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I'm sure there are left turns you hate. Now think about it: Imagine listening to a podcast for a few extra seconds while waiting for that one left-turning car that's blocking 15 other cars.
What if you never had to sit at that left turn again? What if no one ever had to sit at that left turn again (at least not between 7am and 9pm on weekdays)?
Dan Pink believes it's time to throw off the tyranny of left turns, at least at busy intersections in busy cities. He's crunched the numbers and concluded that left turns are bad for driver safety, driver satisfaction, and overall efficiency.
A compelling model that Professor Dunn calls “the Nancy Reagan of left turns…just say no” shows that eliminating half of a city's busiest left turns “could reduce total travel times by about 15 percent.”
“Of course, banning certain left turns means that some drivers may have a longer journey to their destination, perhaps making three consecutive right turns,” Dan acknowledges, but this is just the first of the “lizard-brain” rebuttals he predicts to the anti-left movement.
But if they just implement it, he says, drivers will eventually realize how much they benefit in the long run, and how the policy helps pedestrians and the environment.
It's true that a few lost seconds might hurt the podcast industry, but I doubt many of us would lose much sleep over it if we got home 15 percent earlier than planned and crawled into our Casper mattresses.
Chaser: Or maybe you won't have to drive at all! I recently took my first ride in a self-driving Waymo ride-hailing vehicle. In 2022, Megan McArdle reported that she wasn't as surprised as I was.
Some Americans never want to be told which direction to go — they want to evaluate all the information for themselves and choose left over right, or vice versa.
To see more of this, just watch Thursday's debate between President Biden and former President Donald Trump (see what I'm saying?).
EJ Dionne gives a preview of the showdown, including which voting demographic each candidate should appeal to and what they need to prove with their performance. Most interestingly, EJ rejects the conventional wisdom that Biden needs a debate more than Trump does.
“Trump needs to energize more voters, restrain himself from trying to appear rational, hide his fondness for conspiracy theories, and avoid making the debate about himself,” EJ wrote. “I'm skeptical he can pull all of this off.”
But Jen Rubin writes that Trump got exactly what he needed from the Supreme Court's conservative justices: Frustrated that yet another court decision came without any mention of Trump's possible immunity, she said, “There is no better evidence of the majority's malice and bias than their foot-stomping.”
All Trump wanted was to delay his prosecution, ideally until after the election, or at least after the debates, and the Supreme Court effectively did just that.
The Chaser: Ramesh Ponnuru writes that Biden would be wise to grill Trump over his unpopular pledge to strip funding from schools that mandate vaccinations.
Compare this to the 50-plus classmates in the tort law class he attended at the same time at Yale Law School.
In his op-ed, Darnell Epps explains that he attended Lincoln Tech in addition to law school because he wanted to better understand the labor shortage in the U.S. manufacturing industry, particularly where the jobs are often well-paying and the education required is affordable.
Earning the double diploma “reaffirmed my belief in the potential of skilled trades,” Epps wrote, “but for the country to actually attract enough talent to fill new factories, we must reframe how we think about skilled trades and foster a cultural appreciation for these important jobs.”
It's easy to imagine a bright future as a Yale Law School graduate. It should be just as easy to imagine a bright future as someone with a Lincoln Institute of Technology degree.
Since there's still no heavenly fireball-melting-everything-in-its-path dress (coming soon at Zara!), it's sundress season again this summer, and people are really thinking about this slip.
Magdalene Taylor, author of the Substack newsletter Many Such Cases, explores the sexual politics of the sundress. She sees it as a not-so-bad throwback to clothing understood, or at least enjoyed, by the male gaze. (She contrasts the sundress with other fashion trends that gay men have been enjoying lately. I could write a lot about gray sweatpants, but I'll leave the sundress to Taylor.)
“Social media tends to flatten everything — the what-ifs, the expectations, the secrets — and move straight toward banality,” she says. “Sundresses allow the viewer and the wearer to materialize their own desires.”
Kathleen Parker is looking for hope in Haiti. She found a glimmer of hope in the rural village of Ranquit, at an all-pink kindergarten graduation. Vladimir Kara-Murza writes from a Russian prison, “I am not a foreign agent.” That doesn't change Vladimir Putin's definition of a foreign agent: anyone who disagrees with him. The editorial board writes that the Maryland governor's marijuana pardon is a good model for the country.
It's goodbye. It's a haiku. It's… “goodbye.”
Two mistakes don't make one right
You need to turn left three times
Have a newsy haiku of your own? Email me with any questions, comments or concerns you may have. See you tomorrow!
