“How old do you think I’ll be when I have my first kiss?” Ryan asked during dinner.
I put down my salad fork and turned to look at my son.
My eleven-year-old son.
“What’s the rush?” I asked.
Recently, while driving through the town where I live, I noticed a sign at a new restaurant. “EAT WELL BE TRUE,” the sign said. I was confused, at first. “Eat well be true?” What does that even mean?
Then I became angry. Why was some random restaurant in my own hometown telling me how to live? On the rare occasion that I do require input on how life should be lived, after all, it is to close friends that I turn, not restaurants — or department stores, or bikini wax clinics, or even the local Jiffy Lube.
There is no denying that Paris-based journalist Elaine Sciolino is a badass. As part of her encyclopedic research for her new book, “The Seine: The River That Made Paris,” the former Paris bureau chief for the New York Times, 70, stripped down to her undies and jumped into the Seine about 125 miles southeast of Paris on a July day. The water was less than 60 degrees.
You could call it immersive journalism. Because, let’s face it, there’s nothing like an American in Paris to truly enthuse over every aspect of France, its beautiful Seine and all things French, no matter how frigid.
Historians have often cast the story of cigarettes in 20th-century America in epochal terms. Smoking, as that narrative goes, insidiously afflicted public health and life expectancy decade after decade through the 1960s, after which it was gradually banished by the light of science. The stories within this narrative are familiar: elite conspiracies against the public; the struggle for truth in science and policy; popular consumer products secretly delivering dependence and death.
We know those stories well. But in her new book, The Cigarette: A Political History, Sarah Milov tells a different story — or, more accurately, several different ones. She delivers not a singular epic, but descriptions of historical episodes that function like well-observed, interconnected short stories, each untangling a unique aspect of the tobacco industry’s embeddedness in the United States’s political economy. By the end, the clear outlines of the old epic’s heroes and villains are considerably hazier.
“Goliath” retells the history of the last century as the rise and fall of populism itself. (In Stoller’s view, populism means opposing monopoly and is synonymous with democracy. Indeed, early versions of the book swapped those words in the subtitle.) Largely skimming over the agrarian politics of the late 19th century, Stoller argues that populist anti-monopolists emerged as an intellectual force during Brandeis and Wilson’s time before ousting the plutocrats during the New Deal in the 1930s. The result, briefly, was what Stoller calls a “democracy of small business” by the 1950s.
Within a few decades, however, the monopolists were back, and Americans lost sight of their once-proud anti-monopoly tradition. By the 1970s, liberals robustly embraced the regulatory state while Chicago-school conservatives promised neoliberal market-based solutions to every social problem. Cut from both sides, antitrust law no longer sought to prevent market power or promote competition, but rather simply to keep consumer prices low. Antitrust suits against IBM, AT&T and Microsoft, while splashy, did little to stem the tide of concentration.