LUCK ISN’T SO DUMB AFTER ALL: I’ve been enjoying reading about the science of lucky breaks, as explored by Janice Kaplan and Barnaby March in How Luck Happens. They take a critical look at some of the legends of luck, like the story of Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin when he came from vacation to find that a petri dish he’d left on a windowsill had been contaminated with mold:

And lo and behold, the bacteria surrounding the mold had been destroyed.

He didn’t shout, “Eureka!” or go running naked through the streets (as Archimedes reportedly once did),* but he did realize that the mold might have inhibited the bacterial growth. And there you have it— one lucky break and millions of people have been saved from diseases like strep throat and scarlet fever, as well as wound infections.

“When I woke up just after dawn on September 28, 1928, I certainly didn’t plan to revolutionize all medicine by discovering the world’s first antibiotic, or bacteria killer. But I suppose that was exactly what I did,” Fleming said later.

The revolution wasn’t quite as casual as all that. During World War I, Fleming had been in the Royal Army Medical Corps doing research into wound infections and antiseptics. After the war, he returned to his lab at St. Mary’s Hospital at the University of London, and by 1921, he had made his first big discovery, finding an enzyme that fights bacteria.

That research reportedly began when Fleming had a cold and dropped some mucus into one of his bacteria cultures. Are you starting to see a pattern here? The dropped mucus and the plopped mold were serendipitous, but they were common events. It wasn’t their occurrence that was so lucky and magical, but what Fleming made of them.

At the time of his family vacation, Fleming had been working on questions about bacteria and the human immune system for more than a decade. As is often the case in science, he had many small breakthroughs and lots of incremental steps. Many of the things he tried didn’t lead anywhere. When one does pay off, it’s not random luck— it’s the result of months and years of focused energy, and plenty of experiments that didn’t pan out.

You get lucky only when you know what you’re looking for. Someone else coming into Fleming’s lab after that vacation might have tossed away the contaminated petri dish without a second thought. One man’s scientific breakthrough is another man’s yucky, moldy mess.

Their conclusion: “Luck occurs at the intersection of random chance, talent and hard work.”

GIVE LIBERTARIANS CREDIT: Welcome to the Golden Age.  Steven Pinker’s new bestseller, Enlightenment Now, is a remarkably broad and deep — and readable — rebuttal to the pessimism that passes for profundity among progressive intellectuals. While the Cassandras keep predicting disaster, things keep getting better for everyone else. For all the concerns about capitalism and its discontents, like income inequality, people at all levels of society keep getting happier as they get richer. Pinker nicely sums up the data about wealth and happiness with a joke:

A dean is presiding over a faculty meeting when a genie appears and offers him one of three wishes—money, fame, or wisdom. The dean replies, “That’s easy. I’m a scholar. I’ve devoted my life to understanding. Of course I’ll take wisdom.” The genie waves his hand and vanishes in a puff of smoke. The smoke clears to reveal the dean with his head in his hands, lost in thought. A minute elapses. Ten minutes. Fifteen. Finally a professor calls out, “Well? Well?” The dean mutters, “I should have taken the money.”

I highly recommend it in my review in City Journal, but I do quibble with his treatment of libertarians. Although the book is a paean to the Enlightenment’s libertarian values — free minds and free markets — he takes a few digs at modern libertarians that seem to me at odds with the data (including his own). Otherwise, it’s a great book for us Cornucopians to enjoy, as is Gregg Easterbrook’s new one, It’s Better Than It Looks.  

STOP THEM BEFORE THEY BUILD AGAIN: Trump’s Infrastructure Opportunity. Every president talks about infrastructure, but this administration actually knows how to do something about it. Thanks to Trump’s smart appointments, it has developed a strategy that really could make infrastructure again: Get the federal government out of the way. In previews of their infrastructure initiative, expected any week now, administration officials have promised to shift responsibility back to the cities and states that benefit from these projects. For too long, as I write in City Journal, politicians of both parties have pretended that it takes wise central planners to coordinate a nation’s infrastructure—a myth typically justified by pointing to the Interstate highway system, begun by Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s and lauded by its boosters ever since as “the greatest public works project in history.”

In reality, though, the Interstate system is the most powerful illustration of how a perfectly sound and seemingly simple project can be ruined by central planners. There was no need to nationalize highways, which had traditionally been a state responsibility. Pennsylvania and other states pioneered the expressway era with their own network of turnpikes, which generated plenty of revenue to maintain the roads while repaying the bondholders who financed them. But then Eisenhower and Congress, arguing that a highway network was necessary for national defense, concentrated money, power, and decision-making in Washington.

The new Interstate system, financed by gas taxes, seemed to work well at first. Drivers marveled at how they could zoom on open highways without stopping at traffic lights or toll booths. But the Interstates were ultimately doomed by the inherent inflexibility and political deal-making of a centralized system. The highways were needlessly expensive, particularly in cities. In order to get urban members of Congress to go along, Washington bribed them with extra money to build highways that obliterated neighborhoods; the projects would never have been built if cities and states had been spending their own money. The damage to cities was compounded by Washington’s one-size-fits-all requirements to build highways with wide lanes and shoulders—an attractive safety feature for an expressway through the prairies of Kansas but one that doesn’t make sense in a dense urban neighborhood.  Worst of all, the central planners outlawed tolls on new federally funded highways, thus preventing states from using a financing mechanism that would have ensured proper long-term maintenance and could be used to reduce congestion at peak times.

The result, half a century later: a highway system that no longer works. It’s horribly congested and in bad shape physically. Much of the system needs to be rebuilt because the highways are at the end of their useful life, yet there’s not even enough money to maintain the existing roads.

With Washington out of the way, the states could build Interstate 2.0, as Robert Poole of Reason calls it. But it won’t be easy persuading Congress, especially Democrats, to give up their pork barrel.

SWAMP-DRAINING LESSONS FROM 1787: A Trump adviser and speechwriter, F.H. Buckley, offers a sweeping perspective on the Washington swamp in his new book, The Republic of Virtue: How We Tried to Ban Corruption, Failed, and What We Can Do About It. Buckley, a professor at George Mason University School of Law, describes how the Founding Fathers sought to create a republic of disinterested public virtue. They admired the British constitution but wanted neither a monarchy nor British-style corruption. At crucial moments in the 1787 Constitutional Convention, when extreme nationalists such as Madison proposed a walk-out that might have split the country, it was the prospect of an anti-corruption constitution that kept things together. And that is how the document was drafted.

That was then. Now we’re stuck with a presidential regime that fosters corruption, the wrong kind of federalism and, in Buckley’s words, “the thickest network of patronage ever seen in any country, a crony capitalism in which business partners with government and transfers wealth from the poor to the rich.” Instead of criminalizing political speech, Buckley says, we should scrap nearly all our campaign finance laws, focus instead on reining in lobbyists, and recognize that a purely virtuous state is an impossible chimera.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The End of the Modern Academy. Universities have abandoned the three ideals that once defined their mission, according to Richard Shweder, the cultural anthropologist at the University of Chicago, writing at Project Muse. Once upon a time, these were the core values:

Ideal #1: “Research done primarily in anticipation of profit is incompatible with the aims
of the university.”
Ideal #2: “The basic principles of the university include complete freedom of research
and the unrestricted dissemination of information.”
Ideal #3: “There must be no consideration of sex, ethnic or national characteristics, or
political or religious beliefs or affiliations in any decision regarding appointment,
promotion, or reappointment at any level of the academic staff.”

Unrestricted discourse and no identity politics? Why, these days on campus that’s hate speech.

KEEPING THE SKIES UNFRIENDLY: The Corporate Jet Set’s War on Coach Passengers. The federal government’s air-traffic control system is so awful that even the unionized controllers want to turn it over to a not-for-profit corporation, as Republican leaders in Congress hope to do this month. They’ve got a good chance of succeeding in the House, but prospects are uncertain in the Senate. My piece in City Journal:

Members of Congress are about to face a tough choice: should they vote to replace America’s scandalously antiquated air-traffic control system with one that would be safer and cheaper, reduce the federal deficit, conserve fuel, ease congestion in the skies, and speed travel for tens of millions of airline passengers? Or should they maintain the status quo to please the lobbyists representing owners of corporate jets?

If that choice doesn’t sound difficult, then you don’t know the power that corporate jet-setters wield in Congress. They’re the consummate Washington crony capitalists: shameless enough to demand that their private flights be subsidized by the masses who fly coach, savvy enough to stymie reforms backed by Democratic and Republican administrations.

If they prevail, we’ll be stuck with an air-traffic system mired in mid-twentieth  century technology:

Controllers and pilots rely on ground-based radar and radio beacons instead of GPS satellites. They communicate by voice over crowded radio channels because the federal government still hasn’t figured out how to use text messaging. The computers in control towers are so primitive that controllers track planes by passing around slips of paper.

The result: an enormous amount of time wasted by passengers, especially those traveling in the busy airspace of the Northeast. Because the system is so imprecise, planes have to be kept far apart, which limits the number of planes in the air—leaving passengers stranded at terminals listening to the dread announcements about “air traffic delays.” When they do finally take off, they’re often delayed further because the pilot must fly a zig-zag course following radio beacons instead of saving time and fuel by taking a direct route.

Reformers have been trying to fix the system for decades, but the lobbyists for the Gulfstream class like it just the way it is.

SCIENCE ON THE MARCH, BACKWARDS: Standing on the Shoulders of Diversocrats. Now that identity politics rules the humanities, it’s time to conquer the sciences and engineering. The UCLA engineering school has its first “dean of diversity and inclusion” ready to rectify the “implicit bias” that so distorts engineers’ calculations. Heather Mac Donald in City Journal:

The only thing that the academic diversity racket achieves is to bid up the salaries of plausibly qualified candidates, and redistribute those candidates to universities that can muster the most resources for diversity poaching. The dean of UCLA Engineering, Jayathi Murthy, laments that of the 900 females admitted to the undergraduate engineering program in 2016, only about 240 accepted the offer. “There are (about) 660 women there that are going somewhere else and the question is . . . is there an opportunity for us to do something differently,” she told the Daily Bruin.  Presumably, those 660 non-matriculants are getting engineering degrees at other institutions. If the goal (a dubious one) is to increase the number of female engineers overall, then it doesn’t matter where they graduate from. But every college wants its own set of “diverse” students and faculty, though one institution’s gain is another’s presumed loss.

The pressure to take irrelevant characteristics like race and sex into account in academic science is dangerous enough. But Silicon Valley continues to remake itself in the image of the campus diversity bureaucracy. Dell Technologies announced in September a new “chief diversity and inclusion officer” position. Per the usual administrator shuffle, the occupant of this new position, Brian Reaves, previously served as head of diversity and inclusion for software company SAP. Reaves will engage the company’s “leaders” in “candid conversations about the role of gender and diversity in the workplace,” said Dell chief customer officer Karen Quintos in a press statement. “Candid” means:  you are free to confess your white cis-male privilege. “Candid” does not mean questioning Dell’s diversity assumptions, as this summer’s firing of computer engineer James Damore from Google made terrifyingly clear to any other potential heretics.

Read the whole thing.

STOP THEM BEFORE THEY PAINT AGAIN: Destroying the Neighborhood to Save It.  When whites leave for the suburbs, it’s racist “white flight.” When they return, it’s racist too, even if they’re fellow lefties whose art promotes the correct social-justice themes. In the finest tradition of the Cultural Revolution, activists are driving art galleries out of the Boyle Heights district near downtown Los Angeles because they might actually improve the Latino neighborhood. They’ve have been harassing the owners with protests, racial taunts, boycotts and vandalism. One gallery was spray-painted with the lovely inclusive message of “Fuck White Art.” Latino artists at the galleries are denounced as “coconuts” — brown on the outside, white on the inside.

In City Journal, Kay Hymowitz reports on the horrible crime of converting a vacant building, formerly a piano warehouse, into a gallery and performance space named 356 Mission:

The artists and gallery owners suddenly found themselves in the same enemy camp as destroyer billionaires like Starbucks founder Howard Schultz, or even President Trump. (One protest flyer read: “Donald Trump is a Developer and so is 356 Mission.”) For the anti-gentrification protestors, art galleries are by definition capitalist enterprises, and thus enemies of “the community.”

One of the major local activist groups calls itself The Boyle Heights Alliance Against Artwashing and Displacement (BHAAD). “Artwashing” refers to artists, arts organizations, and their corporate sponsors who, unwittingly or not, rebrand and upscale—i.e., gentrify—low-income neighborhoods. (The related term“pinkwashing” refers to gay newcomers to those neighborhoods, who cause wine bars and dog groomers to come snooping for real estate.)  BHAAAD was not interested in compromise with their presumptive political comrades. “[A]ll new art galleries [should] immediately leave Boyle Heights,” the group announced on Facebook.“Those buildings should be utilized by our community members the ways we best see fit which may be converting them into emergency housing, shelters, or centers for job training.”

So it’s basically a bunch of thugs making a real-estate grab.

FUNNY THING ABOUT DEMOCRATS: The Weinstein Silence. Comics pretend they speak truth to power, but on late-night TV that’s limited to mocking Trump and other Republicans. Which is not exactly a profile in courage, as Bob McManus writes in City Journal:

In the absence of personal risk, haranguing the powerful can be soul-satisfying, and sometimes it forges careers, but it isn’t brave by a long shot. Thomas More spoke truth to Henry VIII, and it cost him his head. Dietrich Bonheoffer spoke truth to Adolf Hitler and was hanged in a concentration camp. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn spoke truth to the Soviet Union and suffered grievously for it. Stephen Colbert piddled on the president’s rug, and he’s been cashing big-bucks checks ever since. See the difference?

Their sense of humor mysteriously vanishes when a Democrat like Harvey Weinstein is involved:

Weinstein caught no grief came from late-night wisecrackers. Colbert was dumb as a post on the topic for days, breaking silence only after Weinstein had been fired—and even then, only to call him “a bad guy.” His late-night colleagues in calumny weren’t any better. Saturday Night Live invented slow-motion political character assassination with its over-the-top post-Watergate treatment of Gerald Ford, and the show has been gleefully tormenting politicians of a certain party ever since (and Bill Clinton, for his Oval Office shenanigans). But SNL had nothing to say about Weinstein over the weekend. Lorne Michaels, the show’s top producer, dismissed the scandal as “a New York thing” early Sunday morning.

Nobody reasonably expects political balance in a comedy sketch—how boring would that be?—and it is generally understood that Hollywood, and the media in general, descended into a progressive sinkhole long ago. So ignoring Weinstein’s agony is not surprising, ideologically—not to mention his storied ability to vaporize careers. There’s no appetite in show biz to speak truth to that kind of power.

Now that Hollywood is finally turning on Weinstein, expect the late-night comics to bravely join the mob.

CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE, ROGER: Bench the NFL. Pro football’s success is founded on shrewd lobbying and a federal favor. After a court forbade the NFL teams from jointly negotiating a TV deal, the league persuaded Congress in 1961 to grant a special exemption from antitrust laws. This perk has often has been criticized, but the efforts to remove it have never gone far in Congress. The NFL enjoyed bipartisan support because it seemed a national institution above politics. But now that the owners and players have so resolutely united against Republicans (and public opinion), Steve Malanga of City Journal wants Congress to reconsider:

The national anthem protest controversy offers a new perspective on the privileges that Congress has awarded to the NFL, particularly because the league’s team owners have allowed those protests to take place and even, last weekend, participated in them, in response to President Trump’s criticism of the players’ activism. Patriots’ owner Robert Kraft, for instance, said last Sunday, “I support [players’] right to peacefully affect social change and raise awareness in a manner that they feel is most impactful.” But while players have the right to engage in political speech free from government interference, their freedom does not extend by right to a private employer in its own workplace. The majority of companies in America would not, and do not, allow demonstrations at work by individual employees on political issues unrelated to their employment—just the sort of demonstrations begun last year by former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, and carried on through this weekend by more than 200 players. That the owners have tolerated and lately even encouraged such protests over an issue—charges of police brutality—that divides many Americans is a business risk that they seem willing to take. But the league’s use of its platform—created by its federal antitrust exemption—to broadcast its message across the country is more than a simple business matter. It represents an improper use of resources made available to the NFL by special federal legislation. It’s past time to revoke the Sports Broadcasting Act.

The owners won’t be happy with this, but at least they’ll have something specific to protest in the pregame ceremony.

THE REAL WAR ON BLACK MEN: Hard Data, Hollow Protests. The death toll from Black Lives Matter (and its shills in the NFL and the media) continues to grow, as Heather Mac Donald writes in City Journal:

The FBI released its official crime tally for 2016 today, and the data flies in the face of the rhetoric that professional athletes rehearsed in revived Black Lives Matter protests over the weekend.  Nearly 900 additional blacks were killed in 2016 compared with 2015, bringing the black homicide-victim total to 7,881. Those 7,881 “black bodies,” in the parlance of Ta-Nehisi Coates, are 1,305 more than the number of white victims (which in this case includes most Hispanics) for the same period, though blacks are only 13 percent of the nation’s population. The increase in black homicide deaths last year comes on top of a previous 900-victim increase between 2014 and 2015.

Who is killing these black victims? Not whites, and not the police, but other blacks. In 2016, the police fatally shot 233 blacks, the vast majority armed and dangerous, according to the Washington Post. The Post categorized only 16 black male victims of police shootings as “unarmed.” That classification masks assaults against officers and violent resistance to arrest. Contrary to the Black Lives Matter narrative, the police have much more to fear from black males than black males have to fear from the police. In 2015, a police officer was 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male was to be killed by a police officer. Black males have made up 42 percent of all cop-killers over the last decade, though they are only 6 percent of the population. That 18.5 ratio undoubtedly worsened in 2016, in light of the 53 percent increase in gun murders of officers—committed vastly and disproportionately by black males. Among all homicide suspects whose race was known, white killers of blacks numbered only 243. . . .

Four studies came out in 2016 alone rebutting the charge that police shootings are racially biased. If there is a bias in police shootings, it works in favor of blacks and against whites. That truth has not stopped the ongoing demonization of the police—including, now, by many of the country’s ignorant professional athletes. The toll will be felt, as always, in the inner city, by the thousands of law-abiding people there who desperately want more police protection.

Colin Kaepernick and LeBron James could not be reached for comment.

HE CHOSE WISELY: Trump v. Tattooed Millionaires. Steve Malanga in City Journal:

Once upon a time, professional athletes not only came out of working-class, scrappy neighborhoods, but they also pretty much stayed working class their entire lives. Until as recently as the late 1960s, NFL linemen worked construction or loaded trucks in the offseason to pay their bills. Players with a college degree traded on their celebrity status to sell stocks or insurance. (The policy my mother cashed in when my father died was sold to him in the early 1960s by a retired New York Giants player). Many of today’s players, by contrast, live in a world of ostentatious homes, fast cars, and red-carpet celebrity appearances, far from the struggles of those whose support pays their salaries. These players have deemed themselves important enough to impose their political views on ordinary fans watching sports as a respite from life’s daily grind. . . .

If players and officials think Trump will retreat on this issue, they haven’t been paying attention. And if they believe that their world is impervious, they’ve forgotten that America has had, over the last 75 years, several different favorite sports—from boxing to baseball—that eventually gave way.

Players, sportswriters, and maybe even the owners seem to think that fans will find it impossible to give up football on Sundays in the fall. It’s not.

But hey, didn’t Hillary Clinton prove you don’t need those blue-collar plebes anyway?

CUPID’S SHORTCUTS: Try these “love hacks” to fix your marriage. They’re not miracle cures, but they take only a few minutes a month. And they’re a lot cheaper than couples therapy or a joint self-actualization vacation.

PROGRESSIVISM IS HAZARDOUS TO YOUR HEALTH:  The Corruption of Public Health. Of all the crazy left-wing junk-science crusades I’ve written about, the war on vaping is the craziest. Progressives are effectively protecting Big Tobacco and Big Pharma by misleading the public about the risks of vaping, as I write in City Journal:

How could a profession dedicated to health oppose the most promising method of saving smokers’ lives? The immediate answer involves progressive activists whom the Obama administration appointed to government health agencies; with the change of administrations, their departure gives Republicans a chance to undo the damage. But the vaping story is part of a much bigger and longer-running scandal. It is the most flagrant example of how a once-noble enterprise became corrupted by ideology and self-dealing.

The public-health profession now cares about more growing government than promoting solid research or public health. Millions of lives could be saved if smokers switched to e-cigarettes or smokeless tobacco, but when it comes to nicotine, progressives insist on an abstinence-only policy (also known as “quit or die”) rather than the “harm-reduction” approach they promote for heroin addicts.

This inconsistency can be explained partly by the Left’s preferences in virtue-signaling. Like fundamentalists who object to dancing because it looks like sex, they’re repulsed by vaping because it looks like smoking. A more cynical explanation is the difference in employment opportunities for public-health workers and bureaucrats. There’s no role for them when people get nicotine through snus or e-cigarettes, but they can get jobs running needle exchanges and antismoking campaigns. Prohibitionist activists have received long-running support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which helped create the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids (a leader of the anti-vaping movement) and has spent nearly $700 million toward its goal of a “tobacco-free society.”

Republicans have a chance to to combine sound science and good politics by protecting the 10 million American vapers, a demographic that’s projected to double in the next decade. “These contemptuous nanny-state jerks want to take away the products that are saving their lives,” says Grover Norquist, the GOP strategist. “Believe me, this is a vote-moving issue.”

FOSTERING DIVERSITY IS SO MUCH IMPORTANT THAN SAVING LIVES: Affirmative-action hiring endangers the FDNY. One female recruit failed the entrance exam six times but was hired anyway to satisfy a court-ordered quota system. The goal in hiring firefighters, one judge opined, should not be to identify “those who are strongest or fastest.” Sure, a few victims might not be rescued in time, but think how empowered the new recruits will feel.

A FEW BRAVE PROFS (VERY FEW): Fifteen professors at Harvard, Yale and Princeton have written an open letter urging students to resist campus orthodoxy. “Think for yourself,” they urge. James Freeman at the WSJ calls this good news, and I guess it is these days. But why does this even need to be said? And what about the rest of the professoriate? There are at least 3,000 faculty members (and as many as 8,000, depending on who’s counting whom as faculty) at these three universities, which means the 15 signatories represent, at most, one-half of one percent of the faculty. Maybe the other 99.5 percent could not be reached for comment in their safe spaces.

Meanwhile, Yale’s president, Peter Salovey (definitely not a signatory), has found yet another way to beclown himself and his school. It was bad enough when Yale covered up a Puritan’s musket in a stone carving on the wall of its library (at the behest of a committee of censors responsible for shielding students’ eyes from art that was “not appropriate”). Yale was widely mocked for this vandalism, and even Salovey managed to be embarrassed. ““Such alteration represents an erasure of history, which is entirely inappropriate at a university,” he proclaimed.

His brilliant solution: Take down the whole piece of art! It will be moved (with the musket brazenly uncovered) to “an as-yet-undecided location where it will be available for study and viewing,” the Yale Daily News solemnly reports, without a hint that anyone at the newspaper realizes what a farce this is. Maybe they’ll get the joke when they see it on a future episode of “The Simpsons,” whose writers are in deep debt to Salovey and his sensitive students.

WASHINGTON’S ROGUE ROYALTY: The Tyranny of the Administrative State.  The English fought civil wars to take away the king’s “royal prerogative,” but it has been unlawfully reclaimed by federal bureaucrats, says Philip Hamburger. In my Weekend Interview with him in the Wall Street Journal, he discusses the rogue beast known as the administrative state:

Sometimes called the regulatory state or the deep state, it is a government within the government, run by the president and the dozens of federal agencies that assume powers once claimed only by kings. In place of royal decrees, they issue rules and send out “guidance” letters like the one from an Education Department official in 2011 that stripped college students of due process when accused of sexual misconduct.

Unelected bureaucrats not only write their own laws, they also interpret these laws and enforce them in their own courts with their own judges. All this is in blatant violation of the Constitution, says Mr. Hamburger, 60, a constitutional scholar and winner of the Manhattan Institute’s Hayek Prize last year for his scholarly 2014 book, “Is Administrative Law Unlawful?” (Spoiler alert: Yes.)

“Essentially, much of the Bill of Rights has been gutted,” he says, sitting in his office at Columbia Law School. “The government can choose to proceed against you in a trial in court with constitutional processes, or it can use an administrative proceeding where you don’t have the right to be heard by a real judge or a jury and you don’t have the full due process of law. Our fundamental procedural freedoms, which once were guarantees, have become mere options.” ​

You can read more of his ideas in this excerpt from his new book, “The Administrative Threat.”

THE SMARTEST HUMAN TRICK: Why the Future Is Always on Your Mind. The founder of positive psychology, Penn’s Martin Seligman, has joined with colleagues to start another field, prospective psychology. He and I argue in the NYT that Homo sapiens is a misnomer, because calling ourselves the “wise man” is more of a boast than a description. What makes us wise? What sets us apart? Other animals live in the moment, but we can’t stop thinking about tomorrow.

A more apt name for our species would be Homo prospectus, because we thrive by considering our prospects. The power of prospection is what makes us wise. Looking into the future, consciously and unconsciously, is a central function of our large brain, as psychologists and neuroscientists have discovered — rather belatedly, because for the past century most researchers have assumed that we’re prisoners of the past and the present.

Read the whole thing. Or check out the book-length version, Homo Prospectus.

MISANDRY IN UNIFORM: As Military Combats Rape, the Accused Become Collateral Damage. 

WHERE FREE SPEECH GOES TO LIVE: The University of Chicago has issued another warning to snowflakes. When a high school student is accepted, the first thing he or she sees on the school website is a video reaffirming Chicago’s commitment to let anyone on campus speak freely even if others are offended. It’s an impressive video — one of the few inspiring things to be found on any campus these days — devoted to the motto, Audiatur et Altera Pars (Listen Even to the Other Side).

This should solidify Chicago’s hold on the number one spot in Heterodox Academy’s ranking of universities according to their commitment to free speech and ideological diversity. The next best schools in the rankings are Purdue, Washington University in St. Louis, Carnegie Mellon and William and Mary.

The worst schools — in a tie for last — are Georgetown, Harvard, NYU and Mizzou. It’s been a hotly contested battle for the cellar, thanks to the efforts of aggrieved social-justice warriors and spineless administrators at Yale, Northwestern, Berkeley, Emory, Notre Dame, Rice, Penn, Georgia Tech and a depressingly long list of other schools.

DEMOCRATS’ WAR ON THE POOR: Walmart is the most efficient anti-poverty program in America, but Mayor Bill De Blasio won’t let them open a store in New York. He’d rather force the poor to pay higher prices than displease the food-workers’ union that helped elect him. My City Journal article notes that a majority of New Yorkers — including those in union households — want Walmart stores in the city, and that support for Walmart is especially strong among blacks and Hispanics.

The economist Richard Vedder and I defended the proposition, “Long live Walmart,” Walmart in a recent Intelligence Squared U.S. debate in New York. We expected to have a tough time convincing the liberal audience, but they ended up voting in favor of Walmart. Of course, the economic arguments for Walmart don’t carry the same weight at City Hall as union campaign contributions.

MAKE THE PUNISHMENT FIT THE CRIME: Charles Murray sympathizes with the difficulty facing Middlebury in disciplining the students who disrupted his speech. The ones who physically assaulted him and a Middlebury professor should be expelled, of course, but what about all the ones whose chanting prevented him from speaking? “We’re talking about violations that involve a few hundred students,” Murray says, noting that a “serious tutelary response” would be more appropriate than expulsion.

Here’s my suggestion: Summer school. Require them to take (and pass) a special course this summer devoted to the history of censorship and free speech. The 20th-century portion can delve into the role of university students as the vanguard of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the fascist movements of the 1920s. (The reading list should definitely include Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism.)

One potential problem: Who will teach the class? Who will want to this face this mob regularly in a lecture hall? But I’m sure the professors at Heterodox Academy could lend a hand.

GOOD NEWS ON TITLE IX (REALLY): Could the law banning sexual discrimination actually mean what it says — and apply even if the victim is male? ? K.C. Johnson, co-author of The Campus Rape Frenzy, says a court ruling against Amherst is the best legal news in years for  male college students. It involves the outrageous case on the opening page of the book about a student named Michael Cheng (a pseudonym to protect his identity). While he was “blacked out” drunk, a non-drunk female student performed oral sex on him. Two years later, after becoming involved with anti-rape activists, she rewrote history and accused him of sexual assault. Amherst expelled Cheng, refusing to consider strong evidence (including the woman’s texts after the event) exonerating him.  If anyone was a victim of sexual assault, it was Cheng, but the frenzy on Amherst’s campus required a male scapegoat.

Cheng sued Amherst, arguing that Amherst had violated Title IX by discriminating against men. Amherst tried to get the case dismissed by arguing that Title IX didn’t apply, but a federal judge in Massachusetts ruled against the college. The judge, Mark Mastroianni, noted that Amherst realized the woman had initiated sex while Cheng was incapable of consenting, yet the college “did not take even minimal steps to determine whether Doe should have been viewed as a victim.” The judge allowed the suit to go forward because there is a “a sufficient basis for Doe to proceed with a Title IX deliberate indifference claim.”

Johnson and his co-author, Stuart Taylor Jr, have tracking the rape frenzy since the Duke lacrosse case. Their superb book debunks the myth of a rape epidemic and tells the horror stories of men convicted in the kangaroo courts mandated by the infamous “Dear Colleague” letter from a bureaucrat at the federal Department of Education. Dozens of them have sued, with mixed results so far, but Johnson says the Massachusetts ruling is an encouraging development:

To me, this is the most significant district court decision since the ‘Dear Colleague letter,’ because of the facts of the case: Cheng is not only innocent, but it’s at least plausible that his accuser victimized him, with the college ignoring it. So if Amherst had won the motion to dismiss, it would be hard to imagine any set of facts that would ensure a defeat for a college. The judge is an Obama appointee who, it seems to me, was disinclined to rule for the accused student but had no choice. He wasn’t looking for legal precedents to help Cheng. But even under the more limited precedents he cited, he couldn’t come up with a way to decide for Amherst. The Title IX section of the ruling was very broad, and puts Amherst in a tough position.

Good.

THE WAR ON MEN: Sex Offenders Are Still Locked up After Serving Their Time. Why?  Richard Bernstein in Real Clear Investigations reports on the troubling trend:

Some 20 states have civil commitment programs for people deemed sexually violent predators. Records show that more than 5,000 Americans are being held this way nationwide. Those numbers have roughly doubled over the previous decade or so, as judges, governors and state legislators have reacted to public concern about violent sexual crimes.

Civil confinement lies at the fraught intersection of crime, sex, and politics, in which sexual crimes, and just the possibility of sexual crimes, are treated differently from other offenses. Murderers, armed robbers, drunken hit-and-run drivers, insider traders, and other criminals are released when their prison sentences have been served.

States operating these programs defend them as necessary to protect the public, especially children, against dangerous sexual predators. The Supreme Court has upheld them, ruling that as long as they are narrowly tailored, with their “clients” subject to regular reviews, they serve a legitimate public interest in keeping potential dangerous offenders off the streets.

But critics of civil commitment argue that men are being locked away (and almost all of the detainees are men), often effectively for life, on the basis of subjective predictions of what a former sex offender might do in the future. They assert that this is a flagrant violation of the 14th Amendment’s requirement that no person shall be deprived of his freedom without “due process of law.”

Recidivism rates for sex offenders are typically lower than for people who commit other types of felonies. But statistics don’t matter when politicians and judges are trying to mollify the mob.

21ST CENTRY DATING: Sleeping Together Before First Date Is OK, But Using Your Phone During the Date Is Taboo. A third of singles have had sex with each other before their first date, according to Match.com’s representative survey of the American population. “We have a real misunderstanding of Millennials,” said Helen Fisher, the anthropologist who designed the survey. “I think they are very career oriented, so sex before the first date could be a sex interview, where they want to know if they want to spend time with this person.”

But don’t answer your  phone during the date. That’s a turn-off for three-quarters of the singles. Other findings:

The majority of men believe that feminism has changed dating for the better, with only 35% saying that the rise of gender equality has made dating worse.

Men reported that they want women to take charge, with a little over 90% of men are in favor of a woman making the first move when it comes to kissing and sex.

Thought you had to wait for a man to ask for your number? Not the case, with 95% of men saying it’s OK for a woman to ask for a man’s number, according to the survey.

But once again, while men may appreciate a more assertive women, the message is lost in translation, with only 29% of women reporting that they would initiate a first kiss, and only 13% asking for a phone number.

And the all-important question: Who picks up the check?

While 71% of men find it attractive when a woman offers to split the bill, if a woman asks to split it may mean she’s just not that into you.

Sixty-five percent of men reported that they thought a woman offered to split in order to be polite, while 78% of women surveyed said they offered to pay because they don’t want to feel obligated for anything. That means no hug, kiss or second date.

This helps explain the conspicuous silence during the Women’s March on Washington on the issue of check-equity.