First of all, this. Another piece about how things were *not* better in the past. (Somehow, things are getting better. Despite.)
Vox, Bryan Walsh, 12 Jul 2026: The forgotten success story of America’s teenagers, subtitled “Today’s teens are much safer than 1990s teens. Why doesn’t anyone talk about it?”
I’ll quote the Key Takeaways.
Key takeaways
- The teen birth rate hit another record low in 2025 — down 81 percent from its 1991 peak, or roughly half a million fewer teen births a year.
- It’s not just pregnancy: Teen drinking, smoking, fighting, and drug use have all collapsed since the 1990s.
- The best theory: Teen lives got longer, safer, and richer — and their futures became too valuable to gamble.
- A teenager today is about a third less likely to die than one in 1990.
- The price: Teen sadness has surged since 2017, and the good kinds of risk-taking declined too.
Here’s how the piece begins:
It’s been feeling very 1995 lately.
Oasis, whose last good song came out back when Macs were still see-through, was the second-biggest tour on the planet last year. Gen Z is snapping up the flip phones and digital cameras their parents had traded in for smartphones, and Y2K-era fashion is flooding the mall, in case you were wondering where all the rhinestones came from. Pop star Olivia Rodrigo just released a hit album heavily influenced by alternative rock recorded a decade before she was born.
And this bit:
Speaking as someone who lived through the 1990s as a teenager and mostly enjoyed it (at least in retrospect), it makes total sense to me. Of course, it would — as a Washington Post analysis found, when Americans name the country’s “best decade,” the answer inevitably boils down to whichever decade they turned 11.
This is what, I think, MAGA means: return the nation to whenever they grew up. That’s all. It’s a psychological response that likely has occurred throughout human history. There is no knowledge or analysis to their nostalgia.
The writer goes on expand on that third point.
The best unified theory comes from psychologists like Jean Twenge and more recently writers like Mastroianni, whose “Decline of Deviance” essays argue that kids stopped taking risks of all kinds in part because their futures became too valuable to gamble. As lives got longer, safer, and richer, the expected cost of any given joint, fight, or pregnancy went up. Twenge called this the “slow life strategy,” and it shows up as much in data about taking good risks as it does in taking bad ones: The share of high school seniors with a driver’s license, for instance, fell from 82 percent in 2005 to 63 percent in 2023.
This is fascinating. It can’t be a conscious decision. And yet, there’s the issue of sadness.
The problem with reducing risk-taking behavior across the board is that not all risks are bad. The same caution that might keep a 16-year-old from smoking or having sex might later keep her from founding a company, moving across the country, or writing a strange novel. In Mastroianni’s “Decline of Deviance” essays he documents falling cultural and scientific risk-taking right alongside fewer fistfights. “For the first time in history,” he writes, “weirdness is a choice. And it’s a hard one, because we have more to lose than ever.””
Citing Jonathan Haidt. And concluding:
But our valid worries about the mental state and uncertain future of today’s teens shouldn’t blind us to just how remarkable the shift from the 1990s is as a whole. As Mastroianni writes, “We would have spent billions to solve all of these problems back in the 1990s…and yet when we got the thing we wanted so badly, we didn’t even notice.”
America wanted its teenagers to stop getting pregnant, stop smoking, and stop fighting — wanted it badly enough to put it at the center of a State of the Union address — and then got nearly all of it, mostly free of charge, from the kids themselves.
“Can we take a win?” Mastroianni asks. We can start by counting this one.
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Moving on to how the current administration is tearing things down.
Salon, Heather Digby Parton, today: Marco Rubio’s quest to destroy the International Criminal Court, subtitled “The secretary of state is using the right’s long-standing hatred of the ICC to bolster his MAGA bona fides for 2028”
Setting aside the misunderstood drive of progressives to “defund” the police, why would this administration want to dismantle an international criminal court? The answer is pretty obvious.
For a man who considers himself the greatest builder the world has ever known — move over, Pharaoh Khufu! — Donald Trump has managed vanishingly little of it in either of his presidential terms. What his administrations have done is show an impressive talent for tearing things down.
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NY Times, guest essay by Sally Quinn, today: It’s No Longer So Much Fun to Be MAGA in Washington
The worst part about living in Donald Trump’s Washington has been seeing just how much fun he and all the MAGA vandals he brought to power have been having sacking and pillaging the place. This while the rest of us longtime Washingtonians who abided by norms, shared values and even bipartisanship were filled first with shock, then a feeling of helplessness, and hopelessness. It could border on passivity. What could be done?
This is striking:
I remember running into Kellyanne Conway at a newish private club, already packed with crypto types, who scolded me: “Sally, I wish you would stop writing all these pieces about how terrible Washington is now and how everyone is so depressed and scared. We’re having fun! You know what your problem is? You’re not invited to the right dinners and parties.”
So that’s what it’s all about? But now MAGA is despairing.
Lately, the vibe has shifted. The MAGA Republicans don’t seem to be having such a good time ransacking the place anymore.
It’s not that the party is over, exactly. And to be clear, there’s lots more damage that will be done to this city, and to our democracy — not to mention America’s place in the world — before Mr. Trump and his rabble are through. But it’s clearly starting to dawn on the MAGA minions that the morning after is going to be a doozy.
AlterNet covers this piece with this headline: MAGA complains it’s no longer ‘fun’ ruining everyone else’s lives: report
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Axios, Marc Caputo, today: GOP midterm strategy: Make it a “hate election” (via JMG)
Republicans admit the GOP’s midterm forecast is bleak. But they’re clinging to two hopes: voters’ fear and loathing of Democrats.
- “It’s going to be a hate election,” a Republican tied to President Trump‘s political operation told Axios. “Voters have to hate the Dems more than they hate us. And we have material to work with.”
Straight out of Orwell’s Nineteen Eight-Four.
