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Good morning,
Today, we’re looking at AI data centers (and the workers needed to build them), rising infant mortality rates, a documentary about the Hard Hat Riot, and a writer’s recent experience in Budapest.
Write to us at editors@city-journal.org with questions or comments.
In July, the White House released “Winning the Race: America’s AI Action Plan,” which spells out the Trump administration’s effort to develop “vast AI infrastructure.” To do that, the nation needs data centers. But we face a shortage of skilled-trade workers—the very people that companies need to build out AI infrastructure.
What is to be done about this shortage? City Journal contributing editor Mark P. Mills says that policymakers have three options: encouraging aging workers to stay in the workforce, filling the pipeline with new skilled-trade workers, or importing skilled labor from abroad. Read his thoughts on these choices here.
Mississippi recently declared a public health emergency after the state recorded a dramatic increase in infant mortality rates between 2023 and 2024. But Mississippi is not alone. Texas saw a similar spike between 2021 and 2022, and child and adolescent mortality rates have surged nationally.
According to Emily Putnam-Hornstein and Naomi Schaefer Riley, officials are missing a key contributor to rising infant mortality rates: maternal drug use. Having reviewed more than 3,500 cases of child maltreatment, Putnam-Hornstein and Riley point to the tenfold increase over the past decade in babies born with congenital syphilis, a malady strongly associated with maternal drug use.
“Given the growing movement to legalize drugs and a culture that seems increasingly accepting of drug use,” they write, “it is important to recognize the smallest victims of our addiction crisis.”
A new PBS American Experience documentary, Hard Hat Riot, looks back at a May 1970 clash between antiwar protesters and blue-collar construction workers on the steps of Federal Hall in Lower Manhattan. The documentary, based on David Paul Kuhn’s book of the same name, is timely in light of today’s rising political violence, writes Vincent J. Cannato.
It also contains a lesson for the Left: engaging in “cultural warfare that alienates ordinary Americans”—especially male, working-class voters without college degrees—is a recipe for political disaster.
“A liberalism that looks down on people it perceives as inferiors economically, socially, and culturally, will end up losing electorally,” writes Cannato.
Brian Patrick Eha transports us to Budapest, Hungary, in its sweltering summer months—stifling heat, few air conditioners, poor table service, and flies. “It was impossible to ignore the flies,” he writes.
The city may seem a singularly unaccommodating place—but only for the kind of tourist “who expects a foreign culture always to conform to his idea of creature comforts,” he writes.
For the more patient explorer, the kind willing to read a book to its end, the city reveals “its secret splendors.” Read more here.
“Daniel Diermeier sounds like a really sensible university president.
Neetu Arnold is also conducting a very sensible interview.”
Photo credits: The Washington Post / Contributor / The Washington Post via Getty Images
A quarterly magazine of urban affairs, published by the Manhattan Institute, edited by Brian C. Anderson.
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