Lights coming on across Africa
Just since 2024, electrical service has reached the homes of 50 million more Africans across 40 countries. Electricity is fundamental to every aspect of modern life from refrigerating food to reading after dark to running drip irrigation systems to connecting to the whole information age economy. Not to mention living in smoke-free houses. It’s the…
We’re all richer, but compared to whom?
A little over a week ago, Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire. That’s a net worth equal to about 3 percent of the current US GDP. For comparison, the leading figure of the Gilded Age, John D. Rockefeller, was worth about 1.5 percent of total national output. So Musk has become an avatar, a…
The woods are not lost
The world’s forests are increasingly holding their own these days. Forests matter. They shelter wildlife, cool the air, protect watersheds, provide lumber, offer beauty and natural settings, and – not least – extract carbon from the atmosphere. Deforestation in Brazil has dropped to the lowest levels since 2012–2014, its previous low and a small fraction…
Dads are picking up more child care – and feeling good about it
Bit by bit, men are remodeling their role in the family. Women continue to shoulder most of the labor on the home front. But since the pandemic, men have markedly shifted their behavior in ways that appear to be enduring. College-educated fathers in the US have cut an average of six hours per week at paid…
US violence at historic lows. US barely notices.
As recently as 2023, 77 percent of Americans told Gallup that violent crime had gone up over the previous year. In fact, the murder rate had just had its largest single-year drop in history. The following year was an even steeper drop. 2025 numbers are not fully compiled, but that drop looks still steeper. And…
Against the Great Garbage Island
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch floating in the Pacific between California and Hawaii – and twice the size of Texas – is more like a soup of plastic debris than an island. And it keeps getting thicker. A huge part of it is cast-off commercial fishing nets, lines, and buckets gradually deteriorating into microplastics. Not…
Clean energy is winning where it counts
The Trump administration is no fan of clean energy policies – calling climate change a hoax, rescinding emissions standards for cars and trucks, lowering restrictions on methane emissions, and a slew of other steps to unwind tax benefits and research funding for renewable power sources. But renewable energy is dominating global energy growth anyway –…
Year by year, a lot more small children are surviving
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…
Gen Z: sadder but richer?
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…
Global democracy is looking, slightly, up
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…