2026-06-16 19:11:59
I stumbled on this book in a museum and obviously the title alone had me going: what? Here's the PDF if you want to read along.
(nb: I am aware of Ford's other beliefs, and what he thought of people like me. But I'm still interested in what the discourse about cigarettes was like in 1914).
Ford dedicates the book to The American Boy. He had previously explained in an interview: "I do not feel called upon to try to reform any person over 25 years of age because by that time the habit has been formed. Then it is only a question of the strength of will or mind of the smoker which will enable him to stop. He knows the injurious effects and controls his own destiny. With the boys it is a different matter. Most boys are told to refrain from many things. Seldom are they given a reason. Boys must be educated so they will know why cigarettes are bad for them."
In response, the president of the American Tobacco Company basically told Ford to either prove his claims or publicly retract them. This book is Ford's reply, a compilation of letters from various prominent people complaining about cigarettes. Cool format!
The book opens with this letter from Thomas Edison:
Friend Ford
The injurious agent in Cigarettes comes principally from the burning paper wrapper. The substance thereby formed is called "Acrolein".
It has a violent action on the nerve centers, producing degeneration of the cells of the brain, which is quite rapid among boys.
Unlike most narcotics this degeneration is permanent and uncontrollable.
I employ no person who smokes Cigarettes.
Yours,
Thomas Edison
The next page is the letter from Percival I Hill, the President of the American Tobacco Company, where he complains about Edison and Ford's comments regarding the innocent, beloved cigarette:
The form of your statement is of a character that denies us an opportunity to demonstrate its falsity and to prove the harmlessness of our product in a court proceeding. If you see fit to make a statement of the harmful effect of any of our brands, in such form that being false it is libelous, we will be delighted to institute suit for damages, and will devote the proceeds to some designated charity.
The scientific facts are all in favor of the cigarette, and no man can change these facts because he personally prefers a pipe to a cigar ... or a chew of plug to a cigarette.
It is extremely funny to me that someone can say "you haven't libeled us, can I ask you to do so so we can respond?" And also: I had initially assumed this book was about the dangers of tobacco, but it seems like maybe it is literally an argument about whether cigarettes are dangerous vs pipes and chewing tobacco? The past is a foreign country, truly.
(The rest of the letter is just about how cigarettes have been tested by "the ablest chemists in America and Europe" and found to be "absolutely pure", plus various arguments from authority + the fact that many doctors and other respectable men enjoy cigarettes. Twelve million Americans can't be wrong!)
The next letter is a reply from Ford's secretary to the The American Tobacco Co. It's fun to remember how hard it was to know what anyone was talking about in 1914: the secretary has to start by clarifying that he doesn't know what's been in which newspaper.
The letter is... not actually convincing, it just says that 1) smoking a lot of cigarettes is bad, 2) "young men addicted to the cigarette habit seldom if ever lead in their studies", 3) "99 per cent of the boys .. who come before [a certain magistrate] charged with crime have their fingers disfigured by cigarette stains." Come on Henry['s secretary], we can do better than this! I know you're trying to look out for "the benefit and uplift of our wayward lads", and history has vindicated your position, but a bit more rigour in the process would be appreciated.
The rest of the book is letters like this one from various doctors, educators and other experts:
It feels like what they're describing is inebriation? I'm curious if cigarettes were different then, or the people involved were also drunk, or if what they're describing is actually cigarette withdrawal, or... some other explanation, hit me in the comments please.
There's also a couple of letters which give a glimpse of how research/statistics/science worked back then, e.g.:
Later, a football coach writes in to say that 65% of non-smokers but only 33% of smokers were successful at football tryouts. I found this interesting because I'm extremely curious how people approached this kind of statistical work in 1914. Randomized controlled trials were only invented in the 1920s, right? How did this kind of "let's survey 210 people and announce the results as percentages" stuff feel to people in 1914?
(Obviously it's plausible that smoking makes you worse at sports, but also plausible that the kind of person who smokes is less likely to make the first team anyway – did people realize that in 1914? I guess most people don't really understand it today, so....)
Similarly, the president of the Georgia Woman's Christian Temperance Union – "a woman of exceptional mental attainments", we are told – writes in about an experiment she ran:
I took two small bottles, each holding about three tablespoonfuls of water. In one I placed 15 of these cigarette papers, and in the other an equal thickness of leaves of tissue paper from between visiting cards, for the tissue papers were much thinner and it took a larger number of leaves.
I found that a few drops of the water from the bottle containing the cigarette paper would kill a mouse quicker than you could say ‘Jack Robinson,’ and a teaspoonful of the water from the other papers seemed to cause a mouse to suffer no inconvenience.
I have killed dozens of mice with this water and there are others who have tried the experiment with the same success. Will Mr. Hill please tell me what made the difference in the same water, in the same kind of bottles, except the papers that were placed in the bottle?
I mean truly, what an age of science – have you ever seen a letter like this in a modern magazine? (Maybe there are, I don't read many modern magazines!) I would dearly love to read something about this spirit of experimentation in 1910s America.
(A later letter-writer speaks of injecting tobacco-juice under a cat's skin; "in less than twenty minutes it died in violent convulsions. I take no pride in relating this experiment, for I knew a shorter as well as a more merciful way of ending the cat's life; but what distresses me now is the fact that thousands of boys are repeating that experiment upon themselves with as certain though less immediate results, and only a few people seem to be concerned over what is taking place right before their eyes.")
One doctor writes a letter saying that tobacco causes a "dissipation [in] sense gratification.... the sedative action which it exerts upon the nervous system... steals away a young man's vigilance and alertness and handicaps him in the struggle for success. The use of tobacco paves the way to other dissipation by requiring a compensating stimulant to overcome its sedative effect." Am I reading into this with modern eyes or is that a pretty subtle understanding of how neurotransmitters work?
Various writers describe cigarettes as a gateway drug to alcohol, and then to morphine and opium.
A lot of the letters equivocate between cigarettes specifically, smoking more generally (including pipes), and other kinds of tobacco products. I think you'd need to actually understand the debates of the era to know what's going on here, and I don't.
There follows an excerpt from the London Lancet medical journal talking about the danger in cigarettes from "aldehydes." (The "acrolein" that Edison blamed for cigarettes' harmfulness is an aldehyde, and so is formaldehyde, but so is vanillin, and so is glucose – it's clearly a large category and I'm out of my depths assessing this). I guess a good reminder that there's a lot of steps between figuring out that something is bad for you and figuring out exactly why.
Connie Mack – GM of the precursor to the Oakland A's – is one of several people who basically writes in to say that smokers amount to nothing, ever. "It is my candid opinion, and I have watched very closely the last twelve years or more, that boys at the age of ten to fifteen who have continued smoking cigarettes do not as a rule amount to anything. They are unfitted in every way for any kind of work where brains are needed. No boy or man can expect to succeed in this world to a high position and continue the use of cigarettes.”
Hudson Maxim, an inventor of explosives who was apparently very famous at the time, wrote: "The wreath of cigarette smoke which curls above the head of the growing lad holds his brain in an iron grip which prevents it from growing and his mind from developing just as surely as the iron shoe does the foot of the Chinese girl." (I don't think Chinese footbinding actually used iron?) "With every breath of cigarette smoke they inhale imbecility and exhale manhood.... The yellow finger stain is an emblem of deeper degradation and enslavement than the ball and chain." (I include this just for the prosody).
The book continues with Volume II, and this comic from the Detroit News, which I'm including only because it's funny how long newspapers have been doing this kind of unsubtle commentary via labelled characters and illustrated puns – that's Edison on the left, and a schoolboy Cigarette Smoker in the middle.
Volume II is about the "economic" side of smoking. Says Mr Ford:
Let us see whether you as an ambitious American boy can afford to ruin your prospects by doing those things which are disapproved by employers generally, and which in many, many cases must put you out of the running entirely.
If "millions of American men have convinced themselves that cigarettes are good for them" they have not succeeded in convincing their employers of this fact, and this is especially true as regards boys. I want you to read the expressions of opinion from some of the large employers of the country.... I know that you will then be in a position to judge for yourself whether you can afford to take chances on losing everything, and I am willing to leave the decision in your own hands.
It feels like a weird avuncular threat from the great industrialist of the age, no? I can't tell how much he means it to be a threat.
There follow a bunch of letters from big companies about how they don't want to employ smokers, e.g. from Cadillac Motor Car Company: "Boys who smoke cigarettes we do not care to keep in our employ. In the future we will not hire anyone whom we know to be addicted to this habit..... We made a study of the effect upon morals and efficiency of men in our employ addicted to this habit and found that cigarette smokers invariably were loose in their morals and very apt to be untruthful, and were far less productive than men who were not cigarette smokers.... We are proud to say that none of the prominent or executive men in this company use cigarettes."
After that there's a bunch of letters about how smoking reduces the moral, physical and intellectual qualities of a worker. (I was surprised mainly at the intellectual part, it does truly seem they thought smoking was bad for your brain). There's also a lot of claims to the effect that NOBODY who smokes has ever succeeded at anything, which seems like a bananas thing to claim, though I do get it's possible that cigarettes in 1914 contained heavy metals (or something) and really did dull the mind.
I was interested how many companies claimed that either they don't hire smokers or at least preferentially hire non-smokers. I wondered if this would be legal today, and it turns out 29 US states have "smoker protection laws" that prevent discrimination against smokers, but in the other 21 you can discriminate against smokers even if it's outside work and irrelevant to their job. (For extra credit, readers can guess if it's Democrat or Republican states that protect smokers' rights – it's not obvious which way it would break, right?)
The book ends with this (presumably made-up) story about a smoker and a non-smoker, which I honestly really enjoyed. Initially they are both rising stars in the journalism business, "two fellows whom to know was to like":
I shall not mention their names. That would be revealing identities that might better not be disclosed, for the sake of both. Neither shall I sketch the two careers too intimately. If I did it is more than likely that even in his pitiable mental state the one would recognize the portrait of himself, and there is no desire on my part to add one jot to the mental anguish he must suffer when in the few lucid moments he is permitted he looks back over opportunities that were worse than wasted.
One offers the other a cigarette, and is rebuffed.
"Ha," laughed the political writer, jokingly, "you have no small vices, eh?"
The reporter looked grave.
"I am not sure that is such a small vice," he replied slowly.
Not to be a spoiler but the non-smoker becomes a journalism superstar in New York while the smoker devolves into a life of farm labouring, then lumber shoving, then panhandling and potato peeling, all due to his crippling addiction to cigarettes.
Overall, I found this book a weird and interesting lens into a time gone by, and at 46 pages long it's not too heavy lifting (ok: admittedly at this point in my life even 46 pages is non-trivial, but relatively speaking).
It was also a source for many fun rabbit holes about once-famous people like Mack, Maxim, and "Luther Burbank the wizard of the plant and vegetable kingdom, whose experiments have caused the civilized world to wonder." I wish more books like this existed.
I wish I understood more of the context of the time and how the debate about cigaretttes worked, and (even more so) why smoking took almost a century longer to phase out.
I inevitably also found myself thinking about my own self-damaging compulsions: I've written before that I feel like modern phone use will someday be seen at-least-partly analogously to cigarettes – movies will show couples in the 2000s in bed on their phones, and people will think how did you live like that? – and this book gave me an odd, knowing feeling that it will be easy to compile a book of similar quotes about how phones are frying us, and that (like cigarette smoking) we're going to keep doing it anyway. It's not that simple, but it is, and also it isn't.
2026-06-15 19:11:46
Given that I write blogs and make boardgames, it's in some sense shocking how FEW of my posts are just "you know, life is like a board game...."[^1] But here's one.
There's a popular genre of boardgames called Engine Builders. The idea, roughly, is that you spend different resources to build "engines" which create more resources. You invest early on and reap more and more of the resources as the game progresses, taking "bigger" turns as a result.
For example, one popular recent(ish) engine building game is Wingspan. The players have to juggle cards and eggs and foods to acquire more cards and eggs and food (to win points and win the game).
I think there's a couple of important takeaways from looking at life as an engine builder.
First, it's really important to realise there are multiple resources in the game simultaneously; that it's easy to get pulled in to one resource early on and not-realise that it's going to cost you in the long run (or, at least, narrow down your options). There's a stereotypical version of e.g. the person who spends their 20s and 30s attempting to maximize the "money" resource, and completely neglecting the "love" resource, which they later come to realise is also important to them. But even if all you care about is the money resource, sometimes you reach a point where your ability to acquire it is bottlenecked by (say) relationships, which you'd completely under-invested in.
Second, I think that engine-builders give a good intuition of how exponential resource-growth can be. "Compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe" is a cliche but also sometimes true, and it applies to money and relationships and learning and many other things beside.
I think this is one of the things that is least-obvious until you experience it: the early parts of an exponential curve don't look very different from a linear increase, and (depending on the numbers) could even be lower. But further down the line the exponential just mogs the linear so hard you want to cry.
One important note is that modern boardgame designers generally strive to include catch-up mechanics (or "rubber bands" in the parlance) that make sure the early leader doesn't just run away with everything.
On my worst days I fear that the game of life is kind of broken because NOT ONLY does it not have rubber bands, the players don't even start with remotely similar resources, so some people just luck into an incredible engine early on and then run away from the pack by age 22.
But I'm not so sure about this; part of me thinks that the meta-game is more complicated than the one I see before me, and that the real game is more subtle and better-balanced than it sometimes seems.
[^1]: I'm sure every hobby is full of people saying "you know, life is like [thing from the hobby]" and that this is annoying to everyone outside the hobby, but I'm going to do it anyway.
2026-06-12 19:11:09
I've had the chance to live in a lot of different places, and have come to a mildly surprising conclusion: it's cars that make living in the city stressful.
Basically I have lived in cities which were not very dense but which, due to road-placement, had a lot of traffic around them and it stressed me out. I have likewise lived in places which were dense with tall buildings but for idiosyncratic reasons had very little car-traffic and they did not stress me out. Lastly, I have lived in places that were technically Quiet Suburbs but which had a road nearby where cars went very fast and that stressed me out too.
I am sure the equation is ultimately more complicated, and that buildings and people and factories and whatever else can all play a role. But within the constrained domain of the places I've actually lived, I'm pretty sure that carsiness is the biggest contributor to my stress levels. Which is somewhat optimistic, if (like me) you think we're moving to a future of fewer, quieter and more graceful cars.
2026-06-10 19:11:53
a guest post from dear friend-of-the-blog Kester
Imagine that you (like most humans who lived between the years of 2000 BC and 1910 AD) live in a society where carts are commonly pulled by horses. One day, you see a man on the side of the road with two horses hitched to a cart. The man appears to be stuck: the horses and the cart are not moving. The man knows that something has to be done. So, he starts pleading with the cart to move forward, explaining carefully what he needs it to do. But the cart doesn't move. Next, he bribes the cart with snacks and treats. But the cart still doesn't move. Finally, he gets out a whip and starts beating the cart.
Meanwhile, the horses are standing there, thinking, "ok, bro... you do you."
My friends, I am sorry to tell you that YOU ARE THIS MAN if you have ever tried to get something done by changing how you feel about it. Emotions can't be changed, they can only be observed. Emotions are inherently reactive; they follow a situation like a cart follows a horse. Trying to change your situation by changing your emotions simply does not work.
If you are stuck on something and can't move forward, the logic of procrastination goes like this: "Until I fix X, I can't do Y." For chronic procrastinators, X is usually an emotion. We think,
"I have to feel inspired and passionate before I start writing my novel."
"I'm too nervous to ask that person out on a date, I need to calm down first."
"When I feel more confident, I will apply for a new job."
"I need to be in the mood to clean the kitchen before I clean the kitchen."
These people are all pleading with the cart to move forward.
If you're the kind of person who suppresses bad emotions and fantasizes about all the good emotions you COULD feel in the future (but don't feel yet), that's bribing the cart with snacks.
If you think, "I am a horrible, weak-willed worthless person for feeling scared, embarrassed, sad and uncertain!" then you are beating the cart with a whip. You might push the cart into a ditch this way, but you will certainly not get it to roll down the road.
Ok, so what about the horses in this metaphor? What actually pulls the cart? Willpower? Rationality? The power of Cosmic Manifestation? I'm sorry to once again be the bearer of bad news, but no, no, and no. The only things that have the power to move the cart forward are 1. YOUR ACTUAL PHYSICAL BODY and 2. YOUR REAL-LIFE IN-PERSON COMMUNITY.
That's because change and forward momentum can only begin in reality, and not in the world of thoughts. If you want to change something, you have to move your body and/or be around different people in a different way. These horses pull because they actually exist on the physical plane.
For those of us who love the life of the mind, this might be a tough lesson. But remember, our rational self is still important. It's the man sitting in the cart. He's trying to get somewhere and do some things! And I suppose if we continue the metaphor, our thoughts and willpower are the reins, the treats, and even the whip. We just have to make sure we are applying our willpower to the horses and not the cart.
Almost all change begins in the body and our physical input. That's why the food we eat (healthy or unhealthy), the exercise and sleep we get (too much or not enough), and our sensory experiences (restoring or draining) are the main predictor of our success and emotional wellbeing.
If you are interested in spiritual wellbeing, all the great spiritual traditions prove my point. You begin with physical actions like sitting, breathing, chanting, singing, meeting in groups, serving the poor. The enlightenment comes after a long physical pilgrimage in the same direction.
The other source of actual change is being around other people. Humans are social primates. This is an unavoidable aspect of our evolutionary path. We aren't meant to solve our problems alone. Choosing who you talk to and spend time with is crucial to steering your life. This is why so many people's lives went off the rails during covid lockdown. An activity that feels impossible alone can become 10x easier when you are doing it in a partnership or group, or even just with a friend sitting nearby.
There is a massive benefit that comes from emotions being reactive: they are the best way to test if what you're doing is working or not. Emotions are a signalling system from ourselves to ourselves. You sit on your seat on the cart and you look around and see where the horses have taken you. Is it a better place or a worse place than where you started? Does hanging out with this friend make me feel encouraged, or do they make me feel like crap? Did changing my sleep schedule make me feel happier during the day? Does volunteering really help with depression? When you sincerely check in with your emotions and take them seriously, you will discover some surprising paths to fulfillment and success. And maybe your path is totally different from someone else's! We've all heard the phrase "Follow Your Joy", but I think it's more accurate to say "See What Actions Joy Follows." This is an important distinction, especially when you are just starting to get yourself out of a ditch.
Historical note: other dudes, like Plato and Freud, have also used similar metaphors about charioteers, horses and riders, etc. They are all wrong, and I would be happy to go back in time and fight them!! (Although, if you read the entirety of the Phaedrus, where Plato introduces us to the allegory of the charioteer, you will find that he actually agrees with me more than he disagrees, especially about the power of in-person community.)
Questions for commentators: What is your worst, most life ruining "I need to feel X before I do Y" procrastination logic? (Mine is, I need to feel zero pride before I share something with other people, or else I'm just "showing off." Gah! So toxic!) On the positive side, what's the body or community thing you choose to do that changes your life most effectively? Have you ever had a sensory input that you didn't know was bothering you, and then when you changed that sensory input, your emotions about everything else immediately improved? If so, please describe!
2026-06-09 19:11:42
Here's a trick I like to use when attempting to estimate land areas: planes fly at roughly 500 miles per hour. If you know roughly how many hours it takes to fly across a place, and roughly how long it takes to fly from top to bottom, you can estimate roughly how large the land mass is. For example:
The United States
Width:
Height:
Size:
If you're an intelligent person then you'll have SO many objections to this. The US is not a rectangle! The earth is curved! Planes go slower at takeoff and landing! They don't even fly directly in a straight line! All these flight times and plane speeds are rounded!
This is all true, and yet the actual land area of the contiguous US is 3.12 million square miles. Somehow we ended up within 5% of the correct answer.
The "somehow" is that 1) a bunch of different simplifications cancelled out, 2) I got extremely lucky, 3) I am writing this article, if the calculation had come out badly I might not be writing it. In general I would be surprised if most calculations like this are even within 2x of the right solution. But having been to a few trivia nights where people are asked to guess the area of a land mass, most people left to their own devices don't know if the correct answer should end in "thousands" or "millions" or "billions", so this is an improvement.
Let's do some more.
China
In fact, China is 3.7 million square miles. It is even less of a rectangle than the contiguous US, and our rectangle didn't overlap the region correctly anyway. It doesn't matter! We're just trying to get a reasonable estimate, and we landed 25% off, which is pretty good.
If you'd picked different city pairs (or rounded differently) you might have said "5 hours across and 3 hours down" and then estimated 3.75 million square miles, which would have been spuriously exact; if you'd said "6 hours across and 4 hours down" you'd have estimated 6 million square miles, which is much less-good, but still within 2x of the right answer.
Africa
Africa is very obviously not a rectangle, even more so than the US or China. There's two ways to do this estimate: create two rectangles and calculate them separately, or try to fudge a rectangle that feels like the amount of ocean it wrongly includes might roughly balance out the amount of land it wrongly leaves out. Since I'm getting tired, let's do the latter.
I think Nairobi to Lagos is 5 hours? That would give 2500 miles across. There's a lot of land west of Lagos (and some east of Nairobi), but will that balance out against the large amount of ocean that this rectangle covers? Intuitively I feel like it'll be an underestimate, but I don't have good intuition and I think the curvature of the earth / map skew around the equator might mess me up here.
The correct answer is apparently 11.73 million, which is closer than I thought it would be, but also I got extra-extra-lucky here with the approximation working out. But again, I think if you can get within 2x of the answer here you've done pretty well.
I do want to re-emphasise that there's a lot of Researcher Degrees of Freedom with this blogpost, I might not have published it if it hadn't worked out so nicely, and therefore future estimates are unlikely to come out this close. Still, a fun technique; if you have others I'd love to hear about them.
2026-06-08 19:11:18
0) for some people, alcohol is addictive and life-derailing, to the point where I feel bad writing a post called Mixed Feelings About Alcohol. It's very hard to say this without sounding corny but if you think there's any chance you're one of those people, please talk to someone instead of reading this blogpost. I've had friends who've had good experiences with AA and there's also a drug you can take. I don't know nearly enough about either of these but just, like, please stop reading this and text someone to get the conversation started, or email me and I'll help you figure it out.
1) I generally think that a lot of life is about trying to avoid ruts, and that more people should try to shake their mental snowglobes more often. Alcohol is famous for reducing inhibitions, and in many ways I think that's good. Sometimes you need a stimulus to throw off the bowlines and sail away from the safe harbor, and maybe most ideally that stimulus would be I listened to my small still inner voice and realized in a balanced way that I should ask out Jo, but since realistically that is hard for many of us, it's helpful that there's a substance that greatly increases the chances you will ask out Jo.
2) But shaking the snowglobe isn't risk-free. You really might do something stupid, or regrettable, and I don't think there's any way around that: we build up these protective shells for a reason, and breaking the shell will always be a risk, even if sometimes it's a risk worth taking. (E.g. I have mixed feelings about therapy in part because it seems obvious to me that any activity which can make you dump your boyfriend / quit your job / leave your hometown is obviously a high-risk, high-reward proposition. But that's for another day).
3) Even without great confessions, alcohol's inhibition-lowering has a useful social function as a kind of trust mechanism. I think this is (one reason) why business deals were historically sealed over raucous drinking sessions: if you get incredibly drunk with someone and the worst thing you discover is that they can't sing for s**t, you have some information that they're not hiding anything business-relevant from you. On the other hand, if the drinking causes their loose lips to say they can't believe you were willing to pay $— for this project, nobody else was willing to pay even one-fourth that, maybe you're ready to ghost the deal.
This function is useful, both in professional and personal settings! And it's hard to replace sans spirits: late nights? mutual friends? seeing what they do when things go wrong? None of these are exactly analogous.
4) One of my long-time hobby-horses is that we misunderstand history because successful moral revolutions (abolition, women's suffrage) are remembered as moral revolutions, but failed moral revolutions are remembered as.... weird historical quirks, or something, even though they would have been remembered as moral revolutions if they'd succeeded.
As a result, we think of moral revolutions as more "inevitable" than they really are, and more likely to abide. But this isn't true, and the shining example of that is Prohibition in the United States, which was understood in its own time as the next great moral frontier – explicitly in the mold of abolition – that would save the widow and the orphan and bring light to the darkness.
My mixed feelings about alcohol go so far as to think that we might all be better off if alcohol were indeed abolished. And yes it's different to have a society with No X than to personally boycott X, but still it's weird to be in the position of "in many ways I think this thing is good for me – not just enjoyable but actually good – but also I wonder if it should be banned, and wouldn't be shocked if future generations see it as evil."
5) For moderate drinkers, the health effects of alcohol seem to be mediated by its negative effects on sleep. These effects are greatly reduced by drinking earlier in the day – with a half life of 4 or 5 hours, every drink you have at 2pm should be about 1/4 as impactful on your sleep as a drink at midnight, and I suspect it's more extreme than this because of added effects of alcohol-driven dehydration or compensatory overhydration. The old saw says not to drink before 5pm, and the other old saw says it's always 5pm somewhere, but I wonder if a better norm would be never drink after 5pm in your timezone. (Yes this is incompatible with a 9-5 job, but equally I'm fine with saying "only drink on holidays, and even then only in the daytime")
6) How famous is the If By Whiskey speech amongst youse? Anyway, I think it's very good; mixed feelings about alcohol from 1952:
I want you to know that I do not shun controversy. On the contrary, I will take a stand on any issue at any time, regardless of how fraught with controversy it might be. You have asked me how I feel about whiskey....
If when you say whiskey you mean the devil's brew, the poison scourge, the bloody monster, that defiles innocence, dethrones reason, destroys the home, creates misery and poverty, yea, literally takes the bread from the mouths of little children; if you mean the evil drink that topples the Christian man and woman from the pinnacle of righteous, gracious living into the bottomless pit of degradation, and despair, and shame and helplessness, and hopelessness, then certainly I am against it.
But, if when you say whiskey you mean the oil of conversation, the philosophic wine, the ale that is consumed when good fellows get together...; if you mean the stimulating drink that puts the spring in the old gentleman's step on a frosty, crispy morning; if you mean the drink which enables a man to magnify his joy, and his happiness, and to forget, if only for a little while, life's great tragedies, and heartaches, and sorrows.... then certainly I am for it.
This is my stand. I will not retreat from it. I will not compromise.