The world’s second-richest person, by some counts, could have easily afforded to settle the SolarCity case out of court, as all of his fellow Tesla board members did last year. Instead, he chose to fight it. And so he spent Monday and Tuesday last week in a dreary Delaware courtroom, defending his reputation against a lawyer bent on exposing him as a self-dealing fraud, even as his fellow billionaires Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos were in various stages of adventuring to space.

For the record: critical race theory originated over 30 years ago among legal scholars; it holds that race is a social — not a scientific — construct and offers a framework for understanding the role of systemic racism in the law and in legal institutions. It is taught, if at all, in law school — not high school.

There is a great deal of scientific evidence that when cities hire more police officers, violence tends to decline, and that when high-crime blocks are subject to greater police presence, crime falls in those areas. But while there is some evidence that the pandemic challenged departments and there were fewer officers on the streets in some places, most cities maintained their required levels of patrol in 2020.