Friday roundup

Miss Conduct’s best reading for the week. First up, this article on Soylent, the new food-replacement beverage, and why people might want it, and why other people might fear it. Foodies and crunchy folk object to the social ramifications of food replacement, but as author Lee Hutchinson amusingly argues, “not every meal needs to be a festive life-affirming display of cultural pageantry where we march from kitchen to table bearing the carefully plated masterpieces of locally sourced delicacies while hidden speakers blare the “Circle of Life” song from the Lion King.”

I agree with him–and given my occasional stomach troubles, I plan to get me some Soylent to have on hand for those times I simply can’t eat:

[A] lot of people are turning to Soylent seeking rescue as much as they are seeking basic nutrition. Food can be a wonderful thing, but for people struggling with food-related issues, it can be like a damaging drug that you can never quite quit cold turkey.

Soylent is food methadone. It’s not quite the magic food pill from science fiction, but it does have a lot of that pill’s qualities. It’s satiating without being delicious; eating it won’t provide the endorphin rush that overeaters experience when gorging; and it’s easy to prepare. It’s a thing you can replace snacks or some meals with (or even all meals, if you want), without having to fight urges.

Hutchinson is writing about chronic overeaters, here, but there are all kinds of eating disorders, from the psychological to the physiological. As someone who has one, I can very much see the appeal of Soylent.

Most of the time, though, I’m not suffering from stomach problems, and then I really enjoy a good kale salad. You call this kale salad? I’m so honored that one of my oldest friends thought of me when he read that, and posted it on my Facebook. I’m totally doing it as an audition monologue. Kale is shakti.

My husband sent me this, and when he sends me anything about sports I always read it, because he knows I find the games themselves boring and incomprehensible. It’s about the “unwritten rules” of baseball–baseball etiquette, baseball corporate culture–and how such rules develop and sustain themselves, whether they’re any damn good for anyone or not. (Spoiler: They’re not, apparently.) From the piece:

Young players, most of whom are just worried about keeping their jobs and fitting in, will pick an older player to emulate. They pretty much have to since if they don’t fall in line with a veteran’s whims, they will get labeled selfish. Those young players will eventually come into their own, and turn into older players themselves with rookies looking up to them. They’ll perpetuate their received wisdom about what “playing the game the right way” entails, and on it will go, cycle after cycle, players learning to play the game correctly as first laid down by God knows who, with the nonbelievers being summarily shunned.

Some of those players will get traded to other teams where other leaders with different views have imprinted other rookies. Lockers rooms will face an unwritten code schism. Sects will form. Doctrines will mutate. In many ways, unwritten rules are like religious views, with different values assigned to different doctrines, all of which must be taken on faith. And just like with many religions, believers will embrace things for which they have no clue of the origins, just because they’ve been told to believe them, and that there will be hell to pay if they don’t.

Speaking of hell to pay, check out this long, thoughtful essay by a mother whose life got up-ended when she made the decision to leave her four-year-old child in a locked car on a 50-degree day for five minutes. Someone saw, someone called the cops, and months-long trauma ensued for the entire family. I knew things were bad, but as a non-parent I didn’t realize they were this bad. I wonder if there are many people for whom the questions “Do you want kids?” and “Do you want to raise kids in 21st-century America?” would have very different answers?

Book-wise, this review in Slate had me ordering “A Bintel Brief” immediately. My copy arrived last night:

Starting in 1906, the Forward began running an advice column for Eastern European Jewish immigrants to the tenements of New York City. The column, “A Bintel Brief”—Yiddish for “a bundle of letters”—gave the voiceless community a chance to ask about love and loss, to express the challenges and triumphs of assimilation into American life. Each letter in the column was selected and thoughtfully answered by the Forward’s legendary editor, Abraham Cahan, and the column now gives us a surprising picture of the everyday life of a disappeared turn-of-the-century culture.

And finally, I picked up Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves at the library and read it in one sitting. I’m honestly a little tired of the family-secrets, the you-don’t-really-know-your-spouse-daughter-brother genre that’s so popular nowadays, so I almost didn’t get this one because it sounded like more of the same: Why did my parents give my sister away? But oh, my, why they did! And what happened then! It’s a great read.

Happy weekend! Happy reading!