Plus: the Trump-Biden debate. The appeal of sundresses. Technical school.

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In today’s edition:

• It’s time to ban a lot of left turns
• Trump needs the debate to go his way. SCOTUS already did.
• Lessons from co-enrolling at Yale Law and technical school
• The sexual politics of the sundress

No left turn at last

There is almost certainly a left turn you hate. Think of it now. Imagine all the extra seconds of podcast you’ve listened to waiting for the one left-turner who’s blocking 15 other cars.

What if you never had to sit at that left turn again? What if no one had to sit at that left turn again (at least from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. on business days)?

Dan Pink thinks it’s time to throw off the left turn’s yoke of tyranny, at least at clogged intersections in busy cities. He has crunched the numbers and determined that left turns are bad for driver safety, driver satisfaction and all-around efficiency.

One convincing model — from the professor Dan calls “the Nancy Reagan of left turns … just say no” — shows that axing half a city’s most hectic lefts “can reduce total travel times by about 15 percent.”

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“Of course, banning certain left turns means some drivers will occasionally have to take longer paths to their destinations — perhaps even three consecutive right turns,” Dan allows in what is merely the first of all the “lizard brain” objections he predicts to an anti-left crusade.

But just do it, he says, and drivers will eventually realize how much better-off they are over the long run, as well as how much the policy helps pedestrians and even the environment.

All those lost seconds might hurt the podcast industry, it’s true, but I don’t think too many of us will lose much sleep over it once we get home and crawl onto our Casper mattresses — 15 percent ahead of schedule.

Chaser: Or never drive at all! I recently rode for the first time in a self-driving Waymo ride-hailing vehicle. Back in 2022, Megan McArdle reported being a little less astounded than I was.

Debate camps

Some Americans don’t want to be told which direction to turn, no way, no how. They want to assess all the information themselves and then pick left over right, or vice versa.

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For this, we have Thursday’s debate between President Biden and former president Donald Trump. (See what I did there?)

E.J. Dionne offers a preview of the faceoff, including which voting blocs each candidate ought to speak to and what he needs to prove with his performance. The........

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