible for pain have relied on laboratory experiments in artificial environments. Until now, most research on chronic pain has used indirect measures of brain activity such as functional magnetic resonance imaging or electroencephalography. Furthermore, although doctors widely recognize that chronic pain is not just an extension of acute pain like stubbing your toe it remains unknown how the brain circuits behind acute and chronic pain relate to each other.

Our study was part of a larger clinical trial aimed at developing a new brain stimulation therapy to treat severe chronic pain. My team surgically implanted electrodes in the brains of four patients with post-stroke pain and phantom limb pain to record neural signals in their orbitofrontal cortex, an area of the brain associated with planning and expectation, and cingulate cortex, an area associated with emotion.

We asked the patients about their pain severity levels several times a day for up to six months. We then built machine learning models to try to match and predict each patients self-reported pain intensity scores with snapshots of their brain activity signals. These brain signals consisted of electrical waves that could be decomposed into different frequencies, similar to how a musical chord can be broken down into individual sounds of different pitches. From these models, we found that low frequencies in the orbitofrontal cortex corresponded with each of the patients subjective pain intensities, providing an objective measure of chronic pain. The larger the shift in low-frequency activity we measured, the more likely the patient was experiencing intense pain.

Next, we wanted to compare the relationship between chronic pain and acute pain. We examined how the brain responded to short-term, intense pain caused by applying heat to the patients bodies. Based on data from two participants, we found that the anterior cingulate cortex was more involved in processing acute pain than chronic pain. This experiment provides the first direct evidence that chronic pain involves information-processing areas of brain distinct from those involved in acute pain.

Why it matters

Chronic pain, defined as pain lasting more than three months, affects up to 1 in 5 people in the U.S. In 2019, the incidence of chronic pain was more common than that of diabetes, high blood pressure or depression.

Neuropathic pain resulting from damage to the nervous system, such as stroke and phantom limb pain, often doesnt respond to available treatments and can significantly impair physical and emotional function and quality of life. Better understanding how to measure brain activity to track pain could improve the diagnosis of chronic pain conditions and help develop new treatments such as deep brain stimulation.

What still isnt known

Although our study provides a proof of concept that signals from specific brain regions can serve as an objective measure of chronic pain, it is more likely that pain signals are distributed over a wide brain network.

We still dont know what other brain regions may harbor important pain signals that may more accurately reflect subjective pain. It is also unclear whether the signals we found would apply to patients with other pain conditions.

Whats next

We hope to use these newly discovered neural biomarkers to develop personalized brain stimulation as a way to treat chronic pain disorders. This approach involves incorporating signals into tailored algorithms that would govern the timing and location of brain stimulation on demand, similar to how a thermostat operates.

Prasad Shirvalkar, Associate Professor of Anesthesia, University of California, San Francisco

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Parents launch a legal war on woke at elite schools for 'indoctrinating their kids with their 'preferred political fad of the moment'

When Jerome Eisenberg enrolled his daughter at the Brentwood School in Los Angeles, where Adam Levine met some of his Maroon 5 bandmates, the investment manager says he expected her to get a traditional liberal arts education.

But after the murder of George Floyd, the $50,000-a-year school said it was reimagining its purpose with an eye toward anti-racism and diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI. In Eisenbergs view, Brentwood was pulling a bait and switch on parents. He sued the school last year for breach of contract, civil rights violations and emotional distress.

The curriculum change shifted away from teaching students critical thinking skills how to think and started indoctrinating them into what to think, based on Brentwoods preferred political fad of the moment, Eisenberg said in his lawsuit.

Brentwood succeeded in having the suit sent to private arbitration in November. A representative of the school declined to comment.

War on Woke

Republican politicians like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis have pushed laws to curtail instruction in gender, sexuality and racial identity in public schools. Private schools arent subject to those laws, but that doesnt mean theyre immune to the culture war. Conservative-leaning parents have voiced opposition in other ways, including by filing lawsuits.

There is an increased appetite for parents using the legal process to fight for their kids in a way that just wasnt as prevalent before, said Sara Goldsmith Schwartz, of Andover, Massachusetts-based Schwartz Hannum PC, who frequently represents private schools.

David Pivtorak, a lawyer for Eisenberg, also said he believes legal complaints against private schools over DEI have increased, though he added that the true number may be understated because of arbitration clauses like the one at Brentwood.

Others see a distortion. Jin Hee Lee, director of strategic initiatives at the NAACPs Legal Defense Fund, said the pitched legal and political battles are painting a misleading picture about opposition to DEI instruction.

The majority of parents want their children to attend a school that is diverse and inclusive, Lee said, and the majority of Americans understand that we have a very tragic legacy of slavery and Jim Crow and racial subjugation that were still dealing with in this country.

Breach of Contract

Parents determined to challenge private school teaching and policies face a number of obstacles. Public school parents can argue that the government is infringing on their First Amendment rights by forcing DEI or similar instruction on their children. Parents largely waive those rights when they enroll their kids in private schools.

Private schools are bound by their own policies and not the US Constitution, said Jennifer Rippner, a law lecturer at Indiana University, Bloomingtons School of Education.

When parents do sue private schools, its usually for breach of contract, according to New Hampshire education lawyer Linda Johnson, who represents independent schools and consults with them on managing their legal risk. The process sometimes starts off with a 10-page, single-space letter addressing everything that the parent thought the school did wrong to try to justify a repayment of tuition, she said.

Many of the disputes arise out of school disciplinary action, Johnson said. In the current environment, that can have political overtones.

Manhattans $60,000-a-year Spence School, Gwyneth Paltrows alma mater, was sued in 2019 by Adam and Michelle Parker after their daughter was disciplined for posting on Instagram a text exchange in which she and some friends joked about dressing up as enslaved and indigenous people for Halloween.

Her punishment was a half day of in-home reflection, and the school had multiple grade-wide assemblies to go over what she had done, according to the Parkers lawsuit.

False Narrative

The Parkers say their daughter was mocking, not exhibiting, racism. They allege that Spence disciplined the girl before even seeing the post and perpetuated a false narrative after they saw it. According to the suit, the school admitted to the Parkers that it had gotten it wrong and that Spence failed to convene a community standards committee as stipulated in their enrollment contract.

The suit was dismissed in 2020. Then, last year, a New York appeals court revived a breach-of-contract claim, keeping out allegations of slander, libel and emotional distress.

A lawyer for Spence declined to comment, and lawyers for the Parkers didnt respond to requests for comment.

Johnson said suits focused narrowly on unequal or arbitrary discipline can succeed. If the handbook lays out guidelines for infractions but doesnt have a disclaimer that we maintain the flexibility to handle them the way we think is necessary under the circumstances, the school may be legally exposed, she said.

When it comes to parents challenging private school curricula they see as misguided, Steven Ludwig, a Philadelphia-based education lawyer, said he doesnt see a viable legal path. After all, the parents made the decision to send their children to that school.

If a person doesnt like what is being taught, they can go somewhere else, Ludwig said.

Where to Go?

Thats not always so easy. Private schools that have embraced DEI are frequently also those with the strongest academic reputations and the best records of placing graduates in Ivy League and other elite colleges which themselves have been criticized as bastions of wokeness. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, a noted anti-DEI crusader, was called out for hypocrisy when it emerged that he sent his daughters to a Houston prep school that teaches DEI.

Former investment banker Andrew Gutmann caused a stir two years ago when he wrote a letter to other parents at Manhattans Brearley School urging them to reject Brearleys obsession with race and saying he was pulling his daughter, Lauren, from the top-ranked school, where tuition is about $60,000.

Brearley head Jane Fried shot out an email calling the letter deeply offensive and harmful and reaffirming the schools commitment to being inclusive and antiracist.

Gutmann said in an interview that his family wasnt looking for a conservative education. He said they just want what anybody wouldve used to call a traditional liberal arts education.

A representative of Brearley didnt respond to a request for comment.

Parents Movement

Since withdrawing Lauren from Brearley, Gutmann said, it has been nearly impossible to find a school that challenges his daughter academically but isnt politicized. He tried a small private school in New Jersey and then another in Florida before opting to home-school her this year. He plans to send her to a British boarding school in the fall.

Gutmann clearly has no regrets. Now living in Boca Raton, Florida, he is even running for Congress on the issue, as a Republican in Floridas 22nd congressional district which, he notes, includes Donald Trumps Mar-a-Lago estate. His primary campaign announcement starts by recounting his letter to Brearley.

My words were read by millions of people across America, and they helped ignite what we now call the parents movement and the fight against woke education, Gutmann said in the announcement. He name-checked other groups he said he was proud to call allies, including Moms for Liberty. The Florida-based parents rights group has been at the forefront of efforts to ban certain books and gain control of school boards for conservatives.

Awake to Failure

We have a nation thats awake now to the rampant educational failure thats happening in our schools, and the fact that theyve become indoctrination centers instead of places of learning, said Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice.

Lee of the NAACPs Legal Defense Fund thinks the opposite is true.

Its not as if school districts and private schools are necessarily doing all they should be doing when it comes to race equity or having a more inclusive or representative curriculum, she said. Theres actually more that they should be doing, but what little they are doing is now under attack.

Although the efforts of Justice and other conservative activists focus on public schools, Myra McGovern, a spokesperson for the National Association of Independent Schools which counts Brentwood, Spence, Brearley and the Dalton School among its members said private schools cant help but be affected as well.

Every school across America, and in many ways around the world, is dealing with this increased polarization, McGovern said.

In her Massachusetts law practice, Schwartz sees that too. Short of lawsuits, private schools have had to deal with an incredible increase in the intensity, velocity and volume of complaints generally, from students, parents and alums, she said. The world is frazzled.

California foie gras fans are out of luck after law barring the sale of the delicacy avoids a Supreme Court review

The Supreme Court said Monday it wont get involved in a dispute over a California animal cruelty law that bars foie gras from being sold in the state, leaving in place a lower court ruling dismissing the case.

Foie gras is made from the enlarged livers of force-fed ducks and geese, and animal welfare groups had supported the law. As is typical, the court did not comment in declining to hear the case, and it was among many the court said Monday it would not hear.

The law doesnt completely bar Californians from eating foie gras in the state. Courts have ruled that residents can still order foie gras from out-of-state producers and have it sent to them. Restaurants and retailers are still forbidden from selling it or giving it away, however.

The foie gras case had been on hold at the high court while the justices considered a different case involving another California animal cruelty law, that one governing the sale of pork in the state. In that case, the justices earlier this month backed that law, which requires more space for breeding pigs. The pork industry has said the ruling will lead to higher costs nationwide for pork chops and bacon.

Californias foie gras law, however, predates the pork law and went into effect in July 2012. It says: A product may not be sold in California if it is the result of force feeding a bird for the purpose of enlarging the birds liver beyond normal size.

Farmers and producers of poultry products in Canada sued over the law along with New York-based Hudson Valley Foie Gras. The case has been going on since 2012. Most recently, a trial court dismissed the case and a federal appeals court agreed with that outcome. The Supreme Courts decision not to step in leaves that decision in place.