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?

CENTRAL PLANNING NEVER GOES OUT OF FASHION: Wishful Thinking on Antitrust.  Jonathan Clarke dismantles a progressive law professor’s plan for giving vast new economic powers to antitrust bureaucrats and judges.

ANOTHER PROGRESSIVE MYTH DEBUNKED: What the Prescription Drug Debate Gets Wrong. If we want new drugs for Alzheimer’s and the other ravages of old age, the last thing we need is European-style price controls at the pharmacy. But that’s the dream of Democrats, and the Trump administration is unfortunately threatening to go along with it.

This campaign is based on the same myth that was used to sell Obamacare: Americans are dying because their health-care system is an international disgrace. While it’s true that Canadians’ and western Europeans’ life expectancy is higher than Americans’, it’s not because of their price-controlled drugs and government health services. As I write in City Journal, the gap is due to variables that have nothing to do with health-care systems: the higher rates in America of poverty, obesity, smoking, homicide, fatal accidents and other factors.

The gap would be even larger if it weren’t for the fact that Americans receive better health care, particularly for heart disease and cancer. And the chief reason that American patients fare better than European patients is that they get earlier access to more new drugs. A dollar spent on drugs does more to combat disease and disability than a dollar spent anywhere else.

Yes, Canadians and Europeans pay less at the pharmacy, but they’re getting what they pay for. Why would Trump want to copy them? He should look at the numbers. Americans already get a much better deal.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The Campus Diversity Swarm. Universities are wasting millions on their ever-expanding staffs of diversity apparatchiks with six-figure salaries. This cottage industry even has its own journal — supported with tuition dollars, of course — which publishes timeless articles like, “The Influence of Campus Climate and Urbanization on Queer-Spectrum and Trans-Spectrum Faculty Intent to Leave.”

GROWING THE SWAMP: How Bloomberg Embeds Green Warriors in Blue-State Governments. To be fair, it’s not just Bloomberg. NYU Law School is working with him to plant — and pay for — activists working to raise the price of energy.

OFF WITH THEIR HEADS (IF THEY’RE MALE): The Madame DeFarge of New York. Seth Barron on the New York senator who never lets due process get in the way of her belief in a female’s unsubstantiated (or discredited) accusation against a man.

MEN SHOULD JUST SHUT UP: Feminist Narcissism. Heather Mac Donald on feminists hitting a new low with their attack on Brett Kavanaugh: “It is feminist narcissism to put an uncharacteristic instance of adolescent, never-repeated sexual aggression [even if it were substantiated, which in this case it hasn’t been] ahead of a lifetime of achievement in the law. The priorities look like a revenge attack on a civilization deemed too male.”

THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR BAD ECONOMIC PREDICTIONS: Continually Mistaken, Chronically Admired. From his admiration of Hugo Chavez’ economic policies to his predictions about Fannie Mae, Joseph Stigliz has proven that you don’t have to be correct to be a celebrated left-wing economist. (To be fair, Paul Krugman deserves priority for this discovery.)

JUVENILE LOGIC: Unforgiven. Liberals used to be in favor of leniency for juvenile offenders. But of course they didn’t mean Republicans, as Kay Hymowitz writes in City Journal:

That Kavanaugh’s fiercest opponents are now using a (tenuously recalled) adolescent crime as proof of his unfitness is an irony worth considering. The Left has always been at the forefront of the fight for leniency for minors. Progressives founded the juvenile court in 1899. Liberals fought “law and order” conservative attempts to try juveniles as adults initiated during the crime wave of the 1970s through 1990s. They pointed out, accurately, that those policies affected black kids far more than white. They were rightfully indignant that prepubescent children could be labelled sex offenders. “Children are regularly put on sex offender registries, sometimes for their entire lives, for conduct less serious than what Kavanaugh is accused of,” writes [New York Times columnist Michelle] Goldberg. Well, yes. That’s exactly the tough-on-juvenile-crime approach that has five times as many black as white juveniles in prison and that Goldberg herself would justify against Kavanaugh.

If it weren’t for double standards . . . .

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Reeducation Campus. In City Journal, I report on an experience I wouldn’t wish on anyone: attending the annual convention for the college bureaucrats in charge of indoctrinating freshmen. More than 1,700 of them from around the world convened to discuss the First Year Experience, an umbrella of orientation programs that have spread to 90 percent of American campuses and are rapidly expanding overseas.

These programs often start with a “common read,” a book sent to everyone the summer before school starts, and proceed with lectures, discussion groups, seminars, courses, exercises, field trips, art projects, local activism, and whatever else the schools will fund. The programs are typically run not by professors but by “co-curricular professionals”—administrators lacking scholarly credentials who operate outside the regular curriculum.

These professionals seem to lean even further left than the faculty, to judge from the wild applause they gave to authors promoting common-read books with no literary merit but plenty of identity politics. And in some ways these bureaucrats have more influence than the faculty.

By choosing your courses carefully, you can avoid the progressive sermonizing that passes for scholarship in some departments, but everyone has to undergo the orientation and first-year programs. You may have come to study computer science or literature or biochemistry, but first you’ll have to learn about social justice, environmental sustainability, gender pronouns, and micro-aggressions. You may have been planning to succeed by hard work, but first you’ll have to acknowledge your privilege or discover your victimhood. If you arrived at college hoping to broaden your intellectual horizons, you’ll quickly be instructed which ideas are off-limits.

While the tenured professoriate stagnates, these administrators are expanding their domains, just as predicted by Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy.

NO, THEY’RE NOT GOING TO ABDUCT YOUR CHILD: Fear of Strangers is Fatal. The “World’s Worst Mom,” Lenore Skenazy, on the deadly consequences of scaring parents.

IF YOU CAN READ THIS WITHOUT LAUGHING OR CRYING: Now that the University of Manchester has deemed Rudyard Kipling insufficiently woke and scrubbed his poem “If” from the wall of its student union, Rod Little has revised the poem for today’s students:

If you can self-define as something you’re not,
And crawl into victimhood, however well-bred
And spew out tendentious sub-teenage rot
And wear a vagina on top of your head,
And whine like a ninny, inside your safe space,
When the real world intrudes on the crap you’ve averred,
Then apply to our college – we’ll give you a place,
(For about £30k). And you’ll get a third.

As further punishment, you’ll be forced to read the Maya Angelou poem that has replaced “If” on the wall at Manchester.

THE LEFT’S WAR ON PUBLIC HEALTH: Juul Madness. The smoking rate for American adults and teenagers has hit an all-time low, but public-health activists are working hard to reverse the trend. They’ve renewed their attack on the vaping industry and singled out Juul Labs, the makers of an e-cigarette so effective at weaning smokers from their habit that Wall Street analysts are calling it an existential threat to the tobacco industry (whose stocks have plunged this year along with cigarette sales).  From my City Journal piece:

Activists are so determined to prohibit any use of nicotine that they’re calling Juul a “massive public-health disaster” and have persuaded journalists, Democratic politicians, and federal officials to combat the “Juuling epidemic” among teenagers.

The press has been scaring the public with tales of high schools filled with nicotine fiends desperately puffing on Juuls, but the latest federal survey, released last month, tells quite a different story. The vaping rate last year among high-school students, a little less than 12 percent, was actually four percentage points lower than in 2015, when Juul was a new product with miniscule sales.

A coalition of activists and Democratic senators, including Chuck Schumer and Elizabeth Warren, are denouncing Juul and pressing for regulations that would outlaw most vaping devices now on the market.

You’d think that progressive activists and journalists would be cheering the small company whose life-saving product has become an existential threat to Big Tobacco. But the lower the smoking rate falls,  the less work there is for anti-smoking activists at groups like the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, which has helped lead the attack on Juul and the vaping industry. The activists need a new cause and a new enemy, and they’re not about to let the public’s health get in their way.

Or the facts.

BUCKLEY AT HIS BEST: The Judge Hunter is out today, the latest comic novel from Christopher Buckley (and my new favorite).  On the theory that Washington has become impossible to parody, Buckley switched from political satire (Thank You for Smoking, Little Green Men) to historical fiction, starting in 2015 with The Relic Master, a 16th-century caper to steal the Shroud of Turin. Now he’s on to the 17th century in the The Judge Hunter, in which the London diarist Samuel Pepys gets rid of his feckless brother-in-law, Balty, by sending him to New England to track down two judges who had signed the death warrant of King Charles 1.

It’s a lovely blend of P.G. Wodehouse and George MacDonald Fraser — Bertie Wooster meets Flashman — as the dandified Balty travels from Boston through the wilderness to New Amsterdam, fending off Puritan governors, Indians and Peter Stuyvesant. It gave me a new appreciation for the roots of the grim zealotry animating environmentalists. If you think today’s New Englanders are tough on non-recyclers, consider what their Puritan ancestors were doing to Quakers. When Balty attends a Puritan service in New Haven, he’s shocked to see a young woman walking serenely up the center aisle without a stitch of clothing on her. He assumes she’s insane, but his traveling companion, a savvy military veteran named Huncks, explains that this is a common form of protest for Quaker dissidents.

Balty considered. “Well, I’d call it lunatical. At the very least, fruity.”

“Religions are fruity.”

“Jesus didn’t go parading about naked.”

“He went looking for trouble, didn’t he? Same with Quakers. They embrace persecution. Fulfills them.”

Balty weighed this. “Damn strange bit of business, however you slice it. The sight would have broken your heart. A constable who bellowed at me for running said she’s to be tried tomorrow. Probably because they don’t have trials on the Sabbath. What will they do to her?”

“The King’s missive forbids them to persecute Quakers. No more hangings, floggings, cutting off ears, branding. What shall they do for entertainment?”

Spoiler alert: the Puritans aren’t about to let the King’s missive interfere with their entertainment, but Balty comes to her rescue. Read the whole thing.

WHY THEY HATE HIM: Scott Pruitt, Warrior for Science. How could “the party of science,” as Democrats like to call themselves, be opposed to the EPA administrator’s demand for more transparency in sharing data and more rigorous peer review of the agency’s research? Because better science could get in the way of the green political agenda. My City Journal piece looks at the fight to get rid of Pruitt in the context of the EPA’s history of junk science. Once again, the real war on science is the one waged by the left, as John Stossel writes at Fox News.

A MUST-READ FOR POTENTIAL SNOWFLAKES: All Minus One, a beautifully illustrated and smartly abridged version of John Stuart Mill’s arguments for free speech in “On Liberty,” is just out at Heterodox Academy, which hopes it will become required reading for students before they enter college. Here’s a conversation about Mill — and why he’s more relevant than ever — with Richard Reeves, the Mills biographer who edited this book together with Jonathan Haidt.

JOHN STOSSEL: The Left’s “War on Science.” The real threats to science virtually all come from the Left, not the Right, as Stossel deftly shows in this video. He interviews me and draws from from my City Journal article.