MIT also. Football is such a distraction in the US (I went to a school with a good football team, and people ask me how many games I attended...I can answer none).

Hah! No, the reason I'd say against Imperial isn't the college itself (but even then, is still third on the list of Oxbridge and), it's similar to why I'm not tripping over smart people here in Berlin: fantastic public transit means the smart people aren't all squished together.

Town and gown, massive town. Diluted organisational opportunity, less room for serendipity in meeting fellow nerds of whatever topic of interest.

That said, I do not know the social organisational structures of much of the USA, so it's plausible that this reasoning doesn't work because the USA has the same spread-out-ness from all the cars, or perhaps everyone in both just knows how to find the nerdy and geeky Schelling points…

But (Old) Cambridge? Geeking opportunities are as densely packed in Cambridge as archeology is within 2km of the Parthenon in Athens. Oxford certainly looks similar to Cambridge in this regard. At least, when I visited, as a tourist, given I didn't live in Oxford at any point.

Yes, but the final push was due to Germany’s neighbors passing the buck on helping fleeing Jews. After the world learned the consequences of that, the political will to create the state was cemented.

Yes, but they didn't steal the land until after WW2. What happened in the decades before WW2 is a strong warning to everybody about what can happen when you have mass immigration of young radicals of military age.

Academic institutions in the last decade or two started pre-filtering based on ideology goals before taking into account actual research. In general the system was veering off as the massive bureaucracy gained mission creep.