Stephen D. Shenfield | Author and Translator
Waste and want: Grapes of Wrath revisited
- Published on 01 August 2010
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In his famous novel The Grapes of Wrath (Chapter 25), John Steinbeck described how food was destroyed during the Great Depression:
Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground.
The people come for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges… A million people hungry, needing the fruit – and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains.And the smell of rot fills the country.
Burn coffee for fuel in the ships… Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out [with nets]. Slaughter the pigs and bury them…
And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificates – died of malnutrition – because the food must be forced to rot.
Calhoun Correctional Institution: A Gladiator School
- Published on 09 July 2022
- Hits: 299
Calhoun Correctional Institution is one of fifty major prisons operated by the Florida Department of Corrections, the state’s largest agency. It is in Blountstown, Calhoun County in the Florida panhandle. The warden is Mr. Heath Holland.
Calhoun CI has capacity for 1,350 men. A man who was there from 2009 to 2014 says that the actual number of inmates is about 1,600. There are some cells, but most inmates are accommodated in blocks of 70 bunks. The place is very dirty. In summer the heat gets unbearable, but the inmates have to bear it because there is no air conditioning for them (except when they get to go to the law library or if they are admitted to the infirmary).
A digression. Who was Calhoun?
In whose honor is this prison – and the county in which it is situated -- named? Who was this Calhoun?
Automation: an open letter to Andrew Yang
- Published on 17 July 2022
- Hits: 247
Dear Andrew Yang
I followed with interest your campaign as a candidate in the Democratic Party’s 2020 presidential primaries. You are widely known for advocating Universal Basic Income (UBI) as a necessary response to the massive unemployment that you expect to result from automation in the near future. I recently read your book The War on Normal People: The Truth About America’s Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future, published in 2018 by Hachette Books. I have also studied the website of your new Forward Party.
Beware: cell phones!
- Published on 16 August 2021
- Hits: 1122
Just look at that photo! How cute! Do a search on 'kid' and 'phone' and you'll find lots of equally cute photos of little children using cell phones. Many brands are specifically designed for the toddler market. The average age at which children now get their first cell phone is six, but clearly many get one earlier. It is common to amuse babies by showing them moving images on a cell phone.
Observe that in these photos the kids are holding the phone right up against the ear, where radiation will do the most damage to their vulnerable young brains. It would be somewhat less harmful if they left a gap of an inch between ear and phone, but neither they nor their parents even realize that there is any cause for concern -- that 'children absorb more microwave radiation than adults because they are smaller, their brain tissues are more absorbent, and their skulls are thinner' (L. Lloyd Morgan, Santosh Kesari, and Devra Lee Davis, Journal of Microscopy and Ultrastructure, December 2014).
Captives of Coca-Cola
- Published on 14 October 2021
- Hits: 956
In July 2018 the attention of The New York Times and then Esquire magazine was somehow drawn to a mountain town in southern Mexico and the truly remarkable amount of Coca-Cola drunk by its residents. The British Broadcasting Corporation has produced a documentary on the same topic.
The town is San Cristobal, in the Central Highlands of Chiapas, Mexico’s poorest and southernmost state. A third of its quarter-million or so residents are of Mayan descent. Their average per capita daily consumption of ‘the friendliest drink on earth’ is a gallon – the whole of a two-liter bottle and most of a second, delivered to numerous local convenience stores from a bottling plant on the town’s outskirts.
