Gary Taubes Continues the Good Fight

I tweeted a reference to this article, but you should read it. It summarizes his arguments and insights about obesity. As the referenced documentary apparently makes clear, the CW (conventional wisdom) still attacks the same old shibboleths, but to no avail. Time to take Taubes seriously.

Garry Wills on Caro on LBJ & Bobby

Garry Wills is a master writer and biographer of--among others-- Nixon & the Kennedy clan. Robert Caro, is perhaps the great biographer of our times, and his recently published The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson takes on a time that seems far away, but is well within the memory of many of us. In this piece, Wills does a riff on Caro's work. Wills notes that one of the great themes arising from Caro's most recent volume is the hatred between LBJ & Bobby Kennedy. Hatred, as an important component of this book, overrides, at least in part, Caro's grand theme of the exercise and struggle for political power in mid-20th century America. This piece is a delight, but as Wills notes, the hatred between Kennedy and Johnson brought out the worst in both of them. As Wills describes it, it's like watching two trains colliding head-on.