Among the crowded field of contenders for the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee are four big-city mayors. Yet such candidates have little chance, in part because American cities are suffering from a myriad of afflictions, including gross income inequalities, which are driving out middle-class and working-class families. In a recent study, not one construction worker could afford a median-priced house in Los Angeles, San Francisco, or surrounding areas. In an essay with distinct overtones for Canadian big-city politics, Joel Kotkin argues in City Journal that for cities to remain emblematic of society, they need to attract and nurture the middle-class.

A Spite That Knows No Bounds
Gratingly awful global scold Greta Thunberg’s latest stunt is to turn on her own motherland. Sweden has been very good to her, but the former social-democratic paradise’s mugging by the realities of uncontrolled immigration do not sit well with the keffiyeh-clad rabblerouser. “For years, Sweden took more asylum seekers per capita than any other country in Europe,” writes Fredrik Karrholm in The Spectator. “Now asylum numbers have fallen to their lowest level since 1985.”


