How could a study on obesity be so thin? Smart Growth America and the Surface Transportation Policy Project have found that fat is correlated with sprawl–well, sort of. Two of their researchers, Barbara McCann and Reid Ewing, write in “Measuring the Health Effects of Sprawl” (September): “The people living in the most sprawling areas are likely to weigh six pounds more than people in the most compact county.” Even more underwhelming are the extremes in northeastern Illinois, where the expected average weight of a person who’s five foot seven is 165.54 pounds in Cook County (least sprawling) and 166.91 pounds in Grundy County (most sprawling).
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Of 400 Illinois prisoners surveyed before they returned to Chicago, two-thirds reported using drugs before they were incarcerated, yet at most one-fifth had received any kind of drug or alcohol treatment while in prison. So says the Urban Institute report “Illinois Prisoners’ Reflections on Returning Home” (September), which also notes that 12 percent of the prisoners said they would use drugs after their release even if they were likely to get caught and 3 percent said they expected to make money illegally.
“It is sometimes said that the left won the culture war of the late 1960s and the right won the political war,” writes David Bromwich in the New Republic (August 18 & 25), reviewing Diane Ravitch’s new book, The Language Police. “Things would be better now if it had been the other way around. Our lawmakers have become less liberal than our institutions and laws. Our culture has become more libertine than its consumers…. The left-wing personality of our time, a loser in politics but a winner in culture, is guilty and satisfied. The right-wing personality, a winner in politics and a loser in culture, is angry and resentful even at its moment of triumph.”
