DR. BOLI EXPLAINS THE OBESITY EPIDEMIC.

From a 1961 ad: behold the immensity of the Big Boy, which by today’s standards is a little bitty hamburger.

Americans keep getting fatter. That is the observation of platoons of experts who, after studying the trends on their graphs, are so depressed about the implications of the squiggly upward line that they just want to lock the bedroom door and eat a whole bag of Doritos.

But why are Americans more obese now than they were half a century ago?

It’s a difficult question, the experts say—so difficult that you will need platoons of experts to answer it. They propose many hypotheses. Perhaps it is because of artificial preservatives or chemical additives. Or perhaps it is because we eat prepared meals instead of cooking at home. Or perhaps it is something in the kind of oil our food is cooked in—perhaps we ought to cook everything in olive oil, or in lard.

Where there are many hypotheses, it indicates that no one of them is satisfactory. They have all failed the test: they have not produced a theory, which is to say an explanation that makes testable predictions that come true.

Dr. Boli will now offer a hypothesis of his own, and any graduate students in public health may test its predictions. Dr. Boli’s hypothesis is that Americans are getting fatter because they are eating more food.

His evidence for that assertion is a series of observations made over a more than usually long life. But fortunately some of the evidence is available to anyone who cares to do a bit of archaeology. You need only pick up your pick and go digging in the menus of chain restaurants.

If you are in the Pittsburgh orbit, for example, you are familiar with Eat’n Park, a chain of “family restaurants” that began as a drive-in burger joint. Down at the bottom of the list of hamburgers is the littlest of them all, the Superburger.

If it’s so little, why is it called “Super”?

Well, because, when it was introduced, it was immense. It was a feast for a glutton. It had twice the meat of a normal cheeseburger. (In fact, it was originally a Big Boy, but it had to be renamed when Eat’n Park lost the Big Boy franchise.)

So why did the Superburger shrink?

It didn’t. It’s still the same size. But bigger, more glutton-friendly hamburgers grew up around it, until it looked like a miniature model of a hamburger by comparison.

You can see the same phenomenon wherever these little bits of history are preserved in chain-restaurant menus. The biggest thing on the menu fifty years ago is the smallest thing on the menu today. This pattern reflects, and perhaps caused, a change in Americans’ expectations. We demand more food in a meal today. We eat snacks with the same number of calories that made up dinner in the middle of the twentieth century.

This is Dr. Boli’s hypothesis: that more Americans are obese because we have developed a cultural expectation of eating more food.

To make the hypothesis into a scientific theory, its predictions must be tested.

Some nutrition advocates have tried to match the rise in obesity to the rise of fast-food chains like McDonald’s. But they usually fail. The curves don’t track: there is a significant period after fast food became a huge business when Americans still weren’t getting fatter.

Dr. Boli predicts, however, that the rise in obesity will closely follow the rise of bigger and bigger cheeseburgers that dwarf the former giants like the Superburger, the Big Mac, and the Big Boy. In other words, he predicts that statistical-historical analysis will show a close relationship between getting fatter and eating more food.

Graduate students, you have your assignment.

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ASK DR. BOLI.

“Rising Generation,” by J. W. Orr, from Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 1855

On the subject of smoking, our correspondent “von Hindenburg” asks,

Well, how else does one get company-permitted 15 minute breaks throughout the day?

This is indeed one of the great incentives to beginning a habit that otherwise would seem to have nothing but disadvantages. Dr. Boli has spoken with many in the working classes who tell him the same story: they started smoking because the place where they worked allowed smokers frequent time off throughout the day, whereas no such provision was made for any activity other than smoking.

Is smoking, alone among vices, regarded as so virtuous that employees who smoke ought to be encouraged with special privileges?

Incidentally, if our readers will pardon a digression, the managers who permit smoking breaks have come perilously close to making a paradigm-shifting discovery. They allow the breaks because experience has taught them that their smoking employees are generally no less productive than their non-smoking employees. But they close their eyes to the obvious conclusion: that most employees produce as much benefit to the company whether they are working or not. You may make of this digression what you will; now back to the main subject.

It is well known that smoking shortens the productive life of workers, but since there is no long term in American business, employers do not care whether their employees live beyond the end of the current quarter. We may therefore remove health from the potential arguments against smoking in the workplace. However, it is true that smoking costs employees a large part of their paychecks, which in turn might induce them to demand higher paychecks. That is the sort of risk an American business-school graduate can understand. Therefore, it would be to the advantage of most businesses to eliminate the privileged status of smoking, if not the habit itself.

Dr. Boli has two suggestions for managers. The first is to count the hours in a day the average smoker spends not working because of the tobacco habit. Let us say that the breaks add up to an hour and a half a day. Then we simply make a policy that is fair and equal to smokers and non-smokers. You may take your smoking breaks throughout the day, or you may leave an hour and a half earlier in the afternoon.

But that would strike most managers as drastic. The idea of giving employees more time at home with their families, even if it could be proved that it would make them more productive when they were working, would cause the average business-school graduate to break out in hives. So we have an alternate suggestion. Employees who do not smoke may be permitted an equal number of breaks to indulge in some other vice of their choice. We might call them “booze breaks,” although we would not force employees to drink alcoholic beverages if they have no taste for them. Some employees might use the breaks for online gambling; others might read comic books; others might try to sell each other Amway distributorships. Whatever vice they came up with, it would probably not be as destructive as smoking; and thus by being equally hospitable to all vices, we eliminate the incentive to indulge in one in particular.

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ASK DR. BOLI.

Dear Dr. Boli: I’ve never smoked cigarettes, and in fact I’ve never held a pack of cigarettes in my hand, so forgive me if this seems like a stupid question. A lot of the people I work with smoke, and when they go out on their smoke breaks, they have a ritual: the first thing they do when they take out a pack of cigarettes is bang it repeatedly as hard as they can. Why are they doing that? What do they hope to accomplish? Is tobacco activated by percussion? —Sincerely, A Non-Smoker Who Feels Left Out.

Dear Sir or Madam: Cigarettes, as you are doubtless aware, take years off the average smoker’s life; moreover, they make a drawn-out and unpleasant demise far more likely. If that were not enough, they cost absurd amounts of money that the average working smoker can ill afford. They banish their users to the outer darkness away from polite society. The stench of stale tobacco makes the smokers’ own families avoid them. Most of those smokers you see have tried to quit smoking multiple times, but the cigarettes have always got the better of them in the end. And all this goes to enrich a small number of obscenely wealthy executives who thrive on the misery of hundreds of millions, and who lie, cheat, and bully to keep their trade in vice profitable. Considering all those known facts, it is not surprising that cigarette smokers give way to violence against the only part of the whole sordid business that is momentarily in their control: namely, the single pack of cigarettes they are holding right now. They know that the cigarettes will win seconds later; but for the moment, at least, they can have the symbolic satisfaction of giving the tobacco industry a good spanking.

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ANTEDILUVIAN LIBRARIES AND OTHER HOBBIES OF ERNEST CUSHING RICHARDSON.

If the words “antediluvian libraries” do not intrigue you, then, first, there is something wrong with you, and second, you are probably in the wrong place and should go watch a cat video or something. The rest of us will stay here and make the acquaintance of a famous librarian.

A famous librarian? Well, yes, insofar as there can be such a thing. According to the magazine American Libraries, Mr. Richardson was one of the 100 most important librarians of the twentieth century. How many of the other 99 can you name? That would be an amusing party game. Specifically, it would be the kind of game you reserve for the end of the party, when there are still too many guests hanging around far too late into the evening, and it is necessary to clear out the room in a hurry.

Since Wikipedia exists, we shall not attempt a summary of Richardson’s life here. For our purpose the most significant thing about him was his interest in very old books. People may mean different things by “very old” when they speak of books. Dr. Boli has a copy of the first folio of Spenser’s works, printed in 1611–1612 (apparently it took a while), and visitors often think that is a very old book when they see it in the library. But Mr. Richardson would have regarded that as quite modern.

There are several classes of alleged libraries, which if they have real existence must necessarily precede all others. These include the libraries of the gods, animal or plant libraries, Preadamite and Coadamite libraries and the alleged libraries of the antediluvian patriarchs. All of these may be included under the term antediluvian and the period subdivided chronologically into Adamite or Patriarchal, Preadamite, Prehuman (plant and animal libraries) and Precosmic (libraries of the gods)!

We can see, then, that the era of James I is, comparatively speaking, so close to ours as to be virtually indistinguishable. It is possible, at least in mythology, to trace libraries back before the beginning of time, and if there is anything earlier than before the beginning of time we do not want to hear about it.

The oldest of all alleged libraries are the libraries of the gods.

Almost all the great god families, Indian, Egyptian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, and Scandinavian, had their own book-collections, so it is said. According to several religions there were book-collections before the creation of man; the Talmud has it that there was one before the creation of the world, the Vedas say that collections existed before even the Creator created himself, and the Koran maintains that such a collection co-existed from eternity with the uncreated God. It is obviously idle to try to trace libraries back farther than this. —The Beginnings of Libraries, by Ernest Cushing Richardson, Librarian of Princeton University (Princeton, 1914).

The Beginnings of Libraries traces the idea of the library back as far as it can go; according to Mr. Richardson himself, it ends at about 3400 b.c.. In two other little books Mr. Richardson addresses somewhat more modern libraries, and perhaps one might say more historical libraries.

In Biblical Libraries, he traces the libraries related to events and characters in the Bible from the Babylonian period to the time of the Apostles. “The period of Biblical history may be counted as extending from the beginning of written human history, about the first dynasty of Egypt or say 3400 B.C. (or 4200) more or less, until the death of the last of those who figure in the books of the New Testament or say the middle of the second century A.D.”

But this is of course oversimplifying the matter, because the Bible itself is a library, and therefore an enormous subject.

The Biblical story of course, and the Biblical story of libraries in a way, extends from the creation, which is by the “Word,” to the last Judgment, which, according to the account, is based on a collection of books. Not all of the events told in the Biblical writings have however yet happened, others, being parables, may never have happened and others, while they may be true, are not yet quite history and never will be if the critics can help it. It is one thing to be true, another thing to be believed to be true and yet another to be history.

To complete a trilogy on ancient libraries, we bring forward a book that was actually published three years before the other two: Some Old Egyptian Librarians.

The very title of this paper has amused some, quite as if they thought the subject would be exhausted by the sentence “there were none”, but nevertheless the paper is in sober historical earnest. It, in fact, proposes, among other things, to introduce to you by name and date and with some details of their lives, not always wholly without piquancy, twenty-one librarians who lived long before Assurbanipal, and by the same token, much longer before the Alexandrian library was founded. Moreover this paper makes no pretence of exhaustiveness—it is only a desultory beginning in a rich field. It is a mere sample so to speak of the wealth of material which has not yet gotten much into the encyclopaedias—or the universities.

Though The Beginnings of Libraries would dwell much on mythology, Mr. Richardson is at pains to point out that his Egyptian librarians are real historical figures. However, that does not mean we should dismiss the mythology.

If this account of Egyptian librarians begins with the librarians of the gods Thoth and Seshait please do not think that the paper is to be legendary or mythological in character; on the contrary, it will deal with real human librarians and the genuine historical monuments of these librarians in papyri or inscriptions. The mythological librarians, however, have two great virtues: first they embody the philosophy of books and libraries current among the Egyptians and second these gods were in fact the gods of the librarians themselves, seriously worshipped by them. The significance of this latter fact for the biographical interpretation of historical human librarians is very great, for as a man’s god is, so is he. Tell me a man’s god and I will tell you the character of the man. There is a sound psychological reason for this, since a man’s god is that on which his thoughts most dwell (or conversely that on which one’s thoughts most dwell is one’s god) and what our thoughts dwell upon as ideal that we become. And if, farther, a man’s ideal of his profession is made personal, whether that person be human or divine, this hero worship, or god worship, works all the more powerfully. Not to know Thoth is thus to miss the key to the Egyptian librarian, for Thoth was the ideal of the Egyptian librarian, constantly in his mind for imitation.

So here is the foundation for your own little library of books on libraries: three short but very entertaining books by Ernest Cushing Richardson, one of the hundred most famous American librarians of the twentieth century.

The Beginnings of Libraries. By Ernest Cushing Richardson. Princeton, 1914.

Biblical Libraries. By Ernest Cushing Richardson. A sketch of literary history from 3400 b.c. to a.d. 150. By Ernest Cushing Richardson. Princeton, 1914.

Some Old Egyptian Librarians. By Ernest Cushing Richardson. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1911.

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NEW COLLECTION FROM SAMUEL HAZO.

Once in a while we are privileged to witness an important literary event from the front row, so to speak. Samuel Hazo was the first poet laureate of Pennsylvania, and he served for ten years before his position was eliminated by a new governor, who said there wasn’t room for it in the budget. Since Mr. Hazo had not accepted any money for serving as poet laureate, one might be forgiven for wondering how closely the governor had studied his own budget, but governors have more important things to worry about.

A few weeks ago, Mr. Hazo turned 97 years old. He celebrated with his thirty-first collection of poems, which is now available from our friends at Serif Press.

Click or tap on the image to go to the Amazon page.

All the poems in this collection are written in a kind of blank verse unique to Mr. Hazo, with three accents to the line, catching the rhythm of his best conversation. The topics range from war and peace (and the lack of difference between them) to dropping a penny on the floor and watching it spin.

Satisfaction troubles me.
                                         Dining
   on shrimp scampi, I say
   I’ll stop when I’ve had enough.
I rarely stop until enough
   becomes too much.
                                    That’s how
   satisfaction differs from perfection.

All the poems sound like Samuel Hazo talking straight to you—like sitting down with a great conversationalist as he lights his pipe and begins to get deeply interested in the subject.

And if you think you’d like to sit down for an hour with Samuel Hazo, here’s your opportunity. The poems in this collection are pure essence of Hazo—but more so. Find But More So at Amazon.

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