By now this is a familiar story. During the early years of the century, a new communication tool surges in popularity. The new tool is not just entertaining; advocates expect it to promote commerce, alleviate loneliness, bridge cultural divides, and even support democracy. But, from the beginning, the tool is controversial. Critics fret about people spending less time together in person, conversations becoming gossipy and rude, and private information being leaked. At best, the new tool is considered a mixed blessing. At worst, it's expected to destroy civilization. I'm referring here to th ..read more

Is social media having a "tobacco moment"? In 1964, the Surgeon General's report Smoking and Health touched off a transformation in public consciousness. Although tobacco was already considered harmful, this rigorous, methodologically innovative document spurred legislative action and a national media frenzy. Within a year, federal law required cigarette packages to display that famous warning "Caution: Cigarette Smoking May Be Hazardous to Your Health" and soon the majority of Americans, whether they smoked or not, were more or less convinced of the hazards. Eight decades later, social med ..read more

According to Matt Reynolds at Wired, today, May 16, is the first day lab-grown meat can be purchased directly from a store. Before I get to the apparent significance of this event, I want to invite you to try a little thought experiment on what may seem like an unrelated topic. Last week, scientists reported in Nature Communications that the clicks used by sperm whales to signal each other are structured like a phonetic alphabet. Do the clicks form words and phrases? We don't know yet, but if they do, the day may come that with the help of a translator (ClickGPT?), people and sperm whales c ..read more

On May 1, Governor Ron DeSantis signed into law a ban on the sale of lab-grown meat in Florida. (Alabama passed a similar bill on Tuesday; Arizona and Tennessee may soon follow suit.) The new law is meant to protect Florida's billion-dollar-per-year cattle industry, as DeSantis acknowledges, but he also chose to frame what was, in essence, a business decision in terms of an epic clash between ideologies. As he said last week, "Florida is fighting back against the global elite's plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish, or bugs, to achieve their authoritarian goals."  O ..read more

"How to obtain sufficient sleep – this threatens to be a stubborn problem of the new century...We seem to be drifting toward an age when man must resort to artifice to obtain that share of sleep originally meted out...by nature." (The Washington Post, March 4, 1898.) "The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention just published their first national survey of sleep... The CDC found that more than a third of American adults are not getting the recommended amount of seven-plus hours of sleep on a regular basis." (The Washington Post, February 19, 2016). In the opening lines of these Wash ..read more

Crime rates in the U.S. have been dropping since the 1990s. Criminologists and other experts sometimes call this the "great crime decline". Surveys show that most Americans believe that crime is increasing. I call this the "great crime disconnect" because for nearly two decades, public perceptions have been out of step with the evidence. Last week, I shared some of the data on crime rates and public perceptions. (I've since posted an updated version of that newsletter here.) This week I want to discuss why crime has been declining in the U.S., and what we can do to support this trend. In th ..read more

Interpreting data can be like listening to a 3-year-old talk about their day. At first it all makes sense, but then there's a giraffe, and chocolate sneakers, and other details that complicate the narrative until you're left wondering what really happened. Experts agree that crime in the U.S. has sharply declined since the 1990s, a phenomenon sometimes called the "great crime decline". However, the American public tends to believe crime has been increasing. That sounds like a pretty simple narrative. I call it the "great crime disconnect", because for much of the past two decades, public pe ..read more

Tell someone that our society has been profoundly transformed by statistics and they may nod politely, perhaps stifle a yawn. Then listen to what they want to talk about. You might find yourself discussing artificial intelligence, the latest Biden-Trump poll, Ozempic, or the chances of rain next week: Topics that wouldn't exist without statistics. We're all familiar with statistical data – poll results, student test scores, inflation trends, Caitlin Clark's field goal percentages, the probability of this, the rising tide of that. Less noticeable, for most people, is the role of statist ..read more

On my first day as a doctoral student at Cornell, I was intimidated by the brainy people as well as the brains. Take the Uris Hall elevator up to Cornell's psychology department, and the first thing you'll see when the doors open is a display case exhibiting eight jars, each containing a human brain. "Those are from students who failed," said the older classmate who was showing me around. It took me a moment to realize she was joking. What I was actually seeing were samples from the Wilder Brain Collection. Beginning in 1889, Cornell professor Burt Wilder began amassing a collection of hund ..read more

In March 2000, a man wearing nothing but a swimsuit and goggles set a Guinness World Record by swimming over 188 feet under ice. This was his second attempt. The first time he tried it, his corneas froze and he passed out. Welcome to the world of Wim Hof, aka the Iceman. According to Wikipedia, the only Guinness record that Mr. Hof still holds is for running a half marathon barefoot in ice and snow near Oulu, Finland in 2007 (2:16:34). However, Guinness now shows that Hof's record was broken last month by a man named Josef Šálek (1:50:42). Don't feel sorry for Mr. Hof that he lost his recor ..read more