* That Time I Turned a Routine Traffic Ticket into the Constitutional Trial of the Century.”
* “The Children of the Opioid Crisis: Left behind by addict parents, tens of thousands of youngsters flood the nation’s foster-care system; grandparents become moms and dads again.” See also Isaac’s review of Dreamland, a book about the opioid crisis.
* GM begins delivering the first Chevy Bolts. Good news and an important milestone. Also: “Investors Get Ready for the Coming Electric Car Revolution.”
* “Why Obamacare enrollees voted for Trump,” a weird and fascinating piece of journalism as well as further confirmation of The Myth of the Rational Voter.
* “What’s Wrong With Literary Studies?”
* Peter Watts: “Westworld, Season 1: A Story We Tell Ourselves.”
* To Slow Global Warming, We Need Nuclear Power.
* Ebikes: I Sing the Ride Electric.
* “The long political history of sneakers;” the title sounds dumb but the article itself is actually good.
* Open societies are facing major crises. I don’t think Soros’s answer is the right one or that most people even know who or what they might mean by “elites,” but the problems are clear and not going away.
* “When city retirement pays better than the job: One in four El Monte residents lives in poverty. Yet taxpayers pay a steep price to fund bonus pensions and other perks for city workers.” I try not to post outrage reads, yet sometimes I can’t resist.
* “Federal agencies rush to fill job openings before Trump takes office Jan. 20.”
* The red Solo cup is a marvel of modern engineering.
* “‘Routine’ Jobs Are Disappearing.” A useful piece for those of you running job training programs.
* The Real Reason Your City Has No Money.
* There’s “No proof music lessons make children any smarter.”
* An excellent, too-often-forgotten point: “Every movement…has a smart version and a stupid version, I try to (almost) always consider the smart version. The stupid version is always wrong for just about anything.”
* “Housing supply is [finally, almost, sort of] catching up to demand.”
* “How ‘time-saving’ technology destroys our productivity: The endless tasks it can be used to create leave us working longer and longer hours.” Congruent with “How Computers Have Made Grant Writing Worse.”
* Established education providers v new contenders. We work for both conventional LEAs and charter schools.
* “How our housing choices make adult friendships more difficult.”
* On Building the Skyline, a history of New York’s skyscrapers.