series of blogs with evidence that suggests a link between crime and environmental lead, including the link between the decline in US crime rates and the phaseout of leaded gasoline. The theory was popularized by public health researcher Jessica Reyes and economist Rick Nevin; Drum's thesis was criticized by Jim Manzi in January 2013; Drum has continued to document new evidence in support of the theory. Homelessness In a 2017 blog post for Mother Jones discussing then-recently published research on public perceptions of the homeless, Drum stated:The researchers solved their conundrum by suggesting that most people are disgusted by the homeless. No kidding. About half the homeless suffer from a mental illness and a third abuse either alcohol or drugs. You’d be crazy not to have a reflexive disgust of a population like that.Stephen Piston, one of the authors of the research, objected, claiming that Drum’s article had “profoundly misinterpreted” their research, saying:We argue that media coverage of homeless people often portrays them as unclean or diseased, which activates disgust among the general public. But [Drum] cites our research as proof that homeless people are inherently disgusting — which perpetuates the very problem in journalism our research was trying to solve. Personal In an interview with Norman Geras, Drum said that his intellectual heroes were Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes, Edward R. Murrow and Charles Darwin. He also considers Benjamin Franklin his all-time favorite political hero. Drum married in 1993; he and his wife Marian have no children. On October 24, 2014, Drum posted that he was undergoing treatment for multiple myeloma. On October 18, 2016, he updated readers that it had been two years since his diagnosis and he was "still alive and kicking." In August 2018 he reported that his multiple myeloma remained well under control. References External links Kevin Drum's blog at Mother Jones Kevin Drum interview at The Potomac Journal 1958 births People with multiple myeloma American bloggers American columnists California State University, Long Beach alumni Living people People from Irvine, California Journalists from California 21st-century American non-fiction writers