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How Americans Drink
Perspectives on moderate alcohol consumption have flip-flopped over the decades.
This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.
“Alcohol ambivalence has been with us for almost as long as alcohol,” my colleague Derek Thompson wrote this week. He notes that according to the Greek comic poet Eubulus, of the fourth century B.C.E., “although two bowls of wine brought ‘love and pleasure,’ five led to ‘shouting,’ nine led to ‘bile,’ and 10 produced outright ‘madness, in that it makes people throw things.’”
But perspectives on moderate drinking have flip-flopped several times since then. Derek spent days poring over the research to try to answer a seemingly simple question: Is moderate drinking okay? The answer, as you might expect, is not simple at all. Today’s reading list explores Americans’ changing relationship with alcohol, and what we know about its risks and rewards.
On Drinking
Is Moderate Drinking Okay?
By Derek Thompson
“Every drink takes five minutes off your life.” Maybe the thought scares you. Personally, I find comfort in it.
America Has a Drinking Problem
By Kate Julian
A little alcohol can boost creativity and strengthen social ties. But there’s nothing moderate, or convivial, about the way many Americans drink today.
Not Just Sober-Curious, but Neo-Temperate
By Shayla Love
How sobriety went from a radical social movement to a tool of self-optimization
Still Curious?
- Has alcohol left humanity better or worse off? In 2023, Conor Friedersdorf solicited readers’ opinions.
- Social media is attention alcohol: A fun product has the same downsides as booze, Derek wrote in 2021.
Other Diversions
- Let’s not fool ourselves about TikTok.
- Eight perfect episodes of TV
- Milk has divided Americans for more than 150 years.
P.S.
I recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. “A few years ago we were on a bike ride near Lake Leelanau in Michigan in November,” Melissa Gutknecht, 56, from New Haven, Connecticut, writes. “It was unseasonably warm, the leaves were changing, and a storm was brewing. What a beautiful day.”
I’ll continue to feature your responses in the coming weeks.
— Isabel
