A recent Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) article by Case and Deaton generated a lot of attention outside the journal’s usual readership.1 According to the social media tracker website Altmetric, by 30 December 2015 the paper was picked up by 84 news outlets and 42 blogs, and had been tweeted around 600 times, all in around a month. Altmetric rates on that date placed it as the 11th most impactful output of 37 873 PNAS items evaluated, placing it in the top 0.03% of all papers published in the journal.

The title and abstract of the article, ‘Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century’, was probably important factors in the mainstream media attention. Though it is perhaps not news that, in the USA, life has never been easy if you are African American, Hispanic or a young adult, the finding that life may not be so long for the White and the middle-aged perhaps came as more of a surprise. The Washington Post called the findings ‘startling’, Public Broadcasting Service called them ‘stunning’ and Al Jezeera America called them ‘devastating’.

In parallel with traditional media, the paper also drew interest within the new media of Facebook and bloggers. And it was from the new media rather than the old, and in particular from the personal blog of statistician Andrew Gelman,2 that some of the most insightful commentaries and critiques of the paper emerged.