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Links: Urban sustainability, prisoner reentry, the “Big Bootie” problem, teens are becoming more boring, tax-increment financing, and more!

* “My four months as a private prison guard,” which should make you even more skeptical of the prison-industrial complex than you already should be. Remember this if you’re working on a prisoner reentry proposal.

* “The End of Reflection“? Note that our business is predicated on reflection and the ability to sit quietly, alone, in a room and produce long-form documents. Smartphones have done nothing to help this practice and if anything hurt it.

* “The Superbook: Turn your smartphone into a laptop for $99.” I gave $20. This might be big for anyone in education, where laptops are often rarer than smartphones and almost all students have smartphones. The more powerful phones get and the more capacious their batteries, the more impressive / useful this becomes.

* “NYC Planners Propose Long Overdue Subway Line Just for the Boroughs.”

* “Review: Airmail, an OS X e-mail client that Chris Lee doesn’t hate: It integrates everything beautifully and lets you focus your attention.”

* “The Sotomayor and Kagan Dissents in Utah v. Strieff:” Yet another Supreme Court decision weakens the Fourth Amendment.

* BMW Is Turning Its [Used] Electric Vehicle Batteries Into a New Business. Brilliant.

* “British Lose Right to Claim That Americans Are Dumber.” Here is George Soros pointing out how dumb “Brexit” is.

* “Professors investigated by a ‘Bias Response Team’ for presenting opposing viewpoints.” This is not The Onion. One wonders if the Bias Response Team wears logo hats and t-shirts, or if it perhaps has badges. See also “Cultural Sensitivity, Cultural Insensitivity, and the ‘Big Bootie’ Problem in Grant Writing

* Enforcing the law is inherently violent, a point that ought to be more salient.

* “A field trip to the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), a work-in-progress that will test fusion’s feasibility.” Progress has been made since 2014’s article, “A Star in a Bottle: An audacious plan to create a new energy source could save the planet from catastrophe. But time is running out.” Both are excellent.

* Kids are more boring than they used to be: They’re drinking less, using fewer drugs, and having less sex. What’s the point of being young?

* “Building My $1,200 Hackintosh,” which is pretty attractive compared to Apple’s anemic lineup of desktop Macs.

* “Let’s make peer review scientific,” which ought to have happened ages ago.

* New York City’s subway agency loses six billion dollars a year—and nobody cares.

* “‘No One Can Breathe in This Atmosphere:’ Everyone should read Justice Sonia Sotomayor on how police stops are life-and-death experiences for people of color.”

* “The Surprising Health Benefits of an Electric Bike.”

* “X-Rated Verse From Ancient Rome: Catullus’s poems teem with heartbroken lovers, drunken cavorting youths, old men pining for women a fraction of their age.”

* “Sonnen’s new battery for solar self-consumption could succeed in US.”

* Transit Tax-Increment Financing (TIF) in Chicago.

* “How Expensive Cities Hurt Workers,” which regular readers no doubt know.

* “Pharma companies are fighting legal marijuana because painkiller prescriptions drop when weed is legalized.” Talk about positive unintended consequences.

* “The Fight for the ‘Right to Repair:’ Manufacturers have made it increasingly difficult for individuals or independent repair people to fix electronics. A growing movement is fighting back.” This is especially important for job-training and education providers: Repairing the myriad of digital devices we buy and break.

* Megan McArdle: “Sexual Harassment Is Invisible to Half the Population;” not the dumb stuff you’re used to reading on this topic.

* “When and Why Nationalism Beats Globalism: And how moral psychology can help explain and reduce tensions between the two.”

* The main source of economic growth is new ideas, which should be obvious yet needs to be better known.

* “Half Of TSA’s 30,000 Employees Accused Of Misconduct; Nearly A Third Multiple Times.” Unsurprising.

* “Religious Bric-à-Brac and Tolerance of Violent Jihad,” an uncommonly interesting and thoughtful piece that can’t be excerpted well.

* “We’re Building 6 Homes for Every 10 New Households. Where Will People Live?” When you hear people talking about “income inequality” in the national media, what they’re really saying is, “People feel financially squeezed.” That’s because, since the 1970s, we’ve systematically raised the cost of housing for virtually everybody through zoning rules. But that issue is complex enough that you won’t see slogans or bumper stickers around it.

* Drug Prohibition Has Made Policing More Violent: What can be done to curb the excessive and, sometimes, predatory policing that has emerged from the Drug War?

* “The White House hits the accelerator pedal to increase electric vehicle adoption,” and it looks like grants will be part of that effort. We like that—As the Wayans Brothers used to say, “Mo money without using your money.”

* “Confessions of an Ex-Prosecutor: Culture and law conspire to make prosecutors hostile to constitutional rights.” Disturbing and important.

* “The bicycle is making a comeback in US cities.” I am currently riding a Novara Gotham and previously rode a State bike. The latter is lighter and cheaper but the former is great for city rides. Plus: “Why even driving through suburbia is soul crushing.”

* Texas is the new California, but its status won’t last: “The cost of maintaining an equally endless amount of horizontal infrastructure will inevitably outstrip tax revenue over the next generation.” I’m not sure, and the argument is less analytic than it should be, but still.

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