Steven Shapin

“There is wide agreement that Parker’s descriptive language is more standardised and less fanciful than most, and that his descriptions are at least as effective as any other wine writer’s in the fiendishly difficult task of conveying some idea of taste, smell and texture. Compare Parker on the 1998 Château Léoville-Barton (’impressive concentration, chewy, highly extracted flavours of black fruits, iron, earth and spicy wood’) with Andrew Jefford in the Financial Times on a Georges Duboeuf 2003 cru Beaujolais (’This dark wine . . . helicopters into the mouth with spinning blades of intense fruit’). Parker evidently thinks there has been too much bullshit in wine writing, that it’s a mark of corruption, and that both a simplified vocabulary for talking about wine and a more straightforward sensibility towards what makes wine good are ways of cleansing the Augean stables of the wine world.”

“As an Atkins dieter, you will eat as much as you want, as often as you want; you will eat – and Dr Atkins repeats this word incessantly – ‘luxuriously’: ‘heavy cream, butter, mayonnaise, cheeses, meats, fowl’. The discipline of dietary moderation – indeed, the virtue of temperance – is no longer the way to health. And, despite What Would Jesus Eat? The Ultimate Program for Eating Well, Feeling Great and Living Longer and The Maker’s Diet: The 40-Day Health Experience that Will Change Your Life Forever and dozens of other faith-based fatloss initiatives, among the bestsellers there is no question that an ample dietetics might be sinful.”

Alfred Lee Loomis was well connected. Some of his most valuable connections flowed from the accident of a fortunate birth. On his father’s side, the family came to New England only a few ships after the Mayflower, and Loomis’s father was a wealthy Gilded Age New York physician who combined fashion, philanthropy and philandering in ways that could have made him a character in a...

In 1999, when the French peasant leader José Bové trashed a McDonald’s under construction near Montpellier, so becoming a national and, soon, international resistance hero, one motive for his virtuous vandalism was cheese. The Americans had unilaterally imposed trade restrictions on the excellent local Roquefort, and, if there was going to be no Roquefort in the US, there...

Here is the sort of thing that appals critics of the modern American entrepreneurial university. Members of the physics department invent an electronic gadget that looks like it might be useful in aviation guidance systems. Hearing about the technology, the university’s administration, including a trustee who had been a right-wing Republican President of the United States, takes control...