Nine years ago I made one of the most consequential decisions of my life—I switched to the so-called Paleo Diet (“paleo” is a bit misleading, as I explain in the post). Had I not done so, I would certainly have contributed to the rising obesity statistics for the United States. Within

Sweden and Denmark are both Nordic countries speaking similar languages, sharing a lot of culture and a lot of common history. But they followed very different approaches to managing the Covid-19 pandemic. Denmark was among the first in Europe to shut down schools, restaurants and oth

We are now in the mid-game of the Covid-19 pandemic and it is a good time to take stock of where we are and where we might be going. It is already clear, for example, that the effect of the pandemic on demography is going to be slight—because much less than 1 percent of population wil

After I published my last post on Coronavirus and Our Age of Discord, I’ve been looking through various lists of major epidemics in world history, both on resources such as Wikipedia and in academic articles. I know that there is a strong (although not perfect) association betwe

As readers of this blog know well, I don’t claim to be a prophet and I think that prophecy is, in any case, overrated. But I make predictions. A scientific prediction, unlike a prophecy, is not about a future, but about a theory — it’s a way to find out how good is o

Last week my analysis of the Covid-19 epidemic in Italy yielded a very depressing result: despite all the measures taken by the government, there was no sign that they were making a difference. The epidemic was still growing exponentially with dire implications for the overall number

Last year I had an interesting conversation with someone I’ll call the Washington Insider. She asked me why my structural-demographic model predicted rising instability in the USA, probably peaking with a major outbreak of political violence in the 2020s. I started giving the explanat

One of my most popular posts ever was on Cultural Evolution of Pants. The comments on old posts are off, but recently I got a new one through the “contact me” feature of my site. It was from a French reader named David; here’s the English translation: Hi Peter, I agr

I grew up in Russia and for the first 20 years of my life I never tasted a chili pepper. I still remember my first encounter with this potent condiment in a Thai restaurant after moving to the United States: biting into an innocuous looking bit, burning sensation followed by intense p

In a recent blog post P. D. Mangan discusses the implications of the metabolic theory of cancer and the ideas of Dr. Laurent Schwartz, French physician and oncologist, who has been using this theory to treat cancer patients. Whether this theory is correct, or not, time (and the scient