SPONTANEOUS ORDER: Cheering Section. At 7 p.m., people pause and applaud hospital and health-care workers.

STOP THEM BEFORE THEY REGULATE AGAIN: The FDA Graveyard. For decades, the FDA’s archaic rules have been delaying medical progress and consigning tens of millions of Americans to an “invisible graveyard.” Now a very small part of the graveyard has suddenly become visible: the people dying of Covid-19 because of one bureaucratic obstruction after another to providing tests, masks and other protective equipment.

MOTHER NATURE ISN’T LOOKING SO MATERNAL ANYMORE: How the Pandemic Will Change Our Views on Technology, Innovation, Privacy — and Nature. Europeans and North Americans are paying the price for their neo-Luddite policies.

AND BLAMING EVERYONE ELSE FOR HIS MISTAKES: Preparing for the Wrong Emergency. Focused on climate change, Mayor Bill de Blasio failed to equip New York for the coronavirus.

ANTISOCIAL DISTANCING: Springtime for Introverts. Andrew Ferguson’s marvelously felicitous take on the pandemic’s silver lining for introverts like himself: “The world has caught up with us at last.”

CUTTING RED TAPE FOR COVID: Regulatory Relief Can Save Lives. We need reform at the local, state and federal levels to fight the virus.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: How Not to Tank Your Relationship in Quarantine. Some tips in The Atlantic from Roy Baumeister and me on how to avoid going negative  when spending 24/7 with your beloved. For a fuller discussion of the negativity effect, you can hear me on Krys Boyd’s NPR show, Think. Roy discusses it (and other issues in social science) on Scott Barry Kaufmann’s Psychology Podcast. And for the fullest discussion, of course, there’s our book, The Power of Bad. 

THEY HAD ONE JOB, AND THEY BLEW IT: The Real-Life Costs of Bad Regulation. Early administrative failings of the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control greatly exacerbated the Covid-19 crisis in the United States. Unless there’s major reform, the first response to the next viral threat should be to shut down not the economy but the FDA.

THE NO-FEAR GREETING: Goodbye to Handshakes — and Good Riddance. Now that a virus has finally stopped us from shaking hands, we have a singular opportunity to eliminate this custom once and for all. There’s a much better way to greet one another—and no, it’s not the fist bump, and it’s certainly not the ridiculous elbow tap, either.

TO AVOID COVID-19 AND OTHER ILLNESSES, DON’T USE “SUSTAINABLE” GROCERY BAGS: Greening Our Way to Infection.  The campaign to eliminate single-use plastic bags at the supermarket could prove deadly during the coronavirus outbreak. It has forced shoppers to switch to reusable tote bags that have proved quite “sustainable” for viruses and bacteria from food. The pathogens can linger for days — and then be spread all over the supermarket, especially at the checkout counter.  Researchers have repeatedly demonstrated that the pathogens in the bags are a serious public-health hazard unless grocery shoppers wash the bags regularly, which few people do.

The plastic-bag bans have never made any sense, because the replacement bags are harmful not only to people but also to the environment, as I’ve written. I compared the bag bans to medieval sumptuary laws — which forbade commoners from wearing certain clothes or using certain products that offended their social superiors — but perhaps I was unfair to the medieval rulers who made the laws. At least their edicts didn’t sicken or kill their subjects.

THE REAL REASON YOU CAN’T USE THE GROCERY BAG OF YOUR CHOICE: The Perverse Panic over Plastic. The green campaign against plastic isn’t merely a waste of time and money. Besides inconveniencing humans, it’s harmful to the environment. Banning plastic grocery bags contributes to global warming because it leads to more carbon emissions. Forcing Americans and Europeans to recycle plastic leads to more plastic pollution in the ocean because some of the recyclables end up being dumped in Asian rivers.

So why do greens keep stoking this panic? Because it makes them feel virtuously superior. The plastic bans are best understood as a modern version of medieval sumptuary laws, which forbade merchants and other commoners to wear clothes or use other products that offended the sensibilities of  aristocrats and clergymen. The sumptuary edicts consistently failed to accomplish their stated purpose, but they kept getting issued anyway (there were thousands of them across Europe, as I explain in City Journal) because they enabled nobles to lord it over their social inferiors.

The plastic panic also serves to provide employment for green activists. It’s one more example of what I call the Crisis Crisis: the never-ending series of hyped threats leading to policies that grow the government and leave everyone worse off. (There’s more on this in my new book, The Power of Bad: How the Negativity Effect Rules Us and How We Can Rule It.)

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Yale Cancels Western Art. “Introduction to Art History,” for decades one of the most popular and famous courses at Yale, is being eliminated because its emphasis on Western art is “problematic,” according to the chair of the art history department, Tim Barringer. The Yale Daily News translates that to mean that Western art is a “product of an overwhelmingly white, straight, European and male cadre of artists.” The horror!

The course will be offered one final time during this spring semester, but it sounds as if Barringer has already managed to ruin it. He has promised students that the course will consider Western art in relation to “questions of gender, class and ‘race'” as well as its involvement with capitalism. And he has promised that a “key theme” will be the relationship between art and climate change. Yes, just what everyone wants to learn from an art history professor.

NEVER LET THE CONSTITUTION GET IN THE WAY OF AN IMPEACHMENT: Abuse of Procedure. The House Democrats make an underwhelming case for impeachment — one without a constitutional basis.

BREAKING BAD: How to overcome online negativity. In Business Insider, the strategies that enabled one hotel in New York to dominate the TripAdvisor rankings. An excerpt from my new book, The Power of Bad. 

STARTING WITH ELIZABETH WARREN: The Gist of Bad. In his Slate podcast, Mike Pesca explains the awfulness of Elizabeth Warren’s plan for student debt and also talks to me about climate change, bad apples in the workplace, nostalgia, and other topics from my new book, The Power of Bad.

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: What are the Most Common Nightmares? The top two are “Falling” and “Being Chased,” followed by “Death” and “Feeling Lost.” At the bottom of the list: “Going Bald.”

ACTUALLY, THIS IS A NO-BRAINER: Recycling is becoming so expensive that some towns don’t know what to do. The Boston Globe mournfully reports on the agonizing decision facing Westfield, Massachusetts:

 On a recent afternoon here, with urgency in the air, local officials huddled to consider what until recently was unthinkable. Should they abandon their popular curbside recycling program? Or spend millions to build a plant to process plastic and paper on their own?

With the recycling market across the country mired in crisis, a growing number of cities and towns are facing a painful reckoning: whether they can still afford to collect bottles, cans, plastics, and paper, which have so plummeted in value that in some cases they have become effectively worthless.

“We’re looking at going from paying nothing to paying $500,000 a year,” said Dave Billips, the director of public works in Westfield, referring to the city’s recycling costs. “That’s going to have a major impact.”

Like his fellow devotees, Billips is understating the problem by pretending his recycling program used to break even just because it was able to give away the recyclables. He’s ignoring all the extra money that the town had to spend to collect the worthless stuff, not to mention the value of the time its citizens wasted sorting their garbage. The cheapest way to dispose of solid waste is to collect it all in one truck, send it straight to the landfill, and stop forcing people to perform greens’ favorite sacrament.

Who could have seen this coming?

NEWS YOU CAN USE: How to Overcome Your Brain’s Fixation on Bad Things. Tips from Greater Good Magazine, in an interview with the social psychologist Roy Baumeister and me about our new book, The Power of Bad (which, despite its title, was chosen by Greater Good as one of its favorite books of 2019).

LOUISA MAY ALCOTT WOULDN’T LIKE THE MOVIE EITHER: Little Women Goes to War.  Why, to the horror of feminist critics, aren’t men rushing to see Little Women? For the same reason that Alcott didn’t enjoy writing the novel: it’s a children’s story. She preferred adult fiction, wrote it only because she needed the money, and never liked the way the story ended. She would be even less charmed by the misandry and whininess in the current movie, which distorts the story and exaggerates the oppression of women in Alcott’s day in order to preach today’s progressive orthodoxy.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: How to Train the Fearless Mind. He was known to fans as “Fearless Felix” for his daredevil jumps off the tallest buildings in the world, but Felix Baumgartner lost his Right Stuff while sitting safely on the ground. As he was training for a supersonic jump from a balloon in the stratosphere, he developed a crippling fear of putting on his spacesuit and helmet. The NASA veterans training him figured he’d never overcome it, but he did, as detailed in this excerpt in Medium from The Power of Bad.

THE CONTENT OF THEIR CHARACTER: Against Tribal America. While progressives are desperately promoting racialism, Americans are less racist and more willing to marry outside their race than ever. And African-Americans are moving away from Democratic strongholds in the North to seek opportunity elsewhere. Of the 15 best regions in the country for African-Americans, Joel Kotkin notes in City Journal, 13 are in the old Confederacy (and the other two are in border states).

NEWS YOU CAN USE: How Negativity Can Kill a Relationship. We pride ourselves on the good things we do for partners and friends, but what really matters is what we don’t do. Avoiding bad is far more important than doing good, as Roy Baumeister and I point out in this Atlantic article discussing studies tracking married couples. It’s an excerpt from our new book, The Power of Bad, which notes that Anthony Trollope figured out this negativity effect in marriage long before social scientists, in his 1869 novel He Knew He Was Right. 

THE MOTHER OF ALL CRISES: The Power of Bad: How the Negativity Effect Rules Us and How We Can Rule It. In our new book, published today, the social psychologist Roy Baumeister and I argue that the greatest problem in public life is what we call the Crisis Crisis: the never-ending series of hyped threats that needlessly alarm and anger the public. It’s a consequence of the negativity effect, also called the negativity bias, which is the universal tendency for bad events and emotions to affect us more strongly than good ones. This effect continually skews our thinking and the decisions we make in our personal relationships, education, religion, business, sports, media and politics.

Why does government keep growing? Drawing on Mancur Olson’s Rise and Decline of Nations and Robert Higgs’ Crisis and Leviathan, we show how the negativity effect is exploited by journalists, politicians, academics, lobbyists  and activists — the merchants of bad, as we call these doomsayers —  to scare people into adopting policies that benefit politicians, bureaucrats and special interests while hurting everyone else. Whether you’re absorbing today’s bad news or contemplating the future of humanity, we suggest starting with three assumptions:

1. The world will always seem to be in crisis.
2. The crisis is never as bad it sounds.
3. The solution could easily make things worse.

The negativity effect isn’t going to disappear — evolution has wired it into our brains — and the merchants of bad won’t voluntarily go out of business. They don’t want us to see how much better things keep getting without their help. But they can be resisted, and the book offers some specific proposals for cutting the profits of doom and restoring sanity to public discourse. Read the whole thing (and enjoy a happier new year).

THE WAR ON PUBLIC HEALTH: The CDC Proves Trump Right on Vaping. After frightening vapers to go back to smoking, the CDC has confirmed its own incompetence. Its research shows the e-cigarette scare was deadly misinformation. Fortunately, as I write in City Journal, Trump is learning to ignore the bad science and advice from the CDC, the FDA and the rest of the public-health establishment.

ART FOR ART’S SAKE (WHAT A CONCEPT!): Finding Hope at the Concert Hall. Heather Mac Donald on an increasing rare experience: a beautiful performance of classical music without a note of identity politics. Meanwhile, as she writes, the left continues its long march through  institutions.

A few markers of our present moment: every arts institution in the United States is under pressure to discard meritocratic standards in collections, programming, and personnel, in favor of race and gender preferences. When the Museum of Modern Art opened its renovated headquarters in New York City this October, a Wall Street Journal art critic noted that the new MoMA had been able to “correct, and even make reparations for, its heretofore almost exclusive parade of white male superstars.” Gender and race bean-counting is now the key to evaluating a collection’s worth. “Previously, only about 1/20th of the art in the museum’s permanent collection was by women,” wrote the Journal’s Peter Plagens. “That fraction now exceeds a quarter and is moving toward a third.”

. . . Writing in the New York Times, Darren Walker urged museums to “resist reinforcing biases, hierarchies and inequalities”; instead, they should “redefine excellence and relevance.” That redefinition entails hiring curators and other staff based on race. The goal is “installations and institutions” that represent “people whom the system excludes and exploits.” The museum establishment hardly needed Walker’s prodding; it has already enthusiastically embraced “diversity” as its artistic lodestar. In 2020, the Baltimore Museum of Art, for example, will acquire works only by females and will stage only “female-centric” exhibits.

. . . Narcissistic opera directors have been inflicting their political ideology on defenseless operas for several decades now, but the revisionism is only going to get worse, especially with the rise of #MeToo. From here on, it will be almost impossible to mount Don Giovanni, Rusalka, Turandot, Madama Butterfly, Carmen, and much of the rest of the opera repertoire without similar directorial “help” to purge these works of their toxic masculinity, cultural appropriation, and incorrect attitudes toward the “Other.”

The good news for now: Attendance is not compulsory at MoMA, the Baltimore Museum of Art, or any opera that has been “helped.”