Most opioid addicts are recreational users, not those who started on prescription pain medication and continued to have pain and migrated to illegal routes when doctors behaved ethically and shut them off. It just makes people feel good. It is no surprise that opioids are involved in far more deaths each year than guns. If opiods were legally available without a prescription, they'd be in the same category as alcohol when it comes to lifestyle killers. That is what addiction does.

With historically high levels of LGBTQ2+ visibility, hardly a TV show exists where no matter how small the character list, someone isn't a sexual minority, a new paper says that coming out can still mean drama - even from those inside the LGBTQ2+ community if you don't match the style and tone of the cool clique.

Prior to 2021 and the COVID-19 pandemic, American Democrats led the anti-vaccine movement. They couched it in anti-corporate terminology and that let politically allied academics and journalists turn a blind eye to the harm their thinking caused. In 2015, after a decade of effort by Science 2.0 and many others, California passed a law banning 'philosophical' objections, a haven that had only been used by fringe religious groups before the 1990s, but in California had led to more un-vaccinated children on the coasts, in places like Berkeley, Los Angeles, and Marin County, than the entire rest of the United States combined.

It was a struggle to educate parents that vaccines were safe and necessary when they instead believed in supplements, organic food, and solar power.

A new survey says lots of people opt for 'healthier' substitutes like chicken instead of beef and vanilla-flavored plant juice instead of milk, and 56 percent of them claim to feel better doing so.

Well, they probably do feel better. The reason is not the food, it is that they changed their diet and it is a psychological adjuvant for lots of other positive things, like fewer calories or more exercise or just feeling like they are 'doing' something by getting on a scale. 

In wealthy western breadbaskets like France and the United States, environmental groups who get donations from the $130 billion organic food industry claim it is viable everywhere else too. It's not just that they don't understand agriculture or science, though that is most of it. It is that they don't realize their modern White Savior Colonialism puts Africans at risk.

There is a reason that as Kenya has gotten better about feeding itself, none of it is using the "organic" process - that whole market is just 0.69% and is mostly people who wish they had the money for pesticides. The reasons organic food don't work outside places where food is easy to grow involve climate, poor soil, limited water, and pests and diseases that ruin crops.

Pew has announced they will no longer use 'generational labels' and instead use age cohorts. It makes sense demographically but it never made sense that anyone used them in the first place. 

When I was born, the Baby Boom was an event - a post-World War II increase in births due to soldiers returning home. But when they grew up they were reading the works of people who felt 'lost' because they hadn't been in World War II or the Depression, and dreary mopes like Kerouac and Ginsberg infected a whole lot of teenagers who wants to feel cheated too.