A Sociological Eye

  This is the “Monkey Gland,” a cocktail invented in the 1920s. It is made of equal parts gin and fresh orange juice, with a bar spoon full of grenadine and another of absinthe.  OK, that sounds interesting if a bit odd (orange and absinthe?). But what’s with that name ?  “Monkey glands” were kind of a 1920s meme. The glands in question were testes. And the reason they were all the rage back then? Because a French doctor of Russian origin named Serge Voronoff was removing the testes from chimpanzees and transplanting slices of them into human men’s scrotums. Okaaaay. Why, exactly? Because Dr. Voronoff claimed that this would extend the men’s lives. It would give them added mental and physical vigor, allowing them to work longer hours with greater concentration! It would reverse signs of aging, improve muscle tone, perhaps even cure the need for glasses! In other words, this was an opening salvo of the techbro era of “biohacking.” Long before wearable fitness trackers and...

  Here’s something ironic: lawyers have gotten this individual’s statements about his DOGE activities cancelling basically all federal grants for work in the humanities taken down from YouTube, based on claims that he is now being cancelled by people on the internet.  We really need to talk about what it means to cancel something or someone, because those actions are not equivalent. . .  So: here is the context. The National Endowment for the Humanities is the US federal agency tasked with funding work in the humanities—including history, literature, philosophy, linguistics, languages, law, classics, ethics, and subjects MAGA particularly disdains like gender and women’s studies, ethnic studies, and sexuality studies.  A year ago, in March 2025, DOGE was let loose on the NEH, and within the space of 22 days, 97% of all NEH grants had been cancelled . Basically all work in the humanities other than preserving the papers of George Washington was defunded.  In May ...