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…
Life at the factory farm: poultry progress
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,…
The popular decline of the cigarette
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 modest uplift for the Monarchs
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…
The waning of social media
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…