May your Thanksgiving be blessed!
Photo by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash
We look to our elders for sage advice, words of wisdom, and now, breakfast recommendations. A few weeks back, my grandma, Lisette, celebrated her 99th birthday with champagne, not one but two kinds of cake, lots of Toblerone chocolate, and what my dad lovingly (I swear!) called her "death row" menu, aka all her favorite dishes from various cuisines. And I must admit, she's a bit of a marvel.
At 99 years old, Lisette lives alone in an apartment with minimal help, passing her days watching PBS, listening to opera, and reading the New York Times cover to cover. She's sharp as a whip, with a great sense of humor and somehow a better memory than me (and she's sure to remind me all the time). So what's her secret? She swears it's genetics, but I have a theory her morning meal has something to do with it.
That's because my grandma has been starting her day with the same exact meal for as long as I can remember, and — according to my dad — many years before that.
My grandma — or nana, as I call her — kicks every day off with the same two things: a cup of strong English tea and a fully loaded bagel. Yup, that's right. If you were expecting some healthy concoction of nuts and seeds and an esoteric type of European yogurt, you're barking up the wrong tree.
My nana's must-have meal in the morning is a mini poppy seed bagel with cream cheese — none of the low-fat kind, either — and smoked salmon. I'm not exaggerating when I say that she's eaten this exact breakfast for as long as anyone can remember; so much so, that she calls our family in a panic when she's running low on any of the ingredients.
Is there some magic to this combination that keeps her going at 99 and counting? Perhaps it's the omega-3s and healthy fats. Maybe it's a winning combination of proteins, fats, and carbohydrates. My theory? The routine.
What’s your routine breakfast?
Kirsten Mathisen was walking alone in the woods by her Hansville, Wash., home when she was attacked.
There was no warning. Her attacker was fast and silent, but left its mark.
"It felt like getting punched in the back of the head by someone wearing rings," Mathisen told NPR.
Luckily, she was able to get photos and video of her attacker: a white barred owl.
The attack was unprompted, Mathisen said. She was just walking, as she always does. In fact, she had seen this owl before and there was never any problem.
When she got home, her boyfriend helped disinfect her scalp — now bloodied and cut — and she told him the unbelievable story. Later on, at the urging of her friends, she went to the doctor, who recommended she get a tetanus shot to avoid any further issues from the owl's bacteria-carrying claws.
Mathisen wasn't going to be kept captive in her house, so she did her best to avoid the owl's territory.
"I just was like, 'OK, I just won't walk that way for a few days.' But then, exactly a week later, on the next Saturday, I was on my driveway much closer to the house. And same thing."
Is show, don’t tell good writing advice? Adam Roberts and Alan Jacobs are not so sure, or I should say are quite sure:
[Adam Roberts writes:] Yesterday, Tade Thompson — a writer I like and admire — tweeted the above. As you can see, the tweet was enthusiastically endorsed (+500 likes, which is quite a number in these days of the site falling apart under its present Muskocracy). A number of other writers I also like and admire asserted their agreement: ‘this!’ memes with the finger pointing upwards, all-caps ‘THANK YOU!’s, sentiments of the ‘hopefully Tade’s tweet will kill this nonsense’ kind, a perception that Thompson had tapped something with which the writing community strongly agreed. One reply argued that ‘showing rather than telling’ was ableist, since autistic readers can find it hard to piece together hints and cues of description and performance in art as in life, and are better served with being plainly told what a character is doing, thinking etc.
It seems to me wrong. But, as I say so, I’m struck that this is one of the (one of many!) indicators of how far off base I am with writing and its communities today: how eccentric, in the strict sense of the word, I am. I stand by ‘Show Don’t Tell’. I daresay I stand on my own. I may be wrong, of course: when lots of other, clever, able people tell you you are wrong, the likelihood is: you are. But here I stand.
Relative inequalities at Crooked Timber:
In a previous post I pointed out that humanity is much better off than in the past. But I also pointed out that this is not a reason to be complacent. Inequality has risen in most countries in the last 40 years, but this is consistent with everyone being better off – certainly the poor are much less poor than in the past, and that is a very good thing. But what the Dalton-Atkinson approach highlights is that higher inequality means we could be doing so much better.
If you go to a clinic with HIV and they treat you with 1990s medicine, then that’s a catastrophic failure – it’s irrelevant to point out it’s better than 1980s medicine. Higher inequality means we are failing because we are further from today’s feasible best outcome.
On this approach, inequality isn’t exactly an indicator of well-being per se.* Instead it’s a measure of relative social failure. It tells us how much better we could be doing. As I sometimes put it: inequality represents a wasted opportunity for poverty reduction. Where inequality is high we could reduce poverty through inequality-reducing redistribution, and we are choosing not to.
So here are some key facts to help illuminate what is feasible:
On average, rich countries have lower inequality and greater progressive redistribution than poor countries, and that’s been true for at least 70 years. So it can’t be the case that low inequality stops countries from getting rich.
Most countries were more equal over 1950-1980 than since 1980, and also grew faster during the earlier, more equal, period. So it is implausible that higher inequality is good for growth.
Countries with low levels of inequality achieve that with a combination of high minimum wages, strong (and enforced) labour rights, strong labour unions, and a progressive tax and benefit system.
Today’s large middle-income countries like China, India and Indonesia have far higher levels of extreme poverty than today’s rich countries had when they had similar levels of per capita GDP, because of their higher levels of inequality.
The only reasonable conclusion is that, at least down to real-world Scandi levels, the degree of inequality is not constrained by its impact on mean income or growth. In a rich country like the UK, food banks, homelessness, and children hungry at school would be easy to eliminate through progressive redistribution. In poorer countries, extreme poverty is a result of the acceptance of high inequality, not just of low national incomes. We could be doing much better. That we don’t do so is a political choice.
Oldest known sentence in the first alphabet?
An engraving on an ancient lice comb might be the oldest known sentence written in the first alphabet.
The doubled-edged ivory comb, which was excavated in Israel, bears an engraved inscription wishing away lice, according to researchers writing in the Hebrew University-affiliated Jerusalem Journal of Archaeology.
The inscription in early Canaanite script, made up of 17 letters, reads: "May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard."
Professor Yosef Garfinkel, an archaeologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who helped direct the excavations that discovered the comb, said that the discovery was "a landmark in the history of the human ability to write."
Although attempts to date the comb through carbon dating were unsuccessful, researchers estimate that it dates back to around 1700 BCE.
Homemade muesli! Oats, sunflower seeds, raisins, sliced almonds, coconut, dried pineapple, pieces of dates, banana chips... yum-yum 🙂🙂
This is a late-t0-the-game comment, but the owl story stirred me. I have been enjoying a study of owls this year and even went on an owl prowl at night at our near by nature center. Their eye sockets look like binoculars. Why on earth it zeroed on this lady's head!?