• Sometimes we lose sight of the fact that there has definitely been significant human progress in many parts of the world – dramatic drops in infant mortality, neonatal and obstetric deaths, cancer mortality, and poverty.  Nicholas Kristof writes about this in his “This May Be the Most Important Thing Happening in the World Today” opinion piece in the NY Times.  Some excerpts:

“We happen to live in a transformational era in which 96 percent of the world’s children now survive until adulthood…

…But one reason the world doesn’t do more to help poor countries is exhaustion, a sense that nothing works. I fear that misperception is driven partly by journalists like me, and by aid workers, advocates and other bleeding hearts.

We pounce upon crises, so what the public hears about in Africa is carnage in Sudan, hunger in Somalia and massacres in Ethiopia. Those are real problems that deserve more attention, not less — but we don’t do enough to illuminate the backdrop of gains in health, education and well-being.

Many people believe that global poverty is hopeless — 87 percent said in a 2016 survey that poverty had stayed the same or gotten worse over the previous two decades — while in fact the share of the world’s people living in extreme poverty has plunged from 38 percent in 1990 to about 8 percent now.”

• David French writes in the NY Times that watching Fox can quite alarmingly demonstrate the intractable hold DJT has on his segment of the electorate. An excerpt:

“When I look back on the Trump years, I see a dark time of division, corruption and social decay. After all, when he left office, the murder rate was higher, drug overdose deaths had increased, and the abortion rate had gone up for the first time in decades. America was more bitterly divided, and deficits increased each year of his presidency. His early Covid lies helped fuel an immense amount of confusion and almost certainly cost American lives. And his entire sorry term was capped by a violent insurrection fueled by an avalanche of lies.

If you watched the town hall, however, you entered an entirely different world. According to Trump’s narrative, everything he did was good. His term was a time of economic prosperity, energy independence, fiscal responsibility, a rejuvenated military, a locked-down border and fear and respect from foreign regimes. The only thing that marred his four years was a stolen election and his unjust persecution by the corrupt Democratic Party and its allies in the F.B.I. In Trumpworld, the Trump past is golden, and the Trump future bright, but the present is a time of misery and darkness.”

Be afraid…

• Interesting results from at attempt to rate physician generated versus Chat GPT generated responses to patient questions posed on Reddit’s r/AskDocs:

• Bill Gates riffs on the Natrium next generation sodium cooled nuclear plant he’s funding that will be built in Kemmerer, Wyoming, and also talks about the need to upgrade the grid‘s transmission capabilities.

• David Wallace-Wells has another must-read piece in the NY Times: “It’s Not ‘Deaths of Despair.’ It’s Deaths of Children”

Some excerpts:

“Americans are now dying younger on average than they used to, breaking from all global and historical patterns of predictable improvement. They are dying younger than in any peer countries, even accounting for the larger impact of the pandemic here. They are dying younger than in China, Cuba, the Czech Republic or Lebanon.

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.

Mortality is still increasing more quickly for those without a college degree, but as John Burn-Murdoch demonstrated vividly in The Financial Times, except for a few superrich Americans, individuals at every percentile of income are now dying sooner than their counterparts in Britain, for instance. For the poorer half of the country, simply being an American is equivalent to about four full years of life lost compared with the average Brit.

Black Americans, on average, can expect to live five fewer years than white Americans; Black American men have lower life expectancies than men in Rwanda, Laos and North Korea. White Americans, in turn, can expect to live seven fewer years than Asian Americans. Life expectancy in the Black Belt of the Deep South is as much as 20 years lower than it is north of the Mason-Dixon line and west of the Mississippi, according to the American Inequality Project.

The horror is that, as Burn-Murdoch memorably put it, in the average American kindergarten at least one child can expect to be buried by his or her parents.”

Wallace-Wells also refers to this viewpoint article published in JAMA Network by Woolf, Wolf, and Rivera.