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…

Despite high-profile violence underway in the world, daily experience tells a different story. A global Gallup survey late last year found that more people around the globe felt safe walking alone at night in their city or neighborhood than at any time since Gallup began tracking this in 2006. At 73 percent, this share was…

The air we breathe is becoming significantly less deadly. Globally, the rate of deaths caused by air pollution fell by 21 percent in one decade, from 2013 to 2023. That death rate is age-adjusted because the young and the old are far more severely affected by dirty air. Much of the progress has come from…

Life expectancy in the US has never been as robust as among other advanced countries. Then it seemed to top out in 2014 while it continued to rise elsewhere. Longevity dropped everywhere during the pandemic – but most dramatically in the US. The good news is that US life expectancy at birth is rising again….

Over the past 40 years, the US has become a much more water efficient. Since water use peaked in the 1980s, the population has grown more than 45 percent. Yet the total water use has dropped by 20 percent. On a per person basis, water use is down about 40 percent. This progress has less…