The July 23 Taste section article “Some like it hot!” reports on the surging popularity of spicy dishes among the general blandness of Minnesota cookery.
It’s been obvious to anyone who visits restaurants that this has been the case for some time. Spicy food is everywhere. I have no beef with that. I didn’t mind a little of the heat when I was younger. But I’ve gotten to the age where culinary heat is not a matter of taste, but a matter of health. If I eat a spicy dish at dinner time, the heartburn keeps me awake most of the night.
My problem is that restaurants often don’t let me make an informed decision on what to order. I get ambushed by heat where I least expect it — in a tuna salad sandwich, a plate of risotto, a candied pecan atop a muffin or a pork chop doused in black pepper. Young servers especially cannot be trusted to help choose nonspicy dishes. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been assured “no heat,” and it still comes on the plate.
My plea to restaurant owners is this: make an objective assay of dishes that are spicy. Let some heat-hater specify what’s hot and what’s not. Then provide the information to heat-hating customers, so that they can avoid that unpleasant burning sensation in their mouths and throats — and a sleepless night.
D R Martin, Minneapolis
Letter to Minneapolis Star Tribune
There’s a great dearth of empathy and moral imagination in politics. We see it when politicians with gay children come around belatedly to the view that gays and lesbians deserve equal treatment, or when they take pride in Confederate symbolism until a white supremacist massacres congregants in a black church. Progress might not be so halting if people had wider horizons, which is why encouraging them to see their priorities reflected in distant tragedies is a valuable thing.
Your first major deal was converting the decrepit Commodore Hotel next to Grand Central Station into a Grand Hyatt. Mayor Abe Beame, a close ally of your father Fred, gave you the first-ever property tax abatement on a New York City hotel, worth at least $400 million over 40 years.
As chief economist of the World Bank in the late 1990s, I saw firsthand in East Asia the devastating effects of the programs imposed on the countries that had turned to the IMF for help. This resulted not just from austerity but also from so-called structural reforms, where too often the IMF was duped into imposing demands that favored one special interest relative to others. There were hundreds of conditions, some little, some big, many irrelevant, some good, some outright wrong, and most missing the big changes that were really required.
The top lobbyist for Chevron, Stephen Sayle, is now a senior staff member for the House Committee on Science, which oversees science policy for the federal government. This is a lobbyist, Mr Sayle, who has helped Chevron beat back regulatory efforts that rest on federal science — whether it’s on the ozone or on climate change. And now that he is overseeing the science committee, he has a unique opportunity to shift not only policy that not only governs the way that federal science is used to implement pollution regulations, he also has an opportunity to help with the science committee’s “investigation” of climate scientists. Over the years, the science committee has brought in scientists to quiz them on climate science and other issues that are very controversial now given the EPA’s pursuit of regulations that affect the fossil fuel industry.
Top administration officials are at Congress today for a hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the Iran nuclear deal, a subject that has always brought out the crazy in American politicians.
The whole apparatus of selective college admissions is designed to deliberately confuse things that exist with things that don’t. Many of the most prestigious colleges are an order of magnitude wealthier and more selective than the typical university. These are the primary factors driving their annual rankings at or near the top of the US News list of “best” colleges. The implication is that the differences in the quality of education they provide are of a similar size. There is no evidence to suggest that this is remotely true.
The susceptibility to positive framing is what scientists call an irrational bias, and it is very powerful. To better understand why our psyche responds so deeply, Christopher Krupenye, a Duke University graduate student in evolutionary anthropology, and his colleagues Alexandra Rosati of Yale University and Brian Hare of Duke gathered 40 of our closest living relatives — 23 chimpanzees and 17 bonobos — and offered them options for choosing food: either one or two fruits versus a constant number of peanuts. Sometimes the apes were shown one piece of fruit each time they made the selection, but half the time they were given two: positive framing. In other trials, the apes were initially presented two pieces of fruit, but half the time they got only one: negative framing. Regardless of the framing, the apes ended up with an identical quantity of fruit. Yet they were more likely to choose fruit when they were offered the single fruit with its frequent “bonus” than the double fruit with its frequent “loss.”
Most on the left usually ignores country music, seeing it as a mire of right-wing resentment best avoided, shunned, and ridiculed. This attitude betrays snobbishness toward working class people to the sound of the banjos in Deliverance. There’s no question that country music, like the southern white working class where it originated, has a deep conservatism. The banjo player Earl Scruggs was called the only man in country music who voted for George McGovern in 1972; his old partner Lester Flatt was more typically writing songs about hippies with lines such as “I can’t tell the boys from the girls.” From the string band pioneer Fiddlin’ John Carson playing a role in the 1915 lynching of Leo Frank to the cheap jingoism of Toby Keith and his bro knockoffs, the left has rarely had reason to take country music seriously as an art form that expressed the potential for solidarity.
Uber has commissioned a new study that purports to show that it provides better service to minorities than the incumbent taxi industry. The test was to have someone order an Uber car in a heavily minority community on their smartphone, and compare the time it takes to get their pickup with the time it takes someone calling for a taxi from an incumbent company. Uber found that its service was markedly faster than the service of the incumbent industry.
This particular understanding of the gap between public profession and private confession is one of the five or six things most fundamental to conservative thought. The spectacle of Republicans lowering a flag could not be more public. The act of a Republican anonymously telling a pollster what she really believes about the candidate with the guts to call Mexicans what they “really” are, which is barely-human vermin, is not so public. Significantly, one of two polls that finds Trump ahead by four points was staged by YouGov, which does its polling online, without requiring respondents to talk to another, possibly judgmental, human being—about as private as a political act could be…