While you might think of Spam as a basic canned meat, it’s actually one of the greatest business success stories of all time: Since Hormel Foods Corporation launched the affordable, canned pork product in 1937, it’s sold over eight billion cans in 44 countries around the world.
On July 5, Spam celebrates its 82nd anniversary. It’s fitting that this comes only a day after the birthday of the United States. The product is up there with Coca-Cola, McDonald’s and Pizza Hut as one of the most distinctive American brands of all time.
But the ramen currently available in commissaries, sold for 40 to 60 cents a pack, contains dangerous amounts of sodium — between 66 and 72 percent of the daily recommended intake. Those who consume the noodles are more susceptible to health problems such as diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease, all chronic illnesses that affect incarcerated people at significantly higher rates than the general population (an estimated 40 percent of jail and prison inmates reported suffering from persistent health problems).
Describing his incarceration as a wake-up call, Freeman’s focus is on improving the lives of the 2.2 million people in the United States’ jails and prisons while also appealing to the pockets of the government, which pays billions of dollars in correctional health care costs each year.
We’re in a period of atonement for the 1990s. In the last few years, TV series and movies have revisited and revised narratives about the lives of Marcia Clark, Tonya Harding, and Anita Hill. A forthcoming series about Lorena Bobbitt will do the same. Charlie Rose and Matt Lauer, who became fixtures of national news in the 90s, have resigned amid allegations of misconduct. In the wake of #MeToo, Monica Lewinsky reflected on the humiliation that the media and powerful figures inflicted upon her decades ago.
In her trenchant book 90s Bitch: Media, Culture, and the Failed Promise of Gender Equality, Allison Yarrow looks back on that decade with a heightened awareness of sexism and connected forms of discrimination. Yarrow hones in on the 90s because, she says, Americans had assumed that feminist gains of the past several decades would continue. Instead, the 90s brought many disappointments. The press demeaned women who sought influence, and in Victoria’s Secret stores and on the pages of Cosmo, consumerism masqueraded as female empowerment. “The trailblazing women of the 90s were excoriated by a deeply sexist society,” Yarrow writes. “That’s why we remember them as bitches, not victims of sexism.”
There was never any shortage of exclamation points online, nor a shortage of curmudgeons to bemoan their ubiquity. But there were some who welcomed our enthusiastic new punctuation overlords. David Shipley and Will Schwalbe, in their 2007 email etiquette guide Send, were particularly prescient. “The exclamation point is a lazy but effective way to combat email’s essential lack of tone,” they wrote. So long as email failed to convey affect, they predicted, “we will continue to sprinkle exclamation points liberally throughout our emails.”
They were right. Eventually, most people seemed to stop resisting their rise. In 2012, a Boston Globe columnist found himself giving in to the pressure. “I could feel the shame creeping into my fingertips the first few times I started adding this faux emphasis to pleasantries,” he wrote. “Now there is no turning back.”
To say that the 58-year-old guy who created and wrote the sitcom “Everybody Loves Raymond” is now a food travel show host is more than a little unexpected. But at heart, Rosenthal is a foodie in the purest sense of the word. He says things like “goose might be the world’s best meat” and “the fat is the delicious part” and frequently asks servers if they have any Japanese whiskey.
On his first travel food show, “I’ll Have What Phil’s Having,” which aired on PBS in 2015, he traveled to what he likes to call “Earth’s greatest hits”: Tokyo, Paris, Barcelona, Los Angeles, Italy and Hong Kong. When the PBS show wasn’t picked up for a second season, Rosenthal signed a deal with Netflix for 12 episodes of “Somebody Feed Phil.” Carving out his own space in the streaming service’s growing stable of food shows, Rosenthal is fond of telling journalists, “I’m exactly like Anthony Bourdain if he was afraid of everything.”
GDP maps our past, present and future. No wonder this statistic has been dubbed one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century. And yet, what is it exactly? It sounds simple. GDP is the sum of the value of all goods and services produced within a country’s territory without allowing for wear and tear. But this does not count something that is “out there”. What is out there are car factories, the warehouses of online retailers, and fees charged per hour by lawyers and doctors. This means that GDP is something quite abstract, as is “the economy” for which GDP stands. And both are of relatively recent vintage. Until the early 20th century the word “economy” was used to denote frugality, not the economic system which it evokes today. These abstractions have to be made up. They have to be put together by registering millions of acts of highly varied activity and production and incorporating them all into a single sum.
The insight that the economy is “made up” is no longer new. Depending on your intellectual tastes you could credit the idea to Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Polanyi or Michel Foucault. As we come to terms with an environmental crisis, there has been a rash of books about the growth fetish and how to overcome it. David Pilling’s book isn’t the first or the deepest, but it certainly has a claim to being the most engaging and fast paced. In a wonderfully cosmopolitan survey he shows us the work that goes into making up the world economy. He introduces us to Chinese accountants struggling to scrub their numbers of lethal pollution, Nigerian economists trying to count the informal economy, shamefaced British statisticians valuing sex work.