November 9, 2026 · 9 min

The headline said "linked to". Here is what that phrase means

A study of sixty thousand adults was reported this week under a headline with three confident words in it. I read the paper, and then I read the headline again. The study followed people for eleven years and set two things side by side. It did not change what anyone did, and it could not say why one group differed from the other. The paper says so in its own second paragraph. This week I go through the paper section by section, show where the headline stretched it, and say what a careful reader can take from it and what they cannot. Plus: your letters about press releases, a short note on finding the original paper, and the one chart I still cannot make sense of.