So, two thirds of Americans under 35 now say that moderate drinking is bad for their health. In a vacuum, there's nothing here to get mad at. Not drinking alcohol is, clearly, good for your liver. But this is really important to say: The evidence that moderate drinking—say, ~1 drink a night—is bad for you is based on really shoddy observational surveys that are not worth orienting your life around. And the scariest findings on alcohol-cancer risk aren't communicated well to the public. The recent surgeon general report says moderate drinking increases the relative risk of breast cancer by 10 percent. Ofc, that doesn't sound good! But in absolute terms, that means raising the average woman's lifetime risk of getting breast cancer from about 11 percent to about ... 13 percent. As I've said before: If you pass this information along to a friend, I think you can forgive them for saying: "Sorry, I like my evening chardonnay more than I like your two percentage points with a low confidence interval."

i have no idea if this post is sincere or satirical, but if you were trying to mock the fainting-couch vibes of online taylor swift fandom, i don't think you could do better than this

My 3 favorite graphs from today's deep dive in the American fitness boom 1. The big picture: According to the American Time Use Survey, the share of Americans who say they work out or play sports on an average day is up about 20% this century—with a sharp post-pandemic burst.

New newsletter: THE GREAT AMERICAN FITNESS BOOM Americans are suddenly working out more than ever. I wrote about what's rising (Pilates), what's falling (SoulCycle), and who's leading the sports-and-exercise craze: It's Gen Z and ... Boomer women.

Something like this seems plausible to me: The year is 2027. Mamdani is the NYC mayor. NYC is widely understood to be in trouble. The center-to-right blames socialism. The center-to-left says “Job growth was putrid before he was elected, Trump crushed tourism and declines in net immigration hurt our pop growth, plus that AI pullback in Q3 ‘26 has hurt finance.” And debating the causes of NYC’s struggles becomes a major storyline heading into the primaries.

New pod: GEN Z'S SCARY PERSONALITY CHANGE with @jburnmurdoch I talked to John about Those Graphs. Plus: - The science of personality tests - What we talk about when we talk about "conscientiousness" - Is the Internet displacing "real-world commitment"? - External validities for declining C (e.g., data on declining academic scores), rising neuroticism (e.g., increases anxiety), and falling extroversion (e.g., the antisocial century) - @LDamour chimes in via email on causes: is this ... the internet? the phones? parenting? modern wellness trends? - Is there any fixing this?

$400 billion of annualized capex for a high-tech "mirror mirror on the wall who's the fairest of them all" interlocutor

Good post from Derek. I like his point that there are reasons to suspect AI will amplify existing trends but think it is worth amplifying why and how, though the two word answer is "consumerist therapy."

Kinda wild and sad that Americans bought between 1.2 and 1.5 billion movie tickets every year for 30+ years and realistically speaking, that’s just … never going to happen again?

The red flags are everywhere and we need more people sounding the alarm.