Posts by The What Works Initiative

Few tragedies have been more commonplace and universal through human history than the deaths of small children. By the year 2000, much progress had been made all over the world in raising the survival rates of babies and toddlers. That progress has continued. Since 2000 the number of children dying by age five has been…

Young Americans suffer more troubled spirits these days than older generations. Gen Z is by far the most pessimistic and unhappy age cohort – a position historically held by adults in their 40s and 50s when responsibilities weigh heaviest. But for what it’s worth, Gen Z is actually doing pretty well financially. (And their biggest…

Democracy spread like it was inevitable after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, covering most of the globe. But the movement stalled and the moment turned. The 21st century brought the so-called democratic recession, as authoritarians from China’s Xi to Russia’s Putin to Turkey’s Erdogan tightened their grips on power and chiseled away at…

The vast majority of Americans eat meat, but with some qualms. An industry survey earlier this year found that 67 percent want to know more about the path their protein took to the table. Mostly, this is about chickens. The world eats nearly 80 billion chickens a year, vastly outnumbering cattle, pigs, sheep, turkeys, ducks,…

No apologies to Humphrey Bogart, who helped glamorize the cigarette as a key prop in mid-20th century tough-minded masculinity. It wasn’t just him, of course. Marlene Dietrich and Audrey Hepburn gave it womanly worldliness, and James Dean made it a symbol of reckless youth. Smoking on screen was actually written into the actors’ contracts, through deals…

A Monarch butterfly tried to run me off the sidewalk this weekend. He failed. (We’re in very different weight divisions.) But I was happy to see him. In the 1980s, millions of Monarchs flew south from as far as British Columbia and wintered in California, but those numbers have declined radically since then, roughly 10…

Social media has been blamed for the loneliness epidemic, declining attention spans, rising eating disorders, sleep deprivation, the spread of mis- and disinformation, and bringing an angry polarization to political life. Not all those charges may stick in the end. (And many of them were once levied against life in small towns.) But people are…

Over ten minutes one day last fall, an Economist reporter stood on a busy Montreal street at rush hour and counted 132 passing bicycles and only 82 cars. That wasn’t a fluke. It’s a sign of our times. We’re in a global surge of cycling – not as a pastime or sport but as a…

A California condor couple appears to be tending an egg in the wild in Northern California for the first time in over a century. The species has been nursed back from the brink of extinction to about 600 birds, nearly two thirds now in the wild. River otters have made a significant comeback throughout the…