You are reading the Today’s Opinions newsletter. Sign up to receive this in your inbox.
There’s almost certainly a left turn you hate. Now think about it. Imagine all the extra seconds of the podcast you listened to while you wait for that one left turn blocking fifteen other cars.
What if you never had to sit at that left turn again? What if no one have to sit at that left exit again (on working days at least from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m.)?
Daan Roze thinks it’s time to throw off the tyranny of the left turn, at least at congested intersections in busy cities. He crunched the numbers and determined that left turns are bad for driver safety, driver satisfaction and overall efficiency.
One compelling model – from Professor Dan who calls “the Nancy Reagan left turn… just say no” – shows that eliminating half of a city’s most hectic left side can “cut overall travel times by about 15 percent.”
“Of course, banning certain left turns means that some motorists will occasionally have to take longer paths to their destination – perhaps even three consecutive right turns,” Dan admits in what is only the first of all objections to the “ lizard brain” is what he predicts against an anti-leftist crusade.
But just do ithe says, and drivers will eventually realize how much better off they are in the long run, and how much the policy helps pedestrians and even the environment.
All those lost seconds could hurt the podcast industry, true, but I don’t think many of us will lose much sleep over it when we get home and curl up on our Casper mattresses – 15 percent ahead of schedule.
Hunter: Or never drive at all! I recently rode a self-driving Waymo car for the first time. Back in 2022, Megan McArdle reported being slightly less surprised than I was.
Some Americans don’t want to be told which way to go, in any way, or how. They want to assess all the information themselves and then choose left over right, or vice versa.
For this we have the debate between President Biden and former President Donald Trump on Thursday. (See what I did there?)
EJ Dionne offers a preview of the showdown, including which voting blocs each candidate must speak to and what he must prove with his performance. Most interesting is EJ’s rejection of the conventional wisdom that Biden needs the debate more than Trump.
“Trump needs to encourage more voters, force himself to appear reasonable, hide his love of conspiracy theories and not make the debate about himself,” writes EJ. “Consider me skeptical that he can pull any of this off.”
Trump got precisely however, what he needs from the conservative justices of the Supreme Court, Jen Rubin writes. Frustrated by yet another day of the court ruling without a word on Trump’s possible immunity from prosecution, she says that “there is no better evidence of bad faith and bias on the part of the … majority than its foot-dragging.” ”
All Trump wanted was to delay his prosecution — ideally past the election, or at least past the debate — and that’s what the judges actually did.
Hunter: Ramesh Ponnuru writes that Biden would be wise to crack down on Trump on his unpopular promise to strip funding from any school that mandates vaccinations.
Compare this to the fifty-plus fellow students in his tort class at Yale Law School, which he attended at the same time.
Darnell Epps explains in an op-ed that in addition to law school, he also enrolled at Lincoln Technical Institute because he wanted to better understand the labor shortage in American manufacturing, especially when the jobs pay well and often cover the training needed.
Epps’ dual degree “has reaffirmed my belief in the untapped potential of skilled trades,” he writes. “But we need to reshape the narrative around skilled trades and foster a cultural appreciation for these essential careers” if the country really wants to attract enough people to fill its shiny new factories.
It’s easy to imagine a bright future as a Yale Law graduate. It should be just as easy to imagine one with a degree from Lincoln Tech.
Since we don’t yet have a piece called the celestial-fireball-that-melts-everything-in-its-path dress (available soon from Zara!), this summer is once again sundress season. And, boy, do people have any thoughts on these briefs?
Magdalena Taylor, author of the Many Such Cases newsletter on Substack, explores the sexual politics of the sundress, which she sees as a not-entirely-bad throwback to clothing informed or at least enjoyed by the male gaze. (She contrasts it with other sartorial trends that men have been enjoying recently gays; I could write a lot about gray sweatpants, but I’ll leave the sundresses to Taylor.)
As she says: “The tendency of social media is to flatten everything, all the what-ifs, anticipation and secrecy, and go straight for the banality. With the sundress, both the viewer and the wearer can create their own wishes.”
- Kathleen Parker searches for hope in Haiti. She finds a little bit in an all-pink kindergarten diploma in the rural village of Ranquitte.
- Vladimir Kara-Murza writes from Russian prison: “I am not a foreign agent.” That still won’t change Vladimir Putin’s definition of one person, which is anyone who opposes him.
- The Editorial Board writes that the Maryland governor’s marijuana pardon is a good model for the country.
It’s a farewell. It’s a haiku. It’s… The Bye-Ku.
That two wrongs don’t make a right
This requires three links
Do you have your own newsy haiku? Email it to me, together with any questions/comments/uncertainties. See you tomorrow!
