This Week in Our Dumb World
Teenage Pricks
I think it’s absolutely true that the people who understand Trump the best are the cruelest and meanest of his supporters. The rubes are the people who want to pretend it means anything more than giving the finger to the “them” that you don’t like.
This is a place (and there are many) where people like to imagine that Trump changed something instead of revealing the truth of something that already existed. The GOP did not become this party when Trump arrived, he merely stopped the game of pretend. I think the well-meaning people who believe that liberals are too mean or the left is tearing this country apart have to believe that because it’s the only way to maintain the game of pretend where one of the parties isn’t careening towards fascism.
Yes, I do think there are well-meaning people who believe that. No one wants to believe that our democracy is falling apart. It’s a painful thing to think about and I understand the people who don’t want to think about it. That said, it’s probably time to sharpen up.
This is also what happens when the establishment convinces itself that it’s really the rebels. Rebels so often believe that anything they do is justified because they’re fighting the oppressors who have all the power. If they stray into guerilla warfare, that’s only because that’s what it takes to win. When people in Fairfield, Connecticut imagine they’re the oppressed minority, you know trouble is afoot.
For example: when the boy’s basketball team from Roosevelt High School in Minneapolis, traveled to small town Jordan, Minnesota, for a game in January, a group of young men on the home side of the gym bleachers unfurled a large “TRUMP 2020” banner across their knees. The Roosevelt coach later complained on Facebook, writing: “Please explain how and why this is appropriate at a high school basketball game?”
Presented with just that much information, you can probably fill in the demographic details of everyone involved. And all of them— the kids from the almost entirely white rural host school and the kids from the predominantly black and Latino urban visiting school—knew exactly what that banner meant. It meant: Fuck you. It meant, “we” took “our” country back.
The only person who’d be confused, or who’d infer a more complicated message, is a sophisticated professional adult whose political worldview depends on a condescending belief in America’s essential racial innocence. A person, in other words, who sees the world as a small child does—as opposed to, say, a teenager. Indeed, much of the media discussion around the Jordan incident danced around any explanation of why a black high school basketball coach and his mostly black players would have a problem with that particular banner, while quoting an endless parade of aggrieved white adults pretending at ignorance. As one local parent told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune: “I have no issues with a Trump flag at our game last night in regards to racism. It could be seen as ‘It’s actually pretty cool [young people] are paying attention to things going on in our country.’” Frankly, liberals, you should be thanking the president for finally getting teens—or at least one very specific subset of them—to care about politics!
Rotten Tomatoes
The fact that Rotten Tomatoes has an editorial team making decisions and not an algorithm makes me like that site infinitely more than I did before. It’s very easy to get seduced by the idea that AI can create an objective structure for anything, so I appreciate that there’s a real human team trying to decide “is this blog post a review”?
Also, teenage me is very sad that this didn’t end up being my job.
Understood as a shorthand for film quality, the Tomatometer, as Alison Willmore, a critic at New York, puts it, is actually a measurement of “consensus”: film criticism as popularity contest. This, conveniently, boosts Rotten Tomatoes' visibility. “Because everything boils down to positive or negative, that's why you get stuff up in the 90s and stuff in the single digits,” says Matt Atchity, the site's former editor, who left in 2017. Rotten Tomatoes' brainier, less popular rival Metacritic culls from a smaller number of reviews and seems to assign a lot more ho-hum scores. “What keeps Rotten Tomatoes popular, what helps keep them in the news, are those extreme numbers,” Atchity says.
So back to The Story of the Kelly Gang. The world's first review, rated Fresh, didn't have anything explicitly bad to say about the movie. And yet adjectives like “creditable” and “conscientious” are not exactly glowing. The second review opened with the assertion that the real-life story of the gang was not a “splendid advertisement” for Australian values. It was rated Rotten. But the critic didn't impugn the film itself, and in fact seemed to think it was pretty well made. The point isn't that Ryan reviewed the films incorrectly. I probably would have done the same. The point is, the Tomatometer forces a false choice: Fresh or Rotten. There is no Underripe or Overripe tomato.
Giles recently heard from a critic who objected to a Fresh rating he'd given a review. “She said, ‘I really didn't like this movie. Can you make it Rotten?’ And I said, ‘Absolutely. However, I have to ask, why did you make it a B-?’ And the response was basically, ‘I hate grading things. It's arbitrary.’” Giles added, “I agree completely.”
The Completely Harmless MSG Returns
It’s really amazing to see the way that MSG health scares persist over the years. Despite the research and despite the changes, people still can’t shake the idea that it’s somehow the real villain. There’s no evidence that MSG is bad for you other than eating too much garbage food with MSG might give you a headache.
It is perfectly American that, after a meal of fried noodles and fried chicken and fried spring rolls, we would assume it’s an evil chemical that gives us a headache and not the 10 lbs of salty food we just shoveled into our bodies.
It is also perfect that once it was renamed “Umami” and given a hint of the orient, everyone just dove right in.
Either way, the important takeaway is that MSG is delicious and you shouldn’t worry about it eating.
And in 1972, Olney found similar lesions in the brains of rhesus monkeys injected with MSG, suggesting the problem could affect primates as well. But other researchers who have tried to replicate his results with monkeys have failed, and no link between dietary consumption of glutamic acids and glutamate levels in the human brain have been found.
This is thanks to the blood-brain barrier, a membrane of tightly bound cells that acts a protective filter, keeping substances like excess free glutamic acid from disrupting its precise chemical balance. "The brain is basically the North Korea of glutamate: a closed world. It makes all the glutamate it needs, and does not let glutamate in," Samuel Wang, an associate professor of molecular biology and neuroscience at Princeton University, told me in an email. In the case of newborn mice (Olney's were 2 to 9 days old), the development of their blood-brain barriers would be roughly equivalent to a human infant's in the second trimester, Wang says. And the high dosage of MSG administered (0.5 to 4 milligrams per gram of body weight) would be equivalent to a 165-pound human eating nearly 300 grams of MSG — about 600 times more than we typically consume daily.
If anything resembling a consensus emerges from the tangle of research that follows Dr. Kwok's letter, it's that perhaps a very small number of humans may experience a mild reaction to eating large amounts of MSG, often on an empty stomach — a statement that could describe nearly everything else we eat. Yet no evidence suggesting anything resembling a proven allergy like gluten sensitivity, a diagnosed autoimmune disorder, has been found. The FDA, while acknowledging "short-term, transient and generally mild symptoms" in "some sensitive individuals who consume 3 grams or more of MSG without food," has never removed MSG from its "generally recognized as safe" list. So why, after almost five decades of science that is vaguely inconclusive or inaccurate at worst, or definitively affirmative of MSG's safety at best, does the ingredient remain divisive?
Translating Harry Potter Into Yiddish
It’s always interesting to read about the process of translation, but it’s particularly interesting to combine the already complicated process of translation with the kinds of fantasy novels built on invented terms and place names.
But Rowling didn’t just coin names, she coined many magical terms and concepts, and each of these required its own Yiddish rendering. Translating Quidditch, the fictional aerial sport played on broomsticks in which participants fire a ball through hoops to score points, posed its own challenge. “I could’ve just called it Quidditch [in Yiddish transliteration], but meh, we could do better than that,” Viswanath said. He cast about for something more authentically Yiddish. Inspiration struck when he “remembered that there’s this saying, ‘az got vil, sheest a bezem,’ which means, ‘if God wants, a broom shoots,’ and which possibly refers to somebody who’s impotent, or maybe to a gun.” And so, “shees-bezem”—or “shoot-broom”—was born. Along similar lines, rather than merely transliterate the name of the small flying “golden snitch,” whose capture ends a Quidditch match, Viswanath dubbed it the “goldene flaterl,” or “golden butterfly,” as butterflies are a common motif in Jewish and Yiddish folklore. By riffing off Yiddish sayings and symbols in this way, Viswanath hopes “people will feel the Yiddishe taam [taste].”
While Viswanath consulted other translations for guidance, they could only take him so far, as Yiddish presents some dilemmas that none of them had faced. “One real challenge for me was the cultural transposition,” he said. “How do you take this story which is very much in this Christian European fantasy tradition, transpose it into Yiddish language, make it feel Yiddish, have the characters speak in a way which feels natural to Yiddish, but not make it Jewish?”
He did not want to covertly convert the characters to Judaism, or follow the Hebrew translation, which had replaced some aspects of Christian culture with Jewish analogues, as when it swapped the song “We wish you a merry Christmas” for the Hanukkah tune “Mi yemalel.” Instead, in the interest of authenticity, Viswanath straightforwardly rendered all of the novel’s Christian elements. “I actually had to Google what a Christmas cracker was, because I didn’t know,” he said, “and then I had to translate it into Yiddish.”
Claimed Moons Of Earth
When the flat earth conspiracies no longer give you the rush they’re use to, it’s time to move on to Earth’s second moon!