NewsWire: 2/14/24
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Chart of the Week: SAD SONGS PREVAIL
The success of female songwriters like Billie Eilish and SZA at this year’s Grammys brought to mind this great chart from musician Chris Dalla Riva. The share of #1 hits in a minor key (that is, sad-sounding songs) jumped hugely in the early 2000s, and while it has since dipped, it remains a good 20-30% higher than what it was in the 1970s and ‘80s.
Along with the rise of the minor key have come other telling trends: a decline in #1 songs using the word “love” and an increase in those using the word “hate,” and a rise in “ambiguous key centers” (chord patterns that lack a sense of resolution). For more on these shifts, we recommend this in-depth post from music historian Ted Gioia.
While sad and angry music is, of course, nothing new, the fact that it now consistently makes up half of mainstream radio hits is. As the youth mood goes, so goes its music.
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Study of the Week
The vast majority—about 80%—of people with autoimmune diseases are women. These include not only known autoimmune diseases such as lupus and multiple sclerosis, but also such suspected autoimmune conditions as ME/CFS (chronic fatigue syndrome) and “Long Covid.” A new paper published in the journal Cell from researchers at Stanford University offers an explanation why that is rooted in a molecule called Xist (pronounced “exist”).
The role of Xist, which is found only in women, is to deactivate the extra X chromosome carried by women to avoid a potentially toxic overproduction of proteins. But to do so, it generates other proteins that are linked to many autoimmune diseases. In other words, the deactivation process itself can cause the immune system to start attacking itself.
Genetics are not the only explanation behind autoimmune diseases. This would not explain why men are also struck by them as well. However, this finding helps point the way towards new treatments for what has long been a medical mystery.
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Stats of the Week
- Speaking of depressed youth: When young people are asked if they think they’ll be better off than their parents when they’re older, just 41% of 19- to 24-year-olds and 40% of 12- to 17-year-olds agree, according to a report by Common Sense Media. By race, black teens are the only group where a majority think they’ll be better off. While this is far from the only stat we’ve covered illustrating declining faith in the American Dream, this question is much less commonly asked of teens and kids.
- In our coverage of excess deaths during the pandemic, we noted that this total remained persistently higher than the official U.S. Covid-19 death toll. Many of these excess deaths were assumed to be uncounted deaths from Covid, but until now we did not have a systematic method to confirm this. A new study in PNAS does just that: Researchers show that from March 2020 to August 2022, excess deaths increased in tandem with Covid deaths by county and by month. They also show that excess deaths did not correlate with other speculated drivers of deaths like healthcare delays or overcrowded hospitals. This method is similar to the way the CDC estimates flu deaths and provides much better grounding for the claim that Covid deaths have been underestimated.
- More from our archives: “Why Are Excess Deaths Still So High?”
- Conventional economic wisdom holds that physically attractive people tend to be more successful at work. And, according to a new NBER study, having attractive parents offers a leg up, too. The researchers estimate that having “hot parents” nets children over 2.3K in additional income each year, or an additional 106K over their working lives, compared to those with “average” parents. Why? It’s a double-whammy: Attractive parents tend to have attractive children, which enables the children to earn more; and, meanwhile, the parents are more likely to have earned more themselves due to their own looks and end up passing down more wealth.
- In the United States and other English-speaking nations, membership in service organizations has been declining precipitously since the 1970s. But in India, it’s booming. Rotary Club membership has more than doubled since 2005, while Lions Club membership has jumped +41%. Today, there are more Lions Club members in India than there are in the U.S.
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Recommended Reads
- FT’s John Burn-Murdoch on young Britons’ near-desertion of the Conservative Party
- WSJ’s Liyan Qi tells the story of the miscalculations that drove the creation of China’s disastrous one-child policy
- Businessweek’s Leslie Patton on the problems that child-focused businesses (see: diaper makers) face as the age of childbearing rises, birthrates fall, and families balk at rising costs
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