NO POMP AND CIRCUMSTANCE: You Thought You Were Free, but History Found You. The 2020 commencement speech you’ll never hear, from Caitlin Flanagan.

ZOOM IS JUST THE BEGINNING: Silicon vs. Viruses. Ever since a NASA engineer coined the term “telecommute” in the 1970s, tech prophets have consistently overestimated how many people would choose to work remotely. But this pandemic could be a tipping point — and encourage a host of technologies that will make us a lot better prepared for the next pandemic.

THE FDA STRIKES AGAIN: My Brother’s Life-saving Discovery. John Stossel’s brother, the late Dr. Thomas Stossel of Harvard, found a protein in the blood that reduces inflammation and could potentially be a breakthrough in treating many diseases, including Covid-19. A biotech company has spent $50 million to develop a treatment and has demonstrated its safety in humans. But the treatment is still years — and hundreds of millions of dollars — away from receiving FDA approval for patients to try.  The company is hoping the pandemic will prompt the FDA to speed up the process.

SEX, ART AND MONEY: Corrupted by Commerce? Does putting a price on the good things in life corrupt our appreciation of them? Not according to the prostitutes and art dealers studied by Stanford’s Steve Clowney.

OPENING THE ECONOMY — AND THE STREETS: A Plan for Ending New York’s Shutdown. Arpit Gupta suggests starting by bringing people under 45 back to work. He also proposes closing a lot of streets to give pedestrians more room for social distancing, which strikes me as a good idea. Even though I often drive in Manhattan and am a devout defender of the automobile everywhere else in America,  I think New York has given away too much valuable space to cars, and there’s no need to keep doing it with traffic so much lighter these days.

IT ALWAYS HELPS TO BE LUCKY: Germany’s Covid-19 Story. A combination of good fortune and widespread public compliance helped Germany weather the first wave of infections better than other countries.

IT’S THE TESTING, STUPID: New Jersey’s Corona Debacle.  Governor Phil Murphy has failed to provide sufficient testing for residents, setting back the state’s timetable for restarting the economy. But to give him his due: he did manage to shut down a drive-in tulip farm where the visitors never got out of their cars.

TOO MANY COOKS: When Crisis Planning Doesn’t Work. Why didn’t Washington have a plan to deal effectively with a pandemic? Because its bureaucracies had been ordered to create so many different plans that no one could keep track of them.

THE FDA STRIKES AGAIN: Suffocating Progress. FDA regulations block usage of a feature in Apple Watches that would help millions of users monitor their blood-oxygen levels.

NICOTINE TO THE RESCUE: Smoke fags, save lives. Christopher Snowdon has fun pondering the low rate of Covid-19 infections among smokers (and the mistaken prediction from Public Health England that smokers would suffer higher casualties):

Let us consider for a moment the policy implications of nicotine being the only tried and tested prophylactic for Covid-19. We could issue Lucky Strikes on prescription. We could #ClapForOurCigarettes every Thursday evening. The case for closing down Public Health England would be stronger than ever. We could open the pubs, but only to smokers and vapers. We might allow a few non-smokers in to enjoy the possible benefits of passive exposure, but only if they stand two metres apart.

France is already testing nicotine patches as protection for patients and health-care workers.

IF ONLY THIS PROFESSOR HAD BEEN HOMESCHOOLED: Harvard vs. the Family. A Harvard law professor distorts research findings to justify her campaign to ban homeschooling.

HINDSIGHT IS ALWAYS 20/20: Blame Game. The press wants to blame Trump for warnings that he missed about the pandemic, but it’s easy to point to Democrats and journalists who missed the warnings, too. After every disaster, our hindsight bias leads to a search for scapegoats. But finding scapegoats won’t solve the crisis — or prevent the next one.

UNTIL THERE’S A VACCINE: Alleviation Before Cure. An epidemiologist’s primer on what treatments might work.

IF ONLY THERE WERE SOME CONVENIENT ALTERNATIVE: How Public Transit Makes the Nation More Vulnerable to Disasters Like Covid-19.  Instead of subsidizing mass transit, we should encourage a transportation system that’s resilient during pandemics, terrorist attacks and other disasters: the automobile.

BAD RULES ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: Trumping Poverty. The economist Casey Mulligan calculates how much the poor have benefited from Trump’s rollback of regulations.

THE DOCTOR WILL ZOOM YOU NOW: Has Telehealth’s Time Arrived? It can lead to better health care long after the pandemic.

AND WASHINGTON DOESN’T KNOW HOW IT WORKS: The Economy Is Not a Machine. The government definitely has the power to stifle the economy,  but Keynesian theories of reviving it through government spending make less sense than ever in recovering from this slowdown. It will take more than government pump-priming; the market process itself, in all its complexity, must revive.

GIVE CAPITALISM A CHANCE: A Remarkable Leap Forward. It took four years to develop the first test for HIV. Now after just four months, despite the FDA’s red tape, biotech entrepreneurs have come up with an array of Covid-19 tests, including the first one approved for home use.

NOT IF THEY KEEP ELECTING PROGRESSIVES: Will New York Ever Recover From Covid-19? Joel Kotkin says the demographics were all going the wrong way even before the pandemic imprisoned people in studio apartments.

ANOTHER REASON NOT TO LET UNIONS RUN YOUR GOVERNMENT: No Gain, Lots of Pain. The stock market downturn portends big losses for government pension funds—and billions in new obligations for taxpayers.

NO, MAYOR DI BLASIO, CLIMATE CHANGE IS NOT THE GREATEST THREAT TO NEW YORK: Cities and Pandemics Have a Long History.  Athens, Constantinople and other cities were humbled by plagues like the one that ended the Age of Pericles (and Pericles himself). “Only in the past century have cities ceased to be killing fields,” writes Edward L. Glaeser, and that was only because urban leaders focused on controlling disease instead of remaking society.

How can we reduce the threat of future pandemic and bring the world’s cities back to those halcyon days of November 2019? Almost assuredly, this is worth a massive increase in public-health-related spending. America’s nineteenth-century cities became healthier only because they spent as much on clean water as the federal government spent on everything else, but for the post office and the military. Covid-19 has destroyed trillions of dollars of shareholder value and generated a $2 trillion bailout. It makes sense to spend billions to avoid future losses of trillions.

Read the whole thing.

WARNING: RECYCLING MAY BE HAZARDOUS TO YOUR HEALTH: Stop the Virus Now, Save the Planet Later. Greens dream of a wondrous “circular economy,” but the pandemic exposes the grimmer reality. In: plastic bags. Out: recycling.

LOVE IN THE TIME OF COVID: Cupid in Quarantine. Couples will either grow together or grow apart. Make your choice.

PROGRESSIVES GONE WILD: Chaos by the Bay. San Francisco responds to the coronavirus with an experiment in lawlessness.

THANKS, BUT YOU’VE ALREADY DONE QUITE ENOUGH DAMAGE: Elizabeth Warren and Josh Hawley Will Do Everything Necessary To Combat Coronavirus (Unless It Involves Deregulation). After the debacles of the CDC and FDA, there’s bipartisan agreement on the need for more central planning.