by Susan Schorn

This year, our eleven-year-old daughter was scheduled to take the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, a name which implies that Texas schoolchildren live in a constant state of readiness, like Minutemen, ready to dash out and deploy their multiplication skills in defense of their homeland. As far as I’ve noticed, our kids have never been mobilized, or even called to muster, so I hope whatever threat they’re supposed to be ready for (China?) is a distant one. The STAAR moniker is also misleading in that the tests aren’t administered by the state of Texas but by the state’s proxy, Pearson PLC, which styles itself as “the world’s leading learning company,” and has been paid eleventy billion dollars (approximately)1 in public education funding to determine which of America’s fifth graders are hastening the downfall of our nation by not learning at a government-mandated pace.

We told Lilly she didn’t have to take the STAAR tests this year, even though she has taken them every year since third grade and done well on them — and even though, according to the increasingly dire messaging we received from our local school system as the tests approached, Texas law has decreed that “your child must meet the passing standardon this assessment in order to be promoted to the next grade.” She was happy to skip the tests; they are stressful and stupid, she said, and if you finish them early you aren’t allowed to do anything, even read — you can only check your work or put your head down on your desk.

My husband and I wrote a letter to our daughter’s school, “informing them respectfully” that “in accordance with our deeply held spiritual belief in justice and compassion,” and “with heartfelt appreciation for all you do for our child,” that our child would not take another STAAR test. In reply, the principal — a lovely woman who has a thankless job — somewhat shamefacedly handed us a letter from the local school board (dated two years prior; obviously we weren’t the first parents to raise a fuss about this). It stated that Texas law recognizes no parental right to absent a child from school to avoid testing.

The state of Texas assumes that all state-sponsored tests are good, fair, accurate tests. But we know, for example, that Pearson regularly screws up the answers to its own test questions. To cite just a few examples: In 2000, it incorrectly told nearly eight thousand Minnesota high school seniors that they had failed a state math test, causing some of the students to be denied diplomas. In 2012, New York had to throw out some Pearson test questions that asked fifth graders to find the perimeter of a trapezoid that could not exist mathematically. Last year, Pearson botched the answer key on a fourth grade practice math test in New Jersey, and only corrected the error when a concerned mother brought the problem to its attention. This past spring, New York State education officials discovered flaws in the Common Core English Language Arts exam; they simply scrubbed four questions after the tests had been administered, without saying anything to the public. (States and testing companies regularly tinker with the cut-off scores for passing the tests, even after the tests have been taken.)

Because Pearson demands that teachers and students adhere to confidentiality agreements promising not to talk or write about the tests — and since state educators prefer to obscure any problems — it’s safe to assume that the errors we’ve heard about are only a fraction of the whole. I have further reason not to share my state Board of Education’s faith in the quality of corporate-produced standardized tests. I once “did a little work,” as we used to say, for the testing industry, back when I was a brand-new Master’s candidate in English. At that point, I had never taught anyone anything (unless housebreaking my dogs counts), but I wrote “practice” language arts test question, under the direction of who seemed like2 MBA candidates. Their emails radiated a palpable disdain for literature and, indeed, literacy. These Project Managers regularly “revised” questions by mangling the existing grammar and punctuation; they confused basic parts of speech; they mis-identified simple literary devices, like “foreshadowing” and “personification”; they used expressions, apparently as part of their normal conversation, like “I think this is a go”; they were, in plain terms, people you would gnaw your own arm off to avoid sitting next to on an airplane; and they should not have been in charge of judging any child’s mastery of reading. Yet there they were, producing content to be sold to schools as practice tests to help students and teachers prepare for the real tests, which were made in the same sausage factory from the same rancid meat.

Many of the questions I helped write, if answered “correctly” according to the people revising them, would teach students things that were the opposite of true. I can’t give you any examples, because my contract required me not to share anything. But I can attest that there were errors, and that the people supervising me were either blind or indifferent to those errors. Was my experience anomalous? I’m sure Pearson would insist that it was. Yet I have reason to believe the rot extends throughout the testing industry, because I used the the money I earned writing test questions to complete my Master’s and PhD, and then I took a job in higher education — specifically, in writing instruction.3 One of the perks of my current job is that I sit in meetings with high-ranking administrators and tell them how truly bad and terrible all of the things they get excited about really are.4 Last year, a major U.S. educational publisher — not Pearson, but a big one; you’d know the name, your kids use their textbooks5 — tried to sell our very large public research university a series of online writing “modules” that incoming freshmen could work through to get “up to speed” on grammar.

The salespeople for this product allowed me to peruse the modules. Within ten minutes I had come across this sentence, in a module on noun phrases: “The rain rolled into the bay, so the soaken wet tourists spent most of their time looking for a restaurant to dry off.” Note well: The module didn’t ask students to revise the sentence. The sentence was presented as perfectly correct. All the module wanted was for students to identify a noun phrase in the sentence. What I wanted to do was find the people responsible for that sentence, and bludgeon them with a dictionary while screaming, “How do you dry off a restaurant?”

There were other errors; many more. I was not at all surprised. Things had been bad enough back in my day, when educational testing companies still employed graduate students. Now Pearson hires people off Craigslist who may or may not even have bachelor’s degrees. How likely are they to know that the OED pinpoints the most recent use of “soaken” to 1898?

And that was just one set of grammar modules from one publisher; I am sure equally bad ones are being bought by high schools and colleges around the country, because everyone agrees we need to fix students’ terrible grammar. Why is their grammar so bad? It’s a mystery that, somehow, no set of test results ever helps us solve. And so the snake continues to swallow its own tail.6

Lilly stayed home during the week of STAAR exams (one day of testing, plus several make-up days during which, if your child comes to school, they must take the makeup test). On Day One of her exile, she read Daniel Pinkwater’s novel Borgel. On Day Two, she read some articles about how Pearson had “adapted” an excerpt from Borgel, concerning a rabbit who challenges an eggplant to a race, for a mandatory New York State reading test. Pearson’s crack team of Project Managers stripped the episode of Pinkwater’s absurdist frame, loaded it down with pointless expository digressions, and then asked a series of unanswerable questions about it. For example, “What would have happened if the animals had decided to cheer for the hare?” This is a bit like asking, “What would have happened if the crowd in the marketplace had said kind and supportive things to Hester Prynne instead of taunting her?” It’s an intriguing mental exercise, and could make you ponder Hawthorne’s formative years, whether he was ever bullied at school, and how any such experiences might have informed his narrative choices, but it doesn’t get at anything like testable knowledge.7

Our daughter also wrote her own test about Borgel and then worked with me to revise her questions so that they were a) accurate, and b) fair. After all that, I dragged her to the office of our state representative to talk about what she had learned. I am in many ways a terrible mother, but I am thorough.

“It’s actually illegal for us to be here right now,” I informed our representative after Lilly had recounted her crash course in ethical test development. He had been up until 4:30 in the morning the night before trying to pass a budget in the company of legislators who believe post-rape forensic analysis is the same thing as abortion, but I pressed on ruthlessly. If I were homeschooling my daughter, I pointed out, she wouldn’t have to take the STAAR tests, and people would pat her on the head and tell me what a dedicated parent I was. If my husband and I were sending her to school without a measles vaccine, to potentially infect and kill other children, we’d be within our rights as long as we pretended to have “reasons of conscience.” So why, I asked our groggy legislator, is it illegal to refuse to involve my kid in a test that demonstrably sucks? He nodded blearily, said he understood my frustration, and suggested I contact some other legislators who focus on education issues. To his credit, he didn’t summon the Sergeant at Arms and have us arrested.

All in all, I thought our visit gave Lilly a good glimpse of the legislative process. I was glad because, as I discovered that day, she didn’t have the slightest understanding of how government works: no idea how a bill becomes a law; no sense of the role the government plays in her education; no clue how our representative ended up in his office or why he would meet with us. Our daughter didn’t know any of that because, in her six years of public schooling, she has never been subject to a state-mandated test assessing her knowledge of government or civics, so no one has bothered to teach her any of these things; she is only taught what she will be tested on. As a result, her civic ignorance is vast and pristine, like an unmarked field of freshly fallen snow. In seven more years, she’ll be able to vote.

Having worn out our welcome in the Halls of Government, we chose to become fugitives during the next round of tests, two weeks later. On the first day of the Science and Math STAAR exams, Lilly and I went to Chicago, like a couple of Vietnam-era draft dodgers fleeing to Canada. There we visited the Field Museum, a vast nineteenth-century edifice stuffed with knowledge. Dead animals and dinosaur skeletons and artifacts from vanished civilizations filled its labyrinthine corridors: We saw mummies from Egypt and Vodou spirit figures from Haiti; viewed the museum’s display of ancient ceramic urns from the island of Marajó, where the indigenous culture was wiped out by the Portuguese; and Lilly posed in front of Sue, the famous T-Rex who measuring forty feet long and weighing 6.4 metric tons when she was alive. It isn’t easy to capture a child and a giant lizard in the same frame, so I settled for a shot of Lilly directly in front of Sue’s enormous, bared teeth.

The museum was not without flaws. Its collection, after all, was built on the remnants of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, a loud and triumphant hosanna to colonialism. Walking through it, you had to wonder where all those religious and ceremonial artifacts came from, and whether anyone missed them. Thousands of animals, some of them now extinct, were shot to create the museum’s wildlife dioramas. Still, the museum wasn’t mandatory, and it was transparent. It acknowledged our right to reflect. There were no multiple-choice answers. We asked our own questions.

Our walk back to the hotel took us past the Harold Washington Library and its nearly one million square feet of knowledge. The citizens of Chicago floated a hundred and seventy-five million dollars in bonds to pay for it. “Did you know that rich people used to build libraries?” I asked Lilly as we stared up at the giant aluminum owls on the library’s roof. “And museums?” The men who extracted great personal wealth from America in the nineteenth century — the Fields and Carnegies — saw no profit in museums and libraries. Yet they built them anyway. Now the common citizens have to go into debt to build them, if we decide we want them at all.

Lilly and I flew home from Chicago at the end of the week and shortly thereafter received a letter from our school district. It said that we could be taken to court if our daughter missed more than ten instructional days during the school year. There were a total of twelve STAAR testing days this year.

Pearson and the rest of the “educational” conglomerates have discovered the vast profit to be mined from ignorance: Selling tests untethered from meaning, denying anyone the right to scrutinize them, then selling other shoddy products that promise to undo the damage they’ve inflicted. It’s as if the automobile industry had hit upon the idea of making seat belts out of duct tape, forbid anyone to inspect or talk about accident scenes, and then offered to sell us all cheap Styrofoam crash helmets.

Perhaps this was inevitable. The reservoir of public funding we all pay into, supposedly for the common good, is an obvious resource for corporations to exploit. Taking advantage of it has helped Pearson generate solid profit for its shareholders — thirty-four pence per share for the year ending May 1st.8 Never mind that it has made our educational system more broken and our kids dumber.

In the end, we did not go to court. We were summoned to our daughter’s school for a “grade placement committee meeting,” where the teachers and administrators who had taught our daughter daily for six years unanimously determined that she was ready to be promoted to the sixth grade. It seemed like a perfectly sensible way to make the decision, but the meeting unfortunately didn’t generate any shareholder profits.

Maybe someday, a rare copy of a state-mandated Pearson reading test will lie under glass in a museum. Perhaps scientists will work busily while tourists watch, trying to uncover the logic behind the questions, to reconstruct correct answers from the inscrutable options. I imagine the museum’s visitors will marvel at the old bones of the educational giants, and wonder how they ever grew so big and powerful.9

Photo by Shutterstock.com

1. A 2012 Brookings Report estimated Pearson’s U.S. assessment revenue at $258M annually; Politico reports that 55 percent of Pearson’s $1-billion-plus profit in 2013 came from North America.

2.The only contact I had with them was through several CC’d layers of corporate email addresses. All our conversations were being watched by Someone.

3. It wasn’t anywhere near enough money, and choosing a career in academia only made things worse. Our oldest child is starting college this fall and I’m still paying off my student loans.

4. Some days that’s the only thing that keeps me going, honestly.

5. It was McGraw-Hill.

6. “Its own tail” is a noun phrase.

7. Pearson’s answer options for that question were:
A. The pineapple would have won the race.
B. They would have been mad at the hare for winning.
C. The hare would have just sat there and not moved.
D. They would have been happy to have cheered for a winner.
Pearson has steadfastly declined to state which of these answers it considers correct.

8. With current exchange rates, that amounts to fifty-three cents per share in USD.

9. As I was writing this piece, the Texas Education Agency announced that most of Pearson’s $90 million annual contract with the state will not be renewed. The STAAR testing contract is being handed off to Educational Testing Services, which has, among other acts of sterling civic engagement, attempted to censor MIT researcher Les Perelman, who has thoroughly and brilliantly exposed the poor performance of ETS’s “Automated Scoring Engine,” an automated essay-grading system they are currently marketing to colleges as an “instructional tool.”

This morning, the president of a large publishing company sent a letter to all of his employees, congratulating them on record traffic and being no. 1 in rich millennials:

Dear Colleagues,

Results for July comScore are out and… congratulations are in order. Across our digital network, we hit an all-time high audience of 87.3 million — making July our best traffic month EVER with 47% growth over last year. That means we now rank #22 in the comScore top 100, come in at #1 in the comScore Lifestyle category and continue our streak as the #1 network among affluent millennials for 21 consecutive months.

As a small way of celebrating these awesome results, we are making coffees from the Coffee Bar and cafeteria on the __th floor complimentary today. Hope you’ll enjoy a cup on us.

Best, Bob

Give up? Bob is Robert Sauerberg, the president of Conde Nast.

Reports from the inside indicate that the free coffee from the “Coffee Bar” is of unknown origin, while the cafeteria offers Starbucks.

Photo by Shutterstock.com

“Women’s brains respond more to romantic cues on a full stomach than an empty one,” are the findings of a recent study that I will simply present here without adding additional comment because I know exactly how it would play out otherwise and I’m just not up for it.

“The levels of cocaine Bowie was consuming is not just illegal for a professor like myself, but it’s much too expensive — as well as unhealthy. So at the weekend I had a six-pack of energy drinks to try and simulate the experience of illegal substances. It made me very jumpy.”
 — “Will Brooker, who teaches film and cultural studies at Kingston University, is spending a few months at a time experiencing specific moments of [David Bowie]’s five-decade career — from adopting Bowie’s eating habits and poring over the literature he read, to visiting the same places as the English singer-songwriter.”

If you are looking for reasons to be cheerful I can tell you that it will not be as hot outside as it has been here in New York for the rest of the week. So that’s good. This song is good. And… that’s about all I’ve got. I wish there were more but I’m frankly surprised I was able to find two things for you. Count your blessings etc., and please do enjoy.

1. A data dump, which allegedly contains over 35 million email addresses, 33 million accounts with more detailed information (names and addresses), and every credit card transaction from the last seven years, is reported to have been posted online. It could be doctored or entirely fake, however: a hack was previously confirmed by the company, and early signs point to legitimacy. (Update: Brian Krebs was unsure, but now seems convinced; Ashley Madison’s official statement is ambiguous.)

2. It is not easily accessible to most internet users — it’s still in fairly raw form, in massive downloadable archives.

3. However, 4chan users, and undoubtedly others, are already combing through data and posting their discoveries. They started by searching for people with government email addresses, university email addresses, and addresses associated with major corporations. This is unfolding very quickly, already revealing the email addresses of students, teachers, public servants and municipal employees.

4. Anonymous internet posters have already discovered the email address of at least one public figure. In subsequent posts, they identify this person’s partner. This person has been confronted on Twitter; I would not be surprised if the partner is currently getting alarming emails from strangers. This happened almost instantly after the leak.

5. On 4chan, and on Twitter, users are posting plain, searchable chunks of the data. There appear to be ongoing attempts to make the data much more easily available. It seems very likely that there will be a way for curious, non-technically-inclined people to search for the names of friends, spouses, partners, or anyone else very soon.

6. We associate the cost of hacks mostly with identity theft and financial loss, from which most victims are pretty well insulated. Target assessed the cost of that hack at $148 million; outside financial institutions added another $200 million to that figure. You may know someone affected by that hack, but the resulting damages were likely mostly absorbed by their bank or credit card company. It was unsettling, yes, but it wasn’t widely ruinous.

7. This, on the other hand, is basically unprecedented? Most leaks of this size don’t implicate people in anything aside from patronizing major companies. This is new territory in terms of personal cost. The Ashley Madison hack is in some ways the first large scale real hack, in the popular, your-secrets-are-now-public sense of the word. It is plausible — likely? — that you will know someone in or affected by this dump.

8. Most of the responses and acknowledgements I’m reading now are either straight news stories or… jokes? I’m not sure anyone is really reckoning with how big this could be, yet. If the data becomes as public and available as seems likely right now, we’re talking about tens of millions of people who will be publicly confronted with choices they thought they made in private (or, in some cases, didn’t: Ashley Madison does not validate all email addresses). The result won’t just be getting caught, it will be getting caught in an incredibly visible way that could conceivably follow victims around the internet for years.

9. Such a scenario would present a number of new questions for many more internet users — questions the nature of which they’ve never really had to deal with. If the names and email addresses are available in a simple Google-like search, for example, will they search for their partners? Friends? Coworkers? Representatives? Family members? If so, why? If not, why not? Will you seek out the raw leak data after reading this post? Will news organizations, presented with user profiles associated with public figures, ask for comment? Treat each as news? Which ones? How? The last time people dealt with similar questions on a large scale was when troves of internal Sony documents, including emails, were leaked. Before that, it was when hundreds of private celebrity photos were stolen and released last year. That act was widely denounced, as were the millions of subsequent acts by the people who viewed the photos. But enough people looked at these photos to set traffic records for sites like Reddit. In any case, an incredible number of ethical questions are posed by this situation!

10. Anyway, I may be overestimating how far things will unfold, but this feels like a momentous event. Barring some sort of heroic cleanup effort on the part of the entire internet — which I guess, between Twitter moderation and aggressive lawyering, isn’t totally impossible — millions of lives may be about to change profoundly. It’s easy to kid about the fact that these people were using a site intended to help them cheat. But if understood in more abstract terms, this hack has the potential to alter anyone’s relationship with the devices and apps and services they use every day. Here were millions of people expecting the highest level of privacy that the commercial web could offer as they conducted business they likely wanted to keep between two people (even if a great number of the emails are junk, or attached to casual gawkers, the leak claims to contain nine million transaction records). This hack could be ruinous — personally, professionally, financially — for them and their families. But for everyone else, it could haunt every email, private message, text and transaction across an internet where privacy has been taken for granted. Ashley Madison, in the strange hacker economy of 2015, may have had an especially big target on its back. But it’s a powerful reminder of the impossibility of perfect privacy.

11. Welcome to the future, I guess!

★★★ Again the haze leached up from the horizon. A gray-haired man in a polo shirt and a young woman in a bikini occupied identical chairs on opposite sides of some superstructure on the newly opened tower’s roofdeck, in shade and sun respectively. People forked up lunches while sitting on benches in the forecourt plaza. White things were blinding. Clouds closed over Fifth Avenue in the afternoon. A drip might have fallen from them; under a scaffold something was clearly dripping, though why exactly was obscure. Led by the brightening Empire State, the landscape turned sunny again. By evening the sky had gone back to blue. The air was restoratively warm; the gaze up and down the avenue passed through tinted sheer curtains. The movie theater was right there, but the air conditioning spilling out the door made it too forbidding to go inside.

by Brian Feldman

Over the weekend, Instagram celebrity The Fat Jew — real name Josh Ostrovsky — faced swift and concentrated denunciation over the content (“jokes”) he posts on his account — one-liners, supposedly funny pictures, lowest common denominator viral chaff. Ostrovsky, who swipes material from others without credit and does not make much of what he posts, is arguably the native Instagram celebrity, with 5.7 million followers. There are people with more followers on Instagram, but mostly because they were celebrities before they joined; the Fat Jew is wholly a product of and for Instagram.

The backlash followed news that Ostrovsky had signed with Creative Artists Agency, which reps A-list showbiz people, like George Clooney and Miley Cyrus. Ostrovsky had already inked a development deal with Comedy Central, become a spokesperson for Seamless, and launched “White Girl Rosé,” a perfectly unremarkable line of rosé. The Fat Jew’s poor sourcing, half-assed apologies, and seemingly bulletproof online presence have been complained about for years to seemingly no avail. But this past weekend, a coordinated effort to expose Ostrovsky as a joke thief managed to bring some mainstream attention to the plight of our most precious resource: struggling web-native comedians.

Given that Ostrovsky is beginning to drop the “internet” from “internet celebrity,” it’s worth looking at how he managed to succeed almost in spite of Instagram. Ostrovsky’s success is not the kind that the service is designed to cultivate: Ostrovsky filled a closed and controlled system with jokes and material extracted from elsewhere, rather than with his own photography — creating a personal brand that managed to showcase absolutely nothing personal — while the way he used the network contradicts its function as an airtight loop in which it is difficult to import, export, or move content, much less drive traffic elsewhere.

Hyperlinks, a basic feature of the internet, could have provided a chance for The Fat Jew to source his posts, if he were so inclined. Just post a link to where you found the thing! That’s it! But Instagram does not support hyperlinks — initially, because that wasn’t part of its goal, and currently, because of concerns about spam. In the beginning, the app, which was originally called Burbn, was pitched as “a new way to communicate + share in the real world” with features like location check-ins and event planning. But, founder Kevin Systrom recalled a few years ago in a Quora thread, it “felt cluttered, and overrun with features” so the company “basically cut everything in the Burbn app except for its photo, comment, and like capabilities. What remained was Instagram.”

The only working hyperlink Instagram now offers is a single URL field in users’ bios. This has led to the widely adopted workaround known as “Link in the bio” — a user mentions something in a post, and if they want to direct viewers elsewhere on the web, they just say “Link in the bio” and swap out whatever is in that field as necessary. It’s clunky as hell and requires constant maintenance. There is surely a better way: Tumblr, for instance, adopted a dedicated source field in its CMS, so that even if users deleted text from reblogs, the citation link remained constant and attached to the post. Instagram could add similar field in its upload process, but doing so would be an indirect admission/encouragement of users posting things that they didn’t create themselves. But instead, currently, even if the Fat Jew were diligent about tracking down the sources of his content, he would hardly have anywhere to make it apparent to his followers. (To be clear, none of this is to excuse his pilfering and profiteering, but to point out that Instagram’s first-party tech is woefully inadequate when it comes to citation.)

Unlike Instagram, other major social networks like Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter all offer versions of reposts and quoting; Tumblr practically invented the form with reblogging, and Facebook quickly adopted a similar structure, allowing users to share media from other users on their own profiles while still allowing the original poster to maintain credit. It’s a defining lack of functionality for Instagram, but its absence hasn’t stopped users like The Fat Jew from finding a way around it in order to post others’ material without providing credit.

For a long time, Twitter’s reblog/quote function was the RT. At first that simply meant inserting “RT @username:” in front of a copy-pasted tweet. That gave way to an official Twitter retweet function, which essentially inserted the tweet into the feeds of people who don’t follow the author. This didn’t solve the problem entirely, since users were still using the old method in order to add comments to other people’s tweets — known as manually retweeting, it’s often a transparent way of jacking someone else’s work for your own gain.

people who write “RT” and copy/paste instead of using the retweet button are the same people who changed clothes in the toilet stalls at gym

— wint (@dril) December 20, 2012

That’s why earlier this year, Twitter introduced quoted tweets. Basically, posting a link to another tweet on Twitter will display the actual tweet, rather than a link to it. This nested form allows followers easy access to both the source tweet and the commentary building off of it.

At long last, all the functions are in place for users to interact with Twitter as they’ve grown accustomed to, without have to go outside of Twitter’s system to do it. They can quote and reshare other people’s work without stripping out the credit those creators deserve. It’s also very much worth noting that all of these functions on Twitter were created by users, and Twitter built better functionality in response to them. On Instagram, users who want to reshare other people’s pictures need to use third-party services like Regram, a service so pervasive that it has already become a verb; adding repost functionality has become a cottage industry.

Other platforms contain these processes in order to make it easy to share other users’ content while letting creators retain authorship. If a user wanted to remove the source link on Tumblr, or credit on Facebook, or credit for a one-liner on Twitter, they would have to save that content locally and then create a new post. In other words, if people wanted to scrub ownership from someone else’s work, they would need to put in more effort to do so. Instagram, on the other, works in the exact opposite way.

The Fat Jew and his ilk — Fuck Jerry, Beige Cardigan, Betches and other shitpic peddlers — have no doubt kept a lot of users coming back to Instagram, likely even a substantial portion of the three hundred million monthly active users that the site boasts. For years now, Instagram has served up sponsored posts to those users, bringing in revenue for itself and its parent company, Facebook, while taking little action in response to how users actually behave on its service. It believes that if it deprives users of certain tools, users will change their behavior to fit Instagram’s narrow view of how the service should work. It simply does not account for those that don’t. The Fat Jew might be hiding behind Instagram’s lack of functionality and profiting because of it, but he’s not the only one. Instagram is too.

Stolen material from The Fat Jew via Storify

The website for Whole30, a faddish diet program in the high-protein/low-carb Paleo vein, claims that its restrictions, which include the elimination of dairy, sugars, grains, and legumes from your diet, can have miraculous effects on your life. It suggests that in addition to weight loss, it can cure various aches and pains, increase your energy level, permanently quell seasonal allergies, and address fertility issues (which ones, or how eating burgers without the bun will fix them, is not addressed). “This will change your life,” the site says, even though, like, literally everything you do changes your life. You reading this stupid aggressive vegetable cooking column changes your life if only because you wasted 15 minutes reading it instead of doing your dishes. Regardless!

Whole30 is one of many diets that heavily restrict what you eat and claim, with varying amounts of garbage science and armchair anthropology, that by cutting out the more processed parts of your diet, you can improve your quality of life, and also get skinny. The creators of Whole30 are probably bazillionaires, having written a very successful book that espouses said garbage, and I find this frustrating, because I also spew garbage about food and yet I live in a two-hundred-and-eighty-square-foot apartment in Brooklyn in which the ceiling occasionally falls onto the floor after heavy rains. So I have decided to create a diet myself. It’s called The New World Diet™. (It is not a registered trademark but I think that little ™ makes it look more professional.)

What Is The New World Diet™?

The New World Diet™ is a set of unruly restrictions aimed at forcing us in North America to realize that we have all the best produce. For thirty-one days, which, mathematically, is one better than the Whole30 diet, you must restrict your eating to only ingredients which were found in the Americas prior to 1492. This can include fruits, vegetables, grains, and even meats and fishes. Llama, for example. Eat as much llama as you want.

The New World Diet™ is not an attempt to make you healthier. If it solves your seasonal allergies or fertility issues I would be VERY surprised.

Why New World Foods?

There are huge categories of New World foods that immediately transformed cuisines around the world upon their export from the Americas starting in the late fifteenth century. I have no idea what kind of gruel people were eating before then, but every single major world cuisine improved drastically with the addition of fruits and vegetables and spices that come from the New World.

We have everything here: grains, fruits, vegetables, herbs, spices, legumes, tubers. And even now, when globalization and transportation technology gives us the ability to eat anything, from anywhere, at any time, it’s the New World crops that get us most excited. Summer, in the Americas, means corn and tomatoes. Fall means squash and pumpkins. We should never forget that these are ours. Fuck you, Europe. Try cooking without tomatoes sometime.

What Foods Are Permitted?

Let’s start out with the trio of crops usually referred to by archaeologists and anthropologists as the Three Sisters: corn, beans, and squash. In the more temperate parts of North America, these three crops were by far the most important part of the diet of the native populations, and often planted together. Corn was planted first, growing tall and fast, followed by beans, which used the corn stalks to climb, followed by squash, which covered the ground and prevented the growth of weeds. They are a perfect combination. Eat a shitload of these.

Tomatoes were first found in the Andes but first domesticated, probably, in southern Mexico. (Potatoes, too, are native to the Andes. Potatoes are great. Same with the sweet potato.) The idiot Europeans thought that tomatoes were poisonous when they were first introduced, owing to their membership in the Nightshade family. (Also, to be fair, tomato leaves are poisonous.) We’re in the heart of tomato season in the Northeast right now. These will be an important element in The New World Diet, offering sweetness, acid, and juice.

Chile peppers are perhaps the best-traveled of the native New World crops, becoming an essential part of cuisines from Thailand to Ethiopia to, well, every other center of good food. These will figure heavily in your diet, ranging from very sweet to very spicy, huge to tiny, fresh to dried to powdered.

The avocado is native to Mexico and Central America. It will provide a lot of the fat that in lesser diets is supplied by, say, butter, or coconut oil.

Onions are a problem. There are many varieties of wild onion native to the New World, including the famous ramp, but the vast majority of cultivated plants in the allium family, among them garlic, yellow/red/white onions, leeks, and scallions, are Old World plants. This is very unfortunate. We will allow any sort of wild onion, ramps, and chives to be used. Cheating is acceptable in this case only. I mean, Whole30 allows ghee, a form of butter (butter is otherwise banned) that has been processed (processed food is otherwise banned), which is ludicrous. So, screw it, use a leek if you want.

Every variety of the common bean, Phaseolus vulgaris, will be permitted in The New World Diet™. Like a lot of other heavily domesticated plants, this one species of bean native to the Americas has been bred and re-bred to produce many very different-looking and -tasting crops. Varieties of the common bean include green beans and French beans, but also kidney beans, which probably come from the Andes as well. Lima beans, or butter beans, are also permitted. Fava beans are not. Peas are not.

Peanuts, pecans, black walnuts, and cashews are all native to the Americas and are embraced wholeheartedly, along with their oils and any pastes or butters made by pureeing them. They are all extremely high in fat and will not help you lose weight, which is unimportant to the aims of The New World Diet.

Wild rice and quinoa are both native to the New World. They are both very tasty.

Permitted fruits include the blueberry, strawberry, cranberry, pineapple, guava, papaya, and huckleberry, and permitted sweeteners are maple syrup and agave. Both chocolate and vanilla are New World ingredients. Use them liberally.

Tobacco use is encouraged in the New World Diet™. Cocaine use is technically permitted. Check with your local authorities to find out if cocaine is legal in your area.

A Recipe, To Get You Started: Basic Summer Succotash

Shopping list: Peanut oil, fresh corn, yellow tomatoes, summer squash, green beans, sweet peppers, lima beans (dried, fresh, or frozen), Mexican oregano, any wild onion you can find, squash blossoms, quinoa

Succotash is a pre-Colombian combination of corn and beans. After 1492, the dish changed in some of its details but not in that basic conception; the types of beans changed, maybe, and now, often, it’s made with dairy like butter and heavy cream. When not conforming to the wonderful restrictions of The New World Diet™, I’d likely use a little bit of butter, but peanut oil makes an interesting, and not at all inferior, substitute.

Using a knife, cut the kernels off a few ears of corn. I do this in a big bowl, standing the ear on end and gripping the top half of it with one hand before shaving off the kernels from the bottom half of the ear. Rotate until the entire bottom half of the ear is bare, then flip end over end and do the same to what was previously the top half of the ear. Save the cobs.

Throw the cobs into a pot of water and bring to a boil, then turn the heat down and let it simmer for about 30–45 minutes. Then take out and discard the cobs, keeping the water, which is now a nice mild corn stock. Use the corn stock to cook some quinoa according to package directions, usually a ratio of two parts stock to one part quinoa, brought to a boil then simmered until cooked. Retain any extra corn stock.

Put a large pan or pot (I like enameled cast iron, but really anything will work) over medium-low heat. Add some peanut oil and let it heat up. Chop up your permitted wild onion or your cheater Old World onion and toss it in; let it cook until translucent.

Chop green beans into inch-long pieces. Chop summer squash (any variety is fine, but I like the firmer ones for this, like pattypan squash or zephyr squash) into smallish cubes. Slice tomatoes into small pieces. Chop peppers into small pieces. Everything is in small pieces; this is basically a chopped hot salad. And prepare your lima beans in whatever way they need to be prepared — thawed, shelled, whatever.

Our goal here is to have a one-pot dish in which everything finishes cooking at the same time, which requires some knowledge of how specific ingredients cook. The corn, for example, we want to barely cook at all, but the summer squash will need a bit of time. So we have to add stuff in stages.

First up after the onion will be the squash. Stir and let cook just a bit. Then the green beans and peppers. Then the tomatoes. Then the lima beans. Then the corn. And finally you’ll throw in the cooked quinoa.

Watch this carefully the whole time; you may have to add in a little more peanut oil, but lean toward using the leftover corn stock to deglaze the pan. (Deglazing just means tossing in some liquid when stuff sticks to the bottom of the pan, then scraping all the stuff off the bottom of the pan.) Add in a spoonful every now and then to make sure nothing’s sticking and, as a bonus, to get more corn flavor in.

A succotash should be fresh-tasting, herbal and crunchy and sweet, not mushy and not creamy. We want as little cooking as possible, really, just enough to heat everything through and mingle the flavors, but not enough that any individual ingredient loses its flavor or texture. The corn is the most important: the corn should be super sweet and still crisp when you serve it.

When everything is done, season to taste. Then chop some chives and some Mexican oregano (which, by the way, is a totally different plant than European oregano, though the flavors are weirdly similar), and tear up some squash blossoms. Scatter these last over the top and serve.

The New World Diet™ doesn’t stop at succotash. It should be a way to force you, the reader who hopefully knows nothing because this diet is based on very little factual information, to become more aware of what grows around you. Use corn, not wheat. Use the peanut, not the soybean. Experiment with ingredients that have yet to really penetrate the rest of the world, from tomatillos to chayote to cherimoya. And do it for thirty-one days. It will change your life. Because so does everything.

Photo by Neil Conway

Some things are deliberately designed to be creepy, while other things are creepy in spite of themselves. It’s super rare that you find an item that seems to manage both. Anyway, new Deerhunter out this fall. Enjoy.