Years ago (it was actually in 2003), I began blogging. I tried to consume the best bloggers in the blogosphere at the time. One of them was Andrew Sullivan.

His blog became a daily stop for me. There were few writers covering issues and writing about them with his clarity and erudition. He’s one of the few writers/journalists that I’ve found whose work regularly countered ideological defaults.

I recently signed up for a year-long subscription to New York magazine. Why? Because I’ve consistently been directed to stories on their website. Rather than be a “taker,” I figured a subscription was the least I can do to support what remains of viable journalism in America.

I wasn’t surprised that when my first issue arrived in my mailbox (replete with Clarence Thomas staring back at me from the cover) that there would be a Sullivan-written article on opioids.

New York Magazine cover (Feb. 19-March 4)

It’s the best writing on the topic I’ve read up to this point.

America’s in tailspin on multiple fronts. Simply talking about a crisis like the one afflicting the country won’t solve it, and like Sullivan points out, neither will trying to win it with a “declaration of war,” as has been tried with dismal results in the past.

Then there’s this:

One way of thinking of postindustrial America is to imagine it as a former rat park, slowly converting it into a rat cage. Market capitalism and revolutionary technology in the past couple of decades have transformed our economic and cultural reality, most intensely for those without college degrees. That dignity that many working-class men retained by providing for their families through physical labor has been greatly reduced by automation.

That’s not going away, as technology—which has overshot its intended mark time and time again—with its incessant over-promising and under-delivering, has left America awash in people and lives destroyed by opioids.

Read Sullivan and weep.