January 12, 2018

From Harper's:

An anthropologist examined the ethics of allowing lab monkeys to watch so much TV.

From Harper's:

Describing American goat cheese requires thirty-nine flavor attributes, including waxy, sweaty, and goaty, whereas describing the odor of antique books in the library of St. Paul’s Cathedral requires twenty-one olfactory attributes, including woody, medicinal, and bread.

From The Economist:

Academics at Oxford University have shown that although women still do more housework than men, the gap has narrowed everywhere. In 1974 British women cleaned, cooked and laundered for 172 hours a year more than men. By 2005 they were putting in only 74 hours more. In America, the difference between the time married working women and men spent doing housework each day fell from 38 to 28 minutes between 2003-06 and 2011-15.

From The New York Times (Niall Ferguson on "Which books do you think capture the current social and political moment in America?"):

I shared the widespread enthusiasm for J. D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy” last year, but the must-read book for Trump’s election and presidency remains Charles Murray’s astonishingly prescient “Coming Apart.” I wish the contemptible “students” who disrupted his lecture at Middlebury College earlier this year — not one of whom I’ll bet had ever read a word of his — would read “Coming Apart” and then look in the mirror and realize: “Oh God, I’m a member of that loathsome coastal cognitive elite that is completely out of touch with middle America.”

From The Guardian (Jon McGregor on Home of the Brave):

I did a lot of thinking about radio this year while working on The Reservoir Tapes. Of all the podcasts I subscribed to, this was the one I kept revisiting. Most of the episodes feature Scott Carrier – a contributor to the renowned National Public Radio show This American Life – travelling the US to talk to people who he often disagrees with. Carrier’s voice, which is several shades more laconic than the word “laconic” implies, creates an intimacy that’s well suited to headphones and long journeys. Too many podcasts confuse the accessibility of the medium with a licence to be slapdash, but Carrier treats the form with a beautiful respect and he knows how to edit, since most episodes roll in at around 15 minutes.