“How did humans manage to choose foods and stay healthy before there were nutrition experts and food pyramids or breakfast cereals promising to improve your child’s focus or restaurant portions bigger than your head? We relied on culture, which is another way of saying: on the accumulated wisdom of the tribe. (Which is itself another way of saying: on your mom and your friends.) All of us carry around rules of thumb about eating that have been passed down in our families or plucked from the cultural conversation. Think of this body of food knowledge as samizdat nutrition: an informal, unsanctioned way of negotiating our eating lives that becomes indispensable at a time when official modes of talking about food have suffered a serious loss of credibility.”
2. “In Polanski Case, ’70s Culture Collides With Today”
“In an extraordinary bow toward his reputation as a filmmaker, and the supposed difficulty of adjusting to life in the United States, the report said: ‘Possibly not since Renaissance Italy has there been such a gathering of creative minds in one locale as there has been in Los Angeles County during the past half century. While enriching the community with their presence, they have brought with them the manners and mores of their native lands which in rare instances have been at variance with those of their adoptive land.’”
3. “How Iago Explains the World”
“In 21st-century America, the quest for openness, so often pursued in the name of democracy, can lead to the violation of a sacred democratic principle: the right to privacy.”
4. “Whispering to Rottweilers, and to C.E.O.’s”
“‘I’ve been in the business 30-some years, and I’ve met three people who had that kind of magic. One was Jacques Cousteau. One was Jim Henson. And the third is Cesar.’”
“Emotions are the one thing Dan Brown can’t seem to decipher. His sex scenes are encrypted. Even though Katherine seems like Langdon’s soul mate — she even knows how to weigh souls — their most torrid sex scenes consist of Robert winking at her or flashing her a lopsided grin.”
“As the nation’s highest-profile commentator on language, he inevitably drew the most flak — both from traditionalists who found him insufficiently stern and from scholars who took him to task for his analytical shortcomings. His abiding strength, however, was an openness to critique. In 1981, after the poet Jim Quinn and the linguist Dwight Bolinger published books critical of Safire’s brand of language punditry, he took no umbrage and instead invited them to write guest columns.”
“There’s a political angle (corn subsidies), an authenticity angle (it’s processed, very pervasive and just sounds industrial) and a paranoid angle (the entertaining conspiracy theory that the 1985 New Coke fiasco was an intentional failure, orchestrated to distract consumers from an ingredient switch in Coke Classic). The upshot is the curious celebration of sugar as natural and desirable.”
