Daily newspaper circulation

There is something about the human mind that cannot resist a good catastrophe, especially when accompanied by the slow decline of something else entirely. As newspaper circulation plummeted between 2005 and 2021—people finally accepting that they could learn about the world through means other than dead trees—drowning deaths in American swimming pools rose with the kind of dutiful loyalty you'd expect from a trained dog. One might conclude that reading the news was actually keeping people alive, which would be a remarkable discovery if it weren't completely backwards.

Newspaper circulation's long slide accelerated in 2020 as many print readers cancelled delivery while working from home, while drowning deaths ticked up in the same unsupervised lockdown summer. Both series are haunted by the same year; neither is really about the other.

We are pattern-seeking creatures who see faces in toast and meaning in coincidence, which is generally how we've survived this long. Newspaper circulation and swimming pool drowning deaths moved together not because one caused the other but because they were both passengers on the same lurching economic boat. The real story isn't that newspapers save lives. It's just that we're all making different choices now.