The Sorensen Monologues

Post-Facebook Privacy Breakthrough

Print journalism has of course never been perfect, and social media can be enlightening (see: #BlackLivesMatter). But sometimes I fantasize about what would happen if everyone turned off cable news and unplugged from Facebook and Twitter, and simply subscribed to a print newspaper. And read their local altweekly, if they’re lucky enough to have one. I suspect America would be a lot less crazy.

Assault on Reason

As we see some news outlets try to portray “both sides” of the school shooting protests, let us remember that “the students don’t understand gun owners or gun culture” is not an argument. It’s just a tired, vacuous insult that does not contribute in any way to the discussion at hand.

Troubled Times

As a longtime loyal New York Times reader, it saddens me to have to critique the paper like this. The Times has always been a mixed bag, but some of their investigative reporting is very good. And really, the country needs a fully functioning New York Times — so we should all be trying to make it better, not destroy it.

That said, they have recently gone down a rabbit hole on their editorial pages. In their hiring decisions and topical obsessions, they have doubled down on a misguided attempt to not appear to have “liberal bias.” For example, they (or whoever specifically makes these decisions) have apparently bought into the hyperbolic, highly-distorting, and relentless Fox News obsession with a small number of overzealous college students as an attempt to smear all progressives. Fox’s game is straight from an authoritarian playbook, attacking academia and academics as the “real threat” to a free society, even as we are in the middle of an actual attempted fascist takeover of the country. (Meanwhile, Trump cozies up to people like Erdogan of Turkey, who literally throw academics in prison and fill populations with a sense of victimization at the hands of intellectuals, teachers, etc.) It’s worth noting that the Times actually hired as an editorial page editor a woman who, as a college student, was known for attacking professors who criticize Israeli state policies toward Palestinians.

Indeed, the Times’ self-righteous condescension towards, and stereotyping of, its own readership seems an awful lot like the attitude it chides “liberals” for displaying towards Trump voters — those saintly, salt-of-the-earth people who are definitely not racist (perish the thought!), and are above reproach.

Here are some suggestions for columnists they could have picked if they valued actual diversity of perspectives, and elevating underheard voices instead of dominant ones:

• • An environmental expert commenting on climate change and the rampant gutting of environmental protections
• • A Muslim, or Palestinian-American, who might talk about the criminally-neglected topic of Palestinian rights
• • A woman of color
• • An immigrant
• • A critic of late capitalism, talking about how to innovate away from its worst excesses and power structures towards a more sustainable system of commerce

The country desperately needs the Times to rise to the occasion and help good people preserve democracy in America. Some readers have canceled their subscriptions, and this may or may not be an effective form of protest. I’m not sure about the best tactics here, but I hope the Times sees the light soon.

Beyond the Paleo

I know a lot of people are going to argue with this one, but you have to admit the caveman thing is getting just a little ridiculous. For example:

Dark chocolate almond coconut nutrition bars… just like early homo sapiens used to eat when they needed an energy boost on the big mastodon hunt!

At the same time that lots of scientific evidence was accumulating about the health benefits of the Mediterranean diet, Americans were embracing the Paleo diet – a diet ridiculed by nutritionists (even back in 2011), and consistently ranked near or at the bottom of expert diet recommendations. Wikipedia provides some criticism of the caveman fantasy. In some ways, Paleo is healthier than Americans’ normal terrible diets (particularly where it intersects with the Mediterranean diet), but that’s thin praise.

So why has it been such a big fad? Part of its popularity probably stems from the fact that meat-eating is encouraged, and the “primal man” narrative has a certain easy-to-grasp truthiness. But also, I suspect because it ties into the macho gender politics, a search for tough-guy authenticity, and conspiracy theorizing (the nutritionists are lying to you!) that have consumed American pop culture and politics for the last twenty years. One might say that Americans chose the wrong diet for many of the same reasons that they chose the wrong president.

Which brings us to the all-meat diet in the third panel, inspired by this fascinating Motherboard article on the trendlet of Bitcoin carnivores. It’s well worth your time!