This is Rumplestilskin. He, like the contents of these recaps, is short and evil.
Some shorters:
Maybe Crime's Not Rising, But If Voters Think It Is....
McArdle fact-checks Donald Trump and determines crime is not rising. Then she throws it all in the crapper.
Whatever the underlying reality, people are more concerned about crime than they were a few years back, and as politicians discovered in the 1960s, the public is very sensitive to any perceived increase in public disorder. I suspect that those perceptions have more to do with the riots that have filled our television screens in the last two years than they do with a significant increase in the average American's personal danger of being victimized. But whatever the cause, politicians will have to contend with the effects.
(Corrects when the crime statistics were released in first paragraph.)I left the correction in because it amuses me.
"Whatever the underlying reality" is another keeper. The journalist corrects the record (all the cool kids are doing it) but then ignores reality to blame Black outrage over indiscriminate murder. Of course she believed all the racist propaganda shoved down her throat with a boot, but they're not depraved, they're just culturally deprived.
Affordable Housing Is Easy. In Theory.
You poor people sure are shit out of luck.
The Depression Was Great For The American Kitchen
This one was precious.
I’ve always wanted to read a good account of how American food was transformed by those years, so I was pretty excited when a reader alerted me to "A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Great Depression," by Jane Ziegelman and Andrew Coe.
As someone who has herself published a book, I know that there is no more tedious and dispiriting review than “The author wrote the book they wrote, rather than this completely different book I’d have been much more interested in.” So I’m not going to review the book, other than to say that they have discerned their task pretty narrowly, making it mostly into an account of the inadequacy of food relief efforts during the Depression.Hahaha! "I hate people who do this thing that I am about to do." McArdle really hates to read about capitalism's victims.
Of course McArdle goes on to rhapsodize about kitchen innovation and the wonders of new refrigerators (for those who could afford refrigerators) and frozen food (for those who could afford food).
8 comments:
Depression cooking: adding stale cracker & bread crumbs to scrambled eggs to make them go further. My grandmother told me about that... hey, I have 2 of her scrap-book cook books from that time period.
I'm Thinking of scanning them in... she'd clip recipes and try them out, then rate them with "x's" (more x's the better) or write "UG! Horrible!" Gotta get my daughter to bring the scanner closer to my desk.
Depression cooking: watery, diluted potato soup is what my mom recalls.
Don't forget breast milk.
Refrigerator? Those damn things put my grandfather out of work! He was an ice man in Philadelphia and refrigeration ended his having to climb to 3rd floor walk ups carrying 30-50 pound blocks of ice on his back. My country living relatives still had an ice box in the fifties.
Progress! Ha!
Depression cooking : my grandfather had a good job (paymaster at a meatpacking plant), and his house was two blocks from the railroad tracks. The hoboes put "nice lady" signs to show the way along the alley, because my grandmother always fed any man who came to the back door. Sometimes there were two or three a day. She made a chocolate cake almost every day for ten years, until a postpartum infection from her last birth nearly killed her.
Shorter Shorter McMegan on reviewing McMegan: I wrote a book about continuous failure, and people thought it was autobiographical.
in other (but related) news:
shorter douthat: "Alicia Machado is the same as Trump because she has obviously had more sex than I have"
That was just pathetic.
Ken Heh!
Post a Comment