Saving Democracy From Democracy

Audio Version:Something very strange has happened to journalism. I do not mean that reporters have political opinions. They always have. Newspapers were often viciously partisan throughout American history, and anyone imagining Walter Cronkite descending from Mount Sinai carrying two stone tablets labeledObjectivityprobably needs to read more history. What changed is more fundamental.A large part of the mainstream press no longer seems to believe that its primary responsibility is to report what happened, present competing arguments fairly, investigate the powerful and allow readers to reach their own conclusions. Increasingly, journalists have assigned themselves a different job. They aren’t merely reporting on society.They are helping society move toward what they believe it ought to become.“Protecting democracy” is the polite phrase usually attached to this mission, particularly since Donald Trump's election. But it goes considerably deeper than protecting elections or constitutional government. Modern advocacy journalism has increasingly attached itself to a collection of moral and political causes: climate activism, transgender ideology, racial equity, DEI, expansive immigration, abortion rights, hostility toward traditional religious morality, suspicion of nationalism, and enthusiasm for international institutions and technocratic government. These positions differ from newsroom to newsroom, and certainly not every journalist subscribes to all of them. But taken together, they form a remarkably consistent worldview.The problem isn’t that journalists hold these beliefs. They are entitled to them. The problem is that many journalists have ceased to recognize themas political beliefs at all. They have been elevated into moral truths. Climate policy isn’t a political dispute; one side is “denying science.” Gender ideology isn’t a political or scientific dispute; one side is attacking “trans rights.” Mass immigration isn’t a legitimate disagreement over national interest, labor, culture and sovereignty; opposition becomes “anti-immigrant.” Traditional Christianity isn’t simply another moral framework; increasingly it becomes “Christian nationalism.” National sovereignty becomes “nationalism.” Populism becomes a “threat to democracy.”Once you have classified your own political preferences asmorally correct rather than politically contestable, objectivity becomes almost impossible. Why would you give equal consideration to people who are wrong? Worse, why give a platform to people whose ideas you believe cause harm?There is an arrogance buried inside advocacy journalism that rarely gets discussed. It assumes that the journalist is not merely better informed than the reader, butmorally better equipped to determine which political outcomes are acceptable. The reader becomes less a citizen to be informed than a subject to be guided.That is not journalism.It is social engineering with a press credential.ShareAnd that is precisely where the intellectual justification for advocacy journalism enters. The old journalistic aspiration toward objectivity has increasingly been attacked as “bothsidesism,” false balance or the “view from nowhere.” Prominent journalists and journalism scholars have argued instead for “moral clarity,” an explicitly “moral voice,” and journalism committed to defending an egalitarian conception of democracy and confronting structural inequities.The transformation of journalism into something closer to organized advocacy did not occur in a financial vacuum. TheGates Foundation openly operates a “Global Media Partnerships” program, funding news organizations specifically to expand coverage of health, development, climate and gender issues. Its own grant database documents millions flowing toThe Guardian, including $3.6 million in 2023 to continue its Global Development operation and its “positive influence on priority audiences on key foundation strategic topics,” following earlier multimillion-dollar grants; Gates has also funded NPR'sGoats and Soda, Africa Check, Bhekisisa and the Solutions Journalism Network, including grants explicitly intended to promote the “solutions journalism approach.”George Soros'sOpen Society Foundations has pursued a parallel model, explicitly funding “independent journalism,” journalists and media organizations while simultaneously defining its institutional mission around advancing rights, equity, justice and democratic practice. Open Society has funded journalism programs addressing racial justice, criminal justice, and inequality, including the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting, Soros Justice Media Fellowships, and 31 investigative media grants specifically intended to stimulate discussion about racism and inequality after Hurricane Katrina.This documents something much larger than philanthropic institutions simply supporting journalism. These NGOs have an ulterior motive. They are helping shape journalismbefore reporters ever enter the newsroom, funding programs and curricula that teach students to regard advocacy journalism not merely as acceptable, but as a moral obligation.These progressive colleges and universities are teaching progressive political and economic frameworks, including expansive government intervention, central planning, redistribution, socialism, and related ideological priorities.At the same time, these foundations finance journalism around subjects they have already identified as social priorities, helping determine which issues get covered by reporters, dedicated desks, fellowships, travel budgets, institutional prestige, awards, and years of sustained attention. The result is not simply funding journalism.It is funding the formation of journalists, the framework through which they are taught to understand their profession, and the subjects they are subsequently paid to cover.Notice what has happened.The journalist is no longer merely an observer of the political argument. The journalist has become a participant in it, while retaining the institutional authority of someone who claims merely to be telling you the news.That is a very powerful position.And it creates an equally powerful temptation. If MAGA threatens the society you believe ought to exist, opposing MAGA isn’t partisan journalism. It is “protecting democracy.” If Germany’s AfD party threatens the European project, opposing AfD isn’t political advocacy. It is combating “extremism.” If parents object to gender ideology in schools, taking the other side isn’t activism. It is protecting a marginalized community.Advocacy disappears by being reclassified as morality.That may be the central trick.And advocacy journalism, stripped of the polite terminology taught in journalism school, has another very old name: propaganda.We wrote about this extensively inPsyWar. Edward Bernays, of all people, once rested part of his defense of propaganda on the assumption that an independent press would serve as a check on it. Newspapers, editors and reporters were supposed to act as gatekeepers precisely because the propagandist could not completely control them. That assumption now seems almost quaint.By the twenty-first century, journalism schools were openly discussing and teaching advocacy journalism. Objectivity was increasingly portrayed not as an ideal that human beings imperfectly attempt to achieve, but as an impediment. Reporters were encouraged to understand that neutrality might itself perpetuate injustice. Giving both sides a hearing became derided as “bothsidesism.”There are circumstances in which that criticism is perfectly reasonable. A reporter covering whether the Earth is spherical does not need to find a Flat Earth Society spokesman for balance. But politics is not geometry.Whether immigration levels are too high, whether biological sex matters in women’s athletics, whether national sovereignty should supersede decisions made by unelected transnational institutions, whether energy policy should favor nuclear power, whether parents should have greater authority over schools, whether marriage and family deserve special protection, or whether a nation’s government owes a greater duty to its own citizens than to people who arrived yesterday are political questions. They are supposed to be debated.Instead, an extraordinary number of these questions have migrated from the category of political disagreement into the category of extremism. That migration may be one of the most consequential stories American journalism has failed to cover, perhaps because journalists themselves helped make it happen.Consider Germany. Pick up almost any Reuters or Associated Press story about Alternative für Deutschland and you do not merely encounter the party’s name. You encounter “the far-right Alternative for Germany.” Again and again. Reuters used the formulation this month while reporting that AfD is polling around 41 percent in Saxony-Anhalt and 36 percent in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. The label arrives before readers learn what the party actually proposes. (reuters.com)Think about what that language tells an American reader before he or she learns anything else about the party. Germany. Far right. Rising rapidly. You do not need a degree in neurolinguistic programming to understand the association being planted. AfD becomes associated first with extremism, and only afterward with policy.When Reuters calls a political party “far-right” in virtually every article, most readers are not reaching for Cas Mudde’s academic definition of the European populist radical right. They hear something much simpler: extremist.And then something remarkable happens. Policies that would have been recognizably conservative, or even mainstream, within living memory now serve as evidence for the label. Now, policies such as reducing mass immigration, deporting people who are in the country illegally, protecting the traditional family, restoring nuclear power, resisting further transfer of national sovereignty to the European Union, preserving German culture, and putting German national interests first all become “far-right.”These positions may be right or wrong. They may be practical or impractical. They are open to criticism. But exactly when did believing that the German government should put the interests of Germans first become presumptive evidence of extremism? Apparently somewhere around the same time that believing the American government should put Americans first did.And this isn't history. We can watch the same model operating around the second Trump administration today. Coverage of Kennedy's restructuring of ACIP frequently began not with what the new members had actually done professionally, but with ideological labels telling readers how they should be understood: vaccine critics, vaccine skeptics, Kennedy allies, misinformation figures. When newly released Fauci texts raised legitimate questions about what officials privately discussed concerning vaccination during pregnancy, FactCheck.org immediately framed the story as Republicans reviving a “false miscarriage statistic” and “twisting” Fauci's texts. And when Kennedy challenged CNN's vaccine coverage last week, Dana Bash finally dispensed with the pretense altogether: “I'm not debating nonsense.” There, in four words, is advocacy journalism's central conceit. The journalist is no longer merely responsible for asking difficult questions, testing competing claims and giving the public enough information to decide. She has become the boundary keeper, deciding which questions are legitimate enough for the public to hear in the first place.The same linguistic trick has been performed on Donald Trump and MAGA. “Far-right.” “Extreme right.” “Christian nationalist.” “Authoritarian.” “Threat to democracy.” The vocabulary has become so familiar that people barely notice it anymore.Yet many of the supposedly radical positions associated with MAGA would have been utterly unremarkable in American politics twenty or thirty years ago. Bill Clinton campaigned against illegal immigration. Barack Obama deported enormous numbers of illegal immigrants. Democratic politicians opposed same-sex marriage. The existence of two biological sexes was not a controversial political proposition. Flying an American flag did not require a political explanation. Wanting American industry located in America was not fascism. Skepticism toward China was not xenophobia. And the proposition that the United States government has a special obligation to United States citizens was essentially the reason for having a United States government.The people who still believe these things did not necessarily move. The journalistic reference point moved. The political center of American politics shifted - “we are all far-right now.”That distinction is almost entirely missing from mainstream coverage. If the political and cultural establishment moves substantially left over twenty years while you stand still, you eventually find yourself on “the far right” without having gone anywhere. Convenient trick, that.For some people, the hardest part is admitting that the political ground beneath them has moved. They still cling to the identity of being Democrats while embracing positions that are now routinely labeledfar right. The cognitive dissonance is simply too great a distance to cross. The political left has been remarkably effective at using Trump as the ultimate moral barrier: question the prevailing narrative and you are told that you are siding with a “rapist,” a “dictator,” a “pedophile,” or whatever accusation happens to be circulating that week. It creates a powerful social and psychological trap. Changing your mind about an issue is no longer treated as changing your mind. It becomes an admission that you have joined the enemy. For many people, that makes acknowledging that they no longer believe the mainstream narrative almost impossible.Journalists themselves tell us that their profession has changed. Pew Research Center surveyed nearly 12,000 American journalists in 2022 and asked whether journalists should always strive to give every side equal coverage. Only 44 percent said yes. A majority, 55 percent, said every side does not always deserve equal coverage. The American public saw the issue very differently. Roughly three-quarters of Americans continued to say journalists should strive to give all sides a fair hearing. (pewresearch.org)Again, proportionality matters. Journalism is not obligated to pretend that every fringe theory has equal evidentiary support. But who decides when a political view no longer deserves equal coverage? The reporter? The editor? The owner? The journalism professor? The NGO that has labeled an organization extremist? The government agency supplying the reporter with information?This becomes particularly dangerous when journalists overwhelmingly inhabit the same political, educational and cultural ecosystem. They cease to recognize their worldview as a worldview. It simply becomes reality. Everyone else has an ideology. They have facts.The year 2016 broke something.Two events happened that the transatlantic political and media establishment clearly did not expect: Brexit and Donald Trump. Millions of ordinary people rejected policies endorsed by nearly every prestigious institution available to instruct them. The newspapers told them. The economists told them. The universities told them. The celebrities told them. The NGOs told them. The intelligence establishment told them. The European establishment told them.And the voters said no.That should have produced a period of intense institutional introspection. Why don’t these people believe us? Why don’t they want what we are selling? What are we missing?Instead, much of the establishment settled on another explanation. The voters had been manipulated. Russian disinformation. Facebook. Cambridge Analytica. Fake news. Misinformation. Disinformation. Malinformation. Algorithms. Populism. Extremism.Suddenly, the problem was not that citizens had looked at establishment policies and rejected them. The problem was that citizens had been exposed to the wrong information.This distinction matters enormously. Once the political problem is defined as bad information causing bad democratic choices, information control begins to look like defending democracy. Journalists become natural partners in the project.InPsyWar, we argued that this was the period in which techniques developed for combating foreign propaganda and influence increasingly migrated inward, toward Western populist movements. Brexit, Trump and AfD all came to be treated not merely as political challenges, but increasingly as information-security problems. The book describes how post-2016 institutions began speaking openly about protecting democracy from populist movements and how media, technology companies, NGOs and government actors increasingly operated inside the same information ecosystem.The change in language is impossible to miss. Protecting democracy increasingly came to mean protecting institutions from the choices voters might make. There is a rather large philosophical problem hiding in there.Trump accelerated another change. During his first administration, journalists began talking openly about whether traditional objectivity was adequate for covering someone they considered uniquely dangerous. The argument went something like this: Trump lies, Trump violates democratic norms, Trump attacks the press, therefore ordinary journalistic neutrality is not sufficient. Treating Trump like a normal politician “normalizes” him.And we now have enough distance from recent political events to see just how consequential this transformation became. Russia really did attempt to interfere in the 2016 election, including hacking Democratic targets, conducting influence operations on social media and probing election infrastructure.What never happened, however, was the much larger story subsequently embedded in American political consciousness: that Trump and his campaign had conspired with Russia to steal the presidency. And the government officials who supplied oxygen to that story were not anonymous bureaucrats.CIA Director John Brennan, FBI Director James Comey, FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, FBI counterintelligence official Peter Strzok, FBI attorney Lisa Page and others occupied key positions as the Trump-Russia investigation and narrative developed.Brennan briefed President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Comey and other senior officials in August 2016 on intelligence alleging that the Clinton campaign itself intended to vilify Trump by tying him to Russian election interference.The FBI nevertheless proceeded with Crossfire Hurricane, with Strzok opening the investigation under McCabe's direction, and later used reporting from former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, whose work had been commissioned through Fusion GPS for the Hillary Clinton campaign, to support surveillance of Trump adviser Carter Page. Durham subsequently found that investigators could not corroborate the substantive allegations in Steele's reporting.The FBI relied heavily on Steele's reporting even though it had not corroborated its substantive allegations, knew the same information was being circulated to journalists, and later learned from Steele's own primary sub-source information that substantially undermined the reliability of the dossier. Despite that, Steele's allegations continued to support surveillance applications, while reporting derived from the same information stream helped give the allegations the appearance of independent public corroboration.Journalists then amplified a torrent of allegations, leaks and intelligence claims, often with remarkably little skepticism.This was the feedback loop: political opposition research entered the intelligence and law-enforcement system, government investigations gave the allegations institutional credibility, leaks and official statements carried them into the press, and press coverage then made the underlying allegations appear independently corroborated.That is a very different history from the false story that courageous journalists uncovered a Russian conspiracy inside the Trump campaign.The Steele dossier became part of the evidentiary basis for surveillance of a Trump campaign adviser despite serious reliability problems later documented by the Justice Department inspector general. The resulting Trump-Russia narrative did not prevent Trump from winning in 2016, but it helped define his presidency and taught government, intelligence agencies, technology companies and journalists how effectively the language of foreign interference could be used to shape domestic political information.Four years later, the machinery worked differently. When theNew York Postpublished material from Hunter Biden’s laptop weeks before the 2020 election, former intelligence officials publicly suggested that it bore the hallmarks of Russian information operations, social-media companies restricted its circulation, and much of the institutional press treated the story as suspect. The laptop itself was authentic.This was far more consequential than the failed effort to shape perceptions in 2016 because this time the information intervention occurred immediately before voting and concerned authentic material damaging to one of the candidates.In my worldview, the Biden administration stole this election, although that depends on what one means by stealing. There is no evidence that ballots or vote totals were altered, and we cannot know with certainty how people would have voted in a counterfactual election with unrestricted coverage.But voters were deliberately deprived of politically consequential, authentic information immediately before they chose a president, in substantial part because the information-security establishment had conditioned journalists and technology companies to treat inconvenient information as a potential foreign operation. That is election interference of a different kind, and this time it came from inside the system supposedly protecting the election.The truth is that if the public had known that Hunter Biden's laptop was authentic and had been free to examine what was actually in it, many voters might well have viewed Joe Biden very differently. Probably enough to swing the election in Trump’s favor.The material raised legitimate questions about Hunter's lucrative relationships with foreign interests inUkraine and China, his repeated invocation of the Biden family name and access, and communications surrounding proposed Chinese business arrangements, including the now-famous reference to“10 held by H for the big guy.”Subsequent congressional testimony added important context: Hunter's former business partner, Devon Archer, described Joe Biden as “the brand” Hunter brought to these relationships and testified that Hunter put his father on speakerphone in the presence of business associates roughly 20 times. If the press had done their job, these facts would have come out before the election.But that was precisely the point of journalism: voters were entitled to see the authentic evidence, hear the competing explanations, and decide for themselves whether it mattered. Instead, immediately before an election, much of the press and social-media establishment helped turn the question from “What does this evidence show?” into “Is this Russian disinformation?” and were told by the deep-state, 51 former intelligence officers, that it was fake. The voters made their decision without the scrutiny the story deserved.There was a legitimate issue buried inside this. Journalists should call a demonstrably false statement false. They should not pretend facts are evenly divided merely because two political parties disagree about them. But the principle metastasized.Soon it was not merely false factual statements that required special handling. It was Trump’s politics. Then his supporters. Then MAGA Republicans. Then Christian nationalists. Then parents protesting school boards. Then people questioning COVID policies. Then people questioning vaccine mandates. Then people questioning immigration.The distinction between reporting on a political movement and opposing that political movement began disappearing. The press became part of “the resistance.” And somehow the resistance continued calling itself journalism.This is where I refuse to use the euphemism. If you enter a story having already determined which political outcome is socially desirable, and you select facts, experts, adjectives and context to move the reader toward that outcome, you are not practicing objective journalism. You are practicing advocacy.If your objective is to change the reader’s political attitude or behavior, you have crossed another line. That is propaganda.Propaganda does not have to consist of lies. This is one of its most misunderstood characteristics. Some of the best propaganda is factually accurate. It simply selects certain facts, excludes others, repeatedly associates particular words and images, invokes trusted authorities and guides the audience toward the desired conclusion.Call AfD “far-right” in the first sentence. Call its immigration policy “anti-immigrant,” rather than immigration restriction. Call sovereignty nationalism. Call traditional views of sex anti-LGBTQ. Call opposition to supranational government Euroscepticism. Call populist distrust of institutions anti-establishment. Call skepticism toward the media misinformation.Eventually, an entire political worldview is communicated through adjectives. The reporter barely has to make an argument. The nouns arrive pre-contaminated.Germany makes this particularly potent because it has the nuclear weapon of political analogies sitting permanently in the room: Hitler, Nazism and the Holocaust. No sane German wants those horrors repeated. Precisely because of that history, allegations of right-wing extremism carry extraordinary power in German society. The domestic intelligence service can monitor political organizations suspected of threatening the constitutional order. Parties can, under extraordinary circumstances, actually be banned.That historical structure deserves serious treatment on its own. But American media often take the German government’s classifications and political language and transmit them to American readers with remarkably little skepticism.The German state says AfD is extremist. Therefore AfD is extremist. Germany’s established parties build aBrandmauer, a firewall refusing cooperation with AfD. Therefore cooperation with AfD would normalize the far right. AfD gains support. Therefore Germany has a growing far-right problem. AfD reaches 41 percent. Therefore 41 percent of voters are supporting the far right.There is another possibility. Perhaps a large percentage of Germans genuinely oppose the policies being imposed upon them.Reuters’ own current reporting shows AfD at roughly 41 percent in Saxony-Anhalt and 36 percent in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. (reuters.com)At what point does a journalist have an obligation to reconsider the calibration of the label? If five percent of voters occupy the “far right,” perhaps they are a fringe. If forty percent do, we have at least two possibilities. Forty percent of the electorate suddenly became extremists, or the political establishment’s definition of the acceptable center no longer corresponds particularly well to the population it supposedly represents.Only one of those explanations receives much attention.This is why language matters. The modern censorship and propaganda apparatus does not always need to delete your words. It can simply classify them. Misinformation. Extremism. Far-right. Conspiracy theory. Anti-vaccine. Election denier. Climate denier. Christian nationalist.Put a sufficiently powerful label around a person or an idea and millions of people will stop examining the underlying evidence.We described this inPsyWaras a battle over the information environment itself. Control the framing, and you do not necessarily have to censor the argument. People learn to censor it themselves.That is much more efficient. And much harder to see.There is one little problem with all of this. The public noticed.Gallup began measuring American trust in mass media in the 1970s. In 1976, roughly seven in ten Americans said they trusted the mass media a great deal or a fair amount to report the news fully, accurately and fairly. By 2025 that number had fallen to 28 percent. Among Republicans, it was 8 percent. (news.gallup.com)Eight percent.Journalists can blame Donald Trump for that. They can blame Fox News, social media, Elon Musk, podcasters, misinformation, Russian bots, declining education or the alignment of Saturn and Jupiter. At some point, they might want to consider another possibility.Maybe people stopped trusting journalists because journalists stopped behaving like people who deserved their trust.Pew reported in 2026 that a majority of Americans have little or no confidence that journalists act in the public’s best interests. Among Republicans and Republican-leaning Americans, distrust is dramatically higher. (pewresearch.org)That is not a healthy information system. It is certainly not one that journalists should celebrate as evidence that the public needs more guidance.The purpose of a free press is not to ensure that citizens reach the correct political conclusion. It is to give citizens the information they require to reach their own conclusions.If you believe people are entitled to vote only after receiving information curated to produce an acceptable result, then what you actually believe in is something quite different. You believe in managed democracy.The institutions decide the acceptable boundaries. The media enforce them. The fact-checkers police them. The algorithms amplify them. The public gets to choose from what remains. Then everyone congratulates themselves for having saved democracy.This is exactly backward.A free society requires a press willing to offend its own political tribe, investigate the institutions it instinctively trusts and accurately explain the arguments of people its reporters may personally despise. That includes MAGA. It includes AfD. It includes populists. It includes nationalists. It includes progressives, socialists and communists. And yes, it includes genuine extremists.That used to be the job.JGM/RWMIf you value journalism that still believesyou are capable of making up your own mind, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.Researching pieces like this takes time. It means going back to the original documents, reading the reports everyone else cites but apparently few people actually read, checking what was said against what was reported, and following the money and institutional relationships wherever they lead. Increasingly, that kind of work is being replaced by journalism that tells you not only what happened, but what you are permitted to think about it.We don’t have a Gates Foundation grant, a Soros-funded fellowship, a government contract or an NGO paying us to advance its preferred narrative. We have readers.And frankly, we prefer it that way.Subscribe nowPaid subscriptions are what make our brand of independent journalism possible.If you find this work useful, please consider subscribing. It allows us to keep asking uncomfortable questions without first having to ask whether the people writing the checks will approve of the answers.

Summary: The journalists who came to save us from ourselves


Sunday Strip: All Animals are Equal

Work-life balance…The moral of this story is that this BS doesn’t end with high school.Think group projects are bad now? FAFO. Get a corporate job.Group projects never die. They just become Zoom meetings where six people get together to discuss howyouare going to do the work.And then schedule another meeting to discuss your progress.JGMThanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.ShareMalone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Summary: but some animals are more equal than others


(Early) Love and Marriage

AUDIO VERSION:Robert and I got married when I was 18, and he was 19. We were high-school sweethearts, and by today’s standards that sounds somewhere between quaint and clinically inadvisable. We had very little money. We had no established careers, very few assets, and we were renting a converted garage to live in. Basically, we were dirt poor. When we got married, we were so poor that the priest offered Robert a job sweeping floors in the church.  Robert had started college; I hadn’t. Graduate school was still somewhere in the distant future, and neither of us had finished becoming the people we would eventually become. By most of the conventional measures used today to determine whether a young couple is “ready” for marriage, we probably weren’t. And yet, almost five decades later, here we are.For most of my adult life, I have heard the conventional wisdom about couples like us:marry too young, and you are far more likely to divorce.Plenty of research appears to support that conclusion. In American observational studies, people who marry in their teens and very early twenties have historically had higher divorce rates than people who wait until their mid-to-late twenties. The finding has been repeated often enough that it has become received wisdom. Finish your education. Establish a career. Become financially independent. Figure out who you are. Then marry. Young marriage, we are told, is a risk factor, and delaying marriage is one of the things young adults can do to improve their chances of making it last.But when I started digging into the actual literature, the story became considerably more complicated. The first problem is the one that comes up over and over again in science:correlation is not causation.People are not randomly assigned to marry at 19 or 29. Particularly in contemporary America, people who marry at 19 are a very unusual subset of 19-year-olds, and they differ from those who marry at 29 in ways that may independently affect their likelihood of divorce. Income, education, religion, family structure, geography, unintended pregnancy, cohabitation, previous relationships, attitudes toward marriage and divorce, and probably a host of personality and cultural factors that are difficult to measure are all tangled up with the age at which people marry. When a marriage that began at 19 fails, it is surprisingly difficult to determine how much of the risk stems from being 19 and how much from everything else that statistically accompanies marrying at 19.Researchers have tried to get around this problem, with some fascinating results. One particularly clever American study used the Vietnam-era draft as a natural experiment. In 1965, married men received preferential treatment in the military draft until President Lyndon Johnson abruptly changed the rules, creating a temporary incentive for some young men to marry sooner than they otherwise would have. If marrying earlier were itself a major cause of divorce, those marriages should have been more likely to fail.They weren’t.A similar quasi-experimental study in China used a government policy change that altered marriage timing and likewise found no evidence that marrying somewhat earlier increased divorce among young adults.That does not mean age is irrelevant, and it certainly does not mean that child marriage or marriage in the very early teens is harmless. Those are very different populations, often involving coercion, interrupted education, poverty and enormous power imbalances. Nor does this research prove that everyone should run out and get married at 19. What it suggests is something narrower, but much more interesting:once we are talking about young adults rather than children, the simple claim that delaying marriage by several years causes a more stable marriage becomes surprisingly difficult to demonstrate.The picture becomes even less tidy when researchers stop defining marital success simply as “not divorced.” Norval Glenn, Jeremy Uecker and Robert Love examined five American datasets and considered both marital stability and the quality of the marriages that survived. They did not find a steady improvement in marital success as age at marriage increased. Instead, the highest estimated probability of being in anintact, high-quality marriageoccurred among people who first married at roughly 22 to 25. Later marriages had good survival rates, but marital quality did not continue improving simply because marriage was postponed. Their conclusion was not that 22 is some magical age for marriage, but that there was little evidence for the increasingly common assumption that deliberately postponing marriage beyond the mid-twenties necessarily improves the chances of marital success.Which leaves us with a rather different question. Instead of asking simply whether people who marry young divorce more often, perhaps we should askwhy the people who marry young divorce more often. Those are not the same question. If age itself is the cause, then Robert and I were fortunate exceptions to a fairly predictable rule. But if age is partly a marker for the people who marry young, the circumstances under which they marry, the partners they choose, and the ideas about marriage they bring with them, then perhaps the number18or19tells us considerably less than we have assumed.Another side of the equation receives far less attention. People who form a good marriage in young adulthood and sustain it for decades appear to have an unusually favorable life trajectory. Long, stable marriages are associated with greater life satisfaction, economic and social stability, better health and greater longevity. The strongest signal may therefore not beearly marriageat all. It may bea long, good marriage. That sounds like a small distinction, but it changes the question considerably. If you meet the right person at 22 and are still happily married at 72, you have accumulated fifty years of marriage: fifty years of building a home, pooling resources, raising children, surviving illnesses and financial setbacks, creating friendships and community, and eventually watching children become adults and perhaps grandchildren arrive. It is also fifty years of having another human being who knows when something is wrong, notices when you are sick, has a stake in your health and survival, and shares an enormous portion of your history. Those years are an asset in their own right, and they cannot be accumulated retrospectively.Of course, causation is just as difficult here. A couple who has remained happily married for fifty years is already a highly selected group. The qualities that helped them stay married, such as conscientiousness, emotional stability, loyalty, religious commitment, financial responsibility, the ability to compromise and perhaps simply good judgment in choosing a spouse, may also help explain why they are healthier and happier. We cannot look at a healthy 75-year-old who has been married for half a century and simply declare that marriage caused the outcome. People capable of sustaining good marriages may be different in important ways.But that caveat cuts both ways. For decades, our culture has discussed delaying marriage almost entirely in terms of its advantages. Finish your education. Establish your career. Become financially independent. Travel. Find yourself. Date widely so you know exactly what you want. Only then, once everything else is safely in place, should you consider settling down. There are perfectly sensible reasons behind some of that advice. What we almost never discuss is what we may lose by postponing marriage.Years inside a good marriage are themselves something of value, and they cannot be recovered later.And that brings me to something the marriage literature makes very difficult to ignore:marriage itself appears to run in families.Marriage Runs in FamiliesRobert and I did not come from families in which marrying young was particularly unusual. More importantly, we came from families in whichmarriage lasted. Looking back through the generations we know about, younger marriage was common, and divorce was rare. That pattern extends back at least two or three generations in both of our families. It turns out that this may matter considerably more than I had realized.One of the most interesting studies comes from Paul Amato and Danelle DeBoer, who used national longitudinal data covering two generations to examine the transmission of divorce from parents to children. Parental divorce approximatelydoubled the odds that the children’s own marriages would eventually end in divorce. But the more revealing finding came when the researchers looked at the quality of the parents’ marriages before divorce. Children whose parents had troubled marriages but stayed together did not show the same elevated divorce risk. Even more surprisingly, the intergenerational transmission of divorce was strongest when parents who divorced had reported relativelylowlevels of marital discord beforehand (indicating a lack of commitment to the marriage in the first place). That led the researchers toward an explanation that goes beyond simply learning good or bad relationship skills from our parents. What may be passed from one generation to the next is alsothe level of commitment to marriage itself, including what we believe marriage requires of us when it becomes difficult and where we place the threshold at which leaving becomes acceptable.That does not mean children should be taught that every marriage must survive violence, abuse or truly intolerable circumstances. It does suggest that children learn something profound from watching what their parents do when a marriage is merely difficult, disappointing or unhappy for a period of time. They learn whether marriage is understood primarily as a source of personal fulfillment or also as an obligation extending across decades, through circumstances that neither spouse could have anticipated on the wedding day. Perhaps most importantly, they learn whether unhappiness itself is considered sufficient reason to leave. That understanding of marriage may be every bit as important as the communication skills and conflict-resolution techniques that receive so much attention in modern relationship advice.Marriage timing itself also appears to travel through families. A large multigenerational Dutch study found that parents’ ages at marriage predicted when their children married, and even grandparents’ marriage ages independently predicted those of their grandchildren. That should probably not surprise us. Families transmit culture. They teach children, explicitly and implicitly, when adulthood begins, what constitutes readiness for marriage, whether marriage should precede children, what qualities matter in choosing a husband or wife, and what obligations come with making that choice. What travels through generations may therefore be much more than an age at marriage.Families transmit whether people marry, when they marry, whom they marry, what they expect from marriage, and perhaps how readily they are willing to leave it.There is an interesting political echo of this in contemporary America. Republicans are considerably more likely than Democrats to be married, a difference that persists even after accounting for age, education, race and some measures of religion. A much larger divide is over whether people marry in the first place. Democrats tend not to marry compared to Republicans.Gallup has also found striking differences in attitudes toward the institution itself: Republican parents were much more likely than Democratic parents to say that marriage strengthens commitment and to strongly hope that their children eventually marry. I don’t think the interesting conclusion is that Republicans are somehow inherently better at marriage. The data don’t show that. What they do suggest is thatbelief in marriage itself is culturally transmitted, and today that belief is distributed differently across American political and social groups.This begins to make Robert’s and my ages at marriage look somewhat less like outliers. We were 18 and 19, but we were not two young people inventing marriage from scratch. Both of us came from families where people married young and stayed married, and from generations in which marriage was understood as a normal part of becoming an adult rather than something to be postponed until every other part of life had been completed. We each brought that history into our own marriage. The number 18 tells you how old I was. It tells you almost nothing about the culture of marriage that came with me.Israel and why that mattersThis was one of the things I found myself thinking about during our recent trip to Israel. Israel is an unusual country in many ways, but what struck me was not simply that Israelis have more children. It was how normal family life still seemed to be. Young couples marry, children arrive, often several of them, and family is not treated as something that begins only after every other personal ambition has been completed. Children were everywhere. So were grandparents, cousins, siblings and extended families. Family was not an interruption of adult life. It was adult life.The demographic numbers bear out what we saw. Israel has the highest fertility rate in the developed world, at roughly three children per woman, and this is not simply a phenomenon of the ultra-Orthodox. Secular and traditionally observant Jewish Israelis also have considerably more children than their counterparts in Europe or the United States. Israelis also tend to marry and begin families younger. Yet Israel consistently performs very well in international measures of life satisfaction. That does not prove that children, early marriage, or large families cause happiness. But it certainly complicates the modern Western assumption that happiness is produced by delaying marriage and children while maximizing education, career, income, travel and personal freedom.Nor is Israel some inexplicable cultural outlier. India, despite being vastly poorer and culturally very different, also retains much stronger norms around marriage, children and extended family than most of the West. Marriage generally occurs at a younger age, family obligations remain substantial, and multigenerational relationships still matter. The details are very different, but the larger point is the same: much of the world has not accepted the Western idea that independence from family obligations is necessarily the highest form of adulthood.What I noticed in Israel was something harder to capture in statistics. Large families require responsibility. Children force adults to stop organizing every decision around themselves. Marriage does the same thing. You have people who depend upon you, obligations that cannot simply be abandoned when they become inconvenient, and a future that extends beyond your own career or happiness at that particular moment. Perhaps some of what we now describe as the burden of marriage and children is actually part of their value.I came home wondering again whether the United States has the equation backward. We tell young people to postpone marriage and children until they have constructed a satisfying life. But perhaps, for many people, marriage, children, responsibility and the decades spent building something larger than themselves are precisely how a satisfying life is constructed.The Culture of MarriageThis is why I increasingly wonder whether we have mistaken a cultural variable for an age variable. When researchers find that Americans who marry at 19 divorce more often than those who marry at 27, some portion of that difference may indeed be age and maturity. But “married at 19” also carries information about family background, education, religion, pregnancy, socioeconomic status, attitudes toward divorce, the kind of person chosen as a spouse, and whether the marriage is surrounded by people who expect it to succeed. In a culture where marrying at 19 is unusual, those factors become tangled together. In a culture where marrying young is normal, as it remains in some of the communities we saw in Israel, the meaning of the variable changes completely.Perhaps the missing variable is something much harder to enter into a spreadsheet:a culture of marriage. It includes the marriages we watched growing up, the values we were taught, the kind of spouse we learned to look for, the expectations we bring about children and fidelity, the role of religion and extended family, and the degree to which we regard marriage as permanent. None of these guarantees a good marriage, and some marriages absolutely should end. But taken together, they create the environment in which a marriage either has roots or does not.This may also explain why so many predictors of marital stability are interlinked. People tend to marry others with similar religious beliefs, educational backgrounds, family histories, political, and cultural values. A young couple who share those things may therefore be very different from another young couple of precisely the same age who do not. The question is no longer simply whether two people are old enough to marry. It is whether they understand marriage in roughly the same way and whether they have chosen someone who does too.Perhaps that is what the age-at-marriage statistic cannot tell us.Nineteen tells us when the marriage began. It tells us remarkably little about what that marriage was built upon.Have We Delayed Marriage, or Delayed Adulthood?There is a larger cultural question buried in all of this. Over the past several decades, Americans have steadily delayed marriage, but we have also delayed almost every other marker of adulthood. The modern prescription is familiar: finish college, perhaps go to graduate school, establish a career, become financially independent much later, travel, surround yourself with friends of the same gender, discover yourself, figure out precisely who you are and what you want, and only then consider marriage. This rests on an assumption that is rarely examined: that we must become fully formed adults individually before we can successfully become adults together.Robert and I followed almost the opposite path. At 18 and 19, we certainly weren’t fully formed adults. We didn’t establish two separate lives and then figure out how to merge them.We grew up together.We went through college and graduate school together, struggled financially together, built careers together, raised children together, moved, failed, succeeded, changed direction and changed ourselves. There were certainly disadvantages to starting with so little money and so little experience, but there was also something valuable about building rather than merging our lives. Neither of us arrived with decades of established habits, separate households, financial systems, and expectations that the other somehow had to fit into. We learned how to be adults at the same time that we learned how to be married.This was one of the things that struck me after our recent trip to Israel. For many young Israelis, adulthood is not organized into a neat series of boxes to be checked one at a time. They serve in the military or national service, study, work, marry and have children, often with those stages overlapping. A 23-year-old Israeli may be young chronologically, but may also have spent several years in an institution where other people depended upon him or her, followed by university, work and marriage. Marriage and children are not necessarily treated as rewards that arrive after every other component of adulthood has been completed. They are part of becoming an adult.That makes me wonder whether we have been asking the wrong question about young marriage. The question isn’t whether Americans should all start marrying at 19. Obviously, they shouldn’t, and many 19-year-olds are nowhere near ready to make that commitment. The more interesting question iswhy so many of them aren’t ready, and whether postponing marriage is actually producing that readiness or merely postponing the expectation of adulthood itself. If responsibility, work, service, commitment, and being accountable to other people are part of what makes someone ready for marriage, perhaps those are the things we should be cultivating earlier rather than simply waiting for another birthday.Maybe a bigger issue is the infantilization of young adults. This cultural practice has led to a whole generation of people who aren’t able to form stable relationships or hold down responsible jobs.We have spent decades delaying marriage partly on the assumption that more years as a single person will make people better prepared for it. But independence is not the only skill marriage requires. Marriage also requiresinterdependence: compromise, sacrifice, obligation, patience and the willingness to put another person’s interests alongside your own. Those qualities do not necessarily appear automatically at 27 or 30. Like most adult capacities, they are learned by being expected and practiced. And maybe we need to expect more from our children, not less.So perhaps the provocative question isn’t“Should young people marry earlier?”It is something more fundamental:Have we delayed marriage because young people are not ready for adulthood, or have young people become less ready for adulthood because we keep delaying the expectation that they become adults?The Wedding: Community Versus ConsumptionThere is onesmall studythat fits rather nicely into this larger story. Two Emory economists, Andrew Francis-Tan and Hugo Mialon, examined more than 3,000 Americans and looked at whether the amount spent on the engagement ring and wedding was associated with the length of the marriage. The results were almost the opposite of what the wedding industry might have us believe. Spending more on the ring or wedding did not predict a more durable marriage. In fact, the greater the spending, the shorter the marriage duration.But there was another finding that I find interesting.Having more people attend the wedding was associated with a lower risk of divorce.Marriage has historically been more than a private contract between two people. When parents, grandparents, siblings, friends, churches, and communities are witnesses to the commitment, they remain invested in it long after the cake has been eaten and the photographs have been put away.Increasingly, young adults are encouraged to think about family relationships in terms of personal fulfillment, boundaries and, when those relationships become difficult, estrangement. Sometimes cutting off a parent is entirely justified; abusive and genuinely destructive families exist. But there is an important difference between escaping abuse and adopting the broader idea that difficult family relationships are disposable.When adult children sever themselves from parents, grandparents, siblings, churches and the communities in which they were raised, they may also be severing themselves from precisely the support structure that traditionally surrounded a young marriage. A mother-in-law who occasionally drives you crazy may also be the person who takes the children when your marriage is under strain. A father whose advice you don’t particularly want may be the person who tells his son to go home and work things out with his wife. Extended families can certainly create conflict inside marriages, but healthy ones can also provide practical help, perspective, accountability and continuity when two exhausted young people need it most.Furthermore, if one considers relationships to be temporary or replaceable, then marriage also tends to be seen as temporary.Perhaps what mattered wasn’t how much money was invested in the wedding, buthow many people were invested in the marriage. We have turned weddings into increasingly elaborate exercises in conspicuous consumption (“potlatching” is one anthropologic term applied to this type of behavior), while marriage itself has become increasingly private, and at the same time we have begun weakening many of the family and community relationships that once surrounded it. Yet the evidence we have been looking at keeps pointing in the opposite direction: toward families, shared values, religion, social networks, and communities that reinforce the idea that marriage matters to people beyond the two individuals in it. And that brings me to the question I keep coming back to:if a culture of marriage really can be passed from one generation to the next, how do we make sure we pass it on?What Do We Teach Our Children?Which brings me to what may be the most important question of all. Parents spend enormous amounts of time and money preparing their children for college and careers. They help them choose schools, study for entrance exams, write résumés, prepare for interviews, and think carefully about what they want to do for a living. Yet choosing a spouse may have a far greater effect on their happiness, health, finances, children, and ultimately the entire course of their lives. Strangely, we spend remarkably little time preparing them to make that choice.Perhaps, as parents and families, we need to spend more time teaching our children what makes a good marriage and what to look for in a husband or wife. Attraction matters. Love certainly matters. But so do character, compatibility, shared values, and the ability to make and keep a commitment. Just as importantly, we need to teach our children how tobecome good spouses themselves: why responsibility matters, why promises matter, why compromise and forgiveness are necessary, and why honoring a commitment can sometimes mean putting another person’s needs ahead of your own.Young adults also need to know how to evaluate the person they are considering marrying. Do they share the same fundamental beliefs about children, fidelity, money, religion, and family? Is this person honest and responsible? Does he work hard? How does she behave when angry, disappointed, or under stress? Can he admit when he is wrong? Can she forgive? Is this someone whose character you trust enough to build a life with? And what did marriage look like in the family in which this person was raised? These aren’t particularly romantic questions, but they become extraordinarily important once the wedding is over.And perhaps there is one question young couples almost never ask directly enough:under what circumstances does the person you are considering marrying believe that a marriage should end?Two people can love each other deeply and still enter marriage with completely different definitions of what the promise they are making actually means.Families also have a role here, and perhaps we have become too reluctant to say so. The modern expectation that parents should politely keep quiet while a son or daughter makes one of the most consequential decisions of a lifetime is rather peculiar. Parents know their children. They have decades more experience watching people make both good and terrible choices, and they can sometimes see character flaws, incompatibilities, or warning signs that someone deeply in love simply cannot. More importantly, parents and grandparents can teach their children, long before that choice arrives, what qualities actually matter in a spouse, and model those qualities in their own marriages.Ultimately, perhaps that is how a culture of marriage survives. It is not passed down through lectures about marriage nearly as effectively as it is through example. Children watch whether their parents remain loyal when life becomes difficult, whether they forgive, whether they sacrifice for one another, whether they speak about each other with respect, and whether marriage is treated as something larger than the happiness of either person on a particular day. They learn what a husband and wife look like by watching the husband and wife who raised them. And when the time comes to choose someone for themselves, perhaps the greatest gift we can give them is not simply the desire to marry, but the ability to recognize someone who understands marriage in much the same way.So perhaps the question isn’t“How old should our children be before they marry?”It is:“Have we taught them what marriage is, and will they recognize someone who was taught the same thing as a potential life partner?”JGM/RWMThis essay began with a simple question about whether marrying young really increases the risk of divorce, and, as so often happens around here, that question turned into several days of digging through demographic studies, longitudinal datasets and research on everything from parental divorce to religion, politics, wedding costs and Israeli fertility. That kind of research takes time, but it is also why we write here. The interesting story is often buried underneath the statistic everyone already “knows.”Subscribe nowIf you value independent work like this, please consider becoming apaid subscriber. Paid subscriptions make it possible for us to spend the time following questions wherever the evidence leads, rather than wherever an advertiser, institution or political party would prefer them to go. And if a paid subscription isn’t in the budget, sharing this essay with someone thinking about marriage, raising children, or perhaps wondering whether our culture has gotten some of this backwards helps enormously too.Thank you, as always, for reading, sharing and supporting our work.

Summary: When it works, it works


The First Intervention: Eat Differently

FromHomesteading for HealthThe following is an excerpt from our book,Homesteading for Health. It comes from a section in which we move from diagnosing what has gone wrong with the modern food system to the much more practical question:What can we actually do about it?The short answer is surprisingly simple. Eat real food. Prioritize protein. Reduce processed carbohydrates and ultra-processed foods. Pay attention to how your food was grown and raised. And, where possible, shorten the distance between yourself and the people, animals, and soil that produce what you eat.For us, this was not an abstract exercise in nutrition. In 2022, both Robert and I were in poor metabolic health despite believing, as many people do, that we ate reasonably well. Changing what we ate, and eventually producing much more of that food ourselves, changed our health dramatically. We each lost fifty pounds and kept it off. Other chronic problems improved or disappeared.That experience became one of the central ideas behindHomesteading for Health:you do not have to become a homesteader to take back some control over your food, your health, and your environment.You do not need forty acres, a dairy cow, or a flock of chickens. You can begin with a garden bed, a farmers market, a local farmer, better choices at the grocery store, or simply learning to cook again.The book goes much further into the science, the food system, regenerative agriculture, environmental exposures, and what we have learned from building our own farm. But this section is where much of it becomes practical.It begins with the first intervention:eat differently.Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share everywhere: X, Facebook, Notes, or email.  All is good!ShareThe First Intervention: Eat DifferentlyWe have described, at length, what the modern food system has done to dietary patterns. Now we want to describe, from our own experience, what changing those patterns actually looks like and what it produces.In 2022, after a decade of chronic stress, significant injuries, and the disruptions of the pandemic years, both of us were in poor metabolic health. We were technically obese. Robert was dealing with cardiac arrhythmia, chronic digestive problems, and the lingering effects of post-COVID illness and vaccine injury. Jill was managing neuropathic damage from a trimalleolar fracture and recovering from facial reconstruction after a horse injury. We had been vegetarians for over thirty years and believed we were eating reasonably well. The blood work told a different story.When Dr. Brooke Miller, Robert’s physician, reviewed those numbers, his recommendation was blunt: Eat meat, prioritize protein, and eliminate the processed carbohydrates that had quietly colonized our diet over three decades. We spent a month researching before acting. Then we acted.What followed was not a temporary diet. It was a structural change. We committed to whole foods: our own eggs, grass-fed meat, raw milk from cow shares and then our growing mini Jersey herd, garden vegetables, and organic grains we milled ourselves. We eliminated seed oils, added sugars, refined flour, and processed foods. We adopted intermittent fasting and reduced total caloric intake by 30 to 40 percent. Over the following year, we each lost fifty pounds. Years later, we have not regained them. More significantly, the arthritic symptoms that had plagued both of us largely resolved. Robert’s chronic digestive distress, which had followed him for years, is gone. These were not minor adjustments to a marginal condition. They were meaningful reversals of what had seemed like the inevitable trajectory of aging.We tell this story not because our experience proves anything at a population level (it does not) but because we want to be concrete about what a dietary transformation looks and feels like when it is grounded in real food you have grown and raised yourself. The farm did not just provide the ingredients; it provided the framework. When you are eating eggs you collected this morning, milk from an animal you milked yesterday, and vegetables you harvested from your own soil, the relationship to food changes. You stop eating passively. You start eating with intention.That is available to everyone in some form, whether you have forty acres or a balcony.What to eat: the non-prescriptionThe science of nutrition is genuinely contested in many of its particulars, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What is not contested, however, is the broad direction. Dietary patterns centered on minimally processed whole foods such as animal protein, vegetables, fruits, intact grains, and healthy fats, consistently outperform dietary patterns built around refined carbohydrates, added sugars, and ultra-processed products. This finding holds across observational studies, feeding trials, and the lived experience of millions of people who have changed how they eat and watched their health improve as a result.Our own approach, shaped by both the research and by what our farm actually produces, centers on several consistent principles.Prioritize protein from quality sources.Eggs from pastured hens, meat from animals raised on grass or hay, fish, dairy from animals on pasture . . . these are among the most nutrient-dense foods available and were central to human diets long before industrial agriculture created the alternatives. If you raise your own livestock, you know exactly what went into them. If you do not, buy as close to the source as you can and ask questions.Eliminate or sharply reduce ultra-processed foods.This category covers most of what fills the interior aisles of a modern grocery store: packaged snacks, breakfast cereals, commercial bread, processed meats, most fast food, sweetened beverages, and any product whose ingredient list reads like a chemistry text. These foods are engineered for palatability and shelf life, not for nutrition. They deliver calories efficiently and nutrients poorly. They are also, as we have discussed, the primary vehicle by which glyphosate and other agricultural chemical residues reach the human body.Reduce refined grains and added sugars.White flour, white rice, corn syrup, and the dozens of sweetener variants that appear on ingredient labels under different names all share the same metabolic effect: rapid glucose delivery, insulin response, and, over time, the progressive impairment of insulin sensitivity. This is not about eliminating all carbohydrates. It is about recognizing that the structure of a food, whether whole grain or refined, intact starch or extruded powder, matters as much as its macronutrient composition.Use fats that humans have actually eaten for most of their history.Butter, lard, tallow, olive oil. These are the fats that appeared on traditional tables before industrial seed oil extraction became economically viable. The evidence that saturated fat causes cardiovascular disease, which drove the low-fat era and the substitution of seed oils for animal fats, has not held up.The evidence is accumulating that excess seed oil consumption, particularly the omega-6-rich linoleic acid found in canola, soybean, corn, and sunflower oils, promotes inflammation. We are not claiming certainty here. We are suggesting that when in doubt, the food your great-grandmother would recognize as food is a reasonable heuristic.Source food grown in living soil.The regenerative farming evidence reviewed earlier in this section makes clear that how food is grown matters to its nutritional content. Organic certification does not guarantee regenerative management, but it does prohibit synthetic herbicide and pesticide use and is therefore a reasonable proxy for lower chemical exposure. Local food, when you can know something about its production, is often preferable to certified organic from a distant source. Grown yourself is best of all.Reduce glyphosate exposure where practical.Given the accumulating evidence reviewed in Chapter 4, a precautionary approach is warranted. Buy and grow organic grains, legumes, and oilseeds when possible. If you bake, use organic flour or mill your own from organic berries. Be attentive to conventionally grown oats, wheat, and chickpeas, which are among the crops most commonly treated with preharvest desiccants. Jill regularly sources Italian durum or einkorn wheat pasta and flour, which are subject to different regulatory requirements than their American equivalents. These are not guarantees. They are reductions in a cumulative exposure whose long-term consequences we do not yet fully understand, and where the asymmetry of risk clearly favors caution.The next section of the book is titled “practical starting points,” and for that, we direct you to the book itself, and now the audiobook version (personally recorded by Robert) which is sold from many bookstores and digital distributors listed below, for those who want to listen instead of reading.Malone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Homesteading for Healthis available throughAmazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, Target, Walmart, independent booksellers, and other retailers in the U.S. and internationally.Amazon- hardcover, Kindle and Audio currently listed at$29.99. The shopping listing shows it as in stock.Barnes & Noble— hardcover, currently listed at$29.99. The shopping listing shows it as in stock.Target— hardcover, currently$22.99, discounted from $29.99.Walmart— hardcover, listed at$22.99, sold and shipped by Walmart.Books-A-Million— hardcover, listed at$22.99.BookPal— hardcover, particularly interesting forbulk purchases. They advertise quantity discounts beginning at 25 copies and going up through 1,000+.Skyhorse Publishing— the publisher’s page has direct purchasing plus links to several retailers.There are alsodigital editionsthroughApple Books, as well asBarnes & Noble, Google Play, and Kobo

Summary: A section from our new book: “Homesteading for Health”