Doritos, Deadlines, and a Rock-Star Banker

Plus: Memoir meets the therapist’s couch

“Can Colleges Do Without Deadlines?” The New Yorker is skeptical, pointing to experts who say more deadlines might actually help with student anxiety. In his September/October cover story, Simon Lewsen explored shifts in higher ed when it comes to deadlines, standards, and accommodations, including in his own classroom:

I hold the line on a few things. Classes happen in person only. Lectures are not recorded or beamed out over Zoom. Screens of any kind are forbidden in my classroom. I correct written grammar and style. Class participation is mandatory. I insist on these rules because the skills required to comply with them—clear communication and the ability to exchange ideas in real time, unencumbered by digital distractions—are the skills I’m trying to foster. The overwhelming majority of my students rise to the challenge. In anonymous course evaluations, many report that they’re glad they did so. The experience may be daunting at first, but things worth doing usually are. [Read more]

A writer for Slate recently argued that there are limits to the “therapy novel”: fiction that “serves the same purpose as therapy—to help readers work out their problems.” Tajja Isen tackled how therapy logic has infiltrated another genre, in “Self-Diagnosis Is Making Memoir Too Predictable”:

Such a tight weave between writing and therapy is understandable. The two share core similarities. Both are catalyzed by storytelling, require deep psychic work, and reach for insight; mental health is a fertile subject for memoir, and the prose can suffer if events are narrativized before they’ve been processed. But therapy and writing are also fundamentally different projects. Transposing the aims of one onto the other can feel defensive, even litigious. An elbow jammed between the ribs, a hissed see? The author presides, smacks a gavel. Each scene feels not like the bloom of self-discovery but evidence that snaps toward a verdict. [Read more]

Mark Carney , a former Bank of Canada governor, is planning to help out the Liberals as an economic adviser. Whether he has any other party plans in mind, he won’t say. Curtis Gillespie tracked Carney’s career in a 2021 feature, asking whether politics is a possibility for the “rock-star banker”:

The Liberals, notes [John] Ibbitson, have been known to choose leaders who look great on paper and then struggle on the ground, Michael Ignatieff and John Turner being perhaps the two best examples of intellectual heft that turned into political dead weight, mostly due to an absence of the common touch. Voters, after all, don’t necessarily want the smartest person for the top job—they want someone they trust. And getting to that position is always a fight. “Does Carney take relentless, vindictive personal attacks, both from opposition politicians and from a portion of the press?” Ibbitson wonders. And, even if he can take it, can he dish it out? “On paper, he looks great as a candidate. He is formidably qualified for a senior role in public life,” Ibbitson says. “But politics is a blood sport.” [Read more]

Scientists have discovered that the dye used in Doritos can make mice translucent. How did we get to this deeply weird point in food history? Sasha Chapman ’s “That Empty Feeling” has some insights:

Doritos nearly weren’t the amazing commercial success they turned out to be. … Marketing whiz Arch West had difficulty selling his idea to his colleagues back in 1962, when tortilla chips were virtually unknown in the United States. They became a success only when he made the chips taste like something they weren’t—a meat taco with all the veggie fixings—using artificial flavours. When we munch a Dorito, our body imagines it’s about to ingest something satisfying and substantial. But it doesn’t, so we reach for another and another, in hopes of achieving the nutrients that the chip’s flavour fraudulently promises. “So much of the food we now eat is not only a lie, it is a very good lie,” writes [Mark] Schatzker. “Modern food may be the most compelling lie humans have ever told.” [Read more]

Check out our new podcast, What Happened Next, hosted by Nathan Whitlock . This week’s conversation is with Carl Wilson , about his book Let’s Talk about Love.

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