The New Yorker has published a "humor" essay headlined "Jared Kushner's Harvard Admissions Essay." It reads in part:

My favorite color is green, like money. My favorite shape is rectangle, like money. I also like round, which is like some kinds of money that poor people use for littering in fountains...Here are some things I want to be when I grow up: a fireman, an astronaut, a business boy, a fire truck, a thousand-dollar bill. If you would like some more money, here is some more money!

Why, one wonders, would the New Yorker riff on the idea that Jared Kushner is obsessed with money? It seems to me that if anything his behavior — stepping away from his business to devote himself first to his father-in-law's presidential campaign, then to national service — is characteristic of someone who has other priorities. If President Trump made this sort of stereotype-driven comment about a prominent Jewish person, the New Yorker would probably accuse him of anti-Semitism.

Amazon's announcement of a search for a what it is calling a second headquarters site somewhere in North America is intriguing. I live in Boston, which recently lured GE with a combination of special tax incentives and the city's pre-existing charms. I'd be happy to see Amazon come here so long as the tax breaks aren't a total giveaway. But if I had to predict or bet, I'd suspect that the company winds up choosing Washington, D.C., Virginia, or Maryland.

Jeff Bezos just spent $23 million on a 27,000-square-foot building in Washington, D.C., that he intends to convert into a single-family home, according to a report in the Washington Post newspaper, which Bezos owns.

1. The New York Times is terrible.

2. So is James Comey.

Details are in the Times report on Mrs. Clinton's new book, What Happened.

Why is it so hard to reduce federal spending? Even the most seemingly expendable federal agencies somehow find allies, even among putative conservatives. So, of all places, the Heritage Foundation fetches up defending taxpayer funding of the U.S. Institute of Peace, contending:

There is, no doubt, a need to balance the federal budget and cut unnecessary programs. The Institute of Peace is not one of them. Congress should think carefully before defunding such a vital think tank.

Bowdoin College has published a news item about a senior there who "is writing a 10,000-word thesis" about whether "those who are morally responsible for climate change can be targeted" in a war to prevent environmental threats. The item reports:

Suppose a small developing nation is very seriously threatened by the effects of climate change, in particular by the actions of large developed nations and the corporations therein. This nation has tried using diplomacy to get these developed nations to curb their emissions and to help them adapt to climate change, but the developed nations continue on as usual, indifferent to the smaller nation's plight. In this case, would the small nation have a 'just cause' to go to war to force any of the developed nations to stop emitting and to help it adapt?"

If it were up to me, America would have borders open to basically everyone except incorrigible terrorists, and legal immigration levels high enough above the current caps that no one would have to bother to sneak in.

Congress, alas, doesn't agree with me. Despite pleas from George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and from a lot of corporate executives, newspaper editorial writers, and college and university presidents, the law-writers have, for at least a decade, not only have failed to enact comprehensive immigration reform, they've even declined, so far, to pass a narrower fix aimed at "dreamers" who were brought to America illegally as children. These people in some cases graduate from high school and even make their way into American colleges.

My column this week is about all the people who have pardon cases as worthy or worthier than Sheriff Joe Arpaio's. Please check the full column out at the New York Sun (here).

Spotted this weekend on the back of a car in the parking lot of Morning Glory Farm on Martha's Vineyard:

The Democrats may yet be so confident in their chances of defeating President Trump that they'll go ahead and nominate a self-described socialist from Vermont to run against him in 2020.

Quite a dispatch from Matt Labash in the Weekly Standard on the violent protests in Berkeley, Calif. He observes: "opportunistic leftists/Democrats have been on the prowl to paint everyone to the right of Angela Davis as a dangerous racist lunatic."

The official New York Times Twitter account is touting as one of the newspaper's top ten comments of the past week the assertion that "Pumpkin spice is a horrible disease inflicted on the American palate by capitalism."

The federal government mis-priced flood insurance, encouraging building in low-lying areas, Michael Grunwald writes at Politico:

Houston is renowned for its anything-goes zoning rules, but the feds have also promoted those trends by providing extremely cheap insurance in high-risk areas.

Clive Crook writes at Bloomberg View:

There are two main theories of Trump's support. One is that a large minority of Americans -- 40 percent, give or take -- are racist idiots. This theory is at least tacitly endorsed by the Democratic Party and the mainstream liberal media. The other is that a large majority of this large minority are good citizens with intelligible and legitimate opinions, who so resent being regarded as racist idiots that they'll back Trump almost regardless. They may not admire the man, but he's on their side, he vents their frustration, he afflicts the people who think so little of them -- and that's good enough....

President Trump's reported Oval Office dialogue — "I want someone to bring me some tariffs... I know there are some globalists in the room right now. And they don't want them, John, they don't want the tariffs. But I'm telling you, I want tariffs" — is the topic of my column this week. Please check out the column in full at Newsmax (here), the New Boston Post (here), and Reason (here).

"What Trump Gets About the Media" is the headline over an op-ed piece I wrote for the New York Daily News. Please read it by clicking here.

A New York Times news article about a social media comment by Louise Linton uses the following words to describe her: "labels-loving," "condescendingly," "actress who posed with the diamonds she wore at their June wedding for a Town and Country magazine spread."