Nicholas Eberstadt: Russia's adult population--women as well as men--puts down the equivalent of a bottle of vodka per week. In 2006--the most recent year for which we have such data--overall Russian life expectancy at birth was over three years lower than it had been in 1964. Putin's Kremlin made a fateful bet that natural resources--oil, gas, and other extractive saleable commodities--would be the springboard for the restoration of Moscow's influence as a great power on the world stage. In this gamble, Russian authorities have mainly ignored the nation's human resource crisis. During the boom years--Russia's per capita income roughly doubled between 1998 and 2007--the country's death rate barely budged. Very much worse may lie ahead. How Russia's still-unfolding demographic disaster will affect the country's domestic political situation--and its international security posture--are questions that remain to be answered.
Neil Howe: If you think that things couldn't get any worse, wait till the 2020s.
From the archive, a bit of Gladwell: The relation between the number of people who aren't of working age and the number of people who are is captured in the dependency ratio.
Have you seen "4"? Sometimes a severed pig's head is just a severed pig's head, after all, though sometimes a weeping crone yodeling mournfully about the Volga River is also a symbol of a grotesque and nostalgic nationalism.
Robert Levine: The Great Depression brought the New Deal to the United States. It brought the rest of the world Nazism and universal war. This time, though, many nations have nuclear weapons. "Maybe we could" is the limit of optimism in this paper. The world ahead looks difficult.
Mara Hvistendahl: By the time these newborns reach puberty, war games may seem like a quaint relic.
Drunken Nation: Russia's Depopulation Bomb | 
