Kanner’s serene mood was shaken upon arriving in New York City, where a son of a German colleague accompanied him for his first ride on the subway. Seeing the other passengers clenching their teeth and swiveling their jaws in a rotary motion, Kanner ventured that the poor devils had been afflicted by a tic disorder in the wake of the global epidemic of encephalitis lethargica that began in 1918. His young host gently informed him that their fellow straphangers were in the grips of another plague entirely: the craze for chewing Wrigley’s gum, which had not yet caught on in Berlin. Kanner was
...more
