Jerusalem Demsas, Why America Doesn’t Build:

Local American environmentalists have developed tools to help citizens delay or block development. These tools are now being used against clean-energy projects, hampering a green transition. The legal tactics that allow someone to challenge a pipeline can also help them fight a solar farm; the political rhetoric deployed against the siting of toxic-waste dumps can be redeployed against transmission lines. And the whole concept that regular people can and should act as a private attorneys general has, in practice, put the green transition at the mercy of people with access, money, and time, while diluting the influence of those without…

The problem with bad projects isn’t the local opposition; the problem is that they are bad. Opposition can be a sign of that, but it can also just be a sign that people fear change. The green-energy transition rests on our ability to distinguish between the two. Right now, we can’t.

Julian Sanchez on Twitter:

People often fret about the dangers of entertainment media in terms of things like desensitizing people to violence. But people are mostly pretty good about distinguishing fantasy from reality on that score. I think a less-appreciated harm is cultivating main character syndrome.

As in: Most of life for most people is a little boring. You try to do your work well and love your family. But probably you never become president or thwart a terrorist plot or discover a lost city full of booby traps and treasure.

We’ve been inundated for the last 50 years, to an extent prior generations haven’t really experienced, with visions of life as Epic in a way it just isn’t for most people. And I think that leaves a lot of folks with an itch video games won’t scratch.

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David Von Drehle, A memorial restores humanity to the 146 ghosts of the Triangle Fire:

The Triangle Fire Memorial, a project years in the making, will be dedicated on Wednesday at the corner of Washington Place and Greene Street near Washington Square in the heart of Manhattan.

The 146 fire victims — most of them immigrant women from Italy and Eastern Europe — will be restored as actual names of actual people, at the very spot where they passed into history. Their names are cut into the flowing steel of the monument, which… will stretch like ribbon to ninth-floor windows, then tumble back toward street level, where it will spread its arms to embrace the building where history happened. Light shining through the incised names will reflect on a polished surface, where they will appear as if glowing.

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COVID:  Zero stars.  Not recommended.

Foreign policy and politics:  Read Dan Drezner’s Substack.  Read Heather Cox Richardson’s on domestic politics.

Dan Drezner, America Has Changed Since “NYPD Blue” Aired:

In today’s more polarized environment, I don’t know if a mainstream audience can buy a character who starts out bigoted and ends up being a more constructive member of society. For progressives, the initial racism would be too much; for conservatives, it would be viewed as woke culture run amok. Which is a shame — because the United States could use more characters like Andy Sipowicz. The country is littered with flawed human beings trying to be better. However the show has aged, NYPD Blue understood that compelling point.

Andrew Spencer, Hope for a Humane Agricultural Future: A Review of Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future:

Once someone accepts the significant human contribution to climate change, there are two possible options. The first option is to assume that things are too far gone so that exercising restraint is pointless. Based on this defeatist thinking we should either ride out the coming storm, hoping for the best, or accept that human extinction would be the best thing for the planet. The second option for those who recognize that the current form of human civilization is damaging the environment is to do something about it. What that something should be, however, is the subject of fierce debate.

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