Reading List #24 (Patreon)

Hey everyone! I've got nine great things for you to read this week (not including the three posts I published here last week... yes that's a shameless plug.)

1) Sperm Count Zero  (Daniel Noah Halpern) 9/4/18

In this article I learned two important things: sperm counts have fallen by more than 50% in the past four decades and men with poor semen quality have more health issues and a higher mortality rate than men with good semen quality.  I of course couldn't help but to think of The Handmaid's Tale and Children of Men when reading this.

Read Length: Medium 

2) What Was It Like to Be an African American Freshman in 1962? (Roy Johnson) 8/31/17

PWI students might find a special interest in this article, which profiled the experiences of black Stanford alumni. 

Read Length:  Medium

3) The Most Important Food Dishes That Changed America (Thrillist) 3/20/18

DO NOT read this while hungry. I made this mistake and immediately went out in search of food after reading. Here are two of my favorite highlights from the list:

On the creation of Prince's Hot Chicken in 1941: 

In the 1930s, a woman in Nashville found out that her lover, Thorton Prince, had been spending his time with multiple women around town. Fed up with his cheating ways, she decided to get revenge by sabotaging his favorite dish: fried chicken. She dumped a ton of cayenne pepper and spices onto a batch of freshly fried chicken that she’d made for him one Sunday morning and waited for him to take a bite and double over in pain. To her surprise, not only did he eat the entire batch of chicken, he loved it and asked for seconds. Thorton even saved some of the spicy chicken and brought it to his brothers who loved it, too. In 1945, Thorton and his brothers opened the first location of Prince’s Hot Chicken in Nashville, Tennessee with a recipe that they’ve perfected and worked on for years.

On The Creation of General Tso Chicken c. 1970:

Sugar-shellacked and a shade of otherworldly red, General Tso’s chicken has remained a staple of American Chinese menus for decades. The original version, however, barely resembles its Western cousin.  “They... felt, as many Chinese chefs who are feeding Caucasian people around the world do, the need to emphasize the sweet side of the food for non-Chinese people,” said restaurateur Ed Schoenfeld, who worked at Uncle Tai’s in the 1970s. 

The SHADE! Lol I definitely loved this article because ya'll know I love food history.

Read Length: Long

4) Shifting Sands: Historians Change Their Minds 6/20/16 

In this article you'll find seven historians who might challenge how you are currently conceptualizing the past. This post made me wonder which methodologies I currently employ or conclusions I've came to that may change with age. I look forward to being a seasoned historian one day and looking back on these early writings of my career.

Read Length: Medium

5) Americans Are Shifting The Rest of Their Identity To Match Their Politics (Perry Bacon Jr.) 9/11/18

This isn't surprising, but it was interesting to see this quantified in a study. Some interesting finds include:

Liberal Democrats were much more likely than conservative Republicans to start identifying as Latino or saying that their ancestry was African, Asian or Hispanic.

Conservative Republicans were much more likely than liberal Democrats to become born-again Christians and to stop identifying as non-religious; liberal Democrats were much more likely than conservative Republicans to leave religion and stop describing themselves as born-again.

Conservative Republicans were more likely than liberal Democrats to stop describing themselves as lesbian, gay or bisexual; liberal-leaning Democrats were more likely to start identifying as lesbian, gay or bisexual.

Read Length: Short

6) The Threat of Tribalism (Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld) (Oct. 2018 Issue of The Atlantic)

This is a thoughtful accompanying article for #5. If more and more people are engaging in identity politics shaped around their political beliefs, how does that fare for a "united" nation? 

Read Length: Medium

7) A Brief History of Facts  (David Wootton) 2/3/17

In this short article, the writer reminded me how young the concept of "facts" are in relation to the age of human communication. If you read "Five Things About Fake News", you may find this interesting. The "fact" as we know it didn't enter the collective consciousness until the 17th Century! 

Read Length: Short

8) Jack the Ripper’s victims were not prostitutes (Helena Horton) 9/16/18

So this is a new historical theory that I will be keeping my eye on. According to historian Dr. Hallie Rubenhold:

We have never questioned 19th century orthodoxy - the world in which they were killed was a world in which women were disrespected and treated as second class citizens - we have never changed that narrative - they have been overlooked by society. They were poor, working class women, one of them was more middle class actually, they got married and had children, they were mothers and they were wives, when they fell on hard times they worked in laundry, they worked as servants...but the accepted narrative that all five were prostitutes and that he was a prostitute killer.

I think it's interesting that re-considering the occupations of the women could change the list of suspects for the infamously unsolved 19th century murder spree. Even while I still personally let my imagination run wild with the theory that Jack the Ripper was actually a woman, this theory is one with legs. Plenty of single and poor 19th century women engaged in sex work without it being a full-time career (this is true today, too) meaning they were all stereotyped to be sex workers. I look forward to Rubenhold's book, which drops in March. I just hope her narrative doesn't go the extra mile to distance the victims from sex work to make the crimes seem more horrible because they happened to "normal women". 

Read Length: Short

9) The Diaper Caper and the Small-Dog Scam (Ernesto Quinonez) 7/8/07

While doing research for my new favorite patreon series, If I Could Time Travel, I came across this article that details how looters capitalized on the New York City Blackout of 1977. It turns out diapers were pretty damned valuable.

Read Length: Medium

Happy Reading!