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.”

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).