Mandy Oaklander | August 09, 2026

Good morning! My husband just walked in to tell me something, but I waved him off because I had to write to you about my colleague Angela Haupt's useful piece on how to become a better listener. (Guess I'll have to take her advice later.)

Most people think being a good listener means nodding your head and saying “hm!” a lot. Not so. To truly, deeply listen to someone else—and intuit what they need from you—pay closer attention to their cues.

TODAY’S TOPICS

The deadly toll of mass shootings
Got a question for us?
The risks of feeding AI your test results

WEEKEND ESSAY

The death toll of a mass shooting doesn’t end at the scene

By Vishal R. Patel, Christopher M. Worsham, and Anupam Jena

Police stand behind a crime scene tape near the mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub on in Orlando, Fla. on June 12, 2016.Mandel Ngan—AFP via Getty Images

When a mass shooting tears through an American community, we count the dead. That number—26 at Sandy Hook Elementary, 49 at Pulse nightclub, 58 in Las Vegas—becomes the headline, the official measure of the scope of the horror. But anyone who has watched the alerts pile up on their phone, felt their stomach drop, and struggled to focus for the rest of the day knows the damage doesn’t stop at the victims. It ripples outward across the country, affecting in one way or another millions of Americans who were nowhere near the scene.

Intuitively, we can all sense the broader harm, but it is remarkably hard to measure. Nearly two-thirds of Americans say mass shootings are a significant source of stress in their lives. Researchers have found that after these events, antidepressant use rises among teenagers living near a school shooting. Gun purchases made in response to events have been shown, grimly, to lead to still more accidental gun deaths.

In a recent study published in JAMA Psychiatry, we set out to measure another channel through which a mass shooting’s harm could quietly spread: deaths on the road.

At first glance, it might seem like mass shootings and car crashes have little to do with each other. But decades of research show that stress and distraction make drivers more dangerous, and driving is one of the riskiest things most Americans do every day. In the months after the Sept. 11 attacks, fatal crashes rose in part because travelers traded planes for cars—but there was also evidence of an increase in crashes per mile driven, an increase believed to be linked to the fear and stress that spread nationwide. We wondered whether the country’s deadliest shootings might leave a similar mark.

Read the full essay here.

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