What are public-sector unions for, exactly? What problem are they supposed to solve? That’s the question I found myself asking earlier this month, when the best-paid railroad workers in America went on strike for three days.

To be clear, I get what the unions understand their purpose to be. It’s to get the best deal for their members. That’s what they’re designed to do, and they do it well.

Salaries at the Long Island Rail Road—a commuter-train system that connects suburban residents to New York City—now average $121,646, which is 50 percent more than the median household income in New York City ($80,483). Work rules entitle engineers to double or even triple pay when they drive different types of trains on the same day or when they deliver a train to the maintenance yard after driving passengers. Last year, more than 300 LIRR workers each earned $100,000 in overtime—in addition to their base pay. Those extra wages in turn inflate their pensions, which they can take at the age of 55 after 30 years of service.

All of this is as good for union members as it is unimaginable for most American workers. But taxpayers and commuters are the ones who pay for those generous compensation packages, and it’s reasonable to wonder whether they are getting a fair deal.

To her credit, Governor Kathy Hochul pushed back on the LIRR unions. But she quickly settled the strike on still-to-be-disclosed terms that will keep in place massive overtime payments, expensive work rules, and bloated pensions. That’s business as usual in blue states and blue cities, where public-sector unions wield fearsome political power.

[Michael Podhorzer: The paradox of the American labor movement]

None of this is inevitable. Strong unions persist because roughly 30 states have passed laws requiring collective bargaining with public workers. If this process advanced the common good, all would be well. But the available research suggests that it doesn’t. To the contrary, unions routinely insist on pay packages and work rules that degrade the efficiency and effectiveness of the public sector.

Our laws aren’t doing a good job, in short, of aligning union incentives with the public interest. That’s a big problem, especially as our most vibrant cities struggle to provide good schools, effective policing, and high-quality transit. Reform is long overdue. Thankfully, it’s also achievable.

For many union members, it’s completely obvious why we have collective-bargaining laws. “The training process for this job is over a year long,” explained one LIRR engineer on the picket line. “It consists of multiple examinations. Some of the written ones are incredibly difficult. We are very qualified. And, you know, frankly we deserve this money.”

We deserve this money. What should the public make of this argument?

In a market economy, compensation isn’t normally keyed to what a worker deserves in the abstract. It’s linked, instead, to what an employer has to pay to attract high-quality workers. An employer that pays too little will find itself with too few workers or workers who are bad at their jobs. An employer that pays too much risks being driven out of business by more cost-conscious rivals.

There’s nothing intrinsically fair about the resulting wage distribution. Because, from an employer’s perspective, the goal isn’t fairness. It’s running a successful business.

In the private sector, unions temper that unfairness by pushing corporate owners to split profits with workers. But private-sector unions can push only so hard: If they insist on compensation packages and work rules that make the business go bust, they could find themselves out of a job.

Matters are different in the public sector. The Long Island Rail Road, for example, is owned and operated by the government, much like public schools and police departments. As a result, the unions representing public workers aren’t constrained by the possibility of corporate bankruptcy. They’re constrained instead by politics.

Which means that politicians have to decide how to compensate government workers. One approach, favored by unions, is to depart from the baseline set by the market and pay workers what they deserve. It’s an appealing idea. Public workers do crucial work and ought to be compensated fairly for it.

The trouble, of course, is that there’s no end to claims about deservingness. Pretty much everyone thinks they’re underpaid and underappreciated. Sometimes they’re right; sometimes they’re not. But I don’t know what a teacher or a cop or a railroad engineer “deserves,” nor does anyone else.

Giving public-sector workers what they think they deserve, moreover, clashes with how everyone else in the economy gets paid. Is it fair for one group to get special consideration just because they happen to work for the government? Especially when taxpayers—working people themselves—are picking up the tab?

During negotiations with the railroad union, Hochul suggested that the answer is no: “Workers deserve to be paid fairly for their work,” she said. “But at the same time, we must be responsible with public funds and the fares paid by Long Island residents.”

That’s the right approach. When the government supplies public services, its goal should be to supply those public services as efficiently as possible—not run a tax-and-transfer system to aid the relatively small number of people lucky enough to be union members.

There is a better argument for public-sector unions, which is that unions have the leverage to demand compensation packages and work rules that are necessary to attract excellent public workers. Here’s Randi Weingarten, the long-standing head of the American Federation of Teachers: “If we want to recruit and retain high-quality teachers, it starts with a fair wage, adequate working conditions, and the resources and support to succeed.”

There’s a lot to this. The public sector, like the private sector, is only as good as its workforce. If unions help attract better teachers and cops, collective bargaining might improve the quality of public services. We should be happy, on this view, that unions are fighting for government workers. We’re all better off as a result.

Except that’s not what the research shows.

Start with schools. Two comprehensive reviews of the available evidence, one from 2025 and one from 2015, find that teachers’ unions reliably increase school spending, especially on salaries for veteran teachers. In general, however, they do not appear to help kids. “Most often,” the 2025 review says, “teachers’ unions have no impact or a slight negative impact on performance.”

Recent experience in Wisconsin is revealing. In 2011, Republicans passed a law, Act 10, that curtailed collective-bargaining rights for teachers. In the immediate aftermath, student outcomes suffered, mainly because of a sharp increase in teacher turnover. But that dip was short-lived.

Since then, a series of studies have suggested that Act 10 has improved student performance. Barbara Biasi, an economics professor at Yale, found that test scores rose when districts ditched seniority-based pay in favor of a more flexible approach. Morgan Foy of the University of Illinois found similar gains in test scores and attendance even in districts that didn’t adopt a flexible pay scale—because, he suspects, teachers worked harder when unions couldn’t protect them from discipline. And E. Jason Baron at Duke has shown that the promise of higher entry-level wages enticed more young Wisconsinites to get a teaching degree, which has improved the talent pool.

Now consider policing. In 2003, sheriffs’ deputies in Florida secured collective-bargaining rights because of an unanticipated court decision. Researchers at the University of Chicago Law School took advantage of that natural experiment by comparing sheriffs’ offices with municipal police departments that were unaffected by the court decision. Collective bargaining, they found, caused a roughly 40 percent increase in violent misconduct in sheriffs’ offices relative to police departments.

That’s the opposite of what you’d expect to see if public-sector unions made public services better. But it’s consistent with the general run of the evidence about policing. One forthcoming study, for example, finds that the extension of collective-bargaining rights significantly increased the number of civilians killed by police, especially nonwhite civilians, and “can explain 14 percent of all non-white civilian deaths by legal intervention between 1959 and 1988.”

To put it mildly, these results are hard to square with the claim that public-sector unions improve the public sector. At least three factors seem to be driving those results.

First, unions often push for job protections that frustrate workplace accountability. In the study of Florida sheriffs’ deputies, for example, collective bargaining appeared to cause a rise in violent misconduct, because of “a reduction in expected sanctions.” In other words, sheriffs’ deputies knew they could get away with it.

Second, unions push to equalize pay among their members based on seniority and credentials, not on quality of performance. That makes recruiting talented young people difficult, and rewarding good workers impossible. The Wisconsin reforms, for example, “led younger and less credentialed teachers to earn more on average, and older, more experienced teachers to earn less.” That’s bad for aging union members, but good for students.

Third, public-sector unions avidly negotiate for compensation in the form of pensions, not wages. But pensions are a poor recruitment tool: Starting wages matter much more to young people than pensions that will be paid out decades down the line. When unions use their power to boost pension payments, they aren’t working to attract talented young people. They’re working to reward their members.

If we want unions that actually improve the quality of public services, we’re going to have to reform our collective-bargaining laws.

[Jonathan Chait: The wrong way to win back the working class]

As matters stand, those laws require state and local governments to negotiate with unions. But they also establish what those unions are entitled to negotiate over—what is “bargainable.” And a very wide range of terms and conditions of employment are typically bargainable. That’s how you get demands for job protections, pay equalization, and hefty pensions.

None of that is graven in stone. The laws could be amended to limit the scope of what’s bargainable. Overtime, pensions, work rules, salary schedules—all of those would be off-limits. Unions would be left to negotiate over the one thing that is most likely to attract high-quality workers: base wages.

In that world, unions would still be powerful. They would still serve as a counterweight to local governments that might try to balance their budgets on the backs of middle-class workers. Their members would still receive job protections under civil-service laws. The unions just wouldn’t be allowed to make demands that frustrate the delivery of high-quality, cost-effective public services.

Reformed collective-bargaining laws would bring what unions want into better alignment with the public interest. Otherwise, we’re left with the LIRR engineer’s argument about what the unions are for: We deserve this money. The engineer may be right about what he deserves. Surely we all deserve better in this fallen world. But it’s no way to run a railroad.

Discourtesy, unprofessionalism, disrespect.

Troopers in a rogue New York State Police unit based in the city routinely blew off their supposed duties of patrolling MTA bridges and tunnels to listen to music, sleep with their girlfriends and, in one notorious case, drive to a strip club in New Jersey, get drunk and get arrested for assault, Streetsblog has learned.

All of the officers were paid for that time — and some, including the trooper who had the rendezvous at his girlfriend’s place, even made overtime.

In other police agencies, officers going full overnight shifts without making any traffic stops — or reporting any interactions with the public — might have aroused suspicion among the top brass. But this unit was staffed by inept supervisors, according to an internal affairs file obtained by Streetsblog: One sergeant was never trained to supervise some patrols; another sergeant was locked out of his computer for months and was unaware even where his officers were supposed to patrol.

The State Police has never publicly acknowledged the many problems its internal affairs unit found in the small city-based bridges and tunnels unit.

It kept eight of the nine troopers who repeatedly neglected their duties on the force despite investigators later identifying almost three dozen shifts — including 16 overtime shifts — in which these state police officers failed to do their jobs.

The eight troopers remain among the highest paid cops in New York State, averaging around $180,000 annually.

“It’s stunning that we have this level of graft and misconduct,” said Cory Morris, an attorney who has sued the State Police over requests for its disciplinary files. “Although, the more it goes on, the less I’m stunned.”

What is Troop NYC?

The State Police, whose 5,000 officers are known for their purple ties, gray Stetsons and blue and yellow vehicles, answers directly to the governor.

Troop NYC was the smallest unit and was typically overshadowed by the massive hulk of the NYPD, the state’s largest police force. But former Gov. Andrew Cuomo changed that in 2016, more than doubling the number of troopers in the city, reportedly to rebuke Mayor Bill De Blasio after reports that some NYPD traffic enforcement was slipping. The New York Times called Cuomo’s deployment “unprecedented” and likely more about “expanding his political footprint than with addressing the needs of law enforcement.”

The bridges and tunnels unit was supposed to do ramped-up toll enforcement as part of the transition to cashless tolling. And for a while, it did: The purple ties wrote more than 15,000 tickets the following six months, up from only around 1,600 the entire previous year. The troopers’ presence was very much felt in neighborhoods such as Red Hook and Long Island City, and city politicians quickly pushed back.

In 2020, after the city banned some forms of restraint, the troopers’ union demanded that the governor remove all state police from New York City on the grounds that the bill “puts an undue burden upon our troopers,” as then-union president Thomas Mungeer put it at the time.

The agency’s current New York City troop contains a federal drug task force, a number of high-level counterterrorism missions — and a small bridges and tunnels unit languishing in relative obscurity, said sources familiar with the state police.

It’s unclear what that troop is even doing on taxpayer time: On a weekly blotter page where state police troop reports their traffic stops, arrests and other interdiction efforts every day, Troop NYC has not disclosed any actions since November 2022 — and neither of those was related to traffic.

Arrested on duty in NJ

Top brass might never have had to confront the small unit’s lawless slacker culture but for Trooper Michael Lin’s night of drinking in New Jersey in August 2024. Instead of serving on a taxpayer-funded overnight DWI patrol in Brooklyn, Lin headed to the Garden State in his personal car. He went to a strip club and was arrested for assault.

Lin and his partner, Trooper Marc Vixama, started work that evening about an hour early. They seemingly wanted to drive up their citation numbers before Lin abandoned his post, and they had no trouble doing so — at least four illegal vehicles passed them in just 50 minutes.

Lin pulled over a driver with a suspended New York license. The driver’s white Buick had a New Jersey license plate for a 2007 Mercedes.

Lin issued six citations and let the driver leave.

Vixama stopped one vehicle with switched plates and two with suspended registrations. He also stopped a car with a fake license plate — an obvious felony.

Vixama issued a number of citations to each driver and let them leave.

In no case did the troopers call for a tow truck, as was required by policy.

Lin then drove back to the station on Wards Island. He parked his department vehicle and picked up his girlfriend in his Mazda with no front plate and a camera-thwarting plastic cover on the back plate. He drove over the Verrazzano Narrows Bridge to New Jersey, evading the toll along the way.

He and his girlfriend drank at a Thai restaurant and then a strip club. They drove to a gas station, where Lin crawled under a bathroom stall to confront his girlfriend.

They continued to argue in Lin’s car. Lin grabbed the woman’s wrists, leaving marks.

She called 911 from a nearby parking lot.

Lin was arrested by local New Jersey cops after showing them his badge. He was booked at the police station, where he urinated in his holding cell to “get the police in trouble.”

Then the local cops in New Jersey called a sergeant with the State Police. That sergeant called another sergeant and word went up the chain: Something had gone wrong on the bridges and tunnels unit’s overnight shift.

That was actually Lin’s second consecutive night abandoning his duties, he would later admit. He had left his post to have sex with someone in a parking lot the previous night.

Lin was not prosecuted in New Jersey after his girlfriend declined to press charges. He texted her while he was under investigation to ask her to lie to the State Police.

“Don’t let them know we talk. They will try to trick you,” he texted her after she was contacted by internal affairs. “Just ignore them until tomorrow. Fuck them.”

Hundreds of unaccountable hours

Lin’s arrest spurred an internal affairs investigation that first drilled into his and Vixama’s conduct.

Lin did not always abandon his overnight and overtime shifts. Sometimes, he simply parked his squad car for a bizarre form of recon.

For instance, Lin told investigators that he spent one shift in a parking lot near the Throgs Neck Bridge.

“How do you fill your time during that five-hour period?” an internal affairs officer asked.

“I don’t, I simply watch the bridge. That’s it,” Lin responded.

“So you stare at the bridge for five hours?” the officer asked.

“Pretty much,” Lin replied.

Vixama told investigators that Lin repeatedly left his post to meet women, but he wouldn’t provide specific dates or times. And then investigators scrutinized Vixama’s work records, where they found two overtime shifts where he was off post the previous week.

The night of Lin’s arrest, Vixama spent about three hours of on-duty time at his girlfriend’s apartment in East Harlem. He left when Lin called from New Jersey. But rather than radioing his supervisor, Vixama met up with a colleague who was also off his post.

That colleague, Trooper German Tyuryayev, admitted to investigators that he also repeatedly failed to meet his patrol partner. Investigators identified four shifts — including one overtime shift — where he did little police work.

In one instance, Tyuryayev described waiting by the Prospect Expressway in Brooklyn.

“From 12 to 5, I just, I just sat there,” he said.

Investigators later found that eight other troopers had failed to meet up with their colleagues or do any police work during their shifts.

One trooper, Evantz Charmant, spent hours of on-duty time in the police station parking lot. He was asked if he conducted any traffic stops during the shift.

“The only thing that I could think of would be while I was leaving my station, like, right in front of it,” Charmant said. “Maybe then I wrote a citation.”

On another night, Charmant and a colleague spent hours in a different parking lot.

“Did you have any interactions with the public at all?” the investigator asked.

“No, I don’t believe we did,” Charmant said.

The investigators soon discovered a potential cause for the unit-wide dereliction of duty: Sgt. Edmond Williams was locked out of his agency computer for 10 weeks leading up to Lin’s arrest.

Harmless mistake? Hardly: Williams’s password was changed while he served a previous suspension for unspecified misconduct. He did ask IT for help once, but he gave up when it never came. He resigned to simply monitoring his troopers over the radio.

The State Police slammed Williams in its report, saying over just two days, he failed to notice that six of his troopers were “outright AWOL” — military-speak for “Absent Without Leave.”

It gave Williams a five-day unpaid suspension. He remains a sergeant in Troop NYC.

Last year, he received $210,000 plus benefits from state taxpayers.

Years before this scandal, Cuomo urged state troopers to uphold the highest level of integrity so that the public could always trust them.

“The relationship between a citizen and their government is a function of the level of trust,” Cuomo said in an address to a graduating class of state troopers in 2012. “There are two types of integrity: there is institutional integrity [and] personal integrity. When you are a state police officer, you are a role model for the community, not only when you have the uniform on, but a 24-hour-a-day obligation. And I expect you to uphold that integrity 24 hours a day.”

‘Decisive’ accountability?

The State Police has not been upholding the integrity that Cuomo preached a decade ago. Last November, a number of senior brass resigned after they were caught using their badges to bring family and friends to exclusive areas of a Long Island golf tournament.

The then-head of internal affairs was one of the officers who resigned.

The State Police continues to be the last big law enforcement agency in the state that has not yet released the bulk of its misconduct files to the public after a 2020 change in state law.

Streetsblog filed a request in 2023 for all recent misconduct records of Troop NYC. That request remains unfulfilled. (The 556 pages of files regarding the bridges and tunnels unit were instead obtained from a county DA’s office.)

“Why is that file, which addresses founded misconduct by a number of state employees, private?” asked Morris, the attorney who sued for other files. “That’s not what the law is supposed to be.”

The media keep pushing for information — and occasionally piercing the purple wall. In February, New York Focus and The New York Times reported on a decade of lax and inconsistent disciplinary punishments by the agency that left some troopers who seemingly committed fireable offenses on the job.

Later, Superintendent Steven James issued a statement.

“No organization of our size is immune to lapses in judgment or conduct,” James wrote. “When any member falls short of the standards we demand, we address it directly. We do not minimize misconduct, and we do not excuse it. Accountability within the New York State Police is not symbolic; it is decisive.”

That “decisive” action seems limited to one man: Michael Lin. The agency fired him in September 2025 after the investigation detailed above; a hearing board had determined that “to permit him to return to duty would send a message that his pattern of misconduct, neglect of duties and responsibilities, desertion and abandonment of his coworkers and rejection of our paramilitary chain-of-command structure would be acceptable.”

All the other officers found to have committed misconduct remain with the State Police. The highest punishment any of them received was Vixama’s 30-day unpaid suspension.

Seven other troopers implicated in the investigation served unpaid suspensions or vacations day penalties of less than seven days. One had a 15-day suspension.

All of them still work for the State Police under Gov. Hochul.

Through a spokesperson, Hochul said she retains her confidence in Superintendent James and that her administration “fully investigates any claims of wrongdoing and will continue to strengthen policies and procedures to ensure the State Police meets the highest ethical and professional standards.”

Streetsblog also sought comment from the eight troopers and two sergeants. None responded. The state police union, the Police Benevolent Association of the New York State Troopers, also declined to comment for this article.

Beau Duffy, a director of public information for the State Police, said the agency conducted a “thorough” disciplinary investigation following Lin’s arrest.

“The actions of these individuals are not reflective of the more than 5,000 sworn members of our agency who serve each day with integrity and professionalism,” Duffy said in a statement to Streetsblog.

He refused to clarify if the State Police took steps to recover money paid to troopers while they abandoned their duties, merely stating that they were “subject to the appropriate disciplinary process.”

He also said that the State Police “made changes to ensure all regulations and accountability are being enforced on overnight shifts in Troop NYC” and that “supervisory lapses … have been corrected.”

In previously confidential internal affairs interviews obtained by Streetsblog, some troopers cast blame on the State Police’s culture, claiming they were expected not to “snitch” on their partner.

But at least one trooper expressed remorse.

“I am sorry for my actions,” one trooper said. “If I could change everything back, I would.”

— Editorial assistance by Sanjana Bhambhani

Last month, the Supreme Court ruled that Louisiana’s recently redrawn congressional map was unconstitutional. The decision effectively dismantled a key section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act allowing for the creation of majority-minority districts, in order to ensure that nonwhite voters would be fairly represented in national politics. Since the ruling, elected officials in several southern states have moved to break up predominantly Black voting districts. Tennessee’s Ninth Congressional District, for example, which encompasses most of the majority-Black city of Memphis—and has elected a Democratic representative to Congress since 1983—has been reshaped to form three Republican-leaning districts.

The gerrymandering rush has been speedy, calculated, and legal, prompting no shortage of concern from politicians and voters. On Tuesday, the NAACP announced an effort to do something about it. In a press conference, NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson urged Black athletes and fans to boycott state-funded universities in the Deep South, in an effort to exploit one of the region’s biggest weaknesses: its passion for college sports. Flanked by members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), Johnson said: “No one Black should be on a playing field of institutions that’s living off of our labor and yet in states that are seeking to reinstitute a sharecropping reality.”

Whether or not a boycott could be effective is complicated. Historically, the participation and dominance of Black athletes has helped college football and basketball become billion-dollar businesses. But the financial landscape has radically shifted in recent years; players are now able to monetize their name, image, and likeness, driving huge bargaining wars for their services. Most highly touted players are able to make millions of dollars without even having to think of going pro. Big-time programs in the South have shown that they are willing to spend to have a top program—and asking young athletes to resist the allure of that money will require more than wishful thinking.

In its announcement, the NAACP’s campaign, which is called “Out of Bounds,” laid out a multipart plan asking Black athletes to reconsider playing for elite football and basketball programs such as the University of Alabama, the University of Georgia, Louisiana State University, and Clemson University—schools located in states that have rushed to redraw their congressional maps ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. For athletes already attending these schools, the NAACP suggested that they consider transferring, or pressure their coaches and athletic directors into taking a public stand against the redistricting efforts. The NAACP also asked that athletes consider attending HBCUs and encourage fellow players “not to let their athletic value be separated from their community’s political power.”

Meanwhile, the CBC established its own hard line by announcing that its members will not support the SCORE Act, a bipartisan bill that would give the NCAA antitrust protections, prohibit college players from being classified as employees (effectively preventing them from collectively bargaining), and allow the organization to create eligibility and compensation guidelines. The bill would essentially shift the balance of power away from players, and back toward the schools. Ahead of the “Out of Bounds” announcement, the SCORE Act was pulled from the House floor voting schedule, perhaps reflecting the changing political situation. “This is an unprecedented moment featuring an unprecedented attack on Black political representation, and therefore it requires an unprecedented response,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said.

College sports have been integrated for a long time, though it wasn’t always this way. Black athletes were welcome at white institutions only once those colleges and universities were humiliated into recruiting them. In 1970, after integrated teams had slowly popped up, the University of Southern California’s football team was scheduled to play the University of Alabama. At the time, USC had 18 Black players on its roster, including at the crucial quarterback and tailback positions—no small thing, in an era when the prevailing stereotype dictated that Black players weren’t smart enough or good-enough leaders to play quarterback.

According to historians, the legendary Alabama coach Bear Bryant purposely scheduled the USC game because, although he was ready to embrace integration, the fans were not. USC went on to pummel Alabama 42–21. The lopsided victory signaled to southern schools that they were in danger of being left behind if they didn’t integrate their rosters. In the 2024–25 college season, Black athletes made up 40 percent of football players and 43 percent of men’s basketball players—the two sports that drive the most revenue in college athletics—across Division I.

One only has to look at the average basketball or football roster for a school in the Southeastern Conference (SEC), where most of the powerhouse southern universities play, to understand how dramatically they’d be affected if the Black athletes decided to play elsewhere. During the 2024–25 season, the SEC generated more than $1 billion in revenue. If Black recruits begin to go elsewhere, and teams at SEC schools can’t field elite teams, there’s no question the boycott would drastically affect everyone’s bottom line. The NAACP is hoping that these schools’ win-at-all-costs mentality can be turned against them—enough to persuade them to force state lawmakers into abandoning their redistricting push.

[Read: Democracy is a racial entitlement now]

That works only if the athletes see the value in delaying their own gratification for the greater good. Many of the athletes being recruited by these schools have enough options that boycotting the South isn’t a tremendous sacrifice. Schools in the Big Ten Conference, which is mostly concentrated in the Midwest, can also offer big money. But only so many slots are available at other colleges. And although steering players toward HBCUs is a noble solution, most HBCUs can’t financially compete with the big programs that have nearly unlimited resources, brand-new facilities, and an established pipeline to the pros. In fact, in this year’s NFL draft, not one team drafted a player who attended an HBCU.

Still, college athletes can play a significant role in shifting even the most ingrained attitudes. In 2020, the Mississippi State running back Kylin Hill declared that he would not play for the university unless the state changed its flag, which contained a Confederate emblem. The SEC also threatened to withhold championship events from Mississippi if it kept the flag. The campaign worked, and in 2021, the state adopted a new flag that does not pay tribute to the Confederacy.

The NAACP and the CBC are hoping that athletes and fans channel a similar sense of consciousness. Fans can always watch something else, of course, but some would say it’s unfair to ask young athletes to detour their dreams of playing on the grandest stages in college sports to benefit thousands of people they don’t know.

It’s worth remembering, though, that some of the most prominent civil-rights movements were led by young people. The late John Lewis was just 25 years old when he led hundreds of peaceful protesters across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965, in what became known as Bloody Sunday. The marchers were viciously beaten by Alabama state troopers; Lewis suffered a skull fracture and was nearly killed. Securing the Voting Rights Act literally required blood to be shed.

Athletes and fans aren’t being asked to spill blood, but the same underlying truth remains. Progress usually does not come without sacrifice. And across the country, a lot of households are due for a serious conversation.

Sean Duffy took those seven months to film a reality show called "The Great American Road Trip," because of course he did.

As its name implies, the venerable Notepad++ text editor began as a more capable version of the classic Windows Notepad, with features such as line numbering and syntax highlighting. It was created in 2003 by Don Ho, who continues to be its primary author and maintainer, and it has been a Windows-exclusive app throughout its existence (older Notepad++ versions support OSes as old as Windows 95; the current version officially supports everything going back to Windows 7).

I'm not a devoted user of the app, but I was aware of its history, which is why I was surprised to see news of a "Notepad++ for Mac" port making the rounds last week, as though it were a port of the original available from the Notepad++ website.

Apparently, this news surprised Ho as well, who claims that the Mac version and its author, Andrey Letov, are "using the Notepad++ trademark (the name) without permission."

"This is misleading, inappropriate, and frankly disrespectful to both the project and its users," Ho wrote. "It has already fooled people—including tech media—into believing this is an official release. To be crystal clear: Notepad++ has never released a macOS version. Anyone claiming otherwise is simply riding on the Notepad++ name."

An escalating back-and-forth

Further communication between Ho and Letov can be found in a Notepad++ GitHub thread, where Ho said he had been contacted by Letov before the Notepad++ for Mac app had launched, but that he hadn't had time to reply.

"The problem is that using the official name Notepad++ and its logo gives the impression that your project is an official macOS version maintained or endorsed by the Notepad++ team, which is not the case," wrote Ho in an email to Letov that he reposted to GitHub. "This create [sic] confusion for users and exposes both you and the project to trademark issues."

Letov responded two days later, saying he hadn't meant to insinuate that Ho was involved with the Notepad++ for Mac project. But he did insist that his port "actually expands notepad++ brand to mac" and expressed hope that Ho would allow him to continue to use the name. Ho responded, again asking Letov to stop using the Notepad++ name and logo and to change the project's URL so that users would not mistake the project for an official Notepad++ port and contact Ho looking for support.

"I will prep for the site and some naming changes," wrote Letov. "Give me a couple of weeks. My intention was to expand your brand. I really hope that at some point in the future you change your mind and see this as a positive growth for your brand."

At this point, Ho seemed to lose patience with Letov's responses, particularly with being asked to allow Letov to continue using the Notepad++ name for "a couple of weeks." Ho reported the use of the Notepad++ trademark to Cloudflare, the CDN of the Notepad++ for Mac site, and asked Letov to take it down.

"Every day that website remains active, you are in further violation of the law," Ho wrote earlier today. "I cannot authorize a 'week or two' of continued trademark infringement."

Letov began changing the website two days ago, though at first he claimed to be making these changes "in coordination with Don Ho." This drew further accusations from other GitHub users that he was trying to misrepresent the port's relationship to the original project.

Those changes continue and have ramped up over the last few hours; the app will now be called "NextPad++," an homage to NeXT Computer, and uses a frog icon rather than the Notepad++ lizard. The original version, along with the authors page that lists Ho beneath Letove, is available via Internet Archive snapshots.

Letov claims that the app's name will change in version 1.0.6. Version 1.0.5, with the Notepad++ logo and branding intact, is available for download. The project's URL also hasn't changed.

A seemingly thoughtful but low-effort port

The "Notepad++ for Mac" app looks right, but there are reasons to prefer an "official" port when you can get one. Credit: NextPad++

I had considered writing about Notepad++ for Mac last week, but lost a bit of interest after discovering it was "an independent community port" rather than an official release—independent ports and forks are all well and good, but an official release implies ongoing updates and support, where an "independent community port" might fade away or vanish entirely as soon as its creator gets bored and/or moves on.

But I continued to dig because, at a glance, it seemed like an exceptionally thoughtful community port. It supported macOS versions dating back to 11.0 Big Sur on both Intel and Apple Silicon processors. It was a native macOS app with a Cocoa user interface that replaces the original Win32 interface rather than translating it or using a wrapper. The app seemed to be lightweight and clean, as promised. And it was properly notarized so that users could download and launch it relatively easily—not a given, for many independent and/or open source Mac software projects.

But I paused when I hit Letov's About page, which mentioned being "deep in multi-agent AI" and showed a flurry of GitHub commits that happened exclusively in March and April 2026. The Notepad++ for Mac page made no mention of the project being AI-coded, but when contacted for comment, Letov confirmed that both the Notepad++ for Mac app and the website were created at least partially using Anthropic's Claude CLI.

"I primarily use Claude CLI with some customizations to run multiple agents and also Codex plugin for VSS. I also use Beads," Letov told Ars. "Website is also partly managed using Claude CLI plus some manual work on graphics."

"I run some agents that scan for Issues and general issues reported, list/create options to implement features and fixes. I usually review most and decide on the path," Letov continued when asked how much human oversight the project had. "Also UIs are not as easily tested by AI as backend code and some things have to be thought through and build iteratively."

It's not that I think the use of AI coding tools should be disqualifying in and of itself. AI coding tools do have real utility, and many companies and projects are making at least some use of them; you likely are running or will eventually run an app containing AI-generated code whether you want to or not. But the port being both "independent" and AI-generated heightens my existing concerns about ongoing support and the developer's capability to address bug reports and merge upstream code.

And, as Ho and other users warned in the GitHub thread, downloading an unvetted unofficial port of a project can increase your risk of downloading malware.

"I apologize for sounding paranoid, but I have not verified your code & binaries, and I have no time to do so," wrote Ho, who comes by his concern about hidden malware in Notepad++ honestly.

Read full article

Comments