kontextmaschine:

sophisticated opinion, 2007: these books examining vast swaths of history by reference to a single commodity – sugar, salt, cod – may bring the new academic focus on social and material history to a popular audience, but through a reductionist, monocausal frame that flatters readers’ desires to feel wisely above the fray of humanity more than delivering real insight

also sophisticated opinion, 2007: lead. The entirety of postwar American criminal policy and urban policy and thus domestic policy and party alignment and politics generally comes down to the use of lead in paint and gasoline

Like this was transparently an effort to retroactively justify the Great Society like “Oh, we were all just chemically stupid at midcentury. Black people later than that.”