Required Reading

‣ The weird sales practices of Birkin bags are the stuff of legend and nightmares, so it’s interesting that there’s a class-action suit against Hermès over those same sales practices. For the Business of Fashion, Robert Williams has the story:

Counsel for the plaintiffs claim that Hermès is in violation of US antitrust regulations, which define certain practices of bundling goods or tying them to other purchases as an abuse of market power.

“The tying product, the Birkin Handbags, is separate and distinct from the tied products, the ancillary products required to be purchased by consumers,” the complaint reads. “Plaintiffs have alternative options for the ancillary products and would prefer to choose among them independently from their decision to purchase Birkin handbags.”

‣ David Friedlander writes for New York Magazine about the “transactional” government of the city’s mayor, Eric Adams:

“I think you are setting the example for the new kind of back-and-forth between government and industry,” Johnson said. “You are like the unicorn at the stuff that you do. Folks think that you are about fixing people’s problems. You do fix problems — but that is not the client you are trying to get or that WilmerHale is trying to get. We’re all trying to get clients who have to interact with the government because that is their industry, who care about their reputation with the government, and who care about their brand and the sustainability of their business. So onetime fixes, or fixing a parking ticket, doesn’t do anything for anybody. But having a situation where you have a different kind of car that you can park in different places, consistent with the law? That’s durability.”

If Johnson’s vehicular metaphor wasn’t entirely clear, the upshot of his tribute was unmistakable: Far from being a liability or something to be ashamed of, Carone’s spin through the revolving door is something to be celebrated in the Adams era. After 20 years in which mayors Bloomberg and de Blasio made an effort toward transparency and good government, the people now running New York are grubbier, more transactional, and not at all embarrassed about it. Not since Ed Koch has the pay-for-play spirit been so manifest.

“I have been able to make great friends and good relationships in City Hall,” Carone said. “And the circle grows.” Johnson got up to leave, and Carone called after him: “That other topic. Let’s follow up on it.”

‣ An Austrian political scientist filed the $10 million lawsuit against George Washington University and Lorenzo Vidino, the director of its program on extremism, for an alleged disinformation campaign financed by the United Arab Emirates, which the case says has been seeding false narratives that linked academics to a radical group in the Middle East. Arthur MacMillan and Anuj Chopra of Yahoo! News reports:

Hafez, a visiting professor at Williams College in Massachusetts, was detained in 2020 during Operation Luxor, a series of police raids against Austrian Muslims and businesses. No one who was implicated was convicted, and the operation was ruled unlawful in 2021.

Hafez said he was ensnared in the police action in Austria because of a report by Vidino.

A contractual agreement seen by AFP shows Vidino was paid to provide “leads of interest” to Alp, which the Swiss company used as part of its apparent disinformation operation on behalf of the UAE.

“My client’s life was destroyed by the activities conducted against him by GWU, Vidino, and Alp Services,” David Schwartz, Hafez’s New York-based lawyer, told AFP.

‣ Anna Kodé takes a closer look at the patterns unfolding beneath our feet on the sidewalks lining Central Park for the New York Times:

“Sidewalks are the ultimate public space,” said Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, a professor of urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles who wrote a book about them. “They exemplify openness and democracy. They’re supposed to be the most public of public spaces. To be that, they really have to be open and accessible to everyone, regardless of age, gender, disability, race, ethnicity — all the variables.”

Sidewalks have many more uses today than they did when they were first becoming widespread in the United States in the 19th century, Dr. Loukaitou-Sideris said, pointing to electric scooters, delivery robots, people using Google Maps on foot, people waiting for Ubers, and restaurants expanding onto the sidewalk. “There are all these new uses that have been brought about by digital technology and the pandemic,” she said. “Sidewalks are becoming more important than what they have been, and it might be a new era for sidewalks.”

New Yorkers, who are often credited with turning ordinary necessities into spectacular amenities, can transform the sidewalk into a stage, a marketplace or even a five-star restaurant.

‣ Writing in Time magazine, Nicholas Kryczka, Whitney E. Barringer, Scott McFarlane, and James R. Grossman of the American Historical Association provide evidence that most middle and high school teachers history teachers strive to keep their lessons politically neutral:

Across multiple interviews, teachers repeated their shared commitment to keeping a political poker face in the classroom. Teachers we surveyed strongly agreed on the top goals of social studies education: critical thinking (97% of respondents) and informed citizenship (94% of respondents). History teachers instruct and inspire, but they do not indoctrinate.

‣ Writing for the LA Times, Christopher Knight gives us his opinion about the expansion at the Broad Museum in downtown Los Angeles, and don’t miss this line:

The conceit of a vanity museum’s design being dubbed “the veil and the vault,” with a perforated exterior draped over a treasury for a private collection being made public, was always more pretentious than meaningful.

‣ The US Supreme Court ruled that elected officials cannot block critics on social media channels. Jacob Sallum of Reason reports:

When Donald Trump was president, he provoked a First Amendment lawsuit by banning critics from his Twitter account. “Once the President has chosen a platform and opened up its interactive space to millions of users and participants,” the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit ruled in 2019, “he may not selectively exclude those whose views he disagrees with.” Although that case became moot after Trump left office, the issues it raised have come up repeatedly across the country because public officials, regardless of their political party, are united in resenting criticism and often prefer to silence irksome constituents rather than simply ignoring them.

In two unanimous decisions published on Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court held that such blocking can violate the First Amendment and clarified the standard for determining when it does. The justices did not actually resolve either case, instead sending them back to the lower courts for reconsideration in light of its newly announced guidelines.

‣ Brian Morabito decided to create a funny narrative around an Old Masters painting that appears to be in a North Carolina museum (but we weren’t able to identify it):