Boston Globe Media

The showdown between the Trump administration and Harvard University turned to real dollars and cents Monday, when the White House froze more than $2 billion in federal funding for the institution. Globe reporter Diti Kohli explains. Read the full story: https://trib.al/SM2WOy9

Political news is important, but it isn’t all that’s going on. So Starting Point writer Ian Prasad Philbrick asked Globe editors to recommend a few politics-free stories you might have missed, from the new sports team in town to Montréal clowns.

To understand why President Trump’s attacks on higher education threaten to end the era of American universities driving innovation and leading the world, you have to go back to the fall of 1944, when President Franklin Roosevelt gave a man named Vannevar Bush some homework. For today’s newsletter, I explored the history of that relationship and how colleges and universities are responding to Trump’s actions.

Greater Boston’s housing market has become so stratified in recent years that even people who may otherwise be considered wealthy can barely afford to buy here anymore. While spring is typically a busy time for homebuying, that’s not the case in Greater Boston. Just 750 single-family homes across the region were listed for sale in February, according to the Greater Boston Association of Realtors, down 13 percent from last year and 34 percent from February 2020. And now? Deep uncertainty about the state of the economy and stock markets is sidelining even more would-be buyers and sellers alike. Read the full story below.

There have been anecdotal reports of some of President Trump’s supporters expressing remorse for voting for him last November. A poll from UMass Amherst offers early answers about how widespread that “regretful voters” phenomenon may be, Starting Point writer Ian Prasad Philbrick explains.

Last week’s sell-off of US Treasuries, the $36 trillion market that is the backbone of the global financial system, signaled waning faith among investors in the country’s economic supremacy, writes Larry Edelman in Trendlines, a Boston Globe Media newsletter covering the economy in Boston and beyond.

Lawyers for Harvard University said the school will not comply with a new list of demands sent by the Trump administration on Friday, as part of the government’s purported crackdown on antisemitism and alleged civil rights violations at elite universities. The new demands expand on a previous list sent to Harvard’s leaders on April 3, which ordered Harvard to close diversity offices and cooperate with federal immigration authorities, among other directives. Harvard’s stance is the most forceful pushback yet against the Trump administration’s crackdown on elite universities. This is a developing story. Read more here: https://trib.al/WVK6oCd

President Trump’s efforts to cut research funding and revoke student visas undermine a symbiotic relationship between the federal government and American universities that has spurred innovation for nearly 80 years. Starting Point writer Ian Prasad Philbrick explains how schools are responding.

The mission, should I choose to accept it, came from my editor Tim Logan last Thursday: Amid the trade war sparked by President Trump’s tariffs, could one bypass all the chaos by simply purchasing American-made products? Or is it so hard to do, and so much more expensive, that it would end up being even more stressful? I nodded gamely. After covering retail for the better part of a decade, I knew exactly how this would play out: not well. But always up for a challenge, I took it upon myself to map out a game plan to buy domestically over the course of several days. I failed miserably. The story gets into why, but at seemingly every turn, my efforts to buy American were complicated by the realities of the free market. Thanks to Rachel Slade for her advice on how to tackle this challenge. If you haven't read it, her book, "Making It in America" is a very timely look at these issues.

Earlier this year I realized we were getting close to the 100th anniversary of “The Great Gatsby.” Working at the Globe has trained me to look for stories with ties to New England — and to my surprise, there was one. Today’s newsletter explores a fascinating bit of literary history that helps us better understand why, even after a century, “Gatsby” remains one of the great American novels.