The University of Chicago's invaluable Air Quality of Life Index annual report is now out, and distressing as ever. To begin with, air pollution is responsible for reducing human lifespans, over 8 billion people, by an average of 2.3 years. (1/x) aqli.epic.uchicago.edu/reports/ "The impact of PM2.5 on global life expectancy is comparable to that of smoking, more than 3 times that of alcohol use and unsafe water, more than 5 times that of transport injuries like car crashes, and more than 7 times that of HIV/AIDS."

You may think America's Covid response was hobbled by partisanship, and blame one party or the other as a result. But in fact there was hardly any real partisan divide before vaccines arrived. A thread of the myth of early-pandemic partisanship. (1/x) nytimes.com/2023/06/28/opi… Don’t believe it? Let me take you on a tour of those early months.

One under-appreciated feature of the doomed RFK Jr. hype cycle is that, judging by who got them, mRNA Covid vaccines are actually hugely popular. According to the C.D.C., 80% of adults and 95% of seniors are vaxed. It's a large majority of Republicans and 95%+ of Democrats.

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1673772056872140800

We often talk about the failures of American vaccine uptake because we didn't get quite as far as in some peer countries, where uptake among seniors passed 99%, thereby almost entirely eliminating the pool of truly most vulnerable (while still leaving many at some ongoing risk).

"The implicit (if not explicit) attitude of Silicon Valley is one of indefinite growth. For good or for ill, they consistently believe that the trends of new technological research will continue at the current pace and direction." (1/x) open.substack.com/pub/cactus/p/d… "If anything, proponents of fast AGI believe that the rate of innovation is likely to be faster in the future than in the present. The purpose of this three-part series is to argue the opposite."

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how pervasive and un-quarantinable wildfire smoke has become. Re-upping today, as smoke from Canada blankets the U.S. northeast. 60% of the smoke impact of American wildfire comes outside the state where the fire is. (1/x) nytimes.com/2023/05/17/opi… Eighty-seven percent of the impact is experienced by those living outside the county of the original fire.

Somewhat suddenly, the United States has disowned what had been, for at least a generation, its governing ideology both at home and abroad. But "the end of neoliberalism" has left behind a strange ideological vacuum defined mostly by self-interest. (1/x) nytimes.com/2023/05/25/opi… How did this happen? "When the Inflation Reduction Act was signed into law last August, it fired the starting gun on a new, green industrial arms race. But it also seemed to signal the end of something: America’s uniform rhetorical commitment to the global reign of free markets."

“By this fundamental measure of human flourishing, the US is moving not forward but backward, at unprecedented speed, and now the country’s catastrophic mortality anomaly has spread to its children.” On the life expectancy crisis’s terrible turn (1/x). nytimes.com/2023/04/06/opi… “One in 25 American 5-year-olds now won’t live to see 40, a death rate about four times as high as in other wealthy nations. And although the spike in death rates among the young has been dramatic since the beginning of the pandemic, little of the impact is from Covid-19.”

According to a new dataset, the U.S. has alone contributed 20.9% of all observed global warming to date, nearly twice as much as China, the second most prolific historic emitter, which is responsible for 11.9% of warming to date. nature.com/articles/s4159… Americans and other idle observers often get caught up on present-day emissions and projections of future contributions to warming. But because carbon hangs in the air for centuries if not millennia, the damage done in the past is still with us—and will be, functionally, forever.

Many remarkable things in this remarkable @page88 visit to the Taiwan semiconductor factory that sort of single-handedly powers the information economy. (1/x) wired.com/story/i-saw-th… "By revenue, TSMC is the largest semiconductor company in the world. In 2020 it quietly joined the world’s 10 most valuable companies. It’s now bigger than Meta and Exxon."

"Did mitigation measures imposed in the spring of 2020 actually work? And considering the costs, were they worth it?" Almost silently, the country seems to have decided that, despite a million-plus dead, the answer to both questions is "No." (1/x) nytimes.com/2023/03/17/opi… "Given how panicked and supportive of mitigation measures Americans were in the spring of 2020, the idea that pandemic response was largely defined by excess and overreach may seem extreme. But in its softer form the belief is no longer confined to the skeptical margins."

The green Industrial Revolution, long derided as a left-wing fantasy, is unfolding much more rapidly now in red states—and potentially beginning to depolarize climate and energy in US politics. A thread on the renewables boom and political baby steps (1/x) nytimes.com/2023/03/08/opi… “My whole adult life, the work of fighting climate change was understood as the job of the blue team in America. The red team, we knew, just wasn’t going to play ball.”

"Over time, fatality rates higher than Covid would (one hopes) shake the country’s fatalism. But a deadlier pandemic would probably also reignite arguments over our response to the coronavirus, by making that disease look mild by comparison." (1/x) nytimes.com/2023/02/22/opi… "Beginning in 2020, Covid minimizers compared it to the flu, which kills a fraction as many (and tends to infect many fewer). If in the next pandemic, fatality rates were five times higher, would minimizers dismiss it similarly — 'It’s just Covid'?"

"Whatever happened to our Roaring Twenties? In the first year of the pandemic, it was common to hear predictions that Covid-19 would end in a grand bacchanal like the dizzying decade following the Spanish flu of 1918 and 1919. That end hasn't come." (1/x) nytimes.com/2023/02/22/opi… "The emergency phase of the pandemic is obviously behind us, just look outside. But the country didn’t turn the page so much as limp gradually forward, through a sort of fog of exhaustion and loneliness and long Covid, into the dawn of a new period..."

“Hispanics in the United States tend to have lower household income, educa- tion, and health insurance coverage when compared to non-Hispanic Whites. Despite these economic disadvantages, paradoxically…” pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10… “…Hispanics have displayed an equality with or even advantages over other minority groups and non-Hispanic Whites across a wide range of health outcomes.”

You probably know that about 1.1 million Americans have officially died of Covid-19 over the course of the pandemic. You probably don't know that perhaps 300,000 more Americans have also died whom we should not have expected to in more normal times. (1/x) nytimes.com/2023/02/02/opi… "Over the last three years, the country’s large excess mortality has been mostly attributed to Covid-19. But perhaps a quarter of the total, and at times a larger share than that, has been chalked up to other causes."

The UK is in a startling degree of crisis which foreigners are just beginning to pay attention to. A long thread on the state of the NHS, the price of prolonged austerity, the future of "Stagnation Nation" and what it means for the rest of the world (1/x). nytimes.com/2023/01/25/opi… "In December, as many as 500 patients per week were dying in Britain because of ER waits, perhaps surpassing the death toll from Covid-19. On average, English ambulances were taking an hour and a half to respond to stroke and heart-attack calls; the target time was 18 minutes."

The U.K.'s struggles are bigger than the crisis of the N.H.S., but the struggles of the N.H.S. are truly staggering at the moment. (1/x) nytimes.com/2023/01/25/opi… In December, as many as 500 patients per week were dying in Britain because of E.R. waits, according to the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, a figure rivaling (and perhaps surpassing) the death toll from Covid-19.

“Apple was not really ‘outsourcing’ production to China. Instead, Apple was starting to build up a supply and manufacturing operation of such complexity, depth and cost that the company’s fortunes have become tied to China in a way that cannot easily be unwound.” (1/x)

https://twitter.com/BJMbraun/status/1615267630608420865

“Over the past decade and a half, Apple has been sending its top product designers and manufacturing design engineers to China, embedding them into suppliers’ facilities for months at a time.”

“In the same year that Tesla’s stock dropped by two-thirds, destroying $700 billion in value, the global market for electric vehicles—which for so long the company seemed almost to embody—actually boomed.” The E.V. revolution is finally coming. (1/x) nytimes.com/2023/01/11/opi… “Around the world, E.V. sales were projected to have grown 60 percent in 2022, bringing total sales over 10 million. There are now almost 30 million electric vehicles on the road in total, up from just 10 million at the end of 2020. E.V. market share has also tripled since 2020.”

It is still quite commonplace, even reflexive, to refer to the disaster of American pandemic management in 2020. Of course, it seemed disastrous at the time, and, in retrospect, one hopes we could’ve done better. But it simply isn’t true that the U.S. was an outlier. It also isn’t true that, in the second half of 2020, European failures exceeded American ones—if anything, the U.S. did *worse* compared to its European peers in the second half of that year than it had in the first half.

“The world’s worst pandemic was probably not in the United States or Britain, Italy or Spain, China or India but in Eastern Europe — notably in Russia.” (1/x) nytimes.com/2023/01/04/opi… “Of the 106 countries included by the Economist in its excess mortality data set, the 12 hardest hit were in Eastern Europe, as were 17 of the worst 20.”