SCIENCE: Cycling won’t sabotage a man’s sex life: Study.

BETSY DEVOS: Common Core is dead.

WHAT COULD GO WRONG? Fallen out of love with your roommate? Find your next one Tinder-style.

STOP THEM BEFORE THEY BUILD AGAIN: Trump’s Infrastructure Opportunity. Every president talks about infrastructure, but this administration actually knows how to do something about it. Thanks to Trump’s smart appointments, it has developed a strategy that really could make infrastructure again: Get the federal government out of the way. In previews of their infrastructure initiative, expected any week now, administration officials have promised to shift responsibility back to the cities and states that benefit from these projects. For too long, as I write in City Journal, politicians of both parties have pretended that it takes wise central planners to coordinate a nation’s infrastructure—a myth typically justified by pointing to the Interstate highway system, begun by Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s and lauded by its boosters ever since as “the greatest public works project in history.”

In reality, though, the Interstate system is the most powerful illustration of how a perfectly sound and seemingly simple project can be ruined by central planners. There was no need to nationalize highways, which had traditionally been a state responsibility. Pennsylvania and other states pioneered the expressway era with their own network of turnpikes, which generated plenty of revenue to maintain the roads while repaying the bondholders who financed them. But then Eisenhower and Congress, arguing that a highway network was necessary for national defense, concentrated money, power, and decision-making in Washington.

The new Interstate system, financed by gas taxes, seemed to work well at first. Drivers marveled at how they could zoom on open highways without stopping at traffic lights or toll booths. But the Interstates were ultimately doomed by the inherent inflexibility and political deal-making of a centralized system. The highways were needlessly expensive, particularly in cities. In order to get urban members of Congress to go along, Washington bribed them with extra money to build highways that obliterated neighborhoods; the projects would never have been built if cities and states had been spending their own money. The damage to cities was compounded by Washington’s one-size-fits-all requirements to build highways with wide lanes and shoulders—an attractive safety feature for an expressway through the prairies of Kansas but one that doesn’t make sense in a dense urban neighborhood.  Worst of all, the central planners outlawed tolls on new federally funded highways, thus preventing states from using a financing mechanism that would have ensured proper long-term maintenance and could be used to reduce congestion at peak times.

The result, half a century later: a highway system that no longer works. It’s horribly congested and in bad shape physically. Much of the system needs to be rebuilt because the highways are at the end of their useful life, yet there’s not even enough money to maintain the existing roads.

With Washington out of the way, the states could build Interstate 2.0, as Robert Poole of Reason calls it. But it won’t be easy persuading Congress, especially Democrats, to give up their pork barrel.

IT’S A RELIGIOUS RITUAL, SO THE TEDIUM AND DIFFICULTY AND POINTLESSNESS ARE THE POINT: The Daily Grind of Recycling: Warm feelings about saving the planet have given way to the drudgery of sorting and rinsing and nagging from the government. “Not that recycling seems to be viable — not beyond aluminum cans and plastics number 1 and 2. The rest of it can’t be processed at a profit. (Glass bottles and jars present a particular challenge.) As it turns out, much of the more valuable stuff can’t be processed at a profit either. Not unless the rest of us do a lot of the labor.” Remember, it’s a religious ritual.

THREE OF AMAZON’S TOP 20 SITES FOR ITS NEW HEADQUARTERS ARE IN OR AROUND WASHINGTON, DC and Michael Walsh has a theory why.

BLUE STATE BLUES: New Englanders Have Only Themselves to Blame for Energy Price Spikes.

Both prices and demand for domestic natural gas have surged as people have started plugging in their space heaters. Gas consumption set a new record for daily use on January 1, surpassing the previous record set in January 2014 in the midst of the “Polar Vortex.” Energy prices in most of the country increased 20–30 percent to account for the strong demand before quickly returning to previous levels. But in parts of New England prices spiked more than 400 percent.

Why? New England — including Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island — is the only part of the country that has constrained supplies of natural gas. This constraint is largely self-induced by “above-ground” political issues. Local and state opposition have blocked a number of natural gas pipelines in recent years, with the result that the region hasn’t benefited from the gas production growth in the Marcellus shale formation in nearby Pennsylvania.

Unexpectedly.

CHANGE: Mick Mulvaney, whose appointment to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau generated significant controversy last year, requests no new funding for the bureau, arguing money on hand is sufficient to cover the next quarter’s expenses.

SWAMP-DRAINING LESSONS FROM 1787: A Trump adviser and speechwriter, F.H. Buckley, offers a sweeping perspective on the Washington swamp in his new book, The Republic of Virtue: How We Tried to Ban Corruption, Failed, and What We Can Do About It. Buckley, a professor at George Mason University School of Law, describes how the Founding Fathers sought to create a republic of disinterested public virtue. They admired the British constitution but wanted neither a monarchy nor British-style corruption. At crucial moments in the 1787 Constitutional Convention, when extreme nationalists such as Madison proposed a walk-out that might have split the country, it was the prospect of an anti-corruption constitution that kept things together. And that is how the document was drafted.

That was then. Now we’re stuck with a presidential regime that fosters corruption, the wrong kind of federalism and, in Buckley’s words, “the thickest network of patronage ever seen in any country, a crony capitalism in which business partners with government and transfers wealth from the poor to the rich.” Instead of criminalizing political speech, Buckley says, we should scrap nearly all our campaign finance laws, focus instead on reining in lobbyists, and recognize that a purely virtuous state is an impossible chimera.

TAMARA KEEL: Will You ‘Get Killed on the Streets?’ Personal-Defense Myths Debunked.

AT AMAZON, save on bestselling Office Products.

Plus, deals on Bestselling Jewelry. Valentine’s Day is coming!

NEWS YOU CAN USE? Al-Qaeda Bomb Instructions are a Free Download at Barnes & Noble.

This report is from Bridget Johnson, whose unexplained and unacknowledged Twitter banishment remains unexplained and unacknowledged by Twitter management.

HE’S A SMART GUY: Psychologist leaves reporter speechless after her ‘right not to be offended’ remark: ‘Gotcha.’

AN INCONVENIENT STUDY: New Study Just Threw Cold Water On Worst-Case Global Warming Scenarios.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Law Schools Under A Microscope.

After enjoying an enrollment surge in the first decade of the new century, many law schools have more recently struggled mightily amid a dearth of jobs for young lawyers, dwindling student interest, worries schools were encouraging students to take on high debts they would struggle to repay, and intense criticism that many schools had been admitting students who never had the academic chops necessary to become practicing lawyers. At the same time, the accreditation world has been grinding toward greater transparency, placing some institutions under an unwelcome harsh light.

Resulting developments epitomize the fallout from an admissions bubble. Some schools have resisted changes in the legal education market and regulatory world. Others have moved to shrink in size or exit the market entirely. Observers worry that the most vulnerable students and minority students, who have been taken advantage of in the past, are now being shut out of law schools as the market contracts.

It all comes together in a pressure cooker, because success in legal education and the legal field is so closely tied to students passing the bar examination.

If only someone had seen this coming.

THIS IS BASICALLY A SIGN OF A WORLD GROWING RICH THROUGH TECHNOLOGY: No One Wants Your Used Clothes Anymore. When it took 100 hours to make a suit of clothes, there was always a secondary market. Now that machines make things for next to nothing, there’s less of one.

THEY ALL KNEW ANYWAY: Harvey Weinstein Tried to Delete Computer File of Female ‘Friends’ Before NY Times Expose.

ALL THESE MOONS ARE YOURS: NASA’s Cassini spacecraft found a remarkable similarity between Earth and Saturn’s moon Titan.

DIAGNOSING AUTISM via barely perceptible fluctuations in movement. “The volunteers’ movements were captured using high-speed, high-resolution sensors to track fluctuations in movement invisible to the naked eye. The study also tracked changes in speed and position of the arm at every point in movement, as opposed to a single variable—the top movement of the arm’s velocity—examined in a previously published study from the team. The new motion data strengthens evidence for movement as a biomarker for autism.”

I’D BUY THAT FOR A DOLLAR: Newsweek changed from a solid newsweekly into a Hillary fanfic ezine so slowly, I hardly even noticed.

NOT MERELY RELATED, BUT INEXTRICABLY INTERTWINED:

SHOULD JEFF FLAKE APPLY FOR A JOB AT CNN AFTER HE LEAVES THE SENATE? Well, at least one media veteran thinks the soon-to-be-former Arizona Republican would fit right in at CNN. But not just any job, thanks to Flake’s absurd comparison of Donald Trump to Joseph Stalin.

That’s according to former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who said of Flakes Wednesday floor speech that “Stalin is the second most dangerous person in the 20th century. He killed more people than anyone except Mao Zedong. To compare him to an American president is such an absurdity that Senator Flake probably could get a job at CNN or somewhere else as a reporter.”

SHOCKINGLY, NONE OF THEM ARE IMPRISONED IN TRUMP’S AMERIKKKA: In a time of ‘Fake News Awards,’ here are 11 real, imprisoned journalists.

THEY SAID IF TRUMP WON, HE WOULD SLASH THE FEDERAL BUREAUCRACY: And OMG, look, he’s actually doing it! Congress changed the law to make it much easier for the Department of Veterans Affairs Secretary to fire poor performers at VA. And sure enough, VA Chief David Shulkin says he has gotten rid of “thousands of employees from VA’s roll and set a standard for accountability so that those employees that are continuing to do an excellent job in serving are surrounded by other employees that have the same commitment.”

Shulkin was the highest ranking Obama appointee Trump kept around and then promoted him to run the department that was literally letting veterans die as they waited months on end for basic health care services they were guaranteed in return for serving the country in the military. LifeZette’s Brendan Kirby has more. 

COMMON CHARACTERISTICS OF PEOPLE who don’t need much sleep.