Weird, random Wiki thing: Reading about the history of Southern fried chicken on Wikipedia, and it says multiple times that while the Scottish brought over the tradition of battering chicken and frying it in fat, they did not use "seasoning" I'm no expert here, but it seemed implausible on its face that the Scottish would not "season" their chicken. What would that even mean—that they could fry the chicken in fat but were too stupid to realize it would taste better with salt and pepper?

Anecdote on humanities—during my MA (I know), I took an intellectual history survey w/ a professor who'd been at Brown since the 70s. She said when she started, undergrads would arrive having already read Hegel, Nietzsche, and Marx, and she'd assign things like Fichte and Lukacs By the mid-2000s, she'd had to drop Lukacs because not enough students were familiar with Marx and Hegel, and by the 2010s she'd stopped assigning Hegel because the average reading level had fallen so far that most students couldn't get anything out of it and just wouldn't read

https://twitter.com/estherbrooklyn/status/1630686727835664387

The "15,000 words!!" thing is particularly laughable. There was one 11,000-word magazine feature, plus like three normal-length newspaper articles and a Douthat op-ed over the course of a year

After the crying and the addiction, probably the most-mocked thing about Jordan Peterson is his complaining about how modern Disney movies subvert traditional mythological narratives, but I actually think it’s one of his more astute points Spotted Toad had a great post on his (now-deleted) blog about about how this shows up in the JJ Abrams Star Wars, but this analysis could stand for the whole world of 'progressive realist' entertainment