Reads of the week - 17 June 2022
A fine way to end a very nice, but very hot week: a reading roundup! As always, feel free to comment with something you’ve read and enjoyed (or not, as the case may be).
What does a post-Roe America look like? Over half the women who get abortions in the US are Black or Hispanic; one estimate says the decline in legal abortions would only be about 13%
Who’s dying from drug overdoses, and who’s worried?: Pew reports that while drug overdoses have spiked (up 30% in 2020, and 75% over five years), Black men have been hit the hardest, defined as the biggest increase in deaths among demographic groups.
This is notable in part because we spent a lot of years reading about the effect of the opioid crisis on White Americans (White women are still more likely to die from overdose than Black women, as of 2020, but their death rate grew faster than that of White women). Of note: fewer US adults think drug addiction is a problem now than they did in 2018—maybe there’s just too much to worry about? (By the way, there’s a Twitter debate on the age-adjusted death rates for the data on race, if you want to follow it.)
Did you have Omicron (like I did) this past winter? Mine was (thankfully) mild so I was surprised to learn that it was deadlier for people over 65 than the Delta variant was.
US Baby bump? There was a tiny bump in US births in 2021, but that was likely in part from those who had postponed having children in 2020, and possibly because some women couldn’t get contraception as usual due to COVID disruptions. Notable: teen births reached yet another record low.
What I haven’t read: The novel, The Men, imagines a high-functioning but utterly boring world if there were no men. I don’t think I’ll be reading it, but this discussion of it in The Atlantic sure was interesting to skim.
Something fun: I’m almost finished with the second in this mystery series set in 1920s India and have the third on my nightstand.
