📚 Mela's Highlights

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The Body Mass Index was invented nearly 200 years ago. Its creator, Adolphe Quetelet, was an academic whose studies included astronomy, mathematics, statistics, and sociology. Notably, Quetelet was not a physician, nor did he study medicine. He was best known for his sociological work aimed at identifying the characteristics of l’homme moyen — the average man — whom, to Quetelet, represented a social ideal.

The Bizarre and Racist History of the BMI

Your Fat Friend

But to be clear, this is about far far more than [some] women being less eager than [some] men to weigh in, and it's remarkable how often structural gender inequality also plays a big role in who is available to chat and who isn't.

For No Particular Reason...

@jburnmurdoch on Twitter

The three articles, as well as the one by Jonathan Harwood on Nazi Germany, start with accounts of breeders’ work previous to the fascist seizure of power, and they may evoke similar stories of modernization in the seed sector in the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain. But these are not merely tales of continuity of modernization processes, for every new fascist regime brought a rapid acceleration of the double process of eliminating traditional varieties from the farmers’ fields and introducing the standardized varieties developed by plant geneticists.

Autarky/Autarchy: Genetics, Food Production, and the Building of Fascism

Tiago Saraiva, M. Norton Wise

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