From The Branch in partnership with The 74 and MeidasTouch, Where the Schools Went is a five-part documentary series about what happened to the city’s schools after the levees broke, and how it led to the most radical education experiment in modern American history.

Listen to the trailer now.

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Through first-person accounts from residents and community leaders and a deep dive into the borough’s past, including how Staten Island came to house the largest garbage dump the world has ever seen, this series sets the stage for a broader exploration of how local grievances can reflect national divides.

Listen to episode one now wherever you get your podcasts.

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When a judge in India dies of a heart attack, his passing barely makes the news. But when his niece approaches a journalist two years later, she shares a much more mysterious story. Host Ravi Gupta examines the conflicting evidence in the judge’s death and the overarching threat to India’s democracy.

Listen to the series premiere of Killing Justice on May 27 on Spotify or Apple.

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We received such great feedback on this series that we decided to continue the conversation with guests like Isaac Saul from Tangle, Yascha Mounk, and Todd Rose. There’s more to come, so make sure to follow Lost Debate wherever you listen to podcasts.

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I’ve been getting many questions about my favorite resources on the Israel/Hamas war. The simplest answer is to go to Instagram and carefully read your friends’ paragraph-long statements and memes. 

Just kidding. Please don’t do that. Instead, consider the resources below.

Books

I noted on Lost Debate that books on this subject are notoriously untrustworthy. But here are my favorites:

• Enemies and Neighbors by the late Ian Black is perhaps my most-recommended comprehensive read on this subject. Black was a journalist for The Guardian, which generally takes a pro-Palestine bend. I do think he leans ever so slightly in that direction as he interprets key events, but the book is so comprehensive that most pro-Israel folks will find it a helpful resource.  
• Bibi by Anshel Pfeffer provides the best overview of the man who’s dominated Israel’s politics since I was in middle school. Pfeffer is a Haaretz journalist who’s been on the Bibi beat for a long time. 
• A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East by David Fromkin. It’s a deep dive into how the British Empire and other Western powers played their cards during and after WWI. Fromkin lays out how a mix of bad intel, sneaky politics, and flip-flopping decisions led to a shaky setup in the Middle East, forever changing the region after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. 
• Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001 by Benny Morris is perhaps the most hotly debated book on this list. Morris is one of the so-called “New Historians” who took advantage of documents declassified in the 1970s to challenge conventional narratives about the origins of Israel. The strength and weakness of this book is its level of detail. I wouldn’t start here, but I appreciate how Morris provides reams of primary source documentation, allowing you to make up your own mind. 
• Hamas: The Islamic Resistance Movement by Beverly Milton Edwards and Stephen Farrell is a comprehensive take on Hamas up until 2010. 
• Hamas Contained by Tareq Baconi is also helpful. As I noted in my Hamas episode, this book is up front about its opinions, which are more sympathetic to Hamas than I am. But I generally take the view that we can and should read books by people we disagree with – and this one unquestionably helped me develop a fuller picture of Hamas. 
• Salt Houses by Hala Alyan (who, in full disclosure, is sort of a relative of mine; her aunt married my uncle) unfolds a multigenerational story that captures life in Palestinian exile. She’s a great writer with a huge heart – and her account captures something the more didactic histories can’t. 

Podcasts

• The BBC Global News podcast is my go-to morning listen for up to date information. 
• Pod Save the World has done a few thorough episodes that capture the view of former Obama national security figures. 
• Thomas Friedman did a fascinating interview for the New York Times opinion podcast a month ago. I usually roll my eyes at Friedman, but this interview is great. 
• The folks at Triggernometry hosted a fascinating discussion between Sam Harris and Eric Weinstein. I don’t agree with everything said, but it was an enlightening listen. 
• Of course, if you haven’t listened yet, here are some Lost Debate episodes I’ve done on the subject:
  • Episode 1: History through 1996
  • Episode 2: 1997 to Present
  • Episode 3: Who is Hamas?
  • Episode 4: The current conflict (where I present my opinion)

Videos

• Frontline’s Netanyahu at War is by far the best contemporary docuseries I’ve seen on the subject. It’s one thing to read about events, but seeing the footage and hearing the rationales of key players will have an affect on you. 
• Frontline’s Shattered Dreams (from 2002) is also an excellent recap of the Oslo years. 
• Ian Bremmer took to Big Think to offer an hour-long explainer that’s pretty solid. 
• JFK Forum Debate. If you want a throwback, Noam Chomsky and Alan Dershowitz debated the conflict back in 2005. 

That’s all for now.

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In the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s recent affirmative action ruling, many progressives have responded with a flurry of proposals to push colleges to find alternative methods of pursuing racial equity. Common ideas include pushes to end legacy admissions, invest in more robust recruiting, increase enrollment, and strengthen wealth-based admissions preferences. I support most of those ideas — as we discussed recently on the Lost Debate — as do many experts across the political divide. 

However, a more polarizing and destructive response has been gaining steam in liberal circles. Many prominent commentators have called for an end to standardized tests. The most prominent form of this argument comes from Ibram X. Kendi, who had been calling for universities to abandon the SAT and ACT long before the ruling. In an Atlantic piece written days after the decision, Kendi once again laid out his argument:

When admissions metrics value SAT, ACT, or other standardized-test scores, they predict not success in college or graduate school, but the wealth or income of the parents of the test takers. . . . Standardized tests mostly favor students with access to score-boosting test prep. A multibillion-dollar test-prep and tutoring industry was built on this widespread understanding. Companies that openly sell their ability to boost students’ scores are concentrated in immigrant and Asian American communities. But some Asian American ethnic groups, having lower incomes, have less access to high-priced test-prep courses. 

The problem with Kendi’s argument is that he doesn’t discuss the alternatives to standardized tests, which are often even more regressive. I wrote about this issue in a recent article:

Do you know what else correlates with family income and education? Every alternative to standardized tests. This includes GPA, extracurricular access, the quality and quantity of letters of recommendation, college admissions editing and assistance, and connections to admissions offices. At least standardized testing is transparent and consistent. A student in Harlem is taking the same test as a student in Scarsdale. And though they won’t have the same access to resources to prepare, the tests are evaluated using the same criteria. The same can’t be said of many of the alternatives, which have all of the same resource inequities, but none of the objectivity on the back end. A student can have a 4.0 GPA at their zoned public school but may face college admissions officers who don’t respect that score as much as a 4.0 GPA at an elite private school. If that Harlem student sat for the same test and did better than that kid in Scarsdale, then that student from Harlem will get the admissions officer’s attention.

Now, thanks to a new comprehensive study from Raj Chetty’s team over at Opportunity Insights, we have data to demonstrate the difference between standardized tests and other measures. Here’s what his study had to say:

[O]ur results raise questions about the equity implications of holistic evaluation policies. Highly selective public colleges that follow more standardized processes to evaluate applications exhibit smaller disparities in admissions rates by parental income than private colleges that use more holistic evaluations. While holistic evaluations permit broader evaluations of diverse candidates in principle, in practice, they appear to create incentives and scope for students from high-income families to further differentiate themselves from others (e.g., by enrolling at private high schools that provide non-academic credentialing). Similar challenges may arise in many other settings where applicants are evaluated on complex criteria, from internships to job applications to memberships in selective clubs.

According to Chetty, these so-called holistic practices are “uncorrelated or negatively correlated with post-college outcomes, whereas SAT/ACT scores and academic credentials are highly predictive of post-college success.” 

So, not only do these squishy practices harm poor students, they also select for students who are less likely to succeed in life, which is precisely the opposite of what Kendi claims. 

Kendi also argues that standardized tests are racist: 

[T]he tests themselves have racist origins. Eugenicists introduced standardized tests a century ago in the United States to prove the genetic intellectual superiority of wealthy white Anglo-Saxon men. These “experimental” tests would show “enormously significant racial differences in general intelligence, differences which cannot be wiped out by any scheme of mental culture,” the Stanford University psychologist and eugenicist Lewis Terman wrote in his 1916 book, The Measurement of Intelligence. Another eugenicist, the Princeton University psychologist Carl C. Brigham, created the SAT test in 1926. SAT originally stood for “Scholastic Aptitude Test,” aptitude meaning “natural ability to do something.”

This is a textbook case of the genetic fallacy. If something originated from an invalid or illegitimate (or racist) source, then it must always be wrong. According to this logic, if Isaac Newton was racist, then gravity must be racist. Of course this is silly. But let’s pretend for the sake of argument that an idea with a racist past must always be racist. In that case, the subjective admissions policies that would become our sole criteria in Kendi’s world would also become suspect. 

During its early history, Harvard’s admissions were based purely on academic achievement. But in the 1920s, the rising number of Jewish students led to unease among the university’s leaders, prompting a shift towards a “policy of equal opportunity.” This involved adopting Columbia University’s application system, which evaluated “character” and “fitness,” and subtly included inquiries about “religious affiliation” and “mother’s maiden name.” Adopted across Ivy League universities, this change enabled Harvard to justify a nearly fifty percent reduction in Jewish students in subsequent years.

The difference between the alleged racist origins of standardized tests and the newer “holistic” admissions processes is that the universities have weakened the former in order to discriminate against students of color, most recently against Asian-Americans. And they have kept the latter, the holistic processes, to mask their discrimination. Meaning, this isn’t about the genetic origins of the practices; it’s about their modern form. Universities like Harvard had been using the subjective measures to punish a minority group until a lawsuit exposed their practices. 

At almost every turn of this debate, Kendi has it backward. The subjective measures aren’t the solution, they are the problem. They are the tools of the racists and elites. If we want to be truly anti-racist, we should preserve the tests and abandon anything that can’t be measured.

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