Short Subjects From Whimsical to More Serious

 #Rebecca Leber, "Basket of Disposables," Mother Jones, November + December 2020.

"By extrapolating from pre-pandemic studies of California's restaurants, a midsize restaurant with 30 seats went through 17,800 disposable cups and utensils in a year. Multiple that by 520,000 --the number of US restaurants that the consulting firm McKinsey estimates survived the COVID-9 shutdowns -- and you get more than 9 billion pieces of trash in one year." 

#Tom Philpott, "To Serve America," Mother Jones, November + December 2020.

"Even after a rebound due to fitful reopenings, the food and beverage industry had shed a fifth of its pre-pandemic workforce, or 2.6 million jobs, by mid-summer. In San Francisco, according to credit card data, restaurant sales in July were 84 percent lower than a year ago." "By July, up to 29 million adults and15 million children didn't have enough to eat, according to the Census Bureau."

#Nicola Twilley, "Hw Sweet It Is," The New Yorker, October 12, 2020.

"An average adult, with a daily energy consumption intake of two thousand calories, ought to consume no more than six teaspoons of sugar a day --." "Until the eighteenth century, when sugar production started to become mechanized, most people consumed very little of  what nutritionists call 'free' or 'added' sugar --."

"It has taken only a few decades for obesity rates to triple in America. In 1960, when national surveys began, fewer than fourteen per cent of adults were obese; today, that figure is forty per cent." "Catering to our revealed preferences, manufacturers have amplified it: today, three-quarters of all packaged foods contain added sugar, and, if we continue on our current trajectory, half of the world's population will be overweight, or obese, within fifteen years, and an estimated one in every six Americans will be diabetic." 

#Eric Alterman, "The Plot Against America," The Nation, November 16, 2020.

It isn't enough that Trump has unleashed an "avalanche  of outrages against law, decency, and common sense," in a private meeting with congressional leaders shortly after his inauguration, he "repeated his nonsensical claim" about alleged illegal votes. "Again, remember it's not just that Trump lied about 2016, but rather that this entire notion of widespread voter fraud is itself fraudulent."  

#D.D. Guttenplan, "Unpack the Court," The Nation, November 16, 2020.

"The latest Republican power play has done much to strip away the mystique that previously cloaked the deliberations of the Supreme Court's nine justices. Despite their black robes, ritual use of Latin, the same prejudices and predilections as the rest of us, the Supreme Court has been 'packed' for years with safe, conservative majorities," Justice Stone wrote in 1937. "Those base conservative majorities have stood in the path of almost every major piece of social legislation enacted by the elected representatives of the America people."

#Joe Biden carried only 477 of the 3,141 counties in the U.S., but these counties account for 70 percent of the country's economic output; the remaining counties that voted for Trump account for just 29 percent.