COLD SPRING SHOPS.

[Carnegie Science Center curator Nikki] Wilhelm picks up a red covered bridge from a shelf and turns it upside down. “I’ll show you something cool that Charlie Bowdish built. You see this bridge? Well, it was made from a Milk-Bone box,” she said, pointing to the label from the dog bone company inside the bridge.

“You really just have to let your imagination run wild because you wouldn’t believe the things you can use to make something: the row houses that we have from the Liverpool streets in Manchester, the intricate detail work on the porches — that’s just made from angel hair pasta,” she explained. “The trees are made from dried wild, hydrangea flowers.”

The popularity of model railroading has stood the test of time in part because hobbyists each bring a different skill set to the craft, which in turn helps develop others: Artisans love building the model scenery; history buffs enjoy researching and recreating places long gone; engineering types enjoy designing the tracks; and techies love the technological advances in electronics, wiring and the ability to run your train from an app on your smart phone.

When Bowdish was asked, in one of his final interviews before passing in 1988, why he continued the exacting, painstaking work year after year, he said: “Everyone regardless of their status in life, reaches out towards life’s ultimate achievement — happiness … privileges, money and possessions are useless unless they make a man happy. To those who have been bored and sickened by the monotony of work in offices, sales, fields and factories, where the only evidence of a day’s work is a headache, nothing to exhibit to friends, nothing to view with pride as an example of skill or handiwork — to those people I say ‘You should have a hobby.’”

George [Bailey played by James Stewart] represents the vision of post-war America: the ambition to alter the landscape so as to accommodate modern life, to uproot nature and replace it with monuments of human accomplishment, to re-engineer life for mobility and swiftness, one unencumbered by permanence, one no longer limited to a moderate and comprehensible human scale.

George’s great dreams are thwarted by innumerable circumstances of fate and accident and he remains in Bedford Falls. Most of the film portrays a re-telling of various episodes of George’s life for the benefit of a guardian angel—Clarence Oddbody (Henry Travers)—who is sent down to earth to attempt to save George during his greatest test.

While George’s grandiose designs are thwarted, he does not cease to be ambitious, and does not abandon the dream of transforming America, even if his field of dreams is narrowed.

Claudine is a remarkable leader who is profoundly devoted to sustaining and enhancing Harvard’s academic excellence, to championing both the value and the values of higher education and research, to expanding opportunity, and to strengthening Harvard as a fount of ideas and a force for good in the world. . . . As her many admirers know, Claudine consults widely; she listens attentively; she thinks rigorously and imaginatively; she invites collaboration and resists complacency; and she acts with conviction and purpose. . . . Claudine’s own scholarship and teaching have focused on aspects of democracy—political participation, voting behavior, public opinion, and the interplay of race, ethnicity, and politics in America.

We make the case that public universities must serve as good stewards of taxpayer money, and those that are putting students on career paths where they’re unlikely to be able to pay their student loans ought to be held accountable. Moreover, universities should aid in solving the growing workforce crisis by steering students towards careers where there are shortages in the state. Using extensive data on college defaults and the return-on-investment from various degrees, we highlight the schools and programs that are a net positive for would-be college students, and those that are not.

It didn't help any that Chicago's rookie mayor, Lori Lightfoot, decided that denouncing "vigilantes" was more important than, oh, securing the oases in what would become a food desert.

Two years ago, Target took some stick for pulling stores out of Chicago's south side neighborhoods.  Those were underperforming, according to business metrics, but not under attack by looters.  Today, though, the rookie mayor is not in a good place.  Here's a headline.  "Mayor Lightfoot Pleads With Walmart, Other Retailers To Not Abandon Chicago."  It continues,  "There were earlier reports that Walmart expected to rebuild all stores trashed by looters and vandals, but company officials later said they would open some stores and would not say which ones."  I don't know, if I've had to jump through all sorts of hoops and take all sorts of abuse just to open a store in a city, and then the residents trash it, well, I might be considering a more tactful way of telling the mayor what she told Our [then -- Ed.] President.

City building games have gotten ever more intricate. But if it's realism you want, you can't go wrong with Sim Nimby. The online parody of Sim City doesn't have particularly impressive graphics or great gameplay. But it does teach users what it's like to be a big city developer in the real world of intrusive government driven by overreaching neighbors.

Anyone trying to construct an apartment building, road, or rail network will get hit with a series of obstructing pop-ups screaming "Won't someone think of the property values!," "Keep our local fiefdom weird!," or "Live, laugh, love showing up to these town halls and stopping your building." Eventually the player realizes nothing is getting built and quits.

To provide more predictability in road freight service, [Union Pacific] is working with the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen on the pilot program that lets engineers know when they’ll work every 15 days.

Under the “11 and four” schedule, engineers know which 11 days they’ll work and which four days they’ll be off during every 15-day period, [vice president of operations Eric] Gehringer told an investor conference on Tuesday.

“It’s something we have to do through the collective bargaining agreement. We can’t just instantly put that across the system,” Gehringer says, adding that he’s excited to see what the results will be over the 60 days left in the pilot program.

UP is nearing its goal of hiring 1,400 train and engine employees this year, Gehringer says, with two-thirds of the new hires in active service and one-third in training.

But the railroad remains short of crews across its northern tier and is offering hiring bonuses of $10,000 to $25,000 to new conductors at some locations, including Cheyenne and Green River, Wyo.; Salt Lake City and Helper, Utah; Portland, Ore.; and Seattle.

“We still have those pockets where we are constrained,” Gehringer says. UP aims to hire about 500 additional conductor trainees this year.

Getting back to full strength on train crew staffing levels will improve service and help UP be more resilient when extreme weather or other events hit the railroad, UP executives say.

If the economy softens and freight demand drops, UP will use furloughs as a last resort so that it has enough crews to handle a rebound, Gehringer says. “That’s not a tool that we employ without thinking very carefully through that, because what we want to be most prepared for is when the demand shifts. We want to be able to capture that without missing a beat,” Gehringer says.

A law professor at George Washington University and a commentator on free speech issues wrote that the jury made the right decision.

“Professor Stern went public with his view that the university was using the College of Liberal Arts’ Public Administration major to offer athletes an easy education, particularly as part of the school’s famed football program,” Jonathan Turley, a constitutional law expert, wrote November 18 on his blog.

Turley wrote that while it is commendable when professors have the courage to voice dissenting views, Stern’s criticism of the prestigious Auburn football program “takes an unparalleled level of chutzpah.”

“The decision is a substantial victory for free speech,” Turley wrote.

Stern became something of a thorn in Auburn’s side in 2008, when he worked with a local reporter on a story alleging that Auburn was accepting money from the Charles Koch Foundation in ways that undermined the economics department’s academic integrity. In retaliation for Stern’s internal and external activism, Auburn in 2009 suddenly moved the department of economics out of the College of Business and into the College of Liberal Arts, the lawsuit said. Around this time, Stern’s new dean allegedly opposed his tenure bid, as did the provost, contradicting the positive recommendation of his department. Stern’s tenure was granted by appeal, in 2010.

Later that year, Stern was elected chair of the economics department. He eventually developed a good rapport with his new dean, but that dean was “run off” in 2013 over a then-quiet dispute about whether to keep the public administration major open at the behest of Auburn’s athletics programs, according to the lawsuit. A new dean, Joseph Aistrup, was appointed.

Football player and mathematician John Urschel, who at the time was playing for the NFL’s Baltimore Ravens and who has no connection to Auburn, raised the issue in late 2014, however, arguing in a blog post that that the high density of Auburn players majoring in public administration only had a one in three undecillion chance of occurring randomly.

"A stunning 23 out of the 48 upperclassmen student athlete football players are enrolled in public administration," Urschel wrote. "Logically, it must be a fairly common major, right? This is where things take a turn for the worse. As of last spring, only 88 of the 11,402 upperclassmen in the whole university were majoring in public administration!"

In other words, Stern's lawsuit said, “pretty low odds" that this was random.

Stern shared some of this information with The Wall Street Journal, which published an explosive article just ahead of 2015’s football season. The article said that in 2013 about half of students majoring in public administration at Auburn played sports, including nearly all the top players on the football team. The Journal quoted emails from athletics officials internally lobbying for the major, as well. In one case, an official wrote that “If the public administration program is eliminated, the [graduation success rate] numbers for our student-athletes will likely decline.” In another, an athletics official seemed to be offering money to fund the public administration program, which Stern considered an “institutional bribe.” Stern was quoted in the Journal as describing Auburn athletics as a “second university” in its power.

President Joe Biden has directed the Democratic National Committee to reduce the danger that progressives might effectively challenge him in the 2024 presidential primaries. That’s a key goal of his instructions to the DNC last week, when Biden insisted on dislodging New Hampshire—the longtime first-in-the-nation primary state where he received just 8 percent of the vote and finished fifth in the 2020 Democratic primary. No wonder Biden wants to replace New Hampshire with South Carolina, where he was the big primary winner.

The White House and mainstream journalists have echoed each other to assert that Biden would face no serious challenge to renomination if he runs again. But his blatant intrusion into the DNC’s process for setting the primary calendar is a sign of anxiety about potential obstacles to winning renomination.

Unlike all other states under consideration for early primaries, South Carolina is not a battleground state. Everyone knows that the Democratic ticket won’t come close to winning in deep-red South Carolina in 2024. But that state—which Biden obviously sees as vital to his renomination—has a party apparatus dominated by Biden’s powerful corporatist ally, Congressman James Clyburn.

From health care, extreme economic inequality, labor rights and racial justice to military spending, foreign policy and the climate emergency, voters in Democratic primaries need to hear crucial issues debated.

The current prevailing attitudes are retrograde. While Democratic politicians and pundits weigh in on whether Biden should run for president again, his party’s voters are presumed to be little more than spectators. But the decision on whether Biden will be the nominee in 2024 shouldn’t be his alone. A party that has been emphasizing the importance of democracy should not be so eager to short-circuit it in the presidential nominating process.

Very few congressional Democrats have been willing to publicly depart from the party line that Biden would be a fine standard-bearer. The few dissenting voices among them are usually furtive.