"A Cautionary Tale, Not a Triumphal One"

"This dark history has a happy ending, sort of. The Environmental Protection Agency began forcing smelting companies to install pollution controls in the 1970s. The EPA's phaseout of leaded gasoline, fought by oil company lawsuits for years, was basically complete by the mid-1980s. Blood lead levels in the population dropped 78 percent from 1976 to 1991, and crime rates began dropping dramatically in 1992. The correlation was so close it gave rise to a 'lead-crime hypothesis' among epidemiologists. The nationwide number of serial killers, whose average age is 22, dropped, too, from 669 in the 1990s to 117 by the decade ending in 2020; a 2007 analysis concluded that there was a 'robust' connection between childhood lead exposure and violent crime. Whatever inborn tendency to serial murder that seems to exist in some men may have lost its environmental trigger."

In a 2025 Washington Post article, Wendy Smith reviews Caroline Fraser's Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers.

"The Revisionist Narrative Also Has the Potential to Become a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy"

"If people are convinced that public-health measures don't work in the first place, they will be less likely to follow them, which, in turn, will render them even less effective. This dynamic could even undermine the one measure that the non-right-wing COVID revisionists generally support: vaccines. After all, if people are convinced that the public-health establishment is full of lying ideologues, why make an exception for vaccines? Unchecked COVID revisionism, in trying to correct the errors of the last pandemic, might leave us even less prepared for the next one."

Rogé Karma at The Atlantic gives a warning about the next pandemic.

"Scientific and Public Health Success Has Provoked an Anti-Intellectual and Antisocial Backlash"

"Americans have become more individualistic, more conspiracy-minded, and less committed to collective social effort. This new social Darwinism helped elect Donald Trump—and now it's being put into practice by RFK Jr. and Elon Musk."

Jeet Heer at The Nation looks at America five years after the beginning of the Covid pandemic.

"If the Forces of Science and Health Are to Stage a Comeback, It's Important to Understand Why Those Forces Have Gone into Eclipse"

"We live in an impersonal universe, indifferent to our hopes and wishes, subject to extreme randomness. We don't like this at all. We crave satisfying explanations. We want to believe that somebody is in control, even if it's somebody we don't like. At least that way, we can blame bad events on bad people. This is the eternal appeal of conspiracy theories. How did this happen? Somebody must have done it—but who? And why?"

David Frum at The Atlantic explains "Why the Covid Deniers Won."

And he adds that "[t]o rename the Gulf of Mexico the 'Gulf of America' is to reconceptualize the United States not as a sending point, but as a receiving point; no longer a country that stamps itself upon history, but a country upon which history is stamped."

"The Growing Obsolescence of the Older Ideal of the Nuclear Family "

"Like the cultural innovations of the Sixties youth, the current trends away from family and fertility and toward gender fluidity are likely to endure in some form. They are rooted, for the most part, in underlying social and economic changes that politics and policy cannot easily reverse. They are not confined to the United States but common in other advanced capitalist countries."

John Judis at The Liberal Patriot describes the 1960s and 2010s as "two periods in modern American history where many of the young have adopted distinctive and effective political and cultural outlooks."

And Aria Bendix at NBC News explains "[w]hy abortions rose after Roe was overturned."

"He Misled the Public, Mismanaged the Crisis, and Missed Chances to Save Lives"

"These are unserious people in thrall to a sociopathic clown. Trump's greatest test came in the final year of his presidency when the nation faced a true emergency and he failed spectacularly. The U.S. death rate from COVID far exceeded that of peer nations. That was not due to excessive lockdowns or masking. It was due to incompetence in the White House."

Mona Charen at The Bulwark calls for "a great remembering" of Donald Trump's actions in 2020.

As does Timothy Noah at The New Republic.

And at Salon, Heather Digby Parton remembers Trump's whole term.

"Trump's Mishandling of Covid in 2020 Should on Its Own Disqualify Him from Ever Again Holding Office"

"By May 2020, US job losses were the highest since the Great Depression, and then there were the irrecoverable losses: The tally of covid deaths in the US for that year ended up being 350,831, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. For context, there were an estimated 2,459 US military deaths in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2021, and 20,769 were wounded in action, whereas researchers estimate more than 900,000 covid hospitalizations occurred through November 2020." 

Stephen Robinson at Public Notice explores if Americans were better off four years ago.

"The General Sense of Disarray and Dysfunction That Is Permeating Everything"

"The parallel to national politics is the potential for a seismic backlash in November among voters unsettled by all the disruptions to daily life--from inflation to Covid-19 to crime--that have persisted through Joe Biden's presidency. That continued turbulence has undermined the implicit promise of his candidacy: to return the nation to something approaching normalcy after all the turmoil of the Donald Trump presidency."

Ronald Brownstein at CNN looks at political trends in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

"Makes Visible Things That Need to Be Seen"

"The grisly record-keeping of the trade in enslaved people and colonial governments provided the infrastructure for epidemiological data collection. Downs shows how logs of sickness and death on slave ships, in prisons and at quarantine stations—unmentioned in standard histories—were central to the emergence of public health. A bureaucracy 'established in the service of war, colonialism, and imperialism emerged as the foundation for the development of epidemiology'. Downs provides history as truth-telling."

At Nature, Mary T. Bassett reviews Jim Downs's Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine.

Get the Lead Out

"Put all this together and you have an astonishing body of evidence. We now have studies at the international level, the national level, the state level, the city level, and even the individual level. Groups of children have been followed from the womb to adulthood, and higher childhood blood lead levels are consistently associated with higher adult arrest rates for violent crimes. All of these studies tell the same story: Gasoline lead is responsible for a good share of the rise and fall of violent crime over the past half century."

In a 2013 Mother Jones article, Kevin Drum lays out the lead-crime hypothesis.

"Trump Believes None of This"

"Biden has his faults. He botched the negotiations on his Build Back Better plan, misjudged the pullout from Afghanistan, and underrated the severity of inflation. But the gap between his vision of America and Trump's vision of America makes those faults insignificant. Biden believes in democracy and the rule of law. He believes that the free world must stand together. He believes that Americans should treat one another as compatriots, not enemies, and that they should care about people in other countries."

William Saletan at The Bulwark reacts to President Biden's State of the Union Address.

"If You're Going to Do Anything About It, You Have to Take on the Food Industry, Which No One Wants to Do"

"There is no national strategy. There is no systemswide approach, even as researchers increasingly recognize that obesity is a disease that is driven not by lack of willpower, but a modern society and food system that's almost perfectly designed to encourage the overeating of empty calories, along with more stress, less sleep and less daily exercise, setting millions on a path to poor health outcomes that is extremely difficult to break from."

Helena Bottemiller Evich at Politico writes that "[i]n Washington, there has been no such wake-up call about the link between diet-related diseases and the pandemic."

"This Isn't Freedom; It's Institutionalized Selfishness and Irresponsibility'"

"In its place, conservatives have embraced less an idea than a slogan. Opponents of the vaccine and mask mandates insist they are fighting to protect 'Freedom!' But their opposition to basic public health measures would have seemed bizarre to earlier generations of conservatives."

Charlie Sykes at MSNBC calls the GOP "a party held hostage to its own post-coherence politics."

"Boring Old Liberalism Just Keeps Muddling Through to Prevail Once Again"

"But old-fashioned half-a-loaf liberalism has proven tough to replace. It's not just that revolutionary change is difficult to achieve in the American political system, though it is. There are also plenty of important constituencies invested in conventional liberal policy-making—classes of credentialed work-within-the-system subject matter experts, institutionalized interest groups that prize partial victories over none at all, and a large number of regular voters who hold moderately left-of-center views on domestic affairs and are wary of socialism and laissez-faire-ism alike."

David A. Hopkins at Honest Graft responds to the recent decision by the Supreme Court to protect the Affordable Care Act.

"What If This Crazy Story Turns Out to Be True?"

"Because if the hypothesis is right, it will soon start to dawn on people that our mistake was not insufficient reverence for scientists, or inadequate respect for expertise, or not enough censorship on Facebook. It was a failure to think critically about all of the above, to understand that there is no such thing as absolute expertise. Think of all the disasters of recent years: economic neoliberalism, destructive trade policies, the Iraq War, the housing bubble, banks that are 'too big to fail,' mortgage-backed securities, the Hillary Clinton campaign of 2016—all of these disasters brought to you by the total, self-assured unanimity of the highly educated people who are supposed to know what they're doing, plus the total complacency of the highly educated people who are supposed to be supervising them."

At The Guardian, Thomas Frank ponders the fallout if the accusation that Covid leaked from a Chinese laboratory.

"Because the People Actually Who Were Supposed to Be Fighting the Disease Weren't Doing It"

"She asks one of them, 'Who's running the pandemic response?' And one of them says, 'Nobody's running the pandemic response. But to the degree that anybody's sort of running the pandemic response, we sort of are'"

John Dickerson at 60 Minutes talks to Michael Lewis about Lewis's new book, The Premonition: A Pandemic Story.

"That Type of Destabilization Is What Creates the Conditions for Violence to Emerge"

"My argument is that in areas where communities go through periods of disinvestment and where institutions break down, people feel like they're on their own. This creates conditions where violence becomes more likely. As a place becomes more violent, people change their behavior. They become more likely to interpret uncertainty in an aggressive way, more likely to carry a weapon, more likely to act quickly or first if they feel threatened. This is how the presence of violence creates more violence. This cascading effect, where violence begets violence, has been reinforced in the past year."

At The Atlantic, Derek Thompson interviews sociologist Patrick Sharkey about the new crime wave. 

What's the Matter With Republicans?

"'It's a spirit of rebellion against what people see as liberals who are overly sensitive, or are capable of being triggered, or hypocritical,' says Marshall Kosloff, co-host of the podcast 'The Realignment,' which analyzes the shifting allegiances of and rise of populist politics. 'It basically offers the party a way of resolving the contradictions within a realigning party, that increasingly is appealing to down-market white voters and certain working-class Black and Hispanic voters, but that also has a pretty plutocratic agenda at the policy level.' In other words: Owning the libs offers bread and circuses for the pro-Trump right while Republicans quietly pursue a traditional program of deregulation and tax cuts at the policy level."

Derek Robertson at Politico describes the "weird journey of a tongue-in-cheek catchphrase from conservative-mocking putdown to the defining tenet of the Republican Party's way of life."

And Doyle McManus at the Los Angeles Times notes the health threat during the pandemic because "[h]alf of Republican men say they don't want the vaccine."

"Who Needs a Public Health System When Sickness Is a Personal Failure?"

"In the workplace, the anti-smoking movement had a stronger card to play: the 'social cost' of smoking, which activists learned to quantify. The key moment was a lawsuit brought by a telephone company employee called Donna Shimp, who suffered from headaches and rashes in the smoky office where she worked for New Jersey Bell. In 1975, Shimp sued for a smoke-free workplace on the basis of her rights as a non-smoker, but she also stressed the 'cost factors' of workplace smoking. If New Jersey Bell would not act on behalf of non-smokers, it might act on behalf of its bottom line–as indeed it did. Shimp and the group she founded, Environmental Improvement Associates, gestured towards the health hazards of inhaling second-hand smoke, which researchers were beginning to discern, but her argument boiled down to the claim that 'smoking–and quite often, smokers–cost too much.' This chimed with a new wave of management consultancy that dedicated itself to a leaner, meaner, cleaner workplace."

Jackson Lears at the London Review of Books reviews Sarah Milov's The Cigarette: A Political History.

"From Abolitionist Roots"

"O save the Black man from the curse of drink: he has become an integral part of our civilization. In saving him we shall save ourselves,' Frederick Douglass thundered in his temperance addresses from the 1870s. 'Whisky arms the hand of violence. It stifles in the white race all ennobling sentiments of justice, kindness and good will,' he wrote later in 1887. 'Few things could do more for the elevation and happiness, or for the welfare of the colored people than the banishment of intoxicating liquors.'"

Mark Lawrence Schrad at Politico discusses "The Forgotten History of Black Prohibitionism."