Category: Get off my lawn!

Changes in orange juice and other foods coming from the FDA, and not for the better

August 11, 2025 • 11:00 am

Here’s an article from Food and Wine that simply gives more of the bad news that I thought I was avoiding by reading “regular stuff.” Click on the screenshot to read it. The upshot is that foods—and not just OJ—are going to be diluted and their quality reduced, all supposedly in the name of consumer welfare. Yes, I know that government agencies are doing a ;pt worse stuff, but anybody who beefs that this post is trivial compared to that other stuff risks dire punishment, for I post what I want.

As you probably know if you’re American, the Food and Drug administration sets standards for how food is constituted if it’s going to be labeled one way or another.  For example, the standards of “ice cream” specify that it has to have a certain percentage of milk solids and milk fat. That’s why, before I buy ice cream in a store, I inspect the carton to be sure that it’s labeled “ice cream” rather than “ice milk” or, Ceiling Cat help me, “frozen dairy dessert”. (This is, of course, independent of the ever-shrinking volume of containers, like the half gallons of ice cream that have morphed into 1.5 quarts.) So check what’s written on your carton of Breyer’s to ensure that you’re buying ice cream.

Now the FDA is changing the standards for other foods, and of course not for the better. Quotes from the article (indented):

As Food & Wine previously explained, the FDA began setting standards of identity in 1939 to promote “honesty and fair dealing” and ensure the “characteristics, ingredients, and production processes of specific foods were consistent with what consumers expect.”

Back then, the FDA added, companies often sold products “that were represented as jams containing fruit, but the products contained little fruit,” so it established baseline rules for certain foods to be labeled as such. For example, the Oregon Growers explained that “preserves” and “jams” must contain at least “55% sugar and 45% fruit. If a product does not meet these requirements, it must be called by another name.”

With this new update, jam makers may no longer be required to adhere to these percentages if their standard of identity were to go away, meaning your next jar could be more sugar, water, or some other ingredient entirely than mostly fruit.

Be sure to start inspecting your jams. However, looking at a few of mine, they don’t list the percentage of fruit versus sugar: they just give the ingredients in order of predominance, and sugar is first, even in good jams. But how much sugar are you spreading on your toast? The FDA will ensure that it can increase without your knowing. You’d have to write to the manufacturer to find out.

As for orange juice, well, that’s gonna be diluted:

On Aug. 5, the FDA announced that it’s proposing to amend the standard of identity for pasteurized orange juice, which has been in place for six decades, in an effort “to promote honesty and fair dealing for consumers.” It added that the proposed rule change will “provide flexibility to the food industry.”

Why the change now? As the FDA explained, it’s in response to a petition by the Florida Citrus Processors Association and Florida Citrus Mutual, which is asking for the change, as the current standard of identity has a minimum Brix requirement, “a measurement that indicates the sugar content of a liquid,” at 10.5%. It wants to reduce this requirement to a flat 10%. That’s because the state of Florida has been ravaged by citrus greening disease, which has caused a lower crop production as well as fruit that has less sugar than before.

“The FDA’s pasteurized orange juice standard of identity, when originally promulgated in 1963, was carefully constructed to reflect the qualities of U.S. oranges,” the petition by the two organizations states. “It should now be updated to align with the properties of the modern U.S. crop. Without these changes, manufacturers of finished pasteurized orange juice products must increasingly rely on higher Brix imported juice to meet or exceed the U.S. minimum Brix for pasteurized orange juice.”

The FDA further explained that the change shouldn’t affect the taste of orange juice and will have “a minimal impact on the nutrients found in orange juice.”

What a load of bull! The way you reduce sugar, of course, is to add more water.  “The qualities of U.S. oranges” have changed because of the disease and lower crop production. Granted, perhaps a half percent of lower sugar may even be better for some people, but those standards were there in the first place. And you can bet your tuchas that when the disease goes away and they can once again make OJ to the specificiations, they’re not going to go back to the old standards. But wait! There’s more!

Other foods that may have their standards of identity change soon include several types of canned fruits and vegetables, including artificially sweetened canned fruits (apricots, cherries, pears, peaches, pineapples) and select canned vegetables, such as field corn and dry peas. More than a dozen dairy products are included in the list, including low‑sodium cheddar and colby cheeses, along with cream cheese blends, and frozen desserts like goat milk ice cream and mellorine. Milk breads, rolls, and buns are also on the list, as are enriched macaroni and frozen juice concentrates.

Now I don’t know what the changes are, but you can be sure that they are not going to increase the quality of the product. What are they going to do to breads and macaroni? The mind boggles.  The only worse thing that this reduction of food quality is the way they justify it. There’s a quote in the article that apparently comes from the FDA:

“The FDA’s Standards of Identity efforts have helped ensure uniformity, boost consumer confidence, and prevent food fraud. But many of these standards have outlived their usefulness and may even stifle innovation in making food easier to produce or providing consumers healthier choices,” FDA Commissioner Marty Makary added in the July press release. “Antiquated food standards are no longer serving to protect consumers. It is common sense to revoke them and move to a more judicious use of food standards and agency resources.”

Stifling innovation? Giving consumers healthier choices? “Antiquated standards”? Excuse me, but I’d rather have more fruit in my preserves.  This paragraph is a prime example of duplicity masquerading as good intentions.

You can find the new FDA standards here and here, which, I suppose, are driven not by consumer demand but by corporations, and if you want to go through them, see if the changes conform to the explanation above.

Oy! My kishkes!

Beyoncé wins Grammy for album of the year, despite her so-so music

February 23, 2025 • 11:40 am

Beyoncê (real name Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter) is wildly popular, but it’s a popularity I find baffling. I have listened to a fair amount of her music, trying to understand the key to her musical fame—perhaps the use of catchy tunes or inventive lyrics—but I have come up dry. It is, as modern rock and pop tends to be, formulaic and trite. But most such music vanishes without a trace, yet forgettable songs like hers get Grammys. 35 of them!

Take, for example, song below, “Texas Hold Em”, the flagship song of her recent Grammy-winning album, “Cowboy Carter.”  As Wikipedia notes:

Music critics praised “Texas Hold ‘Em” for its playful tone, authentic sound, Beyoncé’s vocal performance, and its celebration of the Black roots of country music. Country artists and country radio managers also praised the song for elevating the accessibility of country music for a wider audience. It ignited discussions on Black musicians’ place within country music, boosted the listenership of Black country artists and country radio in general, and increased the popularity of Western wear and culture. It was nominated for Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best Country Song at the 67th Annual Grammy Awards.

I am stymied. The “playful tone” involves rhyming words like “Texas” and “Lexus”, and it is not in any sense authentic country music: it just uses country tropes and a country rhythm to convey essentially meaningless sentiments. I suspect the vocal performance is autotuned. The only part I like is the banjo introduction.

The song is a failed attempt to meld two genres, but the critics love. love, love it.  As for igniting interest in black country music, well, this is not black country music (see Charlie Pride for that); it is standard pop music striving to be countrified. It’s like putting a drop of Cointreau in a cocktail and calling it French.

But listen for yourself. Is this a song for the ages? I don’t think so.

Here are the lyrics, and—please forgive me—they seem so incompetent and ham-handed that I laughed when I read them. The first verse, with its risible rhyming of “Texas” and “Lexus”, is especially rich. Likewise rhyming “panic” and “dramatic.” I’ve put the dumbest lines in bold:
Lyrics
This ain’t Texas (woo), ain’t no hold ’em (hey)So lay your cards down, down, down, downSo park your Lexus (woo) and throw your keys up (hey)Stick around, ’round, ’round, ’round, ’round (stick around)And I’ll be damned if I can’t slow dance with youCome pour some sugar on me, honey tooIt’s a real life boogie and a real life hoedownDon’t be a bitch, come take it to the floor now, woo, huh (woo)
There’s a tornado (there’s a tornado) in my city (in my city)Hit the basement (hit the basement), that shit ain’t pretty (shit ain’t pretty)Rugged whiskey (rugged whiskey) ’cause we survivin’ (’cause we survivin’)Off red cup kisses, sweet redemption, passin’ time, yeah
Ooh, one step to the rightWe headin’ to the dive bar we always thought was niceOoh, run me to the leftThen spin me in the middle, boy, I can’t read your mind
This ain’t Texas (woo), ain’t no hold ’em (hey)So lay your cards down, down, down, downSo park your Lexus (woo) and throw your keys up (hey)Stick around, ’round, ’round, ’round, ’round (stick around)And I’ll be damned if I can’t slow dance with youCome pour some sugar on me, honey tooIt’s a real life boogie and a real life hoedownDon’t be a bitch, come take it to the floor now (woo)
And I’ll be damned if I cannot dance with youCome pour some liquor on me, honey tooIt’s a real life boogie and a real life hoedownDon’t be a bitch, come take it to the floor now (woo)
Woo-hooWoo-hooWoo-hoo
There’s a heatwave (there’s a heatwave) coming at us (coming at us)Too hot to think straight (too hot to think straight)Too cold to panic (cold to panic)All of the problems just feel dramatic (just feel dramatic)And now we’re runnin’ to the first spot that we find, yeah
Ooh, one step to the rightWe headed to the dive bar we always thought was niceOoh, you run to the leftJust work me in the middle, boy, I can’t read your mind
This ain’t Texas (woo), ain’t no hold ’em (hey)So lay your cards down, down, down, down, ohSo park your Lexus (hey), throw your keys up (hey)Stick around, ’round, ’round, ’round, ’round (stick around)And I’ll be damned if I cannot dance with youCome pour some sugar on me, honey, tooIt’s a real life boogie and a real life hoedownDon’t be a bitch, come take it to the floor now (woo)
And I’ll be damned if I cannot dance with youCome pour some liquor on me honey, tooIt’s a real life boogie and a real life hoedownDon’t be a-, come take it to the floor now, ooh
Take it to the floor now, oohHoops, spurs, bootsTo the floor now, oohTuck, back, oops (ooh, ooh, ooh)ShootCome take it to the floor now, oohAnd I’ll be damned if I cannot dance with youBaby, pour that sugar and liquor on me tooFurs, spurs, bootsSolargenic, photogenic, shoot
Unlike some of the hard-to-understand songs of, say, Steely Dan, these are just a bunch of fragmentary thoughts strung together, and one sense there’s no message beneath them. Now some of her songs, like “Lemonade”, do tell a story (in that case, the unfaithfulness of her partner), but I find the music lame.  And while words can be lame in a song that’s nevertheless good, it is good because of the music.

But is there a greater meaning here?  A site purporting to give this “meaning” resorts almost completely to simply reiterating what Texas tropes appear in the lyrics. For example (lyrics in bold; dodo’s interpretation in plain text):

“There’s a tornado (There’s a tornado) in my city (In my city)
In the basement (In the basement), that shit ain’t pretty (Shit ain’t pretty)
Rugged whiskey (Rugged whiskey) ’cause we survivin’ (‘Cause we survivin’)
Off red cup kisses, sweet redemption, passin’ time, yeah”

Texas has more tornadoes passing through it than any other US state, and here, Beyoncé regales the listener with a tale of how a twister has forced her and her partner underground.

She subsequently paints a visceral picture of a crude, sparse setting, as they resolve to get through the violent weather with the help of country music’s No. 1 – or perhaps more accurately, No. 7 – painkiller: some good old Jack Daniels whiskey.

Beyoncé throws in another country trope by referencing the red solo cups that regularly pop up in Friday night anthems by the likes of Luke Combs, Morgan Wallen and more.

“Ooh, one step to the right
We headin’ to the dive bar we always thought was nice
Ooh, run me to the left
Then spin me in the middle, boy, I can’t read your mind”

Here, Beyoncé details some of the moves as she guides her hesitant partner through the dance in their local dive, putting him at ease. She again underlines her hopes that he’ll open up to her more, as she frustratedly highlights how she can’t read his mind.

Well, isn’t that special?  I wanted to listen to this song again, for the fourth or fifth time, before I posted this, but I find I can’t bear to hear it again. If any reader wants to tell me why this is such a great song, I’ll be glad to hear it—but I doubt I’ll agree.

I’m not alone in my criticism here; just read the Washington Post‘s article, “Beyoncé’s ‘Cowboy Carter’ isn’t a country album. It’s worse.”

This is an album that posits its lack of ideas as big ideas. Only in its final seconds, when Beyoncé sings about how “old ideas are buried here,” does “Cowboy Carter” start to feel less like an extravagant awards telecast, and more like a clear-eyed comment on the state of the nation — a grand, sprawling, overcrowded place with nowhere else to go.

Freddie deBoer  gives us what I think is the main reason why Beyoncé is so lauded (his piece is largely about Kendrick Lamar, but the lessons apply). The bolding is mine:

We’re left in this bizarre space where no one is willing to flourish, to succeed, without simultaneously calling themselves an underdog, their talents unrecognized and their tastes disrespected. This is planet “Nobody believed in me!,” and facts never get in the way.

Thus, to pick a paradigmatic example, we still get a thousand thinkpieces a year arguing that Beyonce is terribly mistreated and overlooked – Beyonce, a billionaire with the most Grammys in history, every other kind of award that humanity has to bestow, influence in every sphere of human achievement, multiple films and books about her genius, every material, social, artistic, and cultural laurel we as a society can give. Look how fucking long this list of awards is! The only human being on earth who enjoys a combination of celebration and wealth and access and privilege and power that equals that of Beyonce is Taylor Swift, and both are constantly referred to as disrespected and marginalized underdogs in our most prestigious publications. Beyonce has thirty-five Grammys. What would be enough? Seventy? Seven hundred? Honey, the whole point is that nothing could ever be good enough for her. Indeed, the evidence that Beyonce is an immensely lauded human being is so vast that this kind of talk inspires an admonition I get a lot in my career – you’re right, but we don’t talk about that.

. . . . The idea that your moral value is determined by what you do has given way to the assumption that your moral value is determined by what you like. If you’re an aging dad who likes Sabrina Carpenter, you must be an open-minded and discerning feminist. And if you’re a white person who likes Kendrick Lamar, well, you must have all the right attitudes about race.

And so it is with Beyoncé. Calling her mediocre, as I just did, is just asking for vilification.

 

h/t: Greg Mayer for the deBoer reference

Is belief in belief part of anti-wokeness now?

December 24, 2024 • 11:30 am

It’s not surprising to me that a mainstream liberal newspaper, the New York Times, would publish an op-ed on Christmas Eve that assumes the reality of Jesus as the son of God. There are of course endless lessons one can draw from this myth, and the NYT has always been soft on religion. Remember the op-ed column by Anglican minister Tish Harrison Warren, in which we were subject to a weekly dose of anodyne pap? (The paper apparently ditched her after a while.)

But today we get an essay from Peter Wehner that, to me, seems arrantly stupid in its very thesis. For that thesis is that IF you believe in Jesus’s genealogy, and IF you think that one’s genealogy beyond one’s parents could be a source of shame, THEN you could draw lessons from the story of Jesus as told in the Bible.  Every one of these links is weak, and yet the paper published the essay anyway. I’ll give a few quotes below (click below to read the article, or find it archived here, but don’t bother):

Wehner was impressed by a semon her heard at a Baptist Church, and simply draws on its content to show that Jesus was amazing in overcoming his lineage:

One of the forgotten facts of the story of Jesus’ life is that he came from a profoundly dysfunctional family.

I was reminded of this while listening to a sermon this month at Groveton Baptist Church in Alexandria, Va. Chris Davis, the pastor of the church, took as his text the first 17 verses of the Gospel of Matthew, known as the genealogy of Jesus. Those verses, a long list of names that ties one generation to another, are often skipped over in favor of the story of Jesus’ birth. To the degree that they have any meaning at all, it’s usually because for Christians it establishes Jesus as the heir to the promises God made to Abraham and David.

But as the pastor pointed out, Jesus came down to us through broken families: “one generation begetting brokenness of another generation begetting brokenness of another generation begetting brokenness of another generation.” There were murderers, adulterers, prostitutes and people who committed incest, liars, schemers and idolaters.

Now I’ve forgotten my New Testament (yes, I read it), but I’m not sure how broken Jesus’s fictional ancestry was. But let’s assume it was pretty screwed up. From that Wehner ()and Davis) draw the following conclusions, all based on assuming the truth of the New Testament). I’ve indented the quotes; bolding is mine:

1.) The disreputable lineage of Jesus reminds us of something else as well: Past is not prologue. If Jesus himself came from a line of murderers, adulterers, cheats and frauds, the Rev. Scott Dudley, senior pastor at Bellevue Presbyterian Church in Bellevue, Wash., told me, “then there is hope for all of us. He’s a cycle-breaker showing that generations of dysfunction don’t have to be predictive of future events.

The next lesson is pretty much the same:

2.) A Jesus who showed up from nowhere, fully grown and without ancestry, might have too. The actual Jesus, though, shows us something different. We are not our bloodlines or our family histories.

And the lesson in wokeness:

3.) But Jesus’ awareness of broken lives wasn’t restricted to his family tree; it defined his ministry. He identified with the least and the lowliest, not just those in his lineage but those in his life.

4.) The genealogy of Jesus is also a story of radical inclusion. Several of the women listed in the first chapter of Matthew are Gentiles [non Jews]. This incorporation has significance, according to Craig Barnes, a former president of Princeton Theological Seminary.

And that’s about it. Is there anything new here except to draw lessons from a work of fiction? Those lessons, in fact, are purely made up, and the last two are simply wrong. Yes, you could couch Jesus as a Social Justice Warrior, who included everyone in his great love, except for the fact that he stated that he himself was the only way to get to heaven. Remember John 14:6 in the King James Bible?

Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.

That alone should dispel the idea that Jesus’s teachings were inclusive, for what about all those nonbelievers outside of the Middle East who had no opportunity to accept Jesus. Further, Christian theology tells us that these were tainted by Original Sin, and, as unrepentant sinners, were doomed to fry for eternity in Hell.

Yes, what we have here is a believer cherry-picking Scripture to tell us something that everybody knows (if some of your ancestors—but not your parents!—were dysfunctional, you can overcome that); as well as telling us something that isn’t true (Jesus’s love extended to everyone), But yes, it’s the Christmas season, and it’s grinch-y to even say that Jesus might not really have been the wonder-working Son of God.

************

Well, of course the MSM has always been soft on religion, adhering, even if atheistic, to “belief in belief”. What bothers me is that one aspect of my own ideology, which is opposition to the performative and ineffectual forms of wokeness, is also getting soft on religion. I’m not referring to right-wing media like Fox News, which of course won’t go after religion, but to the liberal form of anti-wokeness. Like this article that just appeared in the Free Press (click to read). In some ways this one is worse than above, for it demonstrates the regret of a mother (the author) for not having imbued her children with more of the Jesus-y aspects of Christianity. And that despite the fact that author Larissa Phillips (founder of the Volunteer Literacy Project) and her husband are atheists. (This article isn’t fully archived.)

The thesis here is that yes, Christmas is a great time to get together with family, celebrate in traditional ways by opening presents, having a big feed, and socializing with others.  But this still leaves a God-shaped hole in one’s persona.  Now a mother with kids in her twenties, Phillips regrets not having injected more traditional religion into her kids’ upbringing. And remember, she and her partner are atheists. What gives?

Of all the treasures that came out of the cardboard box of Christmas decorations every December of my childhood, the nativity set was the best. Joseph, Mary, the kings, the shepherds: Our tiny figures were made of clay with a white glaze that looked like icing. I treated them like delicate, special dolls, rearranging them and moving them around the living room, from the coffee table to the stereo console, to the mantle. I might add a blanket for the baby, sometimes a scarf for Mary, cut from scraps of velvet or felt.

These are experiences that my own children, who are now 21 and 25, never had. Their father and I are atheists who, without debate, raised them entirely without religion. At Christmas, we still did the tree and the lights and the presents—all the secular parts of the holiday—and my kids knew the Christmas story, the way they knew about Greek myths. But there were no religious symbols in our home, and no going to church. In recent years, I’ve begun to regret this.

Apparently problems arise if you bring up your kids without Jesus. One of those problems is the Santa myth:

But right away, there were problems with secular Christmas, and they got worse every year.

Santa Claus, for example. If you’ve decided to raise your children without God because you are into truth and reason and rationality, are you going to tell them that Santa Claus is real? And refuse to budge even when your kids become stout little rationalists demanding answers? I thought it was bizarre to lie to your children, but by the time they started asking difficult questions, we were committed to Christmas. We went half in on the Santa delusion, referring to Santa with a wink.

Yes, but kids stop believing in Santa after a while, and you don’t see Santa-believers doing bad stuff to others. This isn’t always the case with Christians.  And then there is the Present Problem:

The problem with presents was worse and ever-worsening. I love presents. I love buying gifts and wrapping them and hiding them in secret places. I love the sight of a Christmas tree surrounded by presents. I love Christmas morning, sitting around in pajamas opening all the gifts. And when the kids were still little it was simple: Fill a stocking with a few chocolates and trinkets and wrap up some presents. Preschoolers are easy to impress. They like boxes more than anything else. (“Mom!” my 4-year-old daughter stage-whispered to me one Christmas morning, having peeked under the tree. “He brought clementines!”) But older kids always want more. By middle school my daughter had graduated to texting me an extensive shopping list with links. She once told me that her friends’ parents spend $1000 on each child. It made me wonder whether I should give up on presents completely.

Seriously? I know families whose present-giving is minimal, and I doubt that Amish or Orthodox Jewish families engage in this sort of wholesale gift-giving.

But the biggest problem is that God-shaped hole:

Maybe we didn’t have to reject every aspect of the religious traditions.

I’m sure my kids would have had complaints about church on Christmas Eve. I’m sure I would have too. I can imagine sitting in a pew silently grumbling about the minister’s call for obedience. My husband might have sighed pointedly when the man behind us sang too loudly. It wouldn’t have been perfect. But lately I can’t get those services at my grandmother’s church out of my mind. Even as a teenager it was impossible not to be moved by the sight of the familiar building at night, dressed up in garlands and ribbons, the stained glass windows in dark shadows, the altar flickering with candlelight, everyone in velvet dresses or ties or even suits. I remember the voices of the choir vibrating in my chest and the feeling of something very big and old and special.

My generation had the best of both worlds. We played in the crumbling remains of Christian traditions without realizing how much structure and beauty they gave us. I’m still an atheist, but I’ve come to believe that taking religion out of my children’s Christmas was a mistake. They never really witnessed the celebration of a miracle that goes back two thousand years. They didn’t have a nativity set, even though I loved mine, because when you scrub God from your holiday celebration, it’s strange to give your kids a tiny baby Jesus to play with. Isn’t it?

I’m not sure anymore. I couldn’t pass on to my kids a faith in God, but I could have shared the traditions that have always shaped and enchanted childhoods in this part of the world. The remnants were still there, and they were good. To today’s young atheist families building their annual rituals, I offer this advice: It’s okay if you don’t believe in God. Go to the Christmas Eve service anyway. Learn the carols, even the religious ones. Get the nativity set.

Yes, you have to let your kids see that celebration of a delusion.  But what Phillips is mourning here is not really the lack of traditional religious beliefs. She’s mourning what Richard Dawkins likes about Church: the ceremony, the incense, and the singing. What she’s talking about is not a god-shaped hole but a hymn-shaped hole.  The problem with this article is just that: it confects a problem that really doesn’t exist. Does atheist Phillips want her children simply to know more about religion? If so, give them a Bible? Or, if she wants her kids to hear hymns and sniff incense, well, that’s simply ceremony.  Yes, I went to midnight mass at Notre Dame when I lived in Paris, and it was quite the spectacle, with the swinging censers, the music, and the beautiful cathedral. But not for a minute did I believe what they were celebrating, and I could get the same feeling by going to a concert of Tagore songs.

Of course Bari Weiss, the founder of the Free Press, seems to be religiously Jewish; as far as I can see, there are aspects of Judaism that she believes in. But she’s not explicit about it, and so I can’t be sure that she’s not a secular Jew like me.  I’d like to ask her exactly what supernatural stuff she believes in, and what about this article merited its publication.

UPDATE: This just came up: an interview of Tom Holland by Bari Weiss:

An excerpt. Bolding is mine:

Whether you believe in the story of the virgin birth and resurrection, or you believe that those miracles are myths, one thing is beyond dispute: The story of Jesus and the message of Christianity is among the stickiest ideas the world has ever seen.

Within four centuries of Jesus’s death, Christianity had become the official religion of the Roman Empire. It had 30 million followers—which amounted to half the empire. Today, two millennia later, Christianity is still the largest religion in the world, with more than 2 billion adherents.

How did the radical message of Christianity catch on? How did it change the world? And how does it shape all our lives today?

These questions motivate the latest episode of Honestly. My guest is the incredible historian Tom Holland, one of the most gifted storytellers in the world. His podcast, The Rest Is History, is among the most popular out there. Each week, he and his co-host, Dominic Sandbrook, charm their way through history’s most interesting characters and sagas. I can’t recommend it more highly.

I also recommend Tom’s book Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. In it, he argues that Christianity is the reason we have America, that it was the inspiration behind our revolution. He also argues that Christianity is the backbone of both “wokeness,” as an ideology, and liberalism, which so often sees itself as secular.

Oy vey! Something is going on at the Free Press. I guess it’s the claim that Christianity is the backbone not just of wokeness, but of liberalism.

Don’t use too much toothpaste!

November 26, 2024 • 11:30 am

I can guarantee that nearly everyone reading this post is using way too much toothpaste when they brush their teeth. In fact, you’re probably using at least four times the amount you need, and thus you’re paying four times what you should be paying for toothpaste. Not only that, but you may be getting too much fluoride if you are, like most people, using a fluoridated toothpaste. (RFK Jr. may get rid of those!)

How much toothpaste do you need? Several hygienists have told me “the amount about the size of a pea”, and I have verified that from several sites (for example, here, here, and here). Nobody weighs their toothpaste, but this amount is roughly 0.25 grams of paste. That means that a small three-ounce tube should last about six months if you brush twice a day.

And here are photos showing the proper amount of toothpaste to use for both small children and those more than three years old (that includes us):

Source

If you’re dispensing a ribbon of toothpaste that extends the length of the bristles, you’re using (and spending) way too much. STOP IT!

Is this a scam?

October 24, 2024 • 5:26 pm

I noticed this not long ago when a Jewish friend and I fasted for Yom Kippur by getting burgers and fries at Five Guys (a favorite hangout of Barask Obama, who isn’t Jewish . . ).  I spotted a free-refill soft drink machine to the side, and you’re welcome to refill your cup as often as you wish.

The issue is this: they charge you more for a “large” soft drink than for a “small” one, even though you can drink as much as you want. The difference in price just reflects the size of the empty cup they give you when you order. What is going on here? Why would anybody in their right mind pay more for a larger empty cup? (n.b. again: you’re welcome to drink as much as you want).

Prowling the Strip this afternoon looking for lunch, I finally wound up at Dave’s Hot chicken (it’s nearly impossible to get healthy food on the Strip).  And, mirabile dictu, there was the same issue: a all-you-can drink soft drink machine available in the small shack coupled with large and small empty cups having different prices.

What is the purpose of this? To make money by bilking the people who don’t see the drink machine? Or are there some lazy people who can’t be bothered to go back to the machine for a refill?

More on the Strip tomorrow. I have concluded that this is the entrance to Hell.

Music: then and now

October 21, 2024 • 9:30 am

There’s not much new this week, and certainly nothing to inspire me to comment on science, current events, and so on. So it’s time to go back fifty years and compare the Billboard Top Ten Songs from then with the current ones.  It turns out that the comparison isn’t as dire as it has been the last few times.

This may be for two reasons. First, rock had already reached its apogee before 1974, and while there are a couple of classics on the 1974 list, and certainly some great musicians, the list in general is not inspiring.

Second, it seems to me that pop music is getting infused with a soupçon of country music, and, given how bad recent pop music has been, this can only improve it.

First, the list from this week in 1974.  I’ve put a link to the performance of each song.

The best songs on this list include #1 (the Spinners were underrated: “I’ll Be Around” is one of the great soul songs), and the addition of Dionne Warwick makes for a creditable tune.  The Stevie Wonder song is okay, but not close to his greatest efforts (viz. “Isn’t she Lovely?” or “For Once in my Life“, etc.).  I have little use for Bachman Turner Overdrive, but “Jazzman: is an excellent effort by Carole King.  The Elton John song is an 8; I can dance to it.  Bad Company’s song rates a 5 out of 10, and it’s downhill from there, save the classic “Sweet Home Alabama”.  Ergo, I’d rate #1, #4, and #8 as music that will last. We shall forget about Tony Orlando, Mac Davis, and the Osmonds.

Here is the Billboard Top 10 from fifty years ago: October 21, 1974:

1.) “Then Came You”  Dionne Warwicke and the Spinners

2.)  “You Haven’t Done Nothing”  Stevie Wonder

3.)  “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet/Free Wheelin'” Bachman Turner Overdrive

4.)  “Jazzman” Carole King

5.)  “The Bitch is Back”  Elton John

6.)  “Can’t Get Enough” Bad Company

7.)  “Steppin’ Out/Gonna Boogie Tonight” Tony Orlando and Dawn

8.)  “Sweet Home Alabama” Lynyrd Skynyrd

9.)  “Stop and Smell the Roses” Mac Davis

10.) “Love Me for a Reason” The Osmonds

And the latest Billboard Top 10 from October 19, 2024.  

The music on the list below is surprisingly good given that it’s from today.  I’m not a fan of “A Bar Song” as it’s too rap-py—but note the country tinge to it!  My favorite on this list is Billie Eilish’s song (#2), which is quite lovely.  #3 is largely a country/pop hybrid. It’s okay, but the melody and words are rather trite. We shall leave aside the talentless Sabrina Carpenter, which eliminates three songs off this list. The Bruno Mars/Lady Gaga duet has the trappings of country music (cowboy hats and boots, and big hair on Lady Gaga), but it’s just okay: neither catchy or memorable. Chappell Roan appears to be a phenom these days, but I wasn’t impressed with this effort, which in the end is a standard love song, and the melody is trite.  Skipping over Carpenter to Swims, we find a song that’s beginning to sound of a piece with much of modern music, but it’s okay (note the country intonations). Skipping Carpenter for the last time (yes, I listened to all the songs), we finish with Benson Boone, performing a countrified pop song, but again the tune is boring and the lyrics uncompelling.

1.)  “A Bar Song” Tipsy

2.)  “Birds of a Feather” Billie Eilish

3.)  “I Had Some Help” Post Malone featuring Morgan Wallen

4.)  “Espresso”  Sabrina Carpenter

5.) “Die With a Smile”  Lady Gaga with Bruno Mars

6.) “Good Luck, Babe!” Chappell Roan

7.)  “Taste” Sabrina Carpenter

8.)   “Lose Control” Teddy Swims

9.)  “Please Please Please” Sabrina Carpenter

10.)  “Beautiful Things” Benson Boone

All in all, the lists are pretty much tied, but 1974 wins (you knew it would!) because it has a couple of classics. The latest list, in my view, is redeemed by Billie Eilish‘s song, and I should sample more of her music. I see she’s only 22 and her full name is Billie Eilish Pirate Baird O’Connell. (Note that Wonder’s “For Once in My Life” was recorded when he was just 18.)

Here’s “Birds of a Feather” by Billie Eilish, co-written with her brother, Finneas O’Connell

College students no longer want to read books

October 15, 2024 • 12:00 pm

If you’ve been teaching at the college level for a number of years, and your teaching involves reading books, you’ll have noticed the phenomenon discussed in this new Atlantic article (archived here). The phenomenon is that students just don’t want to read books any more: they seem to lack either the will or the attention span.

I noticed this years ago when teaching introductory evolution. I asked the students to read one book: On the Origin of Species by Darwin. Granted, it’s a large and sometimes tedious book, but it’s also the most important biology book ever written, and of course relevant to my topic.

The students hated it. They said it was too long and they didn’t cotton on to the Victorian prose.  So, after that failure, I found a condensed version (it might have been this one, about half the length of the original).  But that didn’t fly either. It turned out that the students just didn’t want to read any books, and I didn’t probe further to find out why. I simply gave up asking the students to read Darwin.

Now there aren’t many biology courses in which students have to read any books beyond the textbook (if even that), but when I was in college it was normal to read at least half a dozen books for a humanities course–sometimes one per week. As the article below says, however, they no longer even do that. They read fewer books or, more often, sections of books.

You can guess the most important reason!

Some excerpts:

Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.

This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.

Oy!  But why have high schools stopped assigning books? This just pushes the problem back to earlier education.

 Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot.
No comprehensive data exist on this trend, but the majority of the 33 professors I spoke with relayed similar experiences. Many had discussed the change at faculty meetings and in conversations with fellow instructors. Anthony Grafton, a Princeton historian, said his students arrive on campus with a narrower vocabulary and less understanding of language than they used to have. There are always students who “read insightfully and easily and write beautifully,” he said, “but they are now more exceptions.” Jack Chen, a Chinese-literature professor at the University of Virginia, finds his students “shutting down” when confronted with ideas they don’t understand; they’re less able to persist through a challenging text than they used to be. Daniel Shore, the chair of Georgetown’s English department, told me that his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet.

14 lines—too much!  But we all know the reason: DEVICES!

Teenagers are constantly tempted by their devices, which inhibits their preparation for the rigors of college coursework—then they get to college, and the distractions keep flowing. “It’s changed expectations about what’s worthy of attention,” Daniel Willingham, a psychologist at UVA, told me. “Being bored has become unnatural.” Reading books, even for pleasure, can’t compete with TikTok, Instagram, YouTube. In 1976, about 40 percent of high-school seniors said they had read at least six books for fun in the previous year, compared with 11.5 percent who hadn’t read any. By 2022, those percentages had flipped.

Those statistics are depressing.

So now students read excerpts instead of books, and there’s a price to pay for that (see below). Another problem is a growing disparity between students educated at fancy private high schools and “regular” high schools.

Private schools, which produce a disproportionate share of elite college students, seem to have been slower to shift away from reading complete volumes—leading to what Dames describes as a disconcerting reading-skills gap among incoming freshmen. But private schools are not immune to the trend. At the prep school that I graduated from five years ago, I took a Jane Austen course my senior year. I read only a single Austen novel.

Faced with this predicament, many college professors feel they have no choice but to assign less reading and lower their expectations. Victoria Kahn, who has taught literature at UC Berkeley since 1997, used to assign 200 pages each week. Now she assigns less than half of that. “I don’t do the whole Iliad. I assign books of The Iliad. I hope that some of them will read the whole thing,” Kahn told me. “It’s not like I can say, ‘Okay, over the next three weeks, I expect you to read The Iliad,’ because they’re not going to do it.”

The same factors that have contributed to declining enrollment in the humanities might lead students to spend less time reading in the courses they do take. A 2023 survey of Harvard seniors found that they spend almost as much time on jobs and extracurriculars as they do on academics. And thanks to years of grade inflation (in a recent report, 79 percent of Harvard grades were in the A range), college kids can get by without doing all of their assigned work.

The article goes on like this, getting more and more depressing, and winding up with the consequences of not reading books:

The economic survival of the publishing industry requires an audience willing and able to spend time with an extended piece of writing. But as readers of a literary magazine will surely appreciate, more than a venerable industry is at stake. Books can cultivate a sophisticated form of empathy, transporting a reader into the mind of someone who lived hundreds of years ago, or a person who lives in a radically different context from the reader’s own. “A lot of contemporary ideas of empathy are built on identification, identity politics,” Kahn, the Berkeley professor, said. “Reading is more complicated than that, so it enlarges your sympathies.”

Yet such benefits require staying with a character through their journey; they cannot be approximated by reading a five- or even 30-page excerpt. According to the neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, so-called deep reading—sustained immersion in a text—stimulates a number of valuable mental habits, including critical thinking and self-reflection, in ways that skimming or reading in short bursts does not.

. . . I can imagine worse preparations for the trials, and thrills, of Lit Hum. Riordan’s series, although full of frothy action and sometimes sophomoric humor, also cleverly engages in a literary exercise as old as the Western canon: spinning new adventures for the petulant gods and compromised heroes of Greek mythology. But of course there is a reason that, despite millennia of reinterpretations, we’ve never forgotten the originals. To understand the human condition, and to appreciate humankind’s greatest achievements, you still need to read The Iliad—all of it.

If Horowitch is right in her conclusion—and I think the trend will continue because there is no end in sight of students glued to “devices”—people will lose their skills at relating to other people. I already see signs of this in young people texting instead of phoning. Actually talking to someone is a dying practice, and talking in real time surely leads to better understanding of and communication with other people. Texting is the ultimate condensed reading, even using abbreviations like “BRB” or “l8r”.

Perhaps I sound like an old curmudgeon, but blame it on Horowitch. I myself have gained infinitely from reading, though I won’t claim that it’s made me more empathic or understanding.  All I can say is that it’s made my world richer, with nonfiction being educational and fiction plucking the strings of emotion. It’s also helped teach me to write, for how can you learn to write well without seeing how others have done it. I simply can’t imagine a world built entirely on texting and reading devices.

Right now I’m reading a fiction book so full of emotion and pain that I can’t do more than thirty pages a night. It’s a masterpiece at depicting the human condition. If you’re up for 700 pages, try this one: (clink cover for Amazon link).

And now, I suppose, we should extol reading by telling each other what books we’re reading, or which ones we’ve especially liked.