A Short History of American Money, From Fur to Fiat

Before independence, America's disparate colonial economies struggled with a very material financial hang-up: there just wasn't enough money to go around. Colonial governments attempted to solve this problem by using tobacco, nails, and animal pelts for currency, assigning them a set amount of shillings or pennies so that they could intermix with the existing system.

The most successful ad hoc currency was wampum, a particular kind of bead made from the shells of ocean critters. But eventually the value of this currency, like that of other alternative currencies of the day, was undermined by oversupply and counterfeiting. (That's right: counterfeit wampum. They were produced by dyeing like-shaped shells with berry juice, mimicking the purple color of the real thing.)

It was a crew of Puritans from Boston who first put their faith in paper. Initially, the Massachusetts Bay Colony tried to issue colonial coinage. The pieces themselves, struck in 1652, were made from a mash-up of poor-quality silver and were soon outlawed by the Brits. Less than a decade later the colonists tried again. They were forced to, really, because they owed money to the crown to help fund Britain's war against France, yet lacked any currency with which to pay up. They called the paper "bills of credit." The local government essentially said to the people: Here, just use this. It's real money. We'll sort out redeemability later.

There were endless debates, from prairie farmlands to the floor of Congress, about whether this paper was real money or just a smoke-and-mirrors scheme destined to end badly. In the United States that dispute, between the fear of paper and the advantages of national currency, would rage for more than a century, and it is even front and center in the Constitution.

During the Continental Congress, the founding fathers deliberately forbid the nascent federal government from issuing "bills of credit." Paper money, one delegate noted, was "as alarming as the Mark of the Beast." The federal government was, however, granted authority "to coin money, regulate the value thereof ... and fit the standard of weights and measure."

by David Wolman, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Deep Freeze Spreads Across Europe

The frigid weather that plagued Eastern Europe much of last week spread westward over the weekend, grounding flights, snarling traffic, and causing hundreds of deaths. While the subzero temperatures and heavy snowfalls have brought hardship, residents of some areas were able to take advantage of the conditions for skating, sledding, kite surfing, and other winter pastimes. Meteorologists warn that more blizzards may be hitting the region, and state officials, shelters, and aid organizations are preparing to help even more people in need. Gathered here are images of frozen Europe from the past several days. [40 photos]
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Patti Smith

by Aleksandra Perovic
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Making Over the Mall

Cleveland’s Galleria at Erieview, like many malls across the country, is suffering. Closed on weekends because there are so few visitors, it is down to eight retail stores, eight food-court vendors and a couple of businesses like the local bar association.

So part of the glass-covered mall is being converted into a vegetable garden.

“I look at it as space, I don’t look at it as retail,” said Vicky Poole, a Galleria executive. “You can’t anymore.”

Malls, over the last 50 years, have gone from the community center in some cities to a relic of the way people once wanted to shop. While malls have faced problems in the past, the Internet is now pulling even more sales away from them. And as retailers crawl out of the worst recession since the advent of malls, many are realizing they are overbuilt and are closing locations at a fast clip.

The result is near-record vacancy rates at malls of all kinds, both the big enclosed ones and the sprawling strips. Sears Holdings is closing up to 120 stores, Gap Inc. 200 stores and Talbots 110. Abercrombie & Fitch closed 50 stores last year, Hot Topic, almost the same number. Chains that have filed for bankruptcy in recent years, like Blockbuster, Anchor Blue, Circuit City and Borders, have left hundreds of stores lying vacant in malls across the country.

Most cities, looking at shrinking budgets, cannot afford to subsidize or knock down ailing malls, and healthy retailers that are expanding — like H&M and Nordstrom Rack — generally will not open at depressed locations. So, as though they were upholstering polyester chairs from the 1960s with Martha Stewart fabric, urban planners and community activists are trying to spruce up and rethink the uses of many of the artifacts.

Schools, medical clinics, call centers, government offices and even churches are now standard tenants in malls. By hanging a curtain to hide the food court, the Galleria in Cleveland, which opened in 1987 with about 70 retailers and restaurants, rents space for weddings and other events. Other malls have added aquariums, casinos and car showrooms. (...)

Even at many malls that continue to thrive, developers are redesigning them as town squares — adding elements like dog parks and putting greens, creating street grids that go through the malls, and restoring natural elements like creeks that were originally paved over.

“Basically they’re building the downtowns that the suburbs never had,” along with reworking abandoned urban malls for nonshopping uses, said Ellen Dunham-Jones, a professor at the College of Architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

by  Stephanie Clifford, NY Times |  Read more:
Photo: David Maxwell

West Loop Wash (Square) (2008) by Brad Gillette (bgilletephoto.com)
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Playing the Piano

There is an old proverb that goes “Play the piano daily and stay sane.” For me, the main word of this proverb is daily. Playing the piano daily means inevitable accomplishment, and, without a sense of accomplishment, life is an impoverished journey.

Machines have taken us away from our hands. In his last days, Rachmaninoff continually practiced a composition he never performed. One of his last statements was: “Farewell, my dear hands.” Today, we are starved for a deep contact with our hands. The poet Edward Dahlberg felt “our hands are already very stupid and morose. What can we do with them? What do we do with them?” Let’s get back to our hands—they are craving good work. At one time, the terms “handmade” and “handcrafted” meant a great deal. In schools, the young are no longer taught to write in script. Handwriting provided the first glimpse of individuality. What a thrill to see our beloved’s handwriting in a letter. And what of drawing, once an essential form of education? Painting and drawing are no longer common practice. Goethe, sickened by the Babel of words, counseled, “Let us draw, instead of talk.”

There is wisdom, so I say, let us play the piano. Non-verbal music reaches into the depths of the unconscious. There is nothing so satisfactory for our hands—physically, sensuously, and artistically—as playing the piano. Nothing compares to the satisfaction of playing a small piece of Bach or Schumann. If you can’t play a Bach invention perfectly, or even imperfectly, try to do it, and you will come to agree with me. The path to such an achievement asks for focus, discipline, attention, a delicate sense of touch, musical feeling, and more. Good practicing is meditation without the mantra. When you commune with Bach or Schubert, you can reach the heights of Mount Parnassus, where the atmosphere is rarified.

Almost everyone is musical. Music is an actual bodily need. Another saying goes “If something is worth doing, it is worth doing well,” but I disagree. Like Chesterton, I feel that if something is worth doing, it is worth doing even badly. Playing the piano is not something to be graded. Adults should take it up the moment they feel the need to play music. As a matter of course, children should be given lessons without pressure. Playing the piano should be an act without material value. It must be a road of discovery, a trackless territory, and never a means of showing off. The piano won’t serve the ego’s craving for recognition.

When I was a student, I had an adult who studied with me. The man was gifted in a number of ways. He took his lessons seriously and worked hard. After about two years, when he thought he had mastered a group of compositions, he could not resist showing off. He rented a small hall and a Steinway and invited a large group of friends. I told him that this was a mistake, as he had no idea what kind of super-mastery was needed to play in public. He was a self-absorbed, flamboyant character who thought he could pull it off with his usual flair, as he did with his acting and dancing.

In the green room before the little concert, he was stunned to find his legs and hands shaking beyond control. Still, he went out to face his audience and made a complete fool of himself, flailing in every piece. The next day, he called me angrily, saying that he was quitting; he didn’t love the piano, he told me. I told him I thought that was a good idea. I never saw him again. His narcissism excluded the possibility of properly loving music. The piano is not only a severe taskmaster, it asks that you possess character. If you have the temerity to play publicly, you are all alone, and the way you perform and your preparation tells a great deal about who you are. In a clash of wills, the piano will always win. Robert Schumann wrote, “The hearing of masterworks of different epochs will speediest of all cure you of vanity and self-adoration.” Playing the piano teaches one much, especially humility.

by David Dubal, The New Criterion |  Read more:
Image via: Wikitionary

The Virgin Father

Trent Arsenault was in the Borg Cube when he heard the knock. “Trent,” his father called through the door. The Borg, tucked into a canyon southeast of San Francisco, consists of a modest two-­bedroom ranch house plus a few tents Trent has erected in the backyard. It’s a warren of floor-to-ceiling modular shelving built to hold all of Trent’s worldly property, which he stores in 800 bins weighing 24,000 pounds. In what was designed to be the living room, a Tempur-Pedic adjustable bed is situated within the shelving units, and an identical second bed next to the first serves as a workstation, with swing-out hospital trays for a desk.

A flat-screen TV is mounted face down, directly over Trent’s pillow, and another is mounted in his shower. Wires snake everywhere. A hose system on a timer automatically refills the birdbaths outside. Behind the house, near a lemon tree, a 50-foot antenna collects radio-­astronomy data from solar flares and broadcasts Trent’s ham-radio signal. Inside, there is a low, near-constant murmur of electronic machinery: radio static, conference-call chatter from Trent’s IT security work, digital chimes, a dulcet computer voice announcing Trent’s next appointment. It is an elaborate system, and it reminds Trent, in a good way, of the devouring cybernetic empire in Star Trek. “The more complex the better.”

“Trent,” his father said. He knocked again. “Trent, are you in there?”

This was last March. Trent hadn’t seen his father in almost a year. For months, he hadn’t responded to his parents’ calls and letters, and at first they hadn’t known why. They hadn’t known that in 2006, Trent hung out a shingle on the Internet and became a do-it-yourself sperm donor, giving his semen away to whoever asked. He was part of a growing movement of peer-to-peer sperm donation that bypassed regulated banks, and in some cases dropped the customary anonymity, but Trent went further, offering unusual transparency by posting records on his website, including STD-test results, his driver’s license, family photos, and a link to his Facebook page. The FDA, having learned what Trent was up to—he suspected a local sperm bank had tipped off the agency—launched an investigation, eventually filing a “cease manufacture” order. Trent had become consumed with the FDA action and avoided informing his parents. “I became unreachable to my family for a while,” he says.

Trent’s father, Reverend Charles Arsenault, is a leading minister in the Assemblies of God, the world’s largest Pentecostal church. Eventually, Charles and his wife, Lillian, who live in Springfield, Missouri, turned to the Internet to find information about their son, and Lillian discovered his sperm-donor website. They sent more letters, by certified mail, expressing love for their child but taking an increasingly reproachful tone. Last March, his mother wrote of “the consequences of such depravatory giving of one’s seed to unknown and most likely degenerate individuals.” Trent had “dishonored and humiliated” the family, and his only hope was to “truly repent and embrace the precepts of the Bible.”

Trent didn’t respond to that one, either. Soon after, his father flew to California, drove to Trent’s home in the town of Fremont, and knocked on his son’s door. Trent, lying on his work bed, didn’t answer. His father sat for a while in his car out front, then left. He returned in the evening, but again Trent didn’t answer. He wanted to spend time with his father. He knew his father had traveled from Missouri just to see him. But … “I just knew that if I talked to him, it could talk me out of everything that I was doing.”

When Trent was 16, he and his best friend made a pact to devote their lives to science and never to marry. “Like most of our wild plans at the time, it was Trent’s idea,” this friend remembers. “I went along for entertainment’s sake. It was simply this zit-faced, socially awkward, nerdy teenager’s excuse for not having to ask out the girls I liked.” In other words, it was the sort of vow that teenagers make and soon forget, except that eighteen years later, when FDA agents showed up on his porch in August 2010, Trent was a well-paid computer-security engineer at Hewlett-Packard and a 34-year-old virgin. He was also, by that point, the father of ten children. The government was not happy about how Trent had pulled this off.

But if the FDA hoped, by intervening, to save America from someone it viewed as a dangerous rogue breeder, its action did more to set back its cause than it could possibly have imagined, turning Trent into something of a poster boy for an entire generation of new DIY donors. The showdown between man and state on the free-sperm frontier drew predictable media interest, mostly mocking and outraged, which in turn generated considerable outreach from strangers, almost all overwhelmingly supportive. Since appearing on various television news programs, Trent has received hundreds of encouraging e-mails, and he’s closing in on 2,000 Facebook friends. Someone recently formed a new Facebook group called Free Sperm Donors, mimicking Trent’s eschewal of anonymity, and a similar new organization called the Known Donor Registry has quickly attracted more than 5,000 members.

by Benjamin Wallace, New York |  Read more:
Photo: Katy Grannan

Rosebud (by Charlotte Abramow)
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We Turn Ourselves Into Media Creations

We are living through a vast cognitive shift: Information has turned from a scarce resource into an abundant feature of life. Lars Mensel spoke with Nicholas Carr about advantages of the printed page, the erosion of contemplation and how information helped our ancestors survive.

The European: A study published around the advent of the railroad warned that traveling at speeds exceeding 30 km/h might harm the brain. The internet age is also relatively young – is it a danger to our mode of thinking?

Carr: The fear of physical motion is very different than the internet’s affect on our tools of collecting and analyzing information; we need to look at the internet on its own merits. I think the internet and computers are something very different in the human world: There’s never been a technology people have used so persistently throughout the entire course of the day to aid them in making sense of the world, thinking and in making judgements and decisions. That has become particularly important in the last years with the spread of mobile devices. Even comparing the internet to earlier, broadly used media like radio and television, our relationship with our computers is more intimate, more persistent and therefore more influential over our moment-to-moment thought processes.

The European: Is that because of the technology’s omnipresence or rather the way we engage with it? You have described how the immersion of browsing the web can’t be compared to that of reading a book.

Carr: If you watch a person using the net, you see a kind of immersion: Often they are very oblivious to what is going on around them. But it is a very different kind of attentiveness than reading a book. In the case of a book, the technology of the printed page focuses our attention and encourages a linear type of thinking. In contrast, the internet seizes our attention only to scatter it. We are immersed because there’s a constant barrage of stimuli coming at us and we seem to be very much seduced by that kind of constantly changing patterns of visual and auditorial stimuli. When we become immersed in our gadgets, we are immersed in a series of distractions rather than a sustained, focused type of thinking.

The European: And yet one can fall down the rabbit hole of Wikipedia; spending hours going from one article to the other, clicking each link that seems interesting.
Carr: It is important to realize that it is no longer just hyperlinks: You have to think of all aspects of using the internet. There are messages coming at us through email, instant messenger, SMS, tweets etc. We are distracted by everything on the page, the various windows, the many applications running. You have to see the entire picture of how we are being stimulated. If you compare that to the placidity of a printed page, it doesn’t take long to notice that the experience of taking information from a printed page is not only different but almost the opposite from taking in information from a network-connected screen. With a page, you are shielded from distraction. We underestimate how the page encourages focussed thinking – which I don’t think is normal for human beings – whereas the screen indulges our desire to be constantly distracted.

The European: How do you weigh the advantages of accumulating information against the distraction we talked about?

Carr: There’s no question that the internet offers all sorts of benefits – that is the reason why we use it so much. It is an incredibly powerful and useful technology that makes all sorts of information immediately available to us. Things that used to be impossible, hard or expensive to find are now right there. And we all know how to improve our ability to make decisions with it. But accompanying that, incredibly, is the fact that we become so intent on gathering information that we never slow down and think deeply about the information we find. We gain the ability to harvest huge amounts of data but we lose the ability to engage in contemplation, reflexion and other modes of thinking that require a large amount of attentiveness and the ability to filter out distractions and disruptions. You can’t separate the good and the bad: We gain something important but we sacrifice something important as well.

by Nicholas Carr, The European |  Read more:

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We're all in the same boat - aren't we?

At every moment there are hundreds of thousands of Americans and Europeans floating around the world on "Funships" - superliners like the Costa Concordia that crashed and capsized off the coast of Italy.

These ships are extraordinary creations, millions of ordinary people pay not very much to spend weeks in an offworld pleasure bubble, surrounded by vast replicas of pictures and architecture from the glories of past civilizations.

I want to tell the story of the rise of the modern cruise ship industry from its beginning in the 1960s - how it promised to make a world of aristocratic luxury available to everyone in the west, but also the hidden story of how that promise was achieved.

In many cruise ships there are hundreds of workers from some of the poorest countries on earth who are paid minute amounts of actual wages - sometimes less than two dollars a day - to attend to the passengers' needs.

Many of the ships' workers can only get a living wage on the whim of the thousands of passengers above them - on the tips they choose to give them. And in the strange fun-world of the superliners the waiters, the cabin staff, the cooks and everyone else who serves, live in a state of continual vulnerability - unprotected by most of the employment laws that apply on land. Meanwhile many of the companies that own the vast ships pay practically no tax at all.

But it wasn't always supposed to be like that.

The biggest company in the cruising world is the Carnival Corporation, based in Miami (the Costa Concordia is owned by one of their subsidiaries). Carnival has its roots in a small company set up in the 1960s which had a utopian vision that cruise liners could transform the world. One of its founders believed that the giant ships were machines that could help bring about a new era of world peace.

The liners would, he was convinced, unite the rich westerners and the poor from the "third world' by bringing tourists to new and remote destinations. This would foster a new enlightened understanding of each other that would bring about equality and justice throughout the world.

But it didn't turn out like that. And this is the story of what happened - and how the very opposite resulted.

It is also the story in miniature of one of the central consumer phenomenons of our time: the democratisation of luxury. How one half of the world all began to live as though they were aristocrats, while the other half became their servants. And how this allowed the real elite aristocrats of our time - who had become wealthier than any group ever before in history - to disappear, and become invisible.

by Adam Curtis, BBC |  Read more:

Homecoming

Photos: markk

The Trees are Dancers by a Moon Shaped Rock by Raja Daja
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Welcome to Cancerland

[ed. The decision this week by the Susan G. Komen Foundation to deny, then reinstate funding for Planned Parenthood prompted many to take a closer look at the organization and who's behind it. Here's an excellent article by Barbara Ehrenreich from 2001.]

Fortunately, no one has to go through this alone. Thirty years ago, before Betty Ford, Rose Kushner, Betty Rollin, and other pioneer patients spoke out, breast cancer was a dread secret, endured in silence and euphemized in obituaries as a "long illness." Something about the conjuncture of "breast," signifying sexuality and nurturance, and that other word, suggesting the claws of a devouring crustacean, spooked almost everyone. Today however, it's the biggest disease on the cultural map, bigger than AIDS, cystic fibrosis, or spinal injury, bigger even than those more prolific killers of women -- heart disease, lung cancer, and stroke. There are roughly hundreds of websites devoted to it, not to mention newsletters, support groups, a whole genre of first-person breast-cancer books; even a glossy, upper-middle-brow, monthly magazine, Mamm. There are four major national breast-cancer organizations, of which the mightiest, in financial terms, is The Susan G. Komen Foundation, headed by breast-cancer veteran and Bush's nominee for ambassador to Hungary Nancy Brinker. Komen organizes the annual Race for the Cure©, which attracts about a million people -- mostly survivors, friends, and family members. Its website provides a microcosm of the new breast-cancer culture, offering news of the races, message boards for accounts of individuals' struggles with the disease, and a "marketplace" of breast-cancer-related products to buy.

More so than in the case of any other disease, breast-cancer organizations and events feed on a generous flow of corporate support. Nancy Brinker relates how her early attempts to attract corporate interest in promoting breast cancer "awareness" were met with rebuff. A bra manufacturer, importuned to affix a mammogram-reminder tag to his product, more or less wrinkled his nose. Now breast cancer has blossomed from wallflower to the most popular girl at the corporate charity prom. While AIDS goes begging and low-rent diseases like tuberculosis have no friends at all, breast cancer has been able to count on Revlon, Avon, Ford, Tiffany, Pier 1, Estee Lauder, Ralph Lauren, Lee Jeans, Saks Fifth Avenue, JC Penney, Boston Market, Wilson athletic gear -- and I apologize to those I've omitted. You can "shop for the cure" during the week when Saks donates 2 percent of sales to a breast-cancer fund; "wear denim for the cure" during Lee National Denim Day, when for a $5 donation you get to wear blue jeans to work. You can even "invest for the cure," in the Kinetics Assets Management's new no-load Medical Fund, which specializes entirely in businesses involved in cancer research.

If you can't run, bike, or climb a mountain for the cure -- all of which endeavors are routine beneficiaries of corporate sponsorship -- you can always purchase one of the many products with a breast cancer theme. There are 2.2 million American women in various stages of their breast-cancer careers, who, along with anxious relatives, make up a significant market for all things breast-cancer-related. Bears, for example: I have identified four distinct lines, or species, of these creatures, including "Carol," the Remembrance Bear; "Hope," the Breast Cancer Research Bear, which wears a pink turban as if to conceal chemotherapy-induced baldness; the "Susan Bear," named for Nancy Brinker's deceased sister, Susan; and the new Nick & Nora Wish Upon a Star Bear, available, along with the Susan Bear, at the Komen Foundation website's "marketplace."

And bears are only the tip, so to speak, of the cornucopia of pink-ribbon-themed breast-cancer products. You can dress in pink-beribboned sweatshirts, denim shirts, pajamas, lingerie, aprons, loungewear, shoelaces, and socks; accessorize with pink rhinestone brooches, angel pins, scarves, caps, earrings, and bracelets; brighten up your home with breast-cancer candles, stained-glass pink-ribbon candleholders, coffee mugs, pendants, wind chimes, and night-lights; pay your bills with special BreastChecks or a separate line of Checks for the Cure. "Awareness" beats secrecy and stigma of course, but I can't help noticing that the existential space in which a friend has earnestly advised me to "confront [my] mortality" bears a striking resemblance to the mall.

This is not, I should point out, a case of cynical merchants exploiting the sick. Some of the breast-cancer tchotchkes and accessories are made by breast-cancer survivors themselves, such as "Janice," creator of the "Daisy Awareness Necklace," among other things, and in most cases a portion of the sales goes to breast-cancer research. Virginia Davis of Aurora, Colorado, was inspired to create the "Remembrance Bear" by a friend's double mastectomy and sees her work as more of a "crusade" than a business. This year she expects to ship 10,000 of these teddies, which are manufactured in China, and send part of the money to the Race for the Cure. If the bears are infantilizing -- as I try ever so tactfully to suggest is how they may, in rare cases, be perceived -- so far no one has complained. "I just get love letters," she tells me, "from people who say, 'God bless you for thinking of us.'"

The ultrafeminine theme of the breast-cancer "marketplace" -- the prominence, for example, of cosmetics and jewelry -- could be understood as a response to the treatments' disastrous effects on one's looks. But the infantilizing trope is a little harder to account for, and teddy bears are not its only manifestation. A tote bag distributed to breast cancer patients by the Libby Ross Foundation (through places such as the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center) contains, among other items, a tube of Estee Lauder Perfumed Body Crème, a hot-pink satin pillowcase, an audiotape "Meditation to Help You with Chemotherapy," a small tin of peppermint pastilles, a set of three small inexpensive rhinestone bracelets, a pink-striped "journal and sketch book," and -- somewhat jarringly -- a small box of crayons. Marla Willner, one of the founders of the Libby Ross Foundation, told me that the crayons "go with the journal -- for people to express different moods, different thoughts. . ." though she admitted she has never tried to write with crayons herself. Possibly the idea is that regression to a state of childlike dependency puts one in the best frame of mind with which to endure the prolonged and toxic treatments. Or it may be that, in some versions of the prevailing gender ideology, femininity is by its nature incompatible with full adulthood -- a state of arrested development. Certainly men diagnosed with prostate cancer do not receive gifts of Matchbox cars.

by Barbara Ehrenreich  |  Read more:

Photos: markk

Charlotte Gainsbourg

Atomic Bread Baking at Home

When Hana enters the small bakery I have borrowed for a day, I am dividing a loaf into 1.5-centimeter slices. The loaf's tranches articulate a white fanned deck, each one the exact counterpart of its fellows. The bread is smooth and uniform, like a Bauhaus office block. There are no unneeded flourishes or swags. Each symmetrical slice shines so white it is almost blue. This is a work of modern art. My ten-year-old daughter does not pause to say hello. She rushes to the cutting board, aghast, and blurts, "Its fake!" Then she devours a piece in three bites, and asks for more.

I have just spent a day re-creating the iconic loaf of 1950s-era soft white industrial bread, using easily acquired ingredients and home kitchen equipment. With the help of a 1956 government report detailing a massive, multiyear attempt to formulate the perfect loaf of white bread, achieving that re-creation proved relatively easy. Until Hana's arrival, however, I did not fully understand why I was doing it. I had sensed that extracting this industrial miracle food of yesteryear from the dustbin of kitsch might have something to teach about present-day efforts to change the food system; that it might offer perspective on our own confident belief that artisanal eating can restore health, rebuild community, and generally save the world. But, really, it was reactions like Hana's that I wanted to understand. How can a food be so fake and yet so eagerly eaten, so abhorred and so loved?

Sliced white bread as we know it today is the product of early twentieth-century streamlined design. It is the Zephyr train of food. But, in the American imagination, industrial loaves are more typically associated with the late '50s and early '60s—the Beaver Cleaver days of Baby Boomer nostalgia, the Golden Age of Wonder Bread. This is not without justification: during the late '50s and early '60s, Americans ate a lot of it. Across race, class, and generational divides, Americans consumed an average of a pound and a half of white bread per person, every week. Indeed, until the late '60s, Americans got from 25 to 30 percent of their daily calories from the stuff, more than from any other single item in their diet (and far more than any single item contributes to the American diet today—even high-fructose corn syrup).

Only a few years earlier, however, as world war morphed into cold war, the future of industrial bread looked uncertain. On the cusp of the Wonder years, Americans still ate enormous quantities of bread, but, even so, government officials and baking-industry experts worried that bread would lose its central place on the American table. In a world of rising prosperity and exciting new processed foods, the Zephyr train of food looked a bit tarnished. And so, in 1952, hoping to offset possible declines in bread consumption, the U.S. Department of Agriculture teamed up with baking-industry scientists to launch the Manhattan Project of bread.

Conceived as an intensive panoramic investigation of the country's bread-eating habits, the project had ambitious goals: First, gain a precise, scientific understanding of exactly how much and what kind of bread Americans ate, when and why they ate it, and what they thought about it. Second, use that information to engineer the perfect loaf of white bread—a model for all industrial white bread to come.

by Aaron Bobrow-Strain, The Believer |  Read more:

Colbert v. the Court

The Supreme Court has always had its critics. Chief Justice John Marshall had to contend with the temper of President Andrew Jackson (“John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it!”). And Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes went toe-to-toe with FDR, who wouldn’t let up with the court-packing. But in the history of the Supreme Court, nothing has ever prepared the justices for the public opinion wrecking ball that is Stephen Colbert. The comedian/presidential candidate/super PAC founder has probably done more to undermine public confidence in the court’s 2010 Citizens United opinion than anyone, including the dissenters. In this contest, the high court is supremely outmatched.

Citizens United, with an assist from a 1976 decision Buckley v. Valeo, has led to the farce of unlimited corporate election spending, “uncoordinated” super PACs that coordinate with candidates, and a noxious round of attack ads, all of which is protected in the name of free speech. Colbert has been educating Americans about the resulting insanity for months now. His broadside against the court raises important questions about satire and the court, about protecting the dignity of the institution, and the role of modern media in public discourse. Also: The fight between Colbert and the court is so full of ironies, it can make your molars hurt.

When President Obama criticized Citizens United two years ago in his State of the Union address, at least three justices came back at him with pitchforks and shovels. In the end, most court watchers scored it a draw. But when a comedian with a huge national platform started ridiculing the court last summer, the stakes changed completely. This is no pointy-headed deconstruction unspooling on the legal blogs. Colbert has spent the past few months making every part of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion in Citizen United look utterly ridiculous. And the court, which has no access to cameras (by its own choosing), no press arm, and no discernible comedic powers, has had to stand by and take it on the chin.

It all started when Colbert announced that, as permitted by Citizens United, he planned to form a super PAC (“Making a better tomorrow, tomorrow”). As he explained to his viewers, his hope was that “Colbert Nation could have a voice, in the form of my voice, shouted through a megaphone made of cash ... the American dream. And that dream is simple. That anyone, no matter who they are, if they are determined, if they are willing to work hard enough, someday they could grow up to create a legal entity which could then receive unlimited corporate funds, which could be used to influence our elections."

by Dahlia Lithwick, Slate |  Read more:
Photograph by Richard Ellis/Getty Images.

Colored Pencil Studs Earrings
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