The American way of beef

THEATLANTIC.COM - MAY 2003

These days, the thought of ingesting hamburger gives many people pause. Massive beef recalls and books like Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation have impressed upon readers' minds the image of the modern beef cow, packed tightly in an enormous feedlot, standing in a cesspool of its brethren's manure as it gorges itself on an excessively medicated mix of corn and rendered animal protein. Although livestock diseases have devastated farms in Europe, American factory farming has earned an especially bad name for its carelessness and inhumanity. As B. R. Myers wrote in his May 2005 Atlantic piece "If Pigs Could Swim," "Livestock are treated better in Europe because Europeans want them treated better. They are treated worse here because we hardly think of them at all. It's as simple as that."

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The cruel wit of Evelyn Waugh

THE ATLANTIC.COM - 11 APRIL 2003

Charity requires that one forgive Waugh," argues Christopher Hitchens in "The Permanent Adolescent," his essay on the author in the May Atlantic, "precisely because it was his innate—as well as his adopted—vices that made him a king of comedy and of tragedy for almost three decades."

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