Justin Fox

Of the natural gas burned in American homes, just 2.8% is used for cooking, according to a 2015 survey by the US Energy Information Administration. Residential natural-gas use in turn makes up just 15% of total US consumption, a percentage that has fallen over the past decade as (1) natural…

The jump in US consumer prices as the economy began reopening this spring — they rose 4.2% over the 12 months ending in April — has prompted a lot of historical comparisons to the bad old inflationary days of the 1970s. If we’re going to do historical comparisons, though, why stop at the 1970s?…

All across the US, people are hugging, talking in each other’s faces, going to the office, attending indoor sports events and not wearing masks in the Walmart. Yet the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes Covid-19 continues its retreat, with confirmed cases down by more than 50% over the past month. …

Dinner the night before had been boneless chicken thighs chopped into pieces and cooked in a skillet with Swiss chard, onion, garlic, poblano pepper and some fish sauce. It would have been pretty good just warmed up by itself in the microwave, but because I was in my own kitchen (and yeah, partly…

After more than 500,000 deaths in just 12 months, the Covid-19 pandemic is now decidedly the deadliest short-term infectious-disease epidemic to hit the US since the influenza pandemic of 1918 and 1919. It has clearly merited an aggressive public-health response, albeit probably not the exact…

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s most recent press release on the “state’s progress during the Covid-19 pandemic” reports that 37,556 people have died from the disease in New York. The state health department’s Covid dashboard gave the same count last time I looked. Nobody else with any…

Confirmed cases of Covid-19 and hospitalizations from the disease have been plummeting for weeks in the US and elsewhere in the Northern Hemisphere. Deaths also are in decline. So it seems the long-dreaded fall-winter wave of the pandemic, which turned out to be just about as terrible as feared …

Since early in the Covid-19 pandemic, would-be prophets (most of them not infectious-disease epidemiologists) have been predicting that it would soon burn itself out as people recovered from the disease and developed immunity. So far they have been proved wrong again and again as temporary declines…

It was nice to see everybody, Democrats and Republicans alike, wearing face masks at President Joe Biden’s inauguration last week. Former President Donald Trump’s refusal not only to wear masks but also to countenance his aides doing so was one of the silliest and most self-defeating aspects of his…

To assess the safety and effectiveness of their Covid-19 vaccines, BioNTech SE, Pfizer Inc. and Moderna Inc. sponsored clinical trials overseen by independent boards that recruited tens of thousands of participants, randomly assigned them to receive vaccines or placebos and waited to see if there…