The newsletter will be off next week and will return Monday, Aug. 10. If you missed the previous newsletter, you can read it here. Our grocery stores mirror the mess of America
Costco is having a moment. I don’t mean as a bazaar of bizarrely large quantities of walnuts, Wheat Thins and teeth-whitening toothpaste. I mean as a symbol. As a retort to what’s wrong with America beyond its unvarnished walls. In The Atlantic in December, Jake Lundberg wrote an excellent tribute to Costco’s efficiency and constancy: “In an age of broken institutions, insufferable politics and billionaire businessmen auditioning to be Bond villains, most things feel like they’re getting worse. Costco seems to stay the same.” Adam Chandler evidently agrees. In The Wall Street Journal this month, he artfully cast Costco as a sorely needed point of consensus in an endlessly bickering country. The article’s headline: “The One Thing Everyone in America Can Agree On? Costco.” I don’t know about everyone. I myself am a Costco fan — I get my eyeglasses as well as my canned tuna there — but I have some acquaintances who find it a depressing burlesque of American bounty, others who simply lack the closet space for a six-month supply of toilet paper and still others who’ve never been to Costco and don’t care. The paeans to the store perhaps overstate its microcosmic significance and healing powers. But they’re right that grocery shopping is as lucid a mirror of our moment as anything else, and what it really reflects is the fragmentation that Costco supposedly pushes back against. That’s the rule to which Costco represents a bit of an exception. When it comes to groceries, as it does to clothes or cars or gyms or housing developments, we’re the willing targets of ever more aggressive sorting and tiering; different merchants target different groups with a promise to validate their particular tastes, accommodate their specific values, affirm their exact stations. They’re marketing identity as much as they are poultry and peanut butter. They’re creating tribes. I live on the border of Chapel Hill, N.C., and Carrboro, N.C., where a suburban aura mingles with a college-town vibe. When people around here announce themselves as regulars at the local Trader Joe’s, they may be disclosing nothing more than their fondness for its steamed soup dumplings or its creamy spinach and artichoke dip. But at least as often, they’re knowingly telling me how they see themselves and who they mean to be: unfussy but whimsical individuals whose fiscal prudence leaves room for inventive frozen canapés and exuberant checkout clerks. They’re victual signaling. So are some shoppers who swear by the Aldi that’s just across the parking lot from Trader Joe’s. Their choice isn’t driven solely by Aldi’s lower prices on many staples. It carries its own message: I’m immune to cutesy come-ons. I’m too practical for that colorful packaging and strenuous cheer over at Joe’s. And when local folks tout their pilgrimages to the Carrboro Farmers’ Market on Saturday mornings, they’re sometimes revealing as much about their political leanings — concern for the environment, worry about sustainability — as their culinary ones. We are where we procure our legumes. It has always been thus and we’ve always had options. But this many of them, each with such painstakingly fashioned, carefully advertised brands? The combined population of Chapel Hill and Carrboro is modest — about 85,000 — but that’s apparently enough not only for the stores I’ve already mentioned but also for a Whole Foods, catering to the shopper interested in an especially robust cheese selection or just all-purpose pampering; a Fresh Market, for the customer who’s tempted by Whole Foods but wants to feel a little less like a luxury lemming or has sworn off all things Amazon (the corporate parent of Whole Foods); two locations of the Weaver Street Market, a co-op that specializes in “natural foods” and has a clientele more tattooed and pierced than Fresh Market’s; and a Wegmans, for the proudly ambidextrous epicure who wants high-end halibut and low-end frozen breakfast sandwiches just a few aisles apart. That’s not to mention the old-style alternatives of at least four Harris Teeter stores and five Food Lions, depending on how you count. If the denizens of Chapel Hill and Carrboro can’t agree on where to buy cereal, how can the voters of the United States come together on tax reform? I’ve been just once to Aldi — a tad too no-nonsense for me — but I repeatedly visit all those other stores. I’m finicky about chicken thighs (best at Fresh Market), have more luck with the produce at Wegmans than at Trader Joe’s and use enough olive oil to warrant Costco’s jugs of it, heavy as kettle bells. But I also tell myself that I’m refusing to be categorized and striking a blow for independent thought. I’m reaching across the (supermarket) aisle. Look at me and my heterodox dinner. Of course that’s its own identity, its own vanity. So where to head for the lamb I need for a dinner party I’m hosting in a few nights? Forward this newsletter to friends … … and they can sign up for themselves here. It’s published every Monday. For the Love of Sentences
In The Atlantic, Matthew Walther questioned an anecdote in JD Vance’s new memoir, “Communion,” about his future wife’s reaction, when they were Yale law students, to something she’d just read: “Usha said she found it ‘cathartic,’ prompting Vance to look up this unknown word in the Oxford English Dictionary. As one does? Until I stumbled onto this passage, I would have guessed that the middle of the Venn diagram of ‘people who use the paywalled O.E.D. rather than Dictionary.com’ and ‘people who don’t know what cathartic means’ is empty, like the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.” (Thanks to Sara L. Todd of Chevy Chase, Md., and Steve Beck of Montgomery, Ala., among others, for nominating this.) In The Guardian, Robert B. Shpiner reeled from a spectacularly hateful tirade by Stephen Miller: “What he said deserves to be quoted rather than summarized, because summary is a mercy it has not earned.” (Lynn Hughes, Upper Bucks County, Pa., and Robert McKeown, Pisgah Forest, N.C.) In Rolling Stone, Matt Bai described President Trump’s approach to international affairs as “manifest masculinity” and his gaudy makeover of Washington this way: “He would turn the city into a theme park trafficking in nostalgia, an Epcot Center for the American Century. Tourists can bask in an approximation of American greatness, while Trump systematically obliterates the real thing.” (Jennifer Siegel, Durham, N.C.) In The Times, Maureen Dowd spotted a lost opportunity during Trump’s limp, ludicrous speech about his (and America’s) supposed victimization by rigged elections: “I’m surprised that Pete Hegseth, who says his ‘High-T Department of War’ will start screening testosterone levels of ‘war fighters’ age 30 and older, didn’t rush over to shoot up the flaccid 80-year-old commander in chief with the elixir of manhood needed, as he put it, to give America ‘the leading edge of lethality’.” (Stephen Waxman, San Francisco, and Hilarie Lennan, Media, Pa., among others) In a comment related to Maureen’s column, a reader identified as Someone with Integrity wrote: “The world’s smallest, shabbiest leader put the world’s tiniest little violin under his chin(s) the other night and proceeded to play his own, wee little concerto in the key of whine flat.” (Barbara Sloan, Conway, S.C.) Also in The Times, Sam Anderson slipped into a $770 jacket to see how it would transform him: “I felt exposed — like a hermit crab who’d exchanged his dirty old shell for a big, glittering, fancy conch, and suddenly all the lobsters were staring at me.” (Zanthe, Taylor, Brooklyn, and Kim Gazella, Raleigh, N.C.) Sam separately assessed the string of close finishes and (until the final match against Spain) victories by Argentina and its star player, Lionel Messi, in the World Cup: “You could pit Argentina against a team of local 6-year-olds and, after the halftime orange slices were cleared away, look up to see that the score was somehow locked at 1-1 — and the game would only be decided in the waning seconds, after a defender got distracted because his sister opened a noisy bag of cookies on the sideline and Messi used that slight opening to create a miraculous goal.” (Emily Stabler, Brooklyn, and Gary Powell, Woodstock, Conn., among others) In Country Life, Caroline Kennedy (no, not that one) described the Sealyham terrier, a rare breed: “Small, white and faintly disheveled, with dark intelligent eyes peering out beneath extravagant eyebrows, it resembles nothing so much as a retired colonel who has wandered out of a country house in search of a whiskey and an argument.” (Patti Tautenhan, Columbia, S.C.) In The Washington Post, Monica Hesse challenged the notion that a person is supposed to read “The Odyssey” — or any classic — during their school days: “Books are not a timed exercise, a game you are only eligible to play between the ages of 12 and 18. The literary canon is not a puzzle with a set number of pieces that perfectly interlock and must be picked up and put down in a certain sequence. You can’t read everything, and it’s never too late to read something.” (Peter J. Geisser, Cranston, R.I.) And in that same article, Hesse confessed a strategy for sustained professional relevance: “The only way A.I. hasn’t fully captured my writing style yet is because I try to keep it guessing butterfly peanut toaster pants pants hypotenuse.” (Ron Fournier, Royal Oak, Mich.) To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here and include your name and place of residence. Bonus Regan Picture!
My driveway isn’t remarkably long. The halfway point is within 20 feet of the nearest door to my house. And yet that’s where Regan, finishing an hourlong walk on a muggy morning, decided she had to rest and revivify before attempting the final stretch and availing herself of air-conditioning. Maybe the heat had sapped her of her usual smarts and her spatial awareness. Maybe she’s that finely attuned to her precise limits and really had reached them. Maybe I hustled her inside regardless. I was a pool of sweat and done with sun. What I’m Reading and Listening To
Retire These Words!
To my deep and eternal embarrassment, I once sat on a high-level advisory board whose leader called it a think tank. I cringed upon first learning of that designation, which struck me as needlessly highfalutin. And then, maybe so I wouldn’t cramp up from continued cringing, I turned “think tank” from an agent of mortification into an object of fascination. I mulled its ambiguity. Did “tank” cast me or my thoughts as goldfish? Was I swimming around or were they? I imagined each idea of mine as a shiny, finned creature circling one of those small scuba-diver figurines and traveling, well, nowhere, a fact that seemed to, er, tank the metaphor. If a think tank is supposed to nurture fresh epiphanies and new solutions, why name it for a rigidly defined enclosure with finite space? As you can tell, I have a habit of overanalyzing things. I apparently also have an aquatic bias. According to various sources, the “tank” in “think tank” refers more generally to a protected space and, around the time of World War II, “think tank” sometimes evoked a room where military plans were made. Decades earlier, though, “think tank” was a colloquialism for the human brain. So a think tank as we currently use it, is where many think tanks gather for their thinking. But why use the term at all? It’s so precious, this assertion that thoughts require some designated, segregated enclave. Even if they do, unpretentious alternatives to “think tank” exist. Strategy group. Research organization. Planning committee. Those suffice. Also, some current applications of “think tank” are deceptive. That was the complaint of James Thomson, a retired University of Toronto professor of evolutionary ecology who divides his time between Toronto and Colorado, where he continues to do research. In an email to this newsletter’s inbox, he objected to “the implication that ‘think tanks’ are institutions where experts analyze issues,” noting that those “experts” are often ideological warriors forging partisan weapons. “Something like the Heritage Foundation merits a more accurate term, something more along the lines of ‘spin vat’ or ‘twist tank’ or ‘propaganda mill,’” he wrote. We humans are apparently drawn to fancy nomenclature as concerns the appointed (and self-appointed) cogitators among us. I noted that in the August 2025 edition of “Retire These Words!” which argued against “thought leader,” “public intellectual” and the like. I wished them gone. And I hereby urge “think tank” to accompany them into etymological exile. “Retire These Words!” is an occasional feature about overused, oddly used, erroneously used or just plain annoying locutions. The previous installment, about the ubiquity of “toxic” as a modifier, appeared in this newsletter. Read past editions of the newsletter here. If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Have feedback? Send me a note at bruni-newsletter@nytimes.com.
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