Roundup #82: Staring in wonder at the world

Photo by NASA via Wikimedia CommonsI waited too long to do this roundup, and the amount of interesting stuff built up to truly vast proportions. So let’s get right to it.1. Crime is down!I often get annoyed with people who trumpet falling crime in American cities. Often, these same people are silent in the years when crime rises — for example, 2015-2021. This means that all those cries of “Crime is down!” might only bring us back to where we were before. Also, even when crime falls in America, it still generally leaves us about 5x as violent as Europe. People who use crime drops to wave away the need for further intensified policing, increased incarceration of repeat offenders, and other tough-on-crime measures completely ignore the very high baseline level of American violence. That said, I often find myself being one of the people trumpeting drops in crime. Sometimes we do make genuine progress, and when this happens, we ought to take note. Successful crime reductions in particular…