Links: Bike lanes, book buying, century-old bestsellers, political darkness, and more!

* Why bike lanes may appear to be underutilized.

* Chicago cops, unaccountable by design.

* How to Culture Jam a Populist in Four Easy Steps.

* “The twilight of the liberal world order,” deeply pessimistic and, I hope, a set of ideas that doesn’t come to pass.

* The top bestsellers of 1916.

* Orwell’s “1984” and Trump’s America:

Whenever there is an authoritarian coup rooted in an irrational ideology, well-meaning people insist that it can’t persist because the results are going to be so obviously bad for the people who believe in it, whether it’s the theocratic revolution in Iran or the first truly autocratic Administration in America. Tragically, terribly, this is never the way it works. There is no political cost for Trump in being seen to be incompetent, impulsive, shallow, inconsistent, and contemptuous of truth and reason.

* Bibliomania: the strange history of compulsive book buying.

* “Sex and Art in 1950s Manhattan: Patricia Bosworth’s life was a dramatic saga of ambition, sex, affairs and abortion. She reveals it all in The Men in My Life.” The review is good but makes me feel like I don’t need to read the book itself.

* “Time to take a stand,” by Sam Altman, although I would argue that the time to take a stand was before the election.

* “Anne Frank and her family were also denied entry as refugees to the U.S.

* The ambiguities of dual citizenship.

* A clarifying moment in American history.

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