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by Jay Winik
No less than people, cities have a personality. Some cities pulse with dynamism; others feel tired. Some are clean and angular and characterized by glass and steel buildings; others are spread out. Some feel old world, or even dilapidated; others feel affluent and could come from the future.
We can start putting names to the cities: New York, where fashion meets finance; San Francisco, where hip meets technology; Los Angeles, where beauty meets Hollywood; and Chicago and St. Louis, where the upscale Midwest finds itself. And then of course, there is Washington DC, which reigns as the nation's capital. It is filled with such iconic images as the White House and the Lincoln Memorial; the mall and the tidal basin and the cherry blossoms; the capitol and the Jefferson Memorial, and the tourists crawling from all over the world.
All of these cities have distinct and diverse neighborhoods. Some, as in Baltimore or pockets of Philadelphia, feel as though time has passed them by; they are seemingly marked by tumultuous streets along with the clank of trains rolling by on worn railroad tracks and the musty smell of tenements. Others, like Austin, increasingly feel as though they were designed for young people.
Washington, DC is an interesting case. It has affluent and lovely suburbs, but more than ever we see that its young people, the millennials, are less interested in homeownership, or at the very least, of the single-family home variety, and are more enamored with population "density," more invested in public transport, and more interested in their refurbished restaurants and upscale bars and other young people themselves.
In each of these cities, there is a story. And part of that story is increasingly that we see a resurgence of urban America. This bodes well for those enamored by city life. They are like the pioneers and settlers of the wild west, but they are instead urban entrepreneurs, reshaping and revitalizing their neighborhoods wherever they go. But as urban planners, the new sages of the cities, remind us, there are complications. Economic complications, social complications, and political complications. Complications between Blacks and Latinos and Asian Americans; complications and dislocations between the working class and the well-to-do. The list goes on.
At the heart of this is often the inscrutable rush of time and the question of gentrification.
Below, Jay Winik, one of the nation's leading historians and frank news columnist, sat down with urbanist and Library of Congress Manuscript Division historian Ryan Reft to discuss how urban history can help residents and others better understand modern day issues of economic development and gentrification.
1. How did you get into Urban History?
Ryan Reft: I grew up just outside Chicago and would go into the city for concerts and other events, so the city always seemed like a destination. Later, I attended college in the city and after graduating, I moved to NYC where I taught English and history in the public schools. Being a public school teacher in New York really made you feel like you were intertwined with the rhythms of urban life and I really enjoyed it. While teaching I enrolled in Columbia's American Studies Masters program and was lucky enough to take Ken Jackson's urban history seminar. At that point, I realized that I just loved cities, working in them, thinking about, and writing about them. So after a few more years of teaching I enrolled in the PhD American History program at the University of California San Diego and eventually became an urban historian.
2. What is Gentrification?
Ryan Reft: Gentrification as a term probably gets used too broadly today, but generally refers to a neighborhood or community that is experiencing increased development and improved municipal services which then is accompanied by rising rents, housing, and cost of living.
Long term residents, usually renters, who might have stuck with the neighborhood in tough times, can no longer afford to live there and move out while new people, often wealthier and whiter move in which can add to racial and class antagonisms between groups. Though the popularity of cities should be celebrated, the pace of gentrified development often leads to economic, social, and political conflicts between new arrivals, frequently white and middle or upper class, and those populations, often consisting of working class Black, Latino, and Asian Americans, that endured earlier decades of austerity economic policies and urban struggles.
It doesn't help that the media often refers to new arrivals, frequently white, as "urban pioneers" basically negating the presence of others, usually minority groups that persisted through tough times in a community.
3. Is this gentrification a new concept or an old one?
Ryan Reft: Let me preface my answer with the fact that I am skirting a lot of history from redlining and segregation to urban renewal to the urban crisis of the 1970s that created the conditions for the kind of intensive gentrification people experience now. Some historians trace gentrification back before the birth of the term to the early twentieth century as a rising middle class began rehabbing nineteenth century homes in neighborhoods like Boston's Beacon Hill, Charleston's Tradd Street, and Brooklyn's Brooklyn Heights only to be largely thwarted by the Great Depression. In 1964, Ruth Glass coined the term gentrification. So the process has existed for decades. Glass's idea of gentrification, as urban historian Suleiman Osman noted recently, referred to a smaller scale process as compared to what urban denizens experience today. Economic factors help to explain the difference from earlier eras.
As noted, gentrification over the past two or three decades is different from these early examples. In many large cities as historian Jason Hackworth illustrates, housing is owned by larger corporate entities, sometimes transnational in orientation. In previous decades, local actors, individuals rather than international conglomerates, owned housing. During the 1960s and 1970s, ostensibly "progressive" whites rehabbed homes in struggling, mixed race, or working class neighborhoods. This was not without conflict, but local owners have different interests than international corporations; the former, arguably more invested in the city or local community than faceless conglomerates. It was also conducted on a much smaller scale, individual houses rather than wholesale corporate development. That's not to say it was much better in the past, but it was different.
Another example would be the increasing tendency of municipal governments to act as urban entrepreneur: reliant on bond/credit ratings, generous with tax abatements for business, and corporatist in nature.
Still, as Osman points out there is a direct connection between the smaller level "sweat equity 'unslumming' conducted by Jane Jacobs and her peers in the 1960s to which Glass referred to the present day's mixed use waterfront luxury development projects championed by cities as the best way to attract a progressive 'creative class' to the center city." Throw in more recent "neoliberal" business approaches such as business improvement districts, community development corporations, local development corporations, and public private partnerships that sprouted in the 1970s and you get an idea of gentrification's modern complexities.
4. How do millennial and others factor into this development?
Ryan Reft: The 1970s and 1980s were a very tough time for urban America. However, beginning in the 1990s and accelerating to the present, cities found various ways to reduce crime, balance budgets, and improve services. Not equally everywhere mind you, some cities have fared far better than others, but overall. Millennials, as a cohort, happen to have overlapped with these developments particularly as the depiction of cities in popular culture have improved during this period; think Friends's or Seinfeld's cultural cache in the 1990s. The former is apparently quite popular with younger folks even if there has been a recent backlash against it.
However, if you believe many media reports, millennials find cities attractive for a number of reasons. Less invested in homeownership and witnesses to the 2008housing debacle, some millennials express ambivalence toward purchasing a home and remain comfortable with renting. Of course plenty of evidence exists arguing that it's not lack of interest in homeownership but rather cost and debt that prevent millennials from buying a home. In any case, be it personal preference toward the "sharing economy", the rising cost of homes in urban areas, or some combination of both (and/or other factors not mentioned here), these forces have drawn millennials to cities. This development is not confined to New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles; smaller mid-sized cities have experienced influxes as well.
The improvement of mass transit and the explosion of city bike programs (dockless and otherwise) and other modes of transportation such as scooters, have made cities more accessible for millennials and others less enamored of automotive travel. However, transit improvements can also drive gentrification. That happened in Washington D.C. where the extension of the WMATA's Green and Yellow Lines to the traditionally African American communities of Shaw and U Street have thankfully given locals greater access to transportation but have also brought more white residents, many from higher income brackets which in turn has driven gentrification in those neighborhoods and made it more difficult for the city's historic black community to remain in the city.
It's also worth mentioning that the rise of Uber, Lyft, and other forms of ride sharing have mitigated the lack of mass of transit in places where public transportation is less pervasive or even non-existent. Los Angeles, for example, has spent over three decades improving its mass transit and the efforts are notable, but many Angelenoes depend more on the Ubers of the world than its newly established light rail or subway. In recent years, the city has become whiter as immigration flows have slowed and housing prices have climbed in part due to gentrification. It should also be noted that plenty of millennials have been decamping for the suburbs in recent years, so they are moving elsewhere but their impact on cities is pretty obvious.
Finally, many older Americans, like my own folks for example, have moved back into cities as well. No longer wanting to manage a large home or desiring better access to mass transit, a number of elderly individuals and couples have also embarked for the big city from the suburbs. So it's not only young people.
5. How have cities tried to manage gentrification?
Ryan Reft: Good question. Unfortunately, at the moment, there doesn't seem to be one all encompassing answer to this issue. I'll give two examples.
Land banks or community land trusts though not identical are two tools that have been used. I'm over simplifying here, but generally quasi-government and/or local non-profit organizations purchase abandoned or vacant land in an urban community which prevents large scale developers from acquiring said property. The organization then arranges for the land's development for affordable housing or community development. One of the nation's fastest growing cities, Austin, Texas has implemented this policy with some success.
In Washington D.C., a city once known as "Chocolate City" due to its predominantly African American population and now sometimes referred to as Latte City as a result of the influx of white middle and upper class residents and the sharp decline of its black population, the city enacted Tenants Opportunity to Purchase (TOPA) in 1980. The law enables tenants in apartment complexes and sometimes single family homes, the right to negotiate for the purchase of units at the market rate in a building being converted into condos and coops (in the case of a stand alone home, the acquisition of the house, but his happens much more rarely).
While there have been TOPA successes, as Carolyn Gallaher noted in her book on the law, The Politics of Staying Put, it does enable residents to remain in their community, but TOPA fails to prevent the increasing costs of everything else in the surrounding community. So it has been an imperfect solution. Also, critics contend that an unintended consequence of TOPA is the dearth of affordable housing. For example, a tenant can sell his or her TOPA rights of purchase to a third party which can lead to numerous complications including an inflation of the price.
6. What is urban history and how can it help us to better understand the conflicts driven by gentrification?
Ryan Reft: Urban history, which over the years adopted a more regional approach in an attempt to eliminate the somewhat arbitrary lines separating the suburbs and cities, particularly as suburbs urbanize, explores the issues, policies, and people residing in American communities. By understanding how places came to be enables citizens and residents to better understand one another. If newcomers are more aware of neighborhood's history, perhaps they will be better neighbors and more invested in local communities. Also, better understanding, one hopes, leads to better community relations and stronger communal ties.
7. Are there any books you can recommend to better understand gentrification?
Ryan Reft: Sure, though I would say it's worth looking at works that also discuss the conditions created by redlining and the urban crisis of the 1970s and 1980s that created the foundation for the rapid gentrification we've discussed here. I'll try to provide some geographic diversity as well.
Redlining/Suburbanization
Kenneth Jackson – Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States
Richard Rothstein - The Color of Law: The Forgotten History of How Government Segregated America
Kevin Kruse - White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism
The Urban Crisis
Tom Sugrue – Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit
Kim Phillips Fein – Fear City: New York's Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics
Neoliberal Governance
Jason Hackworth – The Neoliberal City: Governance, Ideology, and Development in American Urbanism
Neil Smith – The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City
Mary Patillo – Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City
Loretta Lees, Tom Slater and Elvin Wyly – Gentrification
Carolyn Gallaher – The Politics of Staying Put: Put: Condo Conversion and Tenant Right-to-Buy in Washington, DC
A really good short review essay on the subject can be found in the Journal of Urban history by George Washington University urban historian, Sulieman Osman, "Gentrification Matters" but his book The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity in Postwar New York is also very well regarded.
There are, of course, many, many more worthwhile titles and authors, but this is at least a start with a mix of older classics and newer contributions.
Reflections on Money
by Kianga Daverington
This essay, written by Kianga Daverington of Daverington PLLC , was originally published in January 2020. The piece as been condensed for clarity.
Money is not a physical object like a coin, a bar of gold or a dollar bill. Money is at its core, a technology. It is a human invention designed to solve a specific set of human problems. Consider money, perhaps, in a new way. Think of money as a system for capturing time.
Time is the one thing we each have that is absolutely finite. We are born, we die, and the dash in between is all the time we have.
Think of production. We can usually produce more of some good by adding people to a task (also known as "WORK"). But we are still constrained by time. Whatever we produce is still limited by the amount of humans that can be organized to go into that production. Each of us possesses a limited amount of time available to us individually, so we need to convince or coerce others to add their time to ours if we want to achieve more than we can alone.
Out of this imperative, nations are born.
The most important quality of any particular form of money is how well it preserves the value of time over time. Can you buy the same amount of stuff or more in the future than you can buy today? If yes, congratulations - your money is accumulating time for you and future generations while you relax on the beach. If it takes more and more of a unit of money to buy the same amount of time in the future, well then I'm sorry, but that unit of money is getting weaker and weaker. It's losing value or said another way – it's losing purchasing power. The longer you hold it, the less it buys.
In a way, by purchasing goods and services, you are purchasing time. Every product and every service requires time to make and time to deliver - your time and/or someone else's. The price therefore reflects the collective value of all the time put in. Money is a way we exchange time and move it around from where it is valued less to where it is valued more.
This is where prosperity comes from. It comes out of how well a society, collectively and each person, spends its time. How much time is spent creating and making? How much time is spent consuming? If we make more than we consume, we have something left over called wealth. If we consume more than we make, we are left with debt. You can't consume what you don't have, unless someone extends credit. Where does this "credit" come from? Basically –it's made up.
Too much credit or debt eventually collapses and everyone is mixed up in the collapse.
If we understand that a unit of money represents a unit of time, and we understand time is limited, then a unit in a system of money with unlimited supply cannot have any value. This is the problem we are facing today with the world's money supply. The supply of money in the world is increasing exponentially as central banks create money by giving loans to national governments, which is where our money comes from.
Our entire world financial system is a powder keg of debt.
National currencies today are known as fiat money, a currency without intrinsic value that has been given its power to be used as money by a government that says it is money by regulation. Wikipedia says, "Fiat money does not have use value, and has value only because a government maintains its value, or because parties engaging in exchange agree on its value." Well said, Wiki.
A government's job of maintaining the value of its national money boils down to a confidence game. On what basis do the people who use that government's money believe it has value?
What happens to the money and those who hold it when the foundation of that belief begins to crumble?
The Four Courses of the Apocalypse
by Joyce E. Chaplin
Joyce E. Chaplin (PhD and MA Johns Hopkins, BA Northwestern) is the James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History at Harvard University. You can find her on Twitter here.
In our state of emergency, most Americans want to taste deliverance when they eat. Their wish is important. Humans mask their bare need to eat with culture: customs about when food can be taken, manners for how to consume it, equipment to prepare and serve it correctly, and shibboleths to restrict what can be eaten in the first place. Stockpiling, ordering take-out, gardening, pickling, cooking, baking—by expressing food preferences in a pandemic, US citizens demonstrate what they hope for and fear. What follows is a four-course menu based on popular quarantine options, all of them revealing that Americans hanker after normality. But what is normal? Life before COVID-19 had serious problems. #AloneTogether is a hopeful tag for social distancing. When we're all, by definition, stress eating in various states of aloneness, are we also sustaining a United States that must, now and in the future, somehow hang together?
We'll start our meal with sourdough. On Twitter, ongoing convo about bubbly mothers is not about extroverted female parents. Mothers (or starters) are thick, fermented cultures of lactobacilli that, instead of baker's yeast, leaven sourdough. Carefully cultivated, in jar or crock or Tupperware, starters look like loose, frothy dough. You measure some out for a bake, then tenderly feed the remainder some flour and water. True sourdough is vegan and is one of the world's oldest foods, with each lactobacillus strain native to a specific place on Earth.
Sourdough is undeniably American. It was the sturdy fare of many a young man (or woman) who followed the call to go west, to wherever the urban supply line of brewer's yeast gave out, whenever baking powder wasn't yet commercially available. In Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books, sourdough biscuits are the daily bread. Gold miners ate those biscuits, too, also sourdough flapjacks, fixed from treasured starters. Boudin Bakery claims (credibly) to be the longest continuously operating business in San Francisco. It was founded in 1849, when a Frenchman opened a commercial bakery, using a Forty-Niner's sourdough mother, which the company says it's tended ever since. (Bite into Boudin and you're chewing on something roughly 170 years old.) Onward the bubbly mothers went, to the Klondike, site of the next gold rush. The "Sourdoughs," as Alaska miners were called, are commemorated in Charlie Chaplin's Gold Rush (1925). This is the movie in which the Little Tramp and his cabin mate, snowbound together (sound familiar?), get so hungry that Chaplin's character boils and dines on his boot, and then his roomie seeks to dine on him.
Alas, it's this vignette, with one starved Sourdough hallucinating that the other is a tasty chicken and chasing him with an axe, that I cannot forget amid the pleasant twittering about rustic boules. What do people think they're doing when they bake bread at home, one loaf at a time, or even two by two, as if handily adapting ancient divine advice for surviving an impending disaster? Historically, people didn't do that. Baking whole loaves of bread consumes lots of fuel. The ancient Near East, ancestral land of small-grains like wheat and bread baked from them, lost most of its trees in ancient times—Lebanon and Egypt once had forests of cedar and pine. As timber dwindled, firing an oven got expensive. Quick-cooking flatbreads were what people made at home. In the tree-depleted old world, commercial bakers had to figure the cost of fuel into baking multiple loaves of bread in a large oven. For a fee, a baker might make room for household loaves, or even other cooking, for people who couldn't afford much fuel. One way or another, it could take a village to bake a loaf of bread. In North America, however, settlers found plentiful wood—great for baking—until they cleared the woodlands nearest the settlements. At that point, they needed a Monsieur Boudin to bake them something other than quick pancakes.
I don't think most of social media's sourdough bakers know that their re-enactment of American pioneer autonomy defies a bigger history in which daily bread evoked connection to others, if not dependence on them.
Frankly, American sourdough smells like settler-colonialism, a fragrance of biscuits and flapjacks rising above the log cabins and mining camps that steadily eroded Indigenous land rights while cutting down trees on those lands.
It's a myth that pioneering individuals or families settled the West—the federal government did that, through policies that favored the spread of white population. The ability to own and maintain a freestanding household (with an oven) is still a legacy of US racial and class privileges.
Maybe, at this point, you'd like a drink with your meal? Lots of other people are having one, or three. The marketing research firm Nielsen found that, compared to a year ago, March 2020 showed a 75 perecent increase in spirits sold, a 66 percent increase in wine sales, 42 percent for beer, and a spike of 243 percent in online alcohol sales generally. (March 2020 cannabis sales also soared in states where it's legal to buy.)
That's self-medicating to the point of disaster. An editorial in the Boston Globe pleaded for a ban on alcohol sales during the emergency shutdown, pointing out booze's role in rising rates of domestic abuse. Under quarantine, vulnerable individuals are miserably close to abusers and distanced from helpers. The nuclear family was supposed to have been cleansed of the worst residues of ancient patriarchal rights. We're now engaged in a painful test of how much of that work was done. Post-quarantine rates of divorce, (re)marriage, and births will reveal collective confidence, or not, in the American nuclear family, temporarily returned, as it has been, to a state of snowbound homesteading.
Take cheer, for the moment, in our second course, crab rangoon. Aggregate Uber Eats data about early-April deliveries identified this as the nation's third most popular dish, trailing french fries and pad thai. What is it? Bits of crab (or imitation crab) and seasonings are blended into cream cheese. Dollops of the tangy mass are wrapped in wonton pastry, then deep fried. The crisp bundles are typically served with a sweet dipping sauce. If you think this sounds like bar food, you're right. Crab Rangoon seems to have been invented at Trader Vic's, the post-World-War II tiki bar that also claims to have invented the mai tai. Crab rangoon has no connection to Yangon in Myanmar. The fried parcels belong to the chop-suey canon of Chinese-American foods, the knowingly false concoctions that mingle something authentically Asian (like wonton pastry) with some kind of Americana ("Philadelphia" cream cheese), often featuring an expensive treat, like crab.
Is this cultural appropriation? Maybe. Though it was Chinese immigrants themselves who shrewdly sold chop suey to white customers to ensure their grandchildren would never have to work in restaurants. Are crab rangoons culinary abominations? Well, what isn't? It's not as if ballpark beer and hotdogs greatly resemble the lager and wurst homesick German immigrants tried to recreate in the United States. Let's give chop suey and crab rangoon the benefit of the doubt, regarding them as gateway dishes for the timid Euro-American palate. Without those dubious chimeras, would pad thai have become the second most ordered thing on Uber Eats in 2020?
The Uber data proves another of crab rangoon's essential qualities: it's not home-cooking; food service workers make it. When it arrives with its jewel-tone dipping sauce, it's proof that you didn't have to cook. Even if you buy frozen crab rangoon, somebody else got it ready for you to heat up. For this second course in our pandemic dinner, it still takes a village. One commentator on the Uber Eats data wondered (with studied innocence) what chicken tikka masala and "crag [sic] Rangoon" could possibly be? Sadly, some Americans don't enjoy any Asian cuisine. (Perhaps they also call COVID-19 the "kung flu.") The "crag" for crab was probably just a typo, b and g are neighbors on the keyboard, after all. But that mistake conceals the dish's inherent sociability. No one orders crab rangoon from a distant crag where they can't get a phone signal. Just remember: if you order anything, add a tip. Everyone in food service is tired, underpaid, and risking infection.
I hope you're not full, because here comes the main course and it's Spam. This is neither home-made nor ordered from a restaurant. Each can of Spam yields a dense, pink, rounded-edge oblong that can be sliced or diced, then baked, fried, or microwaved. It predates the microwave, invented in 1937 by the Hormel Company to sell pork shoulder during the Great Depresssion. "Spam" vaguely promised shoppers some nice spiced ham. Spam hit the big-time during World War II, when the US government bought it in bulk to feed servicemen. It remains popular on Pacific islands, including Hawai'i, that have had large US military bases.
Spam is newly coveted because it's shelf stable, a prepper protein the Greatest Generation bequeathed to us. It joins several related revivals. Backyard gardening and home canning are also on the rise, just as victory gardens and adaptation to food rationing supported war efforts in the early twentieth century. It must be said, however, that today's prepping also descends from the bleaker survivalism of the Cold War. In the 1950s and 1960s, Spam-stocked bomb shelters were not so much parts of a collective program to defeat the enemy as they were ways to outsurvive one's neighbors. Nicely browned, Spam has a crisp keep-calm-and-carry on quality. But also a Dr. Strangelove sizzle.
Spam sales are part of pandemic enthusiasm for animal products, even those produced from factory farms—even though we should know better. Spam is a branded product. People have heard of it even if they've never eaten it. It's the antithesis of farm-to-table, also of vegetarianism or veganism. It's not just processed food, but highly processed—and cruelly so. Spam is extracted from hogs, a highly sentient and social species. They are bred in metal cages with concrete floors and slaughtered on an industrial scale. Producing protein this way is inhumane and environmentally unsustainable. And yet meat is a high priority for many Americans. On April 28th, President Trump signed an executive order to declare meat processing plants "critical infrastructure." He is indifferent to the hogs, and to the meat-industry workers who now cannot practice social distancing. Who cares about them? Recent analysis of the most-Googled recipes in each US state showed that iterations of hamburger or ground beef were the top choice in twelve states, chicken in five, pork in three more—twenty of our fifty states seek animal flesh. But whatever industrial meat's current merits as comfort-food, we cannot plan to subsist on it in the decades to come.
Time for dessert? Maybe you're trying to avoid "the COVID 15," the fifteen extra pounds stress-eating is packing around some self quarantiners. How about a healthy orange? Fruit isn't a bad choice. Even grapes or apples, which are little more than bags of fructose and water, with trace vitamins, are better than actual candy.
But, first, give thanks to the people who pick your fruit and to the natural world that makes all food possible. Agricultural piece workers have unenviable jobs that poorly match the attractive pyramids of bounty in the produce section. This isn't one of those (vanishingly rare) problems that the pandemic has made better. Most US farm workers are undocumented migrants, to whom many labor regulations never apply. They are now, in the pandemic, categorized as "essential workers," out of concern to maintain the food supply. But this means the workers can't stay home, either to recuperate if they're sick or avoid people they know are infected—and those two factors feed on each other, even out in the fresh air of a field of antioxidant-rich strawberries. If we want to continue to enjoy berries or oranges, we'll need to reconsider the compromised labor conditions for agricultural workers in an increasingly exclusionist United States.
Also, whether we want to think about it right now or not, climate change is threatening most crops, including those, like citrus, that are Goldilocks-picky about their temperature and rainfall.
Now, back to those antioxidants. Many fruits (and vegetables) have super-nutritional qualities. These are critical for maintaining health. Your body will disintegrate from scurvy if you cease to ingest Vitamin C; the known range of vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and micro-nutrients have similar prophylactic functions. Together, they boost the immune system's defense against infections, including COVID-19.
But fruit alone doesn't ward off contagious diseases. We also need immunizations, which shield individuals from horrors like smallpox while giving populations the herd immunity that prevents outbreaks of measles, whooping cough, and the like. Anti-vaxxers, the people who think inoculating children creates autism, preach instead the efficacy of diet. In parallel, right-wing survivalists are peddling pandemic decoctions of colloidal silver. Silver has antibacterial properties; these have no effect on viruses like COVID-19, however. Nor will an orange a day truly keep the doctor away. If anti-vaxxing survives the pandemic, can anything kill it? More to the point, if civic intelligence about science could also be described in terms of herd immunity, at what point might we be collectively doomed by the ignorance of a minority?
I offer a fortune cookie at meal's end. And the fortune reads:
Eat wisely—#AloneTogether is forever.