Four decades ago, I and Gerald Markowitz published an article in the American Journal of Public Health that attracted a fair amount of attention. The article was about the history of the introduction of tetraethyl lead into gasoline in the 1920s.  The article detailed the controversy over putting lead, even then a known industrial poison and neurotoxin, into the gasoline that was powering the new automobile, particularly those that were produced by the General Motors Company.  More

To make a point, the Marxist sociologist Erik Olin Wright (1997) once borrowed a character from the 1960s comic strip Lil’ Abner: a big blobby…  More

At the very end of the Clinton Administration, Republican Congresswoman JoAnne Emerson inserted a two-paragraph provision into the 2001 Treasury and General Government Appropriations Act. These paragraphs would become known as the Data Quality Act (as well as the Information Quality Act) and its passage represented a major victory for industries – including the tobacco and chemical industries – regulated by the federal government.   More

Affordability pressures increasingly shape health risk in the United States, influencing both the upstream conditions that sustain health and the downstream ability to access health promoting resources. Financial stability is a key driver of health, affecting patterns of health, health care use, and the tradeoffs people must make among competing needs. The economic policy landscape aimed at improving financial security for Americans is expansive, complex, and often difficult to organize, making it challenging to discuss how different policies influence financial resilience and population health. We propose the Earn–Keep–Grow framework as a practical way to organize and guide discussion of these policies in population health research and policy decision-making.   More

Public health science gains in the last quarter century in the United States have been formidable due to a focus on structural and social determinants of health, thereby enhancing understanding of the role of inequitable policies in shaping health inequities and inequitable access to ameliorative resources.   More

I recently attended a National Institutes of Health (NIH) meeting concerned with criminal justice interventions. Speakers emphasized the importance of involving people with lived experience—which everyone understood to mean persons who have experienced arrest and incarceration.  More

America’s public health system is being eroded. Proposed federal cuts would slash core programs by half, even as communities face rising infectious disease outbreaks, worsening chronic disease, and shrinking access to basic prevention.   More

In our bitterly partisan age, where science and public health are distrusted, even denigrated, there is a better part of America.  More

The number of older Americans who are food insecure is growing, yet a recent Trump administration decision to terminate data collection of the annual Food Security Supplement will make it impossible to fully track this growth.  More

The December 2025 Executive Order on Artificial Intelligence has generated familiar responses from familiar quarters.  More