Culture

Signs of unwarranted optimism

Examining futile efforts to make life a little better

New Diet Coke Plus—Diet Coke plus vitamins and minerals! This is the new frontier of health—vitaminizing soda? We asked a Coke-sucking cubicle drone—the sort of modern workplace casualty who has to mainline DC just to stay awake—for a capsule review: “Ech. You can taste the good-for-you. Remove this from my sight!”

Harper’s magazine puts all 156 years of its content online, free to subscribers. From the first issue, June 1850: “The design of the Publishers, in issuing this work, is to place within reach of the great mass of the American people, the unbounded treasures of the Periodical Literature of the present day.” Clearly, the urge to force vitamins and minerals onto the public goes way back.

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