Wellness is back! With your personal life coach and raw milk subscription and supplements regimen, you are on the vanguard of the new age of personal health empowerment. And now everyone’s favorite wellness guru, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is poised to take over as Secretary of Health and Human Services. We live in the healthiest of times. And - oh yeah - the unhealthiest of times, with chronic disease at record levels and all the trend lines going the wrong way.
Read MoreIn her excellent article for Slate, “Welcome to the Human Doom Loop,” the writer and urban policy specialist Diana Lind describes and – crucially – names a phenomenon that should be familiar to readers of our newsletter.
Read MoreIf you want to put your ear to the heartbeat of American consumption, take a listen to Walmart’s earnings calls, where the retailer tells Wall Street how the past quarter has gone financially. There was one such call this week, and CEO Doug McMillon said something intriguing: “We're feeling some margin pressure from growth in GLP-1 drugs, so we're pleased to see general merchandise sales be positive.”
Read MoreShould companies be accountable for how their products affect consumers’ health? We think so – and so we did something. Today we released the 2024 Building H Index, which rates and ranks more than 75 popular products and services from companies like Netflix, Uber, Apple, Chick-fil-A and Doordash, on how they affect the health of their users.
Read MoreEver since limes and sauerkraut were discovered as cures and preventatives for scurvy in the 18th century, food has been leveraged as a powerful tool for preventing disease and advancing health. In the 20th century, supplemented foods - adding iodine to sale, boosting milk with vitamin D, even adding fluoride to public water systems - created huge public health benefits, turning the ubiquity of mass-consumed foodstuffs to prevent common diseases.
Read MoreHow might we reimagine online grocery services to be healthy by design? We wanted to explore this question, so we challenged a team of graduate students from the Master of Human-Computer Interaction and Design program at the University of Washington, to create a speculative service design. The result: Social Grocer.
Read More“The typical American, it seems, texts a bunch of people ‘we should get together!’ before watching TikTok alone on the couch and then passing out,” writes Olga Khazan in her article “The Friendship Paradox” for The Atlantic. Khazan delves into a recently published study in which 6,000 American adults were surveyed about their friendships, which showed that the loneliness epidemic that we’ve all been hearing about is actually quite complex.
Read MoreThe big social media platforms have long been blasted for extractive business models that optimize for attention, engagement and time on the platform. We’ve almost become numb to stories about toxic behavior, misinformation, bots, growth hacking and all the cynical techniques that the platforms use to keep people coming back and staying on. What if there were a different story, one in which tech actually builds community, where the goal of online communication is to foster more in-person interaction?
Read MoreNearly 15% of American adults now live with diabetes. That’s a 15-fold increase over the course of 2-3 generations. Nearly 30% of Americans over 65 now have it. As an epidemic it has grown consistently and relentlessly. It is a national tragedy. It is also a massive industry.
Read MoreFast Company recently published an article, from researchers Scott Conger, David Basset and Lindsey Toth, looking at physical activity around the world over the past couple of decades. Fitness tracker sales soared for years without boosting physical activity, analysis shows. In the studies they examined, which covered eight industrialized nations and were conducted from 1995 to 2017, they observed a fairly consistent pattern of declining physical activity in both men and women and in each of the countries.
Read MoreThe Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation recently ranked the countries that would have the longest life expectancy in 2050. The list includes some usual suspects – rich nations like Switzerland, Norway and Singapore, perennial contenders like Japan – but also the less wealthy southern European nations of Spain, Italy, and Portugal. How these less affluent countries have created the conditions for longevity is the subject of a recent article in The Economist.
Read MoreWe’ve been on a bit of a hiatus while focusing our attention on the 2024 Building H Index, which we’re getting ready to release in the next few weeks. The Index has been a massive project: our team has rigorously researched and analyzed more than 75 products and services across 12 project categories in four industries – citing nearly 400 sources in the process.
Read MoreThe controversial social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has a new book coming out entitled The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Haidt excerpts the book in his article, “End the Phone-Based Childhood Now,” in The Atlantic. In it, Haidt steps back and describes the enormous transformation that has occurred in the experience of childhood and links it to dramatic negative shifts in mental health, social connection and academic achievement, along with declines in dating, sexual activity, and teenage employment.
Read MoreAdam Rogers begins his piece Bike lanes are good for business by noting the knee-jerk and not unreasonable fear that many small business owners have about adding bike lanes to downtown streets. They, of course, worry that the attendant removal of parking spaces will make it harder for customers to reach them by car, and anything that limits vehicle access to their stores will cut into their sales. It all makes sense, except, as Rogers shows quite clearly in the article, it’s wrong.
Read MoreImagine: You have somehow secured the power and permission to build anything to the greatest city in the world. So what would you do?
If you’re Robert Moses, and that city is New York, you would build in abundance.
But not buildings. No, Moses built parks - not just in the city but, thanks to his peculiar power, Moses built parks across the state of New York.
In case you missed it, Apple’s new Vision Pro went on sale earlier this month and our feeds are now awash in hot takes about what it is, what it does, and how much it matters. When it was first announced in June, we wrote about it with some curiosity, a bit of awe and no small amount of apprehension (see Building H #84: Brave New Face).
Read More"In America, there is widespread acceptance among businessmen of the handful of general ethical principles,” wrote Baumhart. “But between these general principles (such as 'Thou shalt not steal') and the concrete problems of the businessman (such as whether or not price-fixing is stealing from customers), a wide gap appears."
Read MoreLate last week the New York Times published a story about a model project to conserve water in one of California’s prized agricultural regions. In Some California Farmers Pay Water Fee to Protect Aquifers. Does It Work?, Coral Davenport reports on the case of Pajaro Valley, home to growers of strawberries, raspberries, and blackberries, not to mention brussels sprouts and several varieties of kale.
Read MoreThe original coffee houses were, by design, people places: a space to meet, to talk, to play board games, to listen to stories or music. Appearing first in the Middle East in the 15th century, they were widespread throughout Europe by the 1600s, bustling with political and artistic debate, card games and chess tables, and deal-making.
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