Salon.com > Maria Russo http://www.salon.com Wed, 30 May 2012 06:12:34 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Is 2011 really just 1991? http://www.salon.com/2011/12/18/is_2011_really_just_1991/ http://www.salon.com/2011/12/18/is_2011_really_just_1991/#comments Sun, 18 Dec 2011 14:49:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=10488801 Kurt Andersen has really done it now. His more than three decades spent monitoring the tremolo fluctuations in urban American style, power and class distinctions appear to have ended in defeat, with a single, glum Vanity Fair essay, “You Say You Want a Devolution.” Andersen thinks cultural change has come skidding to a stop. It’s his strangely unironic nod to Francis Fukuyama, who in 1991 proclaimed the end of history, and subsequently became Exhibit A of the dangers of intellectual overreach. But Andersen confidently name-checks Fukuyama as he concludes that the last 20 years have seen culture fizzle out.

The early 2010s, in his analysis, and the early 1990s are effectively indistinguishable. He admits that there may have been minor modifications to the stock American uniform of jeans and T-shirts since the administration of Bush 41 and Desert Storm, but radical change of the sort that we used to demand from art and music has instead become concentrated in the realm of technology. Our computer code is magnificent. Our dress code, and pretty much everything else, is devoid of innovation, he argues.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/12/18/is_2011_really_just_1991/feed/ 122 What Chandra Levy didn’t know http://www.salon.com/2001/07/23/young_old/ http://www.salon.com/2001/07/23/young_old/#comments Mon, 23 Jul 2001 22:54:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2001/07/23/young_old "Whenever you have a situation where the men have power and the women have youth and beauty, there's a trade-off. The men exploit their power to get sex, and the women exploit their looks to get promotions, or good grades, or just a good time."

These lines don't refer to the affair between 24-year-old Chandra Levy and 53-year-old Rep. Gary Condit, although they do shed light on the often sad story of that familiar pairing between an avid young woman and an incautious, high-status older man. They're spoken by a character in David Lodge's new novel, "Thinks." In fact, literary fiction is a good place to turn if you're looking for some insight into this age-old, but nowadays more complicated than ever, match.

Novelists have long been attracted to the subject of an older married man and his much younger girlfriend. It's ideal literary material: Not only does the pairing push many, many people's buttons, it creates stories that inevitably seep past the boundaries of the relationship itself, raising provocative questions about sex and power, aging and mortality, inequity and exploitation.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2001/07/23/young_old/feed/ 0 Depression mania! http://www.salon.com/2001/06/27/depression_5/ http://www.salon.com/2001/06/27/depression_5/#comments Wed, 27 Jun 2001 23:10:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2001/06/27/depression Despite a decade of efforts by public figures such as Tipper Gore and Mike Wallace, as well as by countless health journalists, depression remains a baffling and controversial illness. Its manifestations seem to run the gamut from extreme and destructive dementia to what strikes some observers as not much more than a prolonged bad mood. Take two recent developments: In the case of Andrea Yates, who allegedly murdered her five children, Americans were told that she acted in the throes of an ongoing, severe postpartum depression. A few days later, the publishers of Psychology Today announced that they are launching a new magazine, called Blues Busters, aimed at depression sufferers and billed as "a new antidote to the blues." Within the course of a single week, we've been presented with depression as the cause of homicidal psychosis and as the premise for a lifestyle.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2001/06/27/depression_5/feed/ 0 “I Only Say This Because I Love You” by Deborah Tannen http://www.salon.com/2001/06/26/tannen/ http://www.salon.com/2001/06/26/tannen/#comments Tue, 26 Jun 2001 20:04:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/2001/06/26/tannen Deborah Tannen is the professor of linguistics who gave a scientific imprimatur to the "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus" idea in the bestselling "You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation." Since then, she's tackled the world of business-speak in "Talking From 9 to 5" and taken a shot at our overly confrontational public conversational style in "The Argument Culture." In her new book, "I Only Say This Because I Love You," Tannen returns to her bread and butter: how people talk to each other in their intimate relationships. This time, she's concerned with how families, especially parents and their adult children, communicate -- or, more often, fail miserably to communicate, leaving battle scars where comforting bonds should be.

How to get along with the family is a problem that has launched countless blueprint-for-life self-help franchises. Like most of Tannen's books, this one is clearly aimed at that market -- it's got a strong whiff of the cheery, studiously inoffensive, bullet-pointed formula about it. But that doesn't mean that the wisdom in it is banal.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2001/06/26/tannen/feed/ 0 “Thinks” by David Lodge http://www.salon.com/2001/06/22/lodge/ http://www.salon.com/2001/06/22/lodge/#comments Fri, 22 Jun 2001 18:16:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/2001/06/22/lodge The basic ingredients of David Lodge's novels seldom vary: some academics, a little adultery, a few more academics, a little more adultery. In "Thinks," the British author's 12th novel, he stays that course, telling a story of intellectual and marital peccadilloes at a fictional university called Gloucester. Yet like all of Lodge's books, "Thinks" is so full of humor, humanity, intellectual energy and his distinctive slyly sexy take on life that you forget every barb you ever heard flung at the "campus novel."

At the center of the book are Ralph Messenger, director of a prestigious center for cognitive science and an expert on artificial intelligence and human consciousness, and Helen Reed, a recently widowed novelist, just past 40, who turns up at Gloucester to teach a fiction-writing workshop. Ralph is married to Carrie, a wealthy American, but is known as a womanizer. Helen is still grieving for her husband, who died suddenly of an aneurysm. On the one hand, Helen is just another new, attractive female who appears on Ralph's radar screen and so his interest in her is unremarkable. On the other hand, Helen and Ralph have a lot in common: As a novelist, she's just as interested in the mysteries of human consciousness as he is, and the wildly different approaches of their chosen fields to this central enigma of existence are fodder for fascinating conversation.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2001/06/22/lodge/feed/ 0 “The Collected Stories of Richard Yates” http://www.salon.com/2001/06/19/yates/ http://www.salon.com/2001/06/19/yates/#comments Tue, 19 Jun 2001 21:13:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/2001/06/19/yates "The Collected Stories of Richard Yates," 27 short works with scarcely an uplifting, encouraging or life-affirming moment in them, is turning into a sleeper hit, showing up on several independent bookstores' bestseller lists. This may seem surprising, but it shouldn't be. Yates, who died in 1992, had a small but fiercely devoted following, especially among other fiction writers, and when his 1961 novel "Revolutionary Road" was restored to print last year, with a splendid introduction by Richard Ford, a new audience was introduced to Yates' crisp, distinctive voice. Now we have the collected stories as well, and belated as it may seem to Yates' admirers, 2001 turns out to be an auspicious moment for their arrival.

These stringent, ruthlessly straightforward (yet never, thank God, "minimalist") stories are set mostly in the late '40s and '50s, yet they're perfect reading for right now, when we're just starting to reacquaint ourselves with economic downturn and widespread economic anxiety, when our political discourse is insipid and our mass culture seems more vacuous than ever. In their measured, crystalline prose, Yates' stories make us ask how we ever expected so much in the first place. They demolish all pretense, puncture all forms of bloat. Yates lays into his characters' human flaws with a merciless precision. Yet he's never simply cruel or bilious; he's got his eye on something higher and finer. Somehow, once you've let him blow away your last vestige of hope in the redeeming value of humankind, you feel oddly cleansed, as if finally, now, you can start to think a few things that are true.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2001/06/19/yates/feed/ 0 Little devils http://www.salon.com/2001/05/30/barker_4/ http://www.salon.com/2001/05/30/barker_4/#comments Wed, 30 May 2001 17:44:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/int/2001/05/30/barker In March, British author Pat Barker's latest novel, "Border Crossing" -- the story of the relationship between a psychologist and a boy he'd helped convict of a murder that occurred when the child was 10 -- hit the bookstores just as children who kill were all over the news on both sides of the Atlantic. America confronted the case of 14-year-old Lionel Tate, who was sentenced to life in prison without parole for first-degree murder after causing the death of a 6-year-old girl when he was 12, in what he said was an imitation of World Wrestling Federation moves. Many Americans bridled at the idea of such a Draconian sentence imposed on a child whose moral, intellectual and emotional faculties were not yet fully developed.

In England, meanwhile, debate raged over the imminent release from custody of Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, two 19-year-olds who abducted and killed 2-year-old James Bulger in 1993, when they were 11. The more lenient British court system offered Bulger's killers a second chance -- and the public was not pleased. In their eight years in a juvenile detention home, the boys, according to a judge, have shown no "aggression or propensity for violence" and can be released in August. Bulger's horrified parents are appealing the decision, and public opinion seems to be firmly on their side.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2001/05/30/barker_4/feed/ 0 “Empire Falls” by Richard Russo http://www.salon.com/2001/05/21/russo/ http://www.salon.com/2001/05/21/russo/#comments Mon, 21 May 2001 19:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/2001/05/21/russo "I mean, if I were so unhappy, wouldn't I know?" asks Miles Roby, the hero of "Empire Falls," Richard Russo's fifth and most ambitious novel yet. The answer, of course, is not necessarily, and one of Russo's great talents is to make us understand how an intelligent 40-year-old man can fail to recognize his own quiet desperation -- and then make us believe that his life can change for the better. Along the way, Russo gives us a panoramic yet nuanced view of the imaginary town of Empire Falls, Maine, showing how the history of one powerful family can become the history of a place. It's the kind of big, sprawling, leisurely novel, full of subplots and vividly drawn secondary characters, that people are always complaining is an endangered species. Yet in part thanks to Russo's deft satiric touch -- much of the book is laugh-out-loud funny -- it never feels too slow or old-fashioned.

Russo's Empire Falls is one of those small Maine towns that never recovered from the migration southward of the textile manufacturing jobs that created it. The wealthy Whiting family controlled the place for over a century, until they abruptly sold off the last of the Empire Mills, leaving half the population unemployed. Francine Whiting, the conniving widow of the ineffectual C.B. Whiting, who committed suicide years ago, still owns most of the town, though the downtown is largely abandoned and there's no new development in sight.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2001/05/21/russo/feed/ 0 “My Little Blue Dress” by Bruno Maddox http://www.salon.com/2001/05/21/maddox/ http://www.salon.com/2001/05/21/maddox/#comments Mon, 21 May 2001 19:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/2001/05/21/maddox There's an elaborate trick going on in the pages of "My Little Blue Dress," and I'm going to tell you exactly what it is. I can't be accused of single-handedly spoiling the game, because the book's publisher has decided to reveal all on the book jacket anyway. I can see why, because I opened this novel without even glancing at the jacket or publicity material, and if it hadn't been for my sacred duty as a reviewer I might not have made it past the first 75 pages, after which it becomes hilariously clear what's going on. What starts out as the life story of a 100-year-old woman turns out to be written by a guy in his 20s named Bruno Maddox, who's given himself the task of forging the memoir in one frantic night.

As the night wears on, Bruno interrupts his ersatz memoir to insert pep-talking notes to himself, such as "fucking only ten hours left so TYPE LIKE THE WIND -- and also obviously like an incredibly old woman recalling her life in the 1930s." The woman turns out to be his decrepit, ailing, elderly next-door neighbor, whose name we never learn, and whom Bruno has been caring for since it became clear that she was practically immobile and unable to communicate.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2001/05/21/maddox/feed/ 0 Gloom at the top http://www.salon.com/2001/05/10/gloom/ http://www.salon.com/2001/05/10/gloom/#comments Thu, 10 May 2001 23:18:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2001/05/10/gloom Anyone who's ever attended panel discussions featuring authors can testify that, whatever the designated topic, the event will almost certainly devolve into a chorus of lamentations over the hardships of the writing life. There seems to be no end to the things writers should get, but all too often don't -- appreciation, attention, financial reward.

Still, Monday night's panel at New York's Society for Ethical Culture promised to be an exception. The theme was "So What Do I Do for An Encore?" and the panelists were five authors who had achieved the kind of success that most writers would kill for. Here, at last, was a likely occasion for authors to do something besides complain about their lot.

The event was ominously kicked off when Letty Cottin Pogrebin, the president of the Authors' Guild, the panel's sponsor, described people who write books as an "oppressed class." As the evening wore on, it became clear that anyone who'd shown up hoping to admire a glowing, happy pantheon of literary winners was out of luck. It seems that authors who can't reasonably gripe about their lack of financial or critical success will still find plenty of other things to complain about.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2001/05/10/gloom/feed/ 0 Built on the buzz http://www.salon.com/2001/05/03/drugs_17/ http://www.salon.com/2001/05/03/drugs_17/#comments Thu, 03 May 2001 16:44:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2001/05/03/drugs "Nature is parsimonious with pleasure," writes historian David Courtwright in "Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World." Or, as we used to say in high school, "life sucks, and then you die." But human ingenuity has stepped in to lessen the miseries and add to the delights of earthly existence. Courtwright calls it "the psychoactive revolution": Compared with 500 years ago, people across the planet now have easy access to a, well, mind-blowing variety of consciousness-altering substances. The menu of options differs from culture to culture -- one man's vodka martini is another's kava brew -- but the drive to take a temporary vacation from our normal waking state has made some drugs into perhaps the only truly global commodities. Virtually every language on earth has words for coffee, tea, cacao and cola, the plants that produce caffeine. The 5.5 trillion cigarettes smoked each year in the 1990s represent a pack per week for every living man, woman and child.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2001/05/03/drugs_17/feed/ 0 “This Is Not a Novel” by David Markson http://www.salon.com/2001/04/19/markson/ http://www.salon.com/2001/04/19/markson/#comments Thu, 19 Apr 2001 19:40:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/2001/04/19/markson For some reason unknown to me the image of a nude woman's back, usually cut off just above the derriere, has become a staple of literary fiction book-jacket art. The cover of David Markson's "This Is Not a Novel" obeys that trend, offering us the rear view of a female figure whose naked back is somewhat covered by her waist-length dark hair. But in Markson's case, the image is no mere attempt at tasteful middlebrow titillation -- it's a Rene Magritte painting called "The Evening Gown," and if you appreciate that joke you'll thoroughly enjoy the book beneath the cover.

True to its title, the book doesn't, at first glance, appear to be a novel at all. As in his 1996 book "Reader's Block," Markson assembles a series of notebook-like entries that relate historical facts, philosophical observations and nasty gossip about the lives of great writers and artists throughout history. A typical item: "Trollope, as remembered by a schoolmate at Harrow: Without exception the most slovenly and dirty boy I have ever met." The book begins with an entry that declares, "Writer is pretty much tempted to quit writing," which is followed by "Writer is weary unto death of making up stories." "Writer," whoever he is, pops up now and then after that, complaining more about his writerly ennui and various physical ailments and declaring his determination to create a book that lacks every standard feature of the traditional novel, from story to setting to social themes, but -- through sheer force of Writer's will, perhaps -- will somehow still be a novel.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2001/04/19/markson/feed/ 0 “The Immortal Class” by Travis Hugh Culley http://www.salon.com/2001/04/10/culley/ http://www.salon.com/2001/04/10/culley/#comments Tue, 10 Apr 2001 19:34:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/2001/04/10/culley The title "The Immortal Class: Bike Messengers and the Cult of Human Power" sounds like a scarily Nietzschean proposition, but this first book by 27-year-old Travis Hugh Culley is green and crunchy to the core. It's part memoir of Culley's days as a bike messenger, part call to arms against the tyranny of cars and part love letter to the city of Chicago. Culley sees bike messengers as an emblem of "the cult of human power" -- meaning, literally, human-powered vehicles -- that, he asserts, is taking back our cities from the vicious, fume-choked, corporate-dominated clutches of car culture. That symbolism doesn't really work for a variety of reasons, beginning with the inconvenient fact that what bike messengers are zooming across town to deliver are envelopes headed from one corporate client to another. Still, even at his most dopily earnest, Culley has an energized, original voice that's worth listening to. He's Puck from "The Real World," plus poetry.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2001/04/10/culley/feed/ 0 Psycho factories http://www.salon.com/2001/03/29/hallinan/ http://www.salon.com/2001/03/29/hallinan/#comments Thu, 29 Mar 2001 22:47:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/2001/03/29/hallinan "Going up the River" has a central idea so intuitively convincing, you wonder how it ever escaped our attention: In the aftermath of the Cold War, Americans have replaced military spending with spending on new, high-tech, ever-more-punishing prisons. Prisons are now seen primarily as sources of jobs and revenue, rather than as places for rehabilitating criminals. Those who run prisons have abandoned penal theory -- that troublesome business of figuring out what best helps inmates, most of whom will eventually return to the outside world, clean up their acts. Programs for inmate education and counseling have been steadily disappearing. We no longer want to reform criminals; we simply want to punish them -- and, not incidentally, to make as much money as we can off of them in the process.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2001/03/29/hallinan/feed/ 0 The marriage hoax http://www.salon.com/2001/03/19/divorce_8/ http://www.salon.com/2001/03/19/divorce_8/#comments Mon, 19 Mar 2001 22:18:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2001/03/19/divorce It must be America's most often cited statistic: Fifty percent of marriages end in divorce. For many social commentators, including voices from the right such as Barbara Dafoe Whitehead ("The Divorce Culture") and Gertrude Himmelfarb ("One Nation, Two Cultures"), the lesson in this seems like a no-brainer: Our high divorce rate is a sign of widespread moral decline, evidence that we've become a selfish, consumer-oriented society, one in which even the most hallowed of relationships is disposable.

Last fall, two widely discussed books sounded an urgent call of alarm. Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher's "The Case for Marriage" and Judith Wallerstein's "The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce" both argued that our easy-out approach to marriage is getting out of hand; divorce, they feel, should be granted more rarely. But a new round of books published this year -- Nancy Cott's "Public Vows," Hendrick Hartog's "Man and Wife in America" and Marilyn Yalom's "A History of the Wife" -- tells a different, if less mediagenic, story. These books are histories, not polemics, but together they make a clear and compelling argument: The nation hasn't suffered a massive decline in moral fiber since the 1950s, and marriage isn't really any more fragile now than it was in the days of our grandparents and great-grandparents. The truth is that marriage has always been a shaky, contested, unreliable institution, and we're kidding ourselves that it was ever any other way.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2001/03/19/divorce_8/feed/ 0 When authors attack http://www.salon.com/2001/03/02/authors/ http://www.salon.com/2001/03/02/authors/#comments Fri, 02 Mar 2001 16:47:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2001/03/02/authors No author enjoys getting a bad review, and it's probably especially irritating to read a slam of your book in Publisher's Weekly, the book industry's trade journal, because P.W. reviews are unsigned, so you can't even conjure an image of your adversary. Last week, Jaime Clark, a first-time novelist who was reviewed negatively in P.W., decided to take matters into his own hands: In an e-mail sent to a list of literary editors, Clark offered to pay $1,000 to anyone who would tell him the name of the reviewer. "You need not reveal your identity to collect this bounty," he assured his potential Judas, "but you must be able to substantiate your information."

A bounty is being offered over a negative book review? Somehow, it's not surprising for anyone who's spent time in the trenches of the book review world. Most disappointed authors, of course, still follow the age-old tradition of sucking it up and complaining to their friends. They bear in mind Paul Fussell's sage advice in the essay "Being Reviewed": At all costs, avoid the ABM -- author's big mistake -- of writing a nasty letter complaining about a review of your own work. "If the bad review has made him look like a ninny," Fussell says about the type of prickly author who can't stomach criticism, "his letter of outrage makes him look like an ass."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2001/03/02/authors/feed/ 0 “The Bonesetter’s Daughter” by Amy Tan http://www.salon.com/2001/02/21/tan_4/ http://www.salon.com/2001/02/21/tan_4/#comments Wed, 21 Feb 2001 18:43:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/2001/02/21/tan Amy Tan's new novel returns to the theme of her bestsellers "The Joy Luck Club" and "The Kitchen God's Wife" -- the tortured love and missed connections between Chinese immigrant mothers and their first-generation American daughters. Before you say "Enough already," she's given the topic a timely twist. What if Alzheimer's disease begins ravaging the memory of a mother, and her daughter realizes that the family past she has never bothered to find out about is slipping away? Ruth Young, a ghostwriter of self-help books and the protagonist of "The Bonesetter's Daughter," is an only child who has spent her life contending with her widowed mother's demands, threats and histrionics; now LuLing's difficult temperament is made even worse by memory lapses and erratic behavior. A doctor suspects some form of dementia, confirming Ruth's growing fear. Suddenly, it seems crucial to start figuring out who LuLing actually is -- that is, beyond the domineering pain in the neck whom Ruth has learned to tune out.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2001/02/21/tan_4/feed/ 0 “The Body Artist” by Don DeLillo http://www.salon.com/2001/02/21/delillo_2/ http://www.salon.com/2001/02/21/delillo_2/#comments Wed, 21 Feb 2001 18:37:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/2001/02/21/delillo Some of Don DeLillo's fans -- the ones who worship the elegant, elusive sweep of his novels, their all-encompassing but somehow serene paranoia -- will be puzzled by his new book. "The Body Artist" is short, even modest. It focuses almost relentlessly on one person's consciousness, with little interest in the forces of history and culture. Instead, DeLillo asks the smaller, more itchy philosophical questions: whether someone is the same person from moment to moment, for example. He seems to want to make his readers burrow inside themselves; he'd like them to look at their own versions of reality from a new, unprotected emotional perspective, deprived of all the padding with which we tend to face the hard truths of human existence. "There's something about the wind," DeLillo writes at one point, and he could as well be talking about his own methods. "It strips you of assurances, working into you, continuous, making you feel the hidden thinness of everything around you, all the solid stuff of a hundred undertakings." If you're up for that kind of expert mind-fuck, the rewards of "The Body Artist" are great.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2001/02/21/delillo_2/feed/ 0 It’s a plot http://www.salon.com/2001/02/13/books_list/ http://www.salon.com/2001/02/13/books_list/#comments Tue, 13 Feb 2001 20:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/people/feature/2001/02/13/books_list Paranoia is, of course, a form of desire -- the fantasy of being so important that everyone in the world is out to get you. Writers, who usually feel they're not getting enough attention, are particularly susceptible. Here is an eclectic and far from comprehensive list of our favorites. Can't find your own personal picks? Naturally, it's a plot.

1. "The Crying of Lot 49" by Thomas Pynchon Pynchon might just be the quintessential paranoid novelist because his books stoke his readers' obsession with finding significance in even the tiniest detail. In this, his bounciest effort, Oedipa Maas, a California housewife, stumbles across a conspiracy involving what seems to be a vast, underground postal service.

2. "A Scanner Darkly" by Philip K. Dick If Pynchon isn't the paranoid's poet laureate, then Philip K. Dick is. In this classic tale of drugs and deception, an undercover narcotics agent develops a chemically induced split personality and starts narcing on himself.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2001/02/13/books_list/feed/ 0 Unhappy meals http://www.salon.com/2001/02/08/schlosser/ http://www.salon.com/2001/02/08/schlosser/#comments Thu, 08 Feb 2001 16:54:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2001/02/08/schlosser Americans spend more money on fast food than on higher education, personal computers, computer software or new cars. Every month more than 90 percent of American children eat at McDonald's; the average American eats three hamburgers and four orders of french fries every week.

What's in all those hamburgers? They're most likely made from the meat of worn-out dairy cows (generally the least healthy cattle stock), which spend their days packed in feedlots full of pools of manure. Each burger contains parts of dozens or even hundreds of cows, increasing the likelihood that a sick one will spread its pathogens widely.

Until 1997, those cows, by nature designed to be herbivorous, were fed "livestock waste" -- rendered remains of dead sheep and cattle, along with the remains of millions of dead cats and dogs purchased every year from animal shelters. Thank God the law was changed: Now they're fed only the remains of horses, pigs and poultry. And if you think your fries are animal-free, guess again. While McDonald's no longer cooks them in beef tallow, a process that until 1990 gave the chain's french fries more saturated fat per ounce than its burgers, McDonald's still acknowledges that some of the flavor comes from "animal products."

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