#Sara Vigueris, "The Vitamin D Conundrum," AARP Magazine, August/September 2020.
"The paradox is that you can get vitamin D three ways -- via sunlight, your diet or supplements -- but many of us don't get enough. But a big part of the vitamin D paradox is that we've been told that those UV rays act like the plague, for good reason: sun rays (or tanning beds) are the primary cause of skin cancer, which affects roughly 5 million Americans every year."
"White people have 29 times the incidence of melinoma compared with African Americans, and 62.9 percent of Hispanics." "Vitamin D helps regulate inflammation..."
#Ruth Reichl, "The Changing American Table," AARP Magazine, August/September 2020.
"Food prices have come down so dramatically that the average American spends a mere 7 percent of their budget on it -- less than people spend in any other nation on earth. That seems like progress, but just look at us! Three-quarters of us are overweight and 6 out of ten of us suffer from chronic illnesses such as diabetes, heart disease, asthma, and hepatitis."
"TV' Food Network started on a shoestring, but within 15 years had become a juggernaut that has changed America's ideas about food and cooking, and made chefs the coolest people on the planet." "People who care about the environment, for instance, have driven the cause of organic farms, whose numbers have doubled in the past 10 years."
#Brooke Jarvis, "Your Body Is a Wonderland," The New Yorker, August 3 & 10, 2020.
"The French historian Jules Michelet described the European Middle Ages as 'a thousand years without a bath.' " "Last year, the beauty-and-personal-care market in the U.S. was valued at nearly a hundred billion dollars, which makes it hard to imagine a time when people had to be persuaded to use soap."
"In an effort to show how laxly we regulate the ingredients in cosmetics, fifteen hundred chemicals are banned or restricted in personal-care products in the E.U., compared with only eleven in the United States."
Experts "want us to think of hygiene -- more expansively -- as a matter of health and balance than one of sterility and purity. Excess hygiene can be a problem for one's skin, which has an ecology that we're just beginning to understand." "Skin care, whose market value grew by some twenty billion dollars between 2014 and 2017, has become the most profitable sector of the cosmetics industry."
" 'One person's skin is home to a thousand species of bacterium, not to mention fungi viruses,' [Mority] Lyman writes." Lyman is the author of "The Remarkable Life of the Skin" (Atlantic Monthly Press).
#Diane Dimond, "The good and the very bad..." The Albuquerque Journal, August 8, 2020.
"Murders have spiked in 36 of the 50 biggest American cities that were studied during a newly released Wall Street Journal analysis of crime stats. On average, the nation's homicide rate is up 24% for this year, compared to the same period in 2019." "According to the WSJ, homicides are rising at a double-digit rate in most of the big cities run by Republicans, including Miami, San Diego, Omaha, Tulsa, and Jacksonville, Florida."
#Valentine Faine, "Man and Beast," The Nation, August 24/31, 2020.
"Thirty years after the Chernobyl disaster and the subsequent evacuation of 350,000 people, the site has become [home] to a population of wolves, bears, and bison, and now host to more than 200 bird species." "This practice is now known as dewilding, a conservation method that instead of protecting nature and what remains of it, aims to re-create extinct ecosystems without human interference, through the reintroduction of key species." "Predators are an essential component of any ecosystem, where a stable population presupposes a balance between births and deaths. But now, animal rights organizations, following in the bootstraps of the influential utilitarian philosopher, Peter Linger, are campaigning to alleviate the suffering of wild animals as well."
#Adam Gopnik, "Measuring Man," The New Yorker, June 22, 2020.
"He [Josef Mengele] went on to write another doctoral dissertation, in medical genetics, studying the heritability of cleft palates, which reinforced Nazi legislation requiring the sterilization of Germans with genetic disorders." "Reading about Mengele's prior training, one is struck by the enormous investment of resources, intellectual and financial, that were poured into this weirdly misruled and futile science of racial difference." "Mengele's career is a reminder that Nazism was not, as the left long insisted, capitalism with the gloves off. It was craziness with a white coat on -- a faith driven, as most big historical movements are, by passionate ideas, not passable interests."
"David G. Maxwell, author of "Mengele" (W.W. Norton) surveys with a kind of aghast wonder, the comforts of life for Nazi doctors living amid so much death."
"Mengele made his way, in 1949, to South America, with the help of the Red Cross -- along with the Catholic clergy's 'ratline,' one of the two most efficient escape routes for ex-Nazis." "From France through Poland and then into Romania and Hungary, each country had, in the nineteenth century, an anti-Semitic establishment, often anchored in the Catholic right, but just as often in the Socialist left, which was, in its language, as virulent as the later, Hitlerian kind." "We can see how tightly the elimination of the Jews was bound to a hatred of cosmopolitanism." "The main enemy, as Mengele understood it, had always been the educated Jews of Western Europe." "The masses of poor religious Jews in Poland were almost accidental to the effort; the real target was the elite, who brought with them the bacillus of cosmopolitanism."
#"Fight for the Post Office," The Nation, September 7/14. 2020.
"The opening that Trump has created not just for the defense of the post office at this critical moment , but for its expansion to address the challenges of the 21st century. Democrats should seize that opening and make the promise of the post office's renewal central to their fall campaign." "There must be a big-picture response that addresses the roots of the Postal Service's fixed problems: a draconian congressional mandate that it funds pensions 75 years into the future and severe restrictions on how it can operate in competitive markets." "If it is a fight over the future of the Postal Service that Trump and the Republicans want, give it to them."
#Jeffrey Kluger, "The kids are not alright," TIME, June 8, 2020.
Children, however, my be at particular risk. living in a universe that is already out of their control, they can become especially shaken when the securities they count on to give the world order -- the rituals in their lives, the very day-to-dayness of living -- get blown to bits." "Loneliness in lock-down is common for kids separated from their friends."
"In the U.S., 71.1% of children in the 3-to-17 age group have been diagnosed with anxiety, according to the CDC."
ADDENDUM:
*Last month, President Trump said he would create a commission to push more "pro-American" history. He said that "left-wing rioting and mayhem was the direct result of decades of left-wing indoctrination in our schools."
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