Portrait of a careerist

Samantha Power, who was the US ambassador to the United Nations during the Obama administrations and is currently the head of the Agency for International Development, is a good example of how someone starts out wanting to do good and then ambition takes over and corrupts all the ideals, leaving a residue of cynicism and hypocrisy, something that happened to Macbeth as well. (Incidentally the Agency for International Development has been accused of often acting as a front for the CIA.)

Jon Schwarz writes that her recent statement about Sudan joining the International Criminal Court demonstrates her cynicism.


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Sliced bread was not that great for three months

Slicing bread yourself is not only tedious, it also results in uneven slices. The bread slicing machine, first marketed in 1928, was an incredibly useful invention and took the country by storm so that in just five years, about 80% of bread was sold pre-sliced. The phrase “the greatest thing since sliced bread” has become a cliche, so much so that one wonders whether a similar saying existed before it and, if so, what the equivalent product of comparison was.

But during World War II, the overzealous person in charge of war time food supplies actually banned sliced bread for reasons that had dubious merit.

In 1943, Claude R. Wickard, the head of the War Foods Administration as well as the Secretary of Agriculture, got the bright idea to ban pre-sliced bread in America, which he did on January 18, 1943.  The specific reasons behind this aren’t entirely clear, though it was about conservation of resources, particularly generally thought to have been about conserving wax paper, wheat, and steel.

None of these reasons held up. The US had a two-year stockpile of wheat, there was no shortage of wax paper, and it was not clear that much steel would be saved. The outcry against the ban was so great that he reversed his policy after just three months.

How could big investors have been this gullible?

I have been fascinated by the case of the company Theranos, whose founder Elizabeth Homes is going on trial for fraud.

The trial, delayed earlier this year by Holmes’s pregnancy, is scheduled to begin on Tuesday and last several months.

Jurors will hear allegations that Holmes raised more than $700m from investors on claims Theranos invented a revolutionary machine that could conduct hundreds of laboratory tests from a single finger-prick of blood, but was actually using other companies’ technology for the tests. The company folded in 2018.
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Holmes dropped out of Stanford University at 19 and became a star in a startup space dominated by men. She founded Theranos in 2003, with the goal of revolutionizing blood testing. The company’s rise and fall became a cautionary tale about the Silicon Valley hype machine.

Theranos received glowing media coverage and raised more than $700m from investors on
claims it had invented a machine that could conduct hundreds of laboratory tests from a single prick.

The tests were rolled out in Walgreens stores and Theranos reached a $9bn valuation before it became clear that many of the claims about the supposedly revolutionary blood test were bogus.

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Mikis Theodorakis (1925-2021)

The Greek composer and left wing political activist who fought against his country’s military dictatorship has died at the age of 96.

The renowned Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis, who scored the 1964 classic film Zorba the Greek and was an icon of resistance to the former military junta, has died in Athens, aged 96.

A prolific talent and political maverick, Theodorakis was revered in his home country for his inspirational music and defiance during the junta that ruled from 1967 to 1974.

After the news of his death on Thursday, the Greek flag was flown at half mast at the Acropolis while parliament observed a minute’s silence.

But Theodorakis was perhaps best-known around the world for his film title scores, which also included Z in 1969 and Serpico in 1973. His work ranged from operas to choral music and popular songs, providing a soundtrack to the life of his country.

This is the memorable ending from the film Zorba the Greek where an uptight Englishman played by Alan Bates asks freewheeling Zorba, played by Anthony Quinn, to teach him the traditional sirtaki dance. (Quinn was actually a Mexican-American, one of the earliest Latinos to gain prominence in American films, and was active in civil rights and social movements.)

When allusions fail

I recently posted about how cartoons depend so much on shared knowledge for their humor. But the increasingly fragmented nature of our information sources means that we can no longer take anything for granted. I recall a colleague of mine who had been teaching English for a long time saying that he could no longer depend upon his students having a shared background anymore that he could build upon. One positive reason for this lack of commonality is that the student bodies are now more diverse and the different backgrounds can add richness to the classroom experience.
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Sacklers look likely to get the bankruptcy ruling they sought

Just as I feared, a bankruptcy judge has approved the deal that the odious Sackler family sought that would enable them to preserve and even increase the ill-gotten fortunes that they amassed from aggressively pushing their addictive pain-killers on the public, resulting in massive addiction levels and deaths from overdoses.

A US federal bankruptcy judge on Wednesday conditionally approved a sweeping, potentially $10bn plan submitted by the OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma to settle a mountain of lawsuits over its role in the opioid crisis that has killed a half-million Americans over the past two decades.

Under the settlement reached with creditors including individual victims and thousands of state and local governments, the Sackler family will give up ownership of the company and contribute $4.5bn but will be freed from any future lawsuits over opioids.
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Let’s take a moment to savor a global victory

The news can be depressing so I thought we could use a bit of good cheer. The United Nations announced that the world has finally eliminated the use of leaded gasoline. Algeria was the last country to do so in July.

When in 1921 engineers at General Motors discovered that adding lead to gasoline improved engine performance, it was already known that lead was toxic but they went ahead with it anyway, arguing that small amounts were not harmful. That was wrong. It became increasingly realized that the copious amounts of lead that were being released into the atmosphere was finding its way into people, leading to all manner of problems, including lower IQ and a propensity for violence. (I wrote about this back in 2014.)
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The desire for fleeting fame can lead to unnecessary and dangerous risk taking

When the Guinness Book of Records initially came out, it consisted of information that could settle the kinds of debates that one has with friends about some bit of trivia, like how old was the oldest person who ever lived. But then people started doing feats of endurance (like “How long can you dance?”) or pointless (like “How many people can be on a single bicycle?) just to get themselves mentioned in the Guinness book. I shudder to think how much energy and time people have spent over the years just in the effort to get the moment of fleeting fame of getting mentioned in the book.

But with the internet, this has been cranked up to 11, because now you don’t have to go through the tedium of getting approved judges and the like to ratify your claim. Now you can simply do something bizarre, post it on social media, and hope to become a viral sensation. This has taken off with so-called ‘challenges’ where people duplicate the same stunt. We saw before the ice-bucket challenge (where people filmed themselves having a bucket of ice water poured on their heads) and now we have the milk crate challenge. But this one carries risks that doctors are warning about.
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