Muddle, mishmash and militias

The New Yorker can’t seem to decide just where it stands with its “Simons Says” page burner.

You’d expected the liberal weep sheet to be down on reclusive billionaire Jim Simons, controversial founder of Renaissance Technologies, for abusing Bahamas tax havens. Rather, it comes close to lauding him for his philanthropic work funding genome research.

“Taste in science is very important,” Simons says — meaning he likes to pick what will get funded, and let the taxpayer-funded research done in universities go dry.

Next up in the where-do-westand department is a pie-in-thesky article by Nathan Heller that appears to showcase the digital utopia of the tiny post-Soviet nation of Estonia, where citizens vote on their laptops and people leave the private sector for development opportunities in government. Wait a minute. That’s a good thing? Speaking of tone deaf, New

York’s “Reasons to Love New York” hits the mark with its mishmash of tourist-industry propaganda. This while our infrastructure crumbles and our dopey giant of a mayor literally sells off pieces of the city block by block. Imagine your burning rage flipping pages while your subway train is stuck for 20 minutes and the conductor won’t tell you why.

Elsewhere, Jessica Pressler ventures to Garden City, Kansas, where militia men hurl slurs at legal immigrants while fingering the trigger on their guns.

Meanwhile, Time’s “Person of the Year” issue might just win this week’s inconsequential award. The person is actually a group, the “Silence Breakers,” in the sex harassment scandals, and the rest is chock-a-block with BuzzFeed-like lists. Most embarrassing is the best nonfiction book for 2017: Hillary Clinton’s “What Happened,” a graceless memoir that tracks the inside story of the biggest loser in the history of American politics.