Civilization and its discontents

I know I am stealing the title, but there are several recent pieces on crime, drugs, and other social indicators and the way in which we fight them, successfully or not. They are mostly long, but worth reading, or at least skimming.

• A Mother Jones piece on the "Boston miracle" and various philosophies of how violent crime, especially as it relates to gang violence, has been dealt with.
• Rolling Stone's recent evisceration of the War on Drugs and the widespread effects of its prosecution and a summary of it by Brad Plummer.
  
• An article in Commentary that charts the way in which almost every single cultural and social indicator has been showing hope and progress in the last 15 years. The only outliers are out of wedlock births (teen births are down) and people cohabitating outside of marriage, neither of which I see as huge problems.