It’s a macroeconomics truism that rising GDP is generally correlated with rising life expectancy, but the US is an exception to that rule. A 2017 UN report on extreme poverty in the US explained that inequality here is so great that a lot of Americans effectively live in a much poorer country. One key example the report cited was the lack of proper sewage and sanitation systems in the Black Belt. This week, the New Yorker profiles the followup efforts and the overall public health impact of poverty. It’s not a happy story at all. The solution isn’t quite as simple as laying some pipe (provisioning municipal sewer service to rural areas is impossibly expensive; the soil in the area is incompatible with many standard septic systems; sanitation is only one part of the ongoing public health disaster) but it’s a web of problems the US knows how to solve and just prefers not to.
We Need to Talk About Kyle
Kyle Rittenhouse, charged with two murders, is out on $2 million bail, with major contributions from right-wing celebrities. He does not, however, have a product endorsement from his favorite brand of right-wing militant coffee (yes, right-wing coffee is a thing now). People thought he did, though, because right after getting out of jail, he was featured in a photo wearing a Black Rifle Coffee t-shirt, embracing a right-wing influencer/podcaster who does have an advertising relationship with Black Rifle Coffee. The tactical coffee company had to issue a statement disavowing Rittenhouse, and …. well, some people got angry that their breakfast beverage does not sufficiently endorse vigilante gunfire.
Rittenhouse actually seems to have a great deal of support from the right, including a major endorsement from Florida State Representative Anthony Sabatini. Sabatini, interestingly, says that abortion is bad because it’s murder, but killing leftist protesters is just dandy. So, remember, fetuses are people, but leftists aren’t.
One of my favorite stock photo clichés turned niche internet phenomena is “women laughing alone with salad.” It’s great. KnowYourMeme explains the turn from showing up an awful lot in boring stock photography to a viral Hairpin blog post to, I am not kidding, a theatrical adaptation. In news coverage of the play, author Sheila Callaghan told the Washington Post that “nobody likes salad that much; it’s not built for that.”
But there is always an exception! And someone does in fact love salad that much! Her name is Emily Nunn, she’s an author who’s written about food for the New Yorker and Chicago Tribune, and in addition to her book-length projects produces a weekly newsletter called The Department of Salad. It’s delicious!
We’ve previously compared the current US situation with the decline and fall of the USSR (teetering gerontocracy, shortages and bread lines, quagmire in Afghanistan…) but here’s Noah Smith last year comparing it to the 1990s in Japan.
What is a coup? It’s literally a blow, a strike. Someone hitting your normal processes of government, trying to knock them over. The blow doesn’t have to succeed. It still wounds. In our case it was occupying Parliament without a majority. In yours it’s denying the President-Elect after an election. Whether it fails or not, deep structural damage is done. At the time, however, it just feels dumb. …. You can just roll it back, right? Right? No. No no no. Oh God no. The tragic thing which you do not understand — which you cannot understand — is that you’ve already lost. You cannot know exactly what — that’s the nature of chaos — but know this. You will lose more than you can bear.
He closes his grim warning with a wish that we Americans get the benefit of the only thing that has kept him and his family safe so far: luck.
Secretly Ironic 