The half-drawn horse of abundance

Plus: Weezer, Harvard dorms, social mobility, and the first female president

Next week, we’re going to do a twist on the mailbag by having our Writing Fellow Halina Bennet answer your questions. It’ll be a good opportunity to get to know her better — and to shake things up a bit. She’s been doing great work on everything from how chatbots are impacting our lives to detailed looks at SB 79 in California and how BEAD implementation is going now that the Trump administration is running the show.

The customary mailbag thread will go out on Sunday for paid subscribers, so ask your questions for Halina there.

I do also always want to encourage people to become paid members of Slow Boring. Halina joining the team is part of our effort to provide as much value as we can for your subscription. More revenue lets us offer more to our members. I also think the mailbags as such are a fun membership feature that we maybe don’t always talk about. I know there are more newsletters than ever out there now, but I do think we have a somewhat unique offering here focused on a more analytic approach to politics and policy than you typically see in a world increasingly defined by vertical video.

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Brian: In the past, you’ve argued that elite universities like Harvard will never be an engine of social mobility because, regardless of the fact that college admissions can be made fairer, the highest achieving students come from affluent backgrounds. How do you reconcile this point with the fact that selective, elite public schools like Stuyvesant High School are overwhelmingly comprised of students from disadvantaged backgrounds?

I think that’s a little bit overstated. From what I see, 49 percent of Stuyvesant is made up of students from economically disadvantaged households. But even without overstatement, I do think it’s a good counterexample to my analysis.