On the M31

 Dear Diary:

I was on the M31 bus on the way home. I had a cane, and seemingly half of the other passengers had canes or walkers or were otherwise sitting appropriately in seats marked for the elderly or infirm.

An older woman got on and saw that there were no empty seats. She politely asked a teenage girl to give up her seat, which the girl did.

As she was getting off a few stops later, the older woman stopped to thank the girl.

“Someday you’ll be a senior,” she said. “And then you’ll understand.”

“That won’t be for a while,” the girl said. “I’m just a freshman.”

— Paula Gray Hunker

Colleges should consider advising applicants that in order to promote person to person communication cell phone use will be restricted

 

College Students Are Using ‘No Contact Orders’ to Block Each Other in Real Life

Originally meant to protect victims of sexual harassment or assault on campus, NCOs have become the go-to solution for a generation uncomfortable with face-to-face conflict.

By 

Pamela Paul

 | Illustrations by Carl Godfrey

June 6, 2025 7:55 pm ET

Mr. Musk’s might end as a failure and yet, for all that I am alarmed by the danger posed by such visionaries, he’s not wrong about the fragility of our planet. I don’t want to go to Mars, but I would like someone to. And I suppose that someone will have to be unusual, in good ways and bad. I’m reminded of what Mr. Musk once said during a monologue on “Saturday Night Live”: “To anyone I’ve offended, I just want to say, I reinvented electric cars, and I’m sending people to Mars in a rocket ship. Did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?”

 

How History Will Remember Elon Musk

By Louise Perry

Ms. Perry is a journalist based in Britain.

 

Don’t Just Fix Higher Education, Reconstitute It

The real threat to the existing system comes from the internet and AI, not Donald Trump.

By 

Philip Hamburger 

June 2, 2025 4:42 pm ET

Mr. Hamburger teaches at Columbia Law School and is CEO of the New Civil Liberties Alliance. He is the author of “Education Is Speech.”

China’s dominance is greatest for seven rare earths that it has mostly stopped exporting since early April: dysprosium, gadolinium, lutetium, samarium, scandium, terbium and yttrium. These are mined almost exclusively in China and Myanmar and are among the hardest to separate chemically. For metals like dysprosium and terbium, so-called heavy rare earths that are used for heat-resistant magnets, China’s refineries produce up to 99.9 percent of the world’s supply.

 

What to Know About China’s Halt of Rare Earth Exports

Since early April, China has stopped almost all shipments of critical minerals that are needed for cars, robots, wind turbines, jet fighters and other technologies.

By Keith Bradsher

Keith Bradsher, who has covered the rare earths industry since 2009, reported from Beijing and Longnan, China.

The Trump Always Chickens Out (TACO) trade.

899 — The Three Numbers Alarming the Bond Market

Taxing foreign capital could be another nail in the coffin of American exceptionalism. Emerging markets could benefit.

June 3, 2025 at 12:00 AM EDT

By John Authers

John Authers is a senior editor for markets and Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former chief markets commentator at the Financial Times, he is author of “The Fearful Rise of Markets.” 

OPINION

THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Trump’s Gilded Gut Instinct

Wall Street analysts recently began joking that the best way to predict the behavior of President Trump — and make money in the process — was by practicing the “TACO trade,” which stands for “Trump always chickens out.” You can always bet on Trump rolling back a reckless tariff.

Emerging Haven

Among the biggest and unlikeliest winners from the decline of American exceptionalism have been emerging-market currencies. The Trump Always Chickens Out (TACO) trade — a belief that tariffs won’t happen — has given them a tailwind to counteract the trade uncertainty.

European governments embarking on their largest rearmament since the Cold War have identified drones and counter-drone systems as an investment priority. The Pentagon in their latest budget proposal wants $2.7 Billion in the first year of development piloted F-47 fighter planes like The Navy thought Battleships were essential before Pearl Harbor

 Kyiv’s flying machines cost as little as $400 and can neutralize sophisticated Russian equipment worth thousands of times more.

By Aliaksandr Kudrytski, Jake Rudnitsky and Olesia Safronova

June 3, 2025 at 12:00 AM EDT