“A worthwhile corrective to a great deal of wrongheaded popular dogma about food.”
Read the latest review of “Feed the People!” by @jandutkiewicz.bsky.social and @gnrosenberg.bsky.social:
www.wsj.com/arts-culture...
"Feed the People! is a worthwhile corrective to a great deal of wrongheaded popular dogma about food."
Grateful for this generous - if not entirely uncritical - review in the Wall Street Journal today.
www.wsj.com/arts-culture...
I'm optimistic that the album has been unaffected.
Omg this stain!!!!
I'm so excited for Friday. I'm co-hosting an event with WXDU, our student-run radio station, and some other veteran DJs to teach aspiring undergrads how to do the basics of continuous live-set DJing. It's one of those things I do at the university that has zero CV value but is personally invaluable.
it's hard out there for an oaf 🥲
yikes do I smell like coffee lol
I'm still an oaf!
I just walked into a closed (glass) door at my favorite coffee shop, spilling coffee everywhere and smashing my head. This is among the most viscerally embarrassing things to happen to me in recent memory, but it's okay because "only cool guys do this," as my fav barrissta put it.
It's worth considering there are no "MAGA intellectuals," and most conservative intellectuals admit this readily if you talk to them. That's why they can't find one for the NYT op-ed page. What they say isn't legible as "intellectual argument." It's a mix of marketing ploys and nonsense.
That's a different story than the one where profs shift their political opinions (that's happened too, but not to this degree and probably in alignment with public) and it has implications for how you would fix it.
I actually doubt there's been a substantial shift in the underlying ideological make-up of college professors between 1990 and today. What's happened is that the meanings of "right" and "left" have shifted, with skepticism of education and the educated now a larger component of RW culture.
Why is this surprising? The same time period that has seen a marked increase in left/liberal ID has seen the growth of a rabidly (and proudly) anti-intellectual movement on the right, which has also massively shifted voting and ID patterns among all people with college and grad degrees.
The conceit of this whole fantasy is that there are actually two economies: one of stuff and one of food. Somehow being "independent" in one means you needn't ever worry about the other. But the other supplies the rest of your shit and, in fact, includes the things you need to grow the food.
Staring at the picture accompanying it, it just blows my mind that people don't realize what horseshit this is. He's wearing a fucking watch! He's standing in a shed built from corrugated metal and store bought lumber! He didn't "live off the land." He went to Home Depot.
This isn't to say that extensive agricultural practices can't support and sustain wonderful lives. They can! They just can't do it at the population levels we have in the US. And that's what's left unsaid here: the fantasy they're playing with is one in which the reader of the article *is dead*.
When it's marginal, those factors are irrelevant. When it is common? Price in huge security costs (paid in time, energy, and life) and then start slashing your food output (they're all wearing t-shirts; how much time will they have to grow food when they also need to fashion their own garments?).
The problem, of course, is that in a world in which everyone is doing this we have 1) aggressive competition for arable land; 2) no one making all the other things you need to grow the food and survive.
As is clear from the picture, "live off the land" means, functionally, maybe eating mostly food you grew yourself. However, it doesn't include everything else you need to grow the food (tools and inputs) and survive (clothes, house, medicine, even those prescription glasses they're wearing).
Something I wish these silly pieces would mention is that modern "live off the land" homesteading only rarely works now because of how marginal it is. If 350 million decided to "live off the land," it would be a disaster for everyone, including these people.
www.nytimes.com/2026/04/09/u...
A long, thoughtful review of Feed the People!
"At its core, the authors’ pitch comes down to access and sustainability: making sure people can afford better-quality food and that we don’t destroy the planet and the lives of workers along the way."
newrepublic.com/article/2084...
New legislation proposed in California would certify foods as not being ultra-processed. It's a bad idea.
We should be using the regulatory state to improve diets, but by focusing on the specifics of nutrition and not on broad generalizations.
My latest for TNR.
newrepublic.com/article/2086...
I got this new shtick for talks where I take a big swig of Diet Cherry Coke and then say I grabbed the cherry because I've been trying to eat more fruits and vegetables.
The problem with conceptually counterposing the cold efficiency of conventional agriculture and staple crop production to feel-good initiatives like community and backyard veggie gardens is that you're dealing with completely incommensurable scales of production. The former is what feeds us.
Both honored and insulted to be referred to as a vegan Earl Butz in the LARB review of Feed the People! This is the sort of engaged pushback from left-small-food circles I expected when we wrote the book, and also the sort of conversations we should be having.
lareviewofbooks.org/article/feed...
I wrote about James Talarico's blasphemy against meat and barbeque revival on the Texas campaign trail.
newrepublic.com/article/2080...
Folks who remember me from old Twitter will recall that this story, in a somewhat more artful form, was one of my most widely read threads. I'm pleased to say it will play a major role in my next book.
How's that for rugged?!
But he appears in old newspaper articles about the murder under the sign of other names: he is called John and Laurel at times; his family names include LaFleur, Erard, Erad, Cartlton, and Drake. My aunt tells me that, deep in his cups, he once told her that he did not even know his own name.
He died in 1998, a week or so after Ma'am passed, at the age of 82 or 83. We don't know his exact age and do not know with total certainty his birth name, although he was likely born James Farrell, the name he also used as an adult.