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Ross Douthat

By Ross Douthat

Opinion Columnist

It may seem hard to believe when you’re inside the social media cascade, but American society actually stabilized meaningfully across 2025. The homicide and crime rates dropped, finally erasing the surge that began with the George Floyd protests in 2020. Life expectancy began to rise again. Overdose deaths dropped. The suicide rate continued to decline from its 2022 peak. Young people even showed some signs of retreating from the tunnel of a social-media-mediated existence. (I am indebted to the prolific substacker Noah Smith for this list of happy........

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