The Library
Health
12A Day on the Plate — How America’s Children Eat, Move, and Grow
What 5,610 survey records reveal about how young Americans eat, drink, move, and grow — and the quiet inequalities hidden inside the averages.
Four Subway Stops, Twenty-Four Years
Within a single American county, life expectancy at birth can differ by more than two decades. A tract-level tour of New York and Chicago.
Reading the Population’s Vital Signs — Mental Health at the Emergency Room Door
Every month, more than 6,900 emergency departments tell the CDC who walked in — and why. Mental health leaves a trace in that stream. Here is how to read it without being fooled.
The Coefficient Zoo
Fifty-one regressions per health behavior, 306 small models in all: five behaviors fall with income in every state, but binge drinking rises with it almost everywhere. Money doesn't buy abstinence; it changes the vice.
The Curve That Bent — U.S. Drug Overdose Deaths, 2018–2024
For six years the rate of drug overdose death in America rose almost without pause. In 2024 it fell harder than it had ever risen.
The Flat Line
In deprived neighborhoods people see the doctor just as often — and get far less prevention. The health system manages disease where it could prevent it.
The Great Unwinding: Stress Is the Only Emotion with a Retirement Party
Between 55 and 70, the emotional weather of American life transforms: stress collapses, worry recedes, enjoyment returns. Stress, it turns out, is the only emotion that gets a retirement party.
The Slope Factory
We fit the deprivation–life-expectancy regression separately in 266 American metros. Every single slope came back negative. Many small models, one law.
The Starting Line
In 2018 an American infant's odds of dying varied threefold by state — from 2.8 per 1,000 in New Hampshire to 8.4 in Mississippi — and rose with the deprivation of the county it was born into.
Wear and Tear
You would expect the map of American disability to be a map of where old people live. It is not — disability nearly doubles from the most to the least advantaged neighborhoods, while the elderly are spread evenly across both.
Where It Is Deadliest to Be Poor
Rich Americans live about as long no matter where they live. Poor Americans' lifespans depend on their address — and the places that stretch them are not the places with the most doctors, but the places where fewer people smoke.
Within Reach — Four Decades of How Available U.S. Teens Think Drugs Are
Every year, American high-school seniors are asked a simple question: how hard would it be to get each of these drugs, if you wanted some? Four decades of answers trace the rise and fall of whole drug eras — and end on a striking, broad retreat.