New Year's Terror
Plus: Millennial troubles, battle of the X competitors, and more...
More than a dozen people were killed and many others wounded in senseless vehicular attacks on New Year's Day. Both attacks were allegedly carried out by U.S. citizens. At least one, and possibly both, of the alleged attackers were Army veterans.
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In New Orleans, 42-year-old Shamsud-Din Jabbar drove a rented Ford pickup truck into a crowd of people celebrating on Bourbon Street Wednesday morning. He killed 15 people and left dozens more injured. After driving through the crowd, Jabbar allegedly exited the truck wielding a rifle, shot at police officers, and was killed in return fire.
Later that morning, in Las Vegas, a Tesla Cybertruck exploded outside of the Trump International Hotel, killing the driver and wounding seven others. Police found explosives in the back of the truck.
The person suspected of detonating the explosives in Las Vegas is 37-year-old Matthew Livelsberger, a resident of Colorado Springs, Colorado, and the Cybertruck's driver.
A possible link between the New Orleans and Las Vegas attacks "is not being ruled out," Newsweek reports, though Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department Sheriff Kevin McMahill on Wednesday called the Tesla truck explosion an "isolated incident."
The FBI is calling the New Orleans attack a terrorist attack and investigating whether Jabbar acted alone. "We do not believe that Jabbar was solely responsible," Althea Duncan of the FBI New Orleans field office said during a news conference yesterday.
In videos thought to have been recorded during his drive from Texas to New Orleans, Jabbar reportedly discussed his divorce and how he had planned to kill his family before having dreams suggesting that he should instead join ISIS.
The truck Jabbar used for his murders bore an ISIS flag. It's unclear if he actually had any ties to the Islamic State.
Predictably, some discourse around the New Orleans attack has already turned to fear of foreigners, despite the fact that Jabbar was a U.S. citizen who was born in Texas and served for many years in the U.S. military. Jabbar enlisted in 2007 and was deployed to Afghanistan from February 2009 to January 2010, according to the Associated Press. In 2015, he transferred to the Army Reserve, serving until July 2020.
"When I said that the criminals coming in are far worse than the criminals we have in our country, that statement was constantly refuted by Democrats and the Fake News Media, but it turned out to be true," said Donald Trump in a statement about the New Orleans attack.
Livelsberger is also a U.S. citizen. According to Denver's ABC affiliate, Livelsberger once served at the same Army base as Jabbar.
The deluded generation? In another entry in the seemingly endless annals of "millennials fail to launch," The Wall Street Journal looks at how my generation—today's late-20s to early-40s age group—are way behind previous generations when it comes to marrying, having children, and buying homes. "What researchers once called a lag is starting to look more like a permanent state of arrested development," the article states. But that's been the suspicion for quite some time.
Kudos to the Journal, however, for noting that conventional explanations—things like the Great Recession, the pandemic, and a bad housing market leading to poor economic prospects—don't exactly add up.
Median wages for full-time workers ages 35 to 44 are up 16% between 2000 and 2024, from $58,522 to $67,652 adjusted for inflation, according to the Labor Department. The overall wealth of 30-somethings, too, rose 66% between 1989 and 2022, according to the St. Louis Federal Reserve, from $62,000 to $103,000.
In many ways, this age group is in a better place financially, on average, than their parents were at this age. The problem is that they don't seem to know it. Only 21% of adults in their 30s rated the overall economy as good or excellent last year, per the Federal Reserve, and economists say young adults are significantly more pessimistic about the future than prior generations were.
Economist Melissa Kearney, who often writes about family issues (check out my review of her book The Two-Parent Privilege here), points out that part of this is about higher expectations. "Generations before us didn't expect to have large houses where every kid had a bedroom and there were multiple vacations," she says.
Kearney's comments remind me of one of my favorite recent pieces about declining birth rates, from the Substack newsletter writer who goes by Cartoons Hate Her. "I think the majority of the fertility crisis can be boiled down to higher expectations—not only financial expectations," she writes. "Expectations of the type of parent you want to be, expectations for how safe and comfortable you want your kids to be, and the biggest obstacle of all: expectations for who you want to marry." Some of these higher expectations are undoubtedly good; some depend on your perspective. But at the very least, it's a theory that puts a somewhat more positive spin on something that's usually framed in unrelentingly doom-mongering terms.
Bluesky vs. Threads. Going into 2025, "there's no longer any question that Threads and Bluesky have created the most viable alternatives to the platform once known as Twitter," writes Karissa Bell at Engadget. But the two platforms have developed very different operating ethos and are attracting very different audiences.
As a Meta property, Threads is—predictably—a much more managed experience. "Though the company has claimed to embrace 'public conversation,' it has also consistently put its thumb on the scale to encourage certain types of speech over others," notes Bell. "The company throttled 'political' content in an election year" and has taken a heavy hand in moderating other "potentially sensitive" content as well:
For months, the app prevented users from searching for some topics, including those related to COVID-19 and vaccines. Those limits have since been lifted, but there have been numerous and inexplicable instances of other moderation failures on Threads.
In October, Instagram head Adam Mosseri admitted the company had "found mistakes and made changes" after users reported their accounts had been penalized for using mundane words like "saltines" and "cracker." Earlier this month, Meta's communications director Andy Stone apologized after users noted that searches for posts about Austin Tice, the American journalist who disappeared in Syria in 2012, were blocked on the app because the content "may be associated with the sale of drugs." Stone didn't offer an explanation but said the issue has been addressed.
Bluesky takes a much more hands off approach. A user's default feed is simply a chronological list of "skeets" from people they follow (though users can also toggle to an algorithmic feed). Bluesky leaders have also chosen not to penalize links to news articles, unlike Threads and X. And:
While the company employs some of its own moderators to enforce "baseline moderation," users have a lot of control over how much questionable or harmful content they want to see. Blueksy also allows people to create their own moderation services for an even more custom experience.
"Moderation is in many ways, like governance," Bluesky CEO Jay Graber told me earlier this year. "And setting the norms of a social space, we don't think one person or one company should be unilaterally deciding that for an entire ecosystem where people are having public conversations important to the state of the world."
All of this makes Bluesky a highly preferable experience for folks who value free speech and dislike top-down authority, if you can stomach the platform's left-leaning (to put it mildly) bent.
Scenes from Ohio: My boys are making me "breakfast" while I slave away at this Roundup.
Quick Hits
• "New tax brackets and standard deductions are now in effect, which will slightly boost paychecks and lower income tax for many Americans," reports Axios. More on the changes here.
• A state judge in Georgia committed suicide at the courthouse. "According to Effingham County Sheriff Jimmy McDuffie…[Steve] Yekel appears to have died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, though an autopsy will be performed by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to confirm," reports WTOC. Yekel "recently lost re-election and Tuesday would have been his last day, though he was not scheduled in court."
• TikTokers prepare for life without TikTok.
• The funniest part of this article is the idea that Americans really take to heart the U.S. Dietary Guidelines when making decisions about whether or not to consume alcohol.
• Catherine Rampell explores how GLP-1 receptor agonists like Ozempic "will disrupt the economy in 2025."
