US counties reporting good air quality days

The discovery that cleaner air and dirtier discourse move in parallel is the sort of fact that confirms many vague suspicions about the 21st century. We breathe better; we argue worse. It is, at minimum, balanced.

Both moved sharply in 2020 for the same lockdown reason. Good-air-quality days spiked because idled traffic and industry cleared skies across much of the country, while daily tweet volume surged as Twitter became the pandemic's default newsroom and argument arena. One lung and one thumb, both getting more of a workout than usual.

So the correlation is a small meditation on what happens when a country stops moving but keeps talking. The air improved. The feed did not. Something, at least, got better.