Health & Mortality
Life expectancy, overdose deaths, chronic disease, and the geography of health across states, counties, and ZIP codes.
21 pieces
AppHealth of America’s ZIP Codes
A map-first atlas of 26 health and social-need measures across 32,409 ZIP/ZCTAs (CDC PLACES + Census), with stories and methodology.
BlogFour Subway Stops, Twenty-Four Years
Within a single American county, life expectancy at birth can differ by more than two decades. A tract-level tour of New York and Chicago.
BlogNewSafer and More Afraid — The Paradox of Violence in American Schools, 1991–2023
By every measure of actual violence, American high schools are far safer than in the 1990s: fights cut in half, weapons on campus down two-thirds. Yet the share of students too afraid to go to school at all has tripled. Thirty years of d…
BlogNewScars That Don't Show — Bullying and the Mental Health of American Teens
One in four American high schoolers is bullied — in the hallway, on the phone, or both. The bruises are rare. The despair is not: bullied teens report sadness, suicidal thinking, and suicide attempts at rates two to six times higher than…
BlogNewThe Great Sadness — Three Decades of Teen Mental Health, 1991–2023
Around 2011, something broke. After a decade of stable — even improving — mental health, American teenagers, and especially teenage girls, began reporting sadness and suicidal thinking at rates the CDC’s survey had never recorded. By 202…
BlogNewThe Sleep Recession — American Teens and the Eight-Hour Night, 2007–2023
Pediatricians say teenagers need eight to ten hours of sleep. In 2007, fewer than a third of American high schoolers got even the minimum on a school night. Sixteen years later it is fewer than a quarter — and the students getting five h…
BlogNewThe Vanishing Cigarette — How Teen Smoking Died and What Replaced It
In 1997, more than one in three American high schoolers smoked. Today it is one in thirty — the greatest public-health victory in the history of youth surveys. But nicotine didn’t leave the building. It changed its clothes, learned to ta…
BlogNewThe Weight of Home — Adverse Childhood Experiences and Teen Suicidality, 2023
In 2023, for the first time, the CDC’s national youth survey asked high schoolers a battery of questions about what happened inside their childhood homes — abuse, a parent’s addiction or mental illness, jail, hunger. Half of students rep…
BlogDeaths of Despair vs. Felt Despair
Case and Deaton mapped where Americans die of suicide, drugs, and alcohol. Gallup spent a decade asking Americans how yesterday felt. Lay the feelings over the deaths, and the measure that tracks the mortality map best is not sadness, no…
BlogHalf the Deaths, a Sliver of the Map
Half of America
TeachingNYC Metro ZIP Health Segments
Use health prevalence measures to build factor scores, cluster ZIP codes, and interpret the segments by correlating scores with income, age, college share, and deprivation.
NYC-area ZIP health teaching data
ZIP-level geography, deprivation, population, education, income, health prevalence measures, and factor scores.
BlogReading the Population's Vital Signs — Mental Health at the Emergency Room Door
What 88 months of syndromic surveillance data reveal about mental health at the emergency department — and how to read a rate without being fooled by it.
BlogThe Curve That Bent — U.S. Drug Overdose Deaths, 2018–2024
A data narrative on U.S. drug overdose mortality from 2018 to 2024: the fentanyl-driven climb, the uneven toll, and the historic 2024 reversal. Built from CDC / NCHS National Vital Statistics System data.
BlogThe Flat Line
In deprived neighborhoods people see the doctor just as often — and get far less prevention. The health system manages disease where it could prevent it.
BlogThe Ninety-Year-Old Map
Federal appraisers graded American neighborhoods A through D in the late 1930s. Lay the grades over today
BlogWear and Tear
The geography of disability looks like it should be a map of where old people live. It isn
BlogWhat a Year of Life Costs
The housing market already prices life expectancy. In Cincinnati, ZIP codes one year of life apart differ by about $18,000 in median home value; in San Francisco, $141,000.
BlogWhere It Is Deadliest to Be Poor
Rich Americans live about as long everywhere. Poor Americans
BlogWithin Reach: Teen Drug Availability
Read four decades of Monitoring the Future survey data on how available teens think drugs are, comparing substances, grade levels, long-run declines, and 2024 levels.
BlogA Day on the Plate — How America's Children Eat, Move, and Grow
What 5,610 survey records reveal about how young Americans eat, drink, move, and grow — and the quiet inequalities hidden inside the averages.