Hey, at least they don’t cost as much. From a recent press release from the Chicago-based American Dietetic Association: “Healthful food items on a restaurant menu are like the various tools men collect in their garages–nice to have around, but seldom used for home improvements.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
“I’m a leftist (and a feminist) because of evidence and logic, not in spite of it,” writes physicist Alan Sokal in Lingua Franca (May/June). Sokal, who got a nonsensical article published in the postmodern journal Social Text by salting it with trendy relativist jargon, contends that the moral and cultural relativism of such journals as Social Text represents “a profound historical volte-face. For most of the past two centuries, the Left has been identified with science and against obscurantism; we have believed that rational thought and the fearless analysis of objective reality (both natural and social) are incisive tools for combating the mystifications promoted by the powerful–not to mention being desirable human ends in their own right.”
“In southern Illinois the presence of some breeding songbirds may depend on the existence of large forests in the Ozarks,” writes Scott Robinson of the state Natural History Survey in Natural History (July). Nests elsewhere are endangered by invading cowbirds, which displace eggs in other birds’ nests to make room for their own. When the eggs hatch, the cowbird’s offspring are usually larger than that of the host bird, shortchanging the host’s nestlings on food, care, and space. “Nowhere in Illinois have I found a forest tract that is more than four miles (the cowbird’s daily commuting range) from a farm, pasture, or yard. As a result, cowbirds can reach any nest.”
