ANOTHER APOLOGY TOUR: Bloomberg Renounces. He apologizes for his stop-and-frisk strategy  in New York. But what happened when police in Chicago and Baltimore abandoned that strategy?

GOOD, BECAUSE THAT CROWD IS MUCH SANER THAN THE FDA: “We Vape, We Vote” Crowd Got Through to Donald Trump, Advisors Say. The Washington establishment is portraying Trump’s refusal to approve the FDA’s vaping-flavor ban as a victory of politics over science, but the public-health bureaucrats and journalists are wrong. Trump is the one heeding science and protecting the public health, while the FDA and journalists are the ones fomenting a deadly moral panic.

WHERE HAVE YOU GONE, NAT HENTOFF? Journalists Against Free Speech. The First Amendment is no longer sacred among  journalists steeped in progressive orthodoxy about “hate speech” and “repressive tolerance.” My piece in City Journal discusses the new censors at HuffPost, Vox, the New Republic, Slate, the Washington Post, the Columbia Journalism Review and other media outlets.

These mostly younger progressive journalists lead campaigns to get conservative journalists fired, banned from Twitter, and “demonetized” on YouTube. They don’t burn books, but they’ve successfully pressured Amazon to stop selling titles that they deem offensive. They encourage advertising boycotts designed to put ideological rivals out of business. They’re loath to report forthrightly on left-wing censorship and violence, even when fellow journalists get attacked. They equate conservatives’ speech with violence and rationalize leftists’ actual violence as . . . speech.

Read the whole thing.

NOT A DISPATCH FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: One Trade School’s Path To Success. A Pennsylvania college offers kids from hard-up homes an old-fashioned form of social justice: training for a good-paying career.

FREE SPEECH IS ONLY FOR THE PEOPLE I CARE ABOUT: Empathy is Tearing Us Apart. Robert Wright on a new study showing that people who score high on the empathy scale are more likely to applaud efforts by protesters to silence a speaker from the opposing political party. They’re also more likely to be amused by reports that the protesters injured a supporter of the speaker.

Any guess on which party’s voters score higher on empathy? 

REALITY CHECK FOR DREAMERS AT THE SUPREME COURT: DACA in the Dock. What Obama has done, Trump can undo.

YES, LET’S MAKE ALL AMERICANS PAY NEW YORK CITY RENTS:  Strangling the Cities. The Democratic candidates want to make a housing a federal issue — and nationalize the progressive policies that have wrecked local housing markets.

GET WOKE, GO BROKE: The End of Men’s Magazines. Great piece by Brian Patrick Eha explaining how men’s magazines lost faith in men — and lost their readers.

Esquire, Details, Men’s Journal, Maxim, Playboy—it would be easier to list the men’s titles that haven’t shut down, cut issues, changed owners, blown up their editorial strategies, or become all but unrecognizable since 2015. In a tough media environment, men’s magazines are suffering more than most. Some—notably, Playboy and Esquire—appear to have decided that appealing primarily to men is no longer the best way forward. Their recent issues serve as signposts toward the future that, we are told over and over these days, is female—or, better yet, divorced from the gender binary altogether. What we stand to lose from their cultural eclipse is a certain ballast and guidance just as men need it most.

Read the whole thing.

JOURNALISTS IN GLASS HOUSES: The Age of Mutual Assured Cancellation. A modest proposal for my fellow journalists: Could we declare a bipartisan amnesty for the stupid things people did in high school and college—or at least stop pretending that these things have any relevance in judging a middle-aged adult’s professional competence? As much as journalists love to smear political opponents, there’s now a self-interested reason for us to stop throwing stones.

WEEKEND WISDOM: If you’re looking for a break from the political wars, The Three Blind Spots of Politics makes for good weekend reading. Russ Roberts’ 2017 essay explains the blinds spots that afflict liberals and conservatives — and, yes, even libertarians.

HOW TO REVIVE A CITY — AND HOW NOT TO: A Renaissance Runs Through It. No city has worked so hard for so long to reinvent itself as Pittsburgh. After master planners destroyed a once-thriving business district near my parents’ home, I left town and figured the city was a lost cause, but it has made a remarkable comeback, and its lessons are useful for cities everywhere. Now that young people are coming instead of fleeing, there’s a new problem: They’re voting progressive and putting a new breed of master planners in charge.

THE 2020 ANTI-URBAN AGENDA: A Platform of Urban Decline. Democratic presidential candidates believe America is racist, yet they ignore the evidence on crime and ensure that racial disparities persist. Heather Mac Donald discusses the chilling stats that the post-Obama Dems and their apologists in the media refuse to acknowledge.

WARNING: THE FDA IS HAZARDOUS TO PUBLIC HEALTH: A Bad Case of the Vapors. By exploiting a bogus nicotine-vaping scare that they fomented (with the help of alarmist journalists), federal and state officials are adopting policies that could shorten the lives of millions of Americans. My piece in City Journal discusses the hype and the harm from the vaping panic — the deadliest example yet of how progressivism has corrupted the public-health profession in America. 

THE DEATH OF CITIES, ROUND TWO: The Cost of Bad Intentions. Progressive policies threaten a new era of urban dysfunction.

WHY WE’RE STILL TALKING ABOUT CHARLES MANSON: Get Lost, Charlie. “Neil Armstrong’s footprints may be on the moon, but Manson’s footprints (or fingerprints, more aptly) seem more pervasive than do those of the Apollo heroes,” writes Paul Beston in a terrific essay on Manson’s cultural impact and the new film. “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a Tarantino opus that contains all his hallmarks, good and bad, along with what seems a new sense of humanity and justice.” Read the whole thing.

ANOTHER URBAN MYTH DEBUNKED: Gentrification for Social Justice. A new study shows that gentrification actually displaces few long-time residents, doesn’t lead to big increases in their rents, and improves their lives in various ways (like making it more likely that their children will attend college).

FIRST COMES SEX, THEN COMES LOVE: Should We All Take the Slow Road to Love? The anthropologist Helen Fisher has some advice for dating and marriage — and, for a change, some good news about millennials.

WHO’S YOUR DADDY? ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO KNOW? Twisting Ladders chronicles five families dealing with DNA surprises: people discovering who their biological parents are and meeting siblings they never knew about.  Jayne Riew tells their riveting stories in words and photographs. If you think your relatives are complicated, check out these families’ joys and sorrows.

GAMING THE SAT: Grievance Proxies. The College Board adds a tweak to the SAT score to placate diversocrats desperate to admit students by race instead of competence. Heather Mac Donald of City Journal analyzes the racial gap in SAT scores that colleges are trying to ignore.

CAPITALISTS INVADE THE DRUG STORE: Disrupting the Pharmacy. While Democrats (and sometimes President Trump) threaten to impose price controls on prescription drugs, the entrepreneurs at Blink Health have a better idea: let customers shop for the best price. My piece in City Journal describes their challenge to the  the middlemen who are suppressing competition and reaping oligopoly profits at the expense of patients, drug manufacturers and local drugstores. This oligopoly, called Big Pharmacy, has far more market power than Big Pharma. Democrats argue that government control is necessary because the free-market system has failed patients. But the real problem with prescription drugs, as with the rest of the health-care system, is that the free market hasn’t been tried.

ANOTHER BAD IDEA FROM CALIFORNIA: Candidate of Big Tech. Kamala Harris is Silicon Valley’s candidate because she offers its executives a change to safely virtue-signal. She had little regard for individual rights as California’s attorney general, but she carefully protected the rights of tech companies. By backing her with with a “potentially bottomless cash hoard,” as Joel Kotkin writes in City Journal, tech and media oligarchs are buying insurance for their empires while flaunting their progressive credentials. “If she wins, the tech oligarchy—titans of today’s Gilded Age—will have achieved commanding influence, not just in the information business and the media, but in the White House as well.”

WHAT THE ANTI-CONSUMERISTS DON’T UNDERSTAND: Stuff Sparks Joy. While moralists on the Left and the Right denounce Americans for buying too much stuff (and not recycling enough of it, those wastrels!), Marie Kondo knows better. On her Netflix program, she shows people how to declutter their homes — not because she thinks stuff is inherently evil, but because some wise editing lets you enjoy it more. As Katherine Mangu-Ward writes in Reason: 

In almost every episode of Kondo’s Netflix show, there is a cameo by a box of cables. No one knows what they are for, yet they lurk in hall closets and file cabinets. These cord collections are a relic of a time when such stockpiles were rational. A missing cord or adapter could render extremely expensive electronics useless, and replacements could be difficult or impossible to source. Today, thanks to cheap imports from China and elsewhere, electronics are cheap and replacement parts are instantly searchable, then deliverable right to your door.

In this sense, Americans’ homes are crowded with too much stuff not because they’re too rich but because they’re still thinking of themselves as too poor. This seemingly counterintuitive notion is on display in the difference between the homes of the wealthy, which are nearly always large but devoid of visible extraneous objects, and the houses of the working class, which are much more likely to be crammed to the rafters. Poor people tend to keep everything. But the desire to hang on to lots of stuff originates in fear, not joy.

You don’t have to tell Venezuelans that it’s good to have stuff. And it’s even better when you can afford to send some of it to the landfill (and learn to ignore the recycling scolds). Read the whole thing.

HINT TO AOC, IT’S NOT WHITE SUPREMACISTS: Who Commits Most of the World’s Extremist Violence? While progressives are seizing on recent incidents to manufacture a trend of increasing violence by white supremacists, the rate of violent hate crime in the U.S. has been steady for half a century. And most of the violence worldwide is the work of a very different kind of supremacists, as Seth Barron explains in City Journal.

AT THE VERY LEAST, THE DEBATE SHOULD EMBARRASS PROGRESSIVES:  School Choice for All? While Betsy DeVos’ plan to use federal tax credits to provide “education freedom scholarships” may  seem like a political non-starter, Max Eden argues that it could happen: “Any federal school-choice initiative has at least two obstacles: conservatives are wary of “federal” and progressives hate “school choice.” But EFS potentially has appeal for both sides.”

RECYCLING IS STILL GARBAGE: Fiscal realities are finally persuading towns to junk their recycling programs, as the Atlantic reports sorrowfully. Alana Semuels nicely analyzes the fatal economic flaws of recycling but ends with a bit of green sermonizing:

Americans are going to have to come to terms with a new reality: All those toothpaste tubes and shopping bags and water bottles that didn’t exist 50 years ago need to go somewhere, and creating this much waste has a price we haven’t had to pay so far.

Actually, we’ve already paid the price by building landfills with with expensive liners and other environmental safeguards. And we’ve paid a lot more for recycling programs that were never necessary. Yes, those water bottles do have to go somewhere — and there’s plenty of room for them right back where they came from, in the ground. Why are greens horrified by the prospect of a plastic bottle made from petroleum being buried in a landfill? The plastic poses less of an underground threat  than the petroleum did. It’s much better environmentally (and cheaper) to put plastic bottles in a local landfill instead of shipping them  off for recycling to Asia (the only place with any market for them), because some of those bottles end up in rivers that send the plastic waste into the Pacific Ocean.

Eric Boehm at Reason has a much savvier take on the scrapped recycling programs:

Like most other civic issues, recycling programs should be judged by their costs and benefits. That means an honest assessment of the costs and benefits, one that leaves out the social signaling of environmentalism and the feel-good effects of putting an empty Coke bottle in a plastic bin that’s painted blue instead of black. There is no need to recycle all the things all the time, and the market seems to be sending towns and cities a powerful signal about the benefits of calling trash, trash.

Who could have ever predicted this?