I’m a little ashamed to admit how hard I laughed reading this admittedly silly piece by the always great Albert Burneko at the always great (and, to quote the piece, “incredibly deranged”) Defector about the recent Daily Beast story about the eating habits of Ron DeSantis.

The quote in the Daily Beast story from a former DeSantis staffer is great – and probably because of that, I’ve seen the same line quoted in probably half a dozen other summaries since it was originally published. In it, the staffer claims that DeSantis “would sit in meetings and eat in front of people [. . .] like a starving animal who has never eaten before.”

Burneko picks out the most hilarious and disturbing nugget from the story and gives it the full Defector treatment:

The story’s most vivid detail concerns DeSantis once memorably slurping chocolate pudding out of his own bare goddamn hand like a fucking freak:

Enshrined in DeSantis lore is an episode from four years ago: During a private plane trip from Tallahassee to Washington, D.C., in March of 2019, DeSantis enjoyed a chocolate pudding dessert–by eating it with three of his fingers, according to two sources familiar with the incident.

It’s the “three of his fingers” detail that really makes this anecdote sing. Because now you kind of can’t help but picture it, right? Not just “with his fingers” or “out of his hand,” but specifically three fingers. Really disturbing stuff!

While I laughed embarrassingly hard while reading this story, Burneko is 100% wrong about one thing:

The likeliest possibility seems to me to be a pincer type of deal: The index and middle finger, plus the thumb, sort of gently pinching a glob of pudding like a wad of chaw and lifting it to the face of Ron DeSantis, to be slurped at by his large wet tongue, with the now spit-sucked pincer then returning to the chocolate pudding dessert, like the world’s most accursed prize-machine claw, for another disgusting saliva-impregnated clot of chocolate goop.

Having been, in my younger and more vulnerable years, party to a similarly disturbing display in which a friend of mine¹ drunkenly devoured corn syrup from a makeshift honey pot as part of a dismantled Winnie the Pooh Halloween costume, I can say with some amount of confidence that the method employed to eat pudding with one’s fingers is much more likely to be the “garden-spade technique":

Three fingers lined up and pressed tightly together, stabbing down into the pudding dessert and scooping out a little heap. This could be the index, middle, and ring fingers (a Large spade) or the middle, ring, and pinky fingers (Small).

“I shit in a bag,” he reveals, with a hint of pride. “Because I had to go! And there was nowhere to go. And I’m convinced the gods of rock said, ‘That kid’s a true believer. We’ve got to put the thumb on the scale for the old Weeze.' “

Brian Hiatt at Rolling Stone: “The Strange Birth and Near Death of Weezer”

Rachel Hartigan Shea at National Geographic: “Colossal crabs may hold clue to Amelia Earhart fate”

💡

Super interesting read that articulated a few points that have been on my mind recently.

The notion that smaller rust belt communities like the Youngstown-Warren area haven’t tried to diversify their economies reflects basic ignorance. Mayors, economic developers, and business leaders in these communities have done almost nothing but try to attract new industries, but — not surprisingly — they have a much harder time doing that than their larger neigbors, which began the battle for economic recovery with major universities, hospitals, and corporate headquarters already in place.

Nothing frustrates me more than seeing many factions on the left advocate leaving this group of people behind, almost vindictively, out of an assumption that most of them were Trump voters and are thus “getting what they deserve.” These are long-term problems that go back much further than that, and these are people who should be an important part of the liberal agenda. The fact that many among this demographic (although, notably, not Mahoning County) were able to be swindled by Trump just highlights the fact that they felt ignored by the mainstream Democratic Party.

Blaming the working class has long been a default move for elite and middle-class people. Some have faith in the cultural myth of meritocracy. They see their success as a matter of effort and talent and assume that working-class people just don’t have enough of either. For others, judging workers is a way to displace their own anxieties about the uncertain economy. Both project their biases onto the working class and reassure themselves that they deserve their economic privileges.

No wonder working-class people are rejecting mainstream politics, embracing populism, and, increasingly, taking to the streets.

Sick.

. . . radiologists in Kentucky are no longer allowed to diagnose black lung for the purposes of a benefit claim, meaning that physicians . . . must defer to certified pulmonologists. As of last year, there were only six physicians in the state that can diagnose black lung and at least four of those have a history of helping the coal industry with claim appeals.

Appalachia Can’t Breathe - Progressive.org

Baseball players (pitchers especially) are weird. Strangest quote of Spring Training (so far) easily goes to Cleveland Indians' pitcher Mike Clevinger. In a story at The Athletic, about an argument among the Indians' pitching staff about who is the best athlete, he somehow gets to this point:

It’s like a vegan saying you can’t drink milk – do animals drink other animals’ milk? No, because they don’t have the thumbs to milk their nipples. Of course not. But if they did, do you know what a dog would be doing every [forking] day?

…

Really enlightening article at Highline.

And, in a cruel twist, one effect of weight bias is that it actually makes you eat more. The stress hormone cortisol—the one evolution designed to kick in when you’re being chased by a tiger or, it turns out, rejected for your looks—increases appetite, reduces the will to exercise and even improves the taste of food. Sam, echoing so many of the other people I spoke with, says that he drove straight to Jack in the Box last year after someone yelled, “Eat less!” at him across a parking lot.

It’s hard to even really grasp just how much we have the deck stacked against the obese. It’s a systemic problem that it doesn’t seem like we, as a nation, have much interest in solving.

The problem is that in America, like everywhere else, our institutions of public health have become so obsessed with body weight that they have overlooked what is really killing us: our food supply. Diet is the leading cause of death in the United States, responsible for more than five times the fatalities of gun violence and car accidents combined. But it’s not how much we’re eating—Americans actually consume fewer calories now than we did in 2003. It’s what we’re eating.

For more than a decade now, researchers have found that the quality of our food affects disease risk independently of its effect on weight. Fructose, for example, appears to damage insulin sensitivity and liver function more than other sweeteners with the same number of calories. People who eat nuts four times a week have 12 percent lower diabetes incidence and a 13 percent lower mortality rate regardless of their weight. All of our biological systems for regulating energy, hunger and satiety get thrown off by eating foods that are high in sugar, low in fiber and injected with additives. And which now, shockingly, make up 60 percent of the calories we eat.

New Study Shows That Students Are Helped by Making College Better, Not Cheaper

Helping students succeed also involves a different intuition, however, one that every student unable to take required courses because of waiting lists or limited sections understands: Finishing college is less likely if the school isn’t very good and can’t afford quality academic programs.

This is absolutely true, but it might be overlooking a much simpler problem: how do we define “success” for students? Should it simply be whether they pass courses or graduate, or should it factor in how much the student has actually learned and how prepared the student is for life after college? Grades are, ultimately, arbitrary. And when the institution has a vested interest in seeing students succeed (by the limited definition used in basically all education-focused legislation), the likelihood that a student who has not mastered the material will pass anyway—still succeeding by the State and institutional standards—drastically increases while the likelihood of succeeding in life after college undoubtedly decreases. This problem is exacerbated by the funding issues mentioned in the piece. If colleges had the money to invest on a per student basis, I have no doubt they would like to invest that money in driving actual success — making sure that students understood the material and that the degree they received was earned rather than purchased. This is likely one of the things the authors mean by “quality academic programs.” But, as things are, cash-strapped colleges are more likely to pad numbers or water down expectations. These are more affordable solutions to an expensive problem.

Vlad Savov at The Verge perfectly summed up something I’ve been feeling for a long time, but have struggled to put into words.

Whatever it is, I’ve been gripped by a fever of indecision caused by comparing Apples iPhone X and Google’s Pixel 2 XL side by side.

Yep.

Later, he gets into what I think is the real crux of the problem — that, aside from all the ecosystem arguments and camera comparisons, actually using the iPhone X, with its gesture-based interface is such a great experience.

There is pure kinetic joy in swiping up from the bottom of the phone to summon the home screen, or sideways to switch between apps. I marvel at the fluidity and beauty of this human-machine interface. It’s fast, unerringly smooth, and unfailingly satisfying to use.

His experiences are also similar to mine in the advantages of the Pixel: its battery life¹ and its camera.

. . . the iPhone doesn’t match the Pixel 2’s camera, and in my experience it’s not even close.

My experience has been the same. Chalk it up to personal preference — I’ve seen all the great comparisons people have posted online and the difference is much less clear in that context — but in my use, the Pixel 2 XL’s camera is head and shoulders above the iPhone X. For me, this is the single reason that it’s hard to switch. I have a 6-month old son, and the photos that I have routinely captured with the Pixel 2 XL are just so good. Far better than what I expect to capture with my smartphone. The iPhone X similarly does a great job, but the photos look like really good smartphone photos rather than really good photos. Aside from all the other conveniences of the iPhone — the ecosystem, third party apps, iMessage, AirPods, etc.—this is the one reason that I’m having a hard time really making the switch.

But, like Savov:

. . . as soon as I was back on the Pixel, tapping the multitasking button like some 20th century plebeian, looking at the less impressive display, listening to the less stellar speakers, swiping through the Twitter app with the buttons at the top instead of the bottom… I started feeling sad.

Finally, he sums it up perfectly with this line:

The iPhone (X) is every Android fan’s worst nightmare: the outsider that shows you how nice life could be.

1. Who knows how long this will actually last, but for now, while my Pixel is still relatively new, it’s great. ↩︎