Quibbling Scribbling

 It was one of those summer afternoons that seemed to go on forever.  The heat filled the small room and pushed us oozing into our seats. When I looked over, John was fiddling with his phone. "Anything good?" I drawled. He grunted. "Good to hear.  Keep me posted." I said. The heat and silence ballooned oppressively. I slumped further on the couch and stared hazily at the patterns in the cracks in the ceiling. "Can I get your opinion on something?" I finally asked. "Just until until Noah gets here, I know we've gotta go soon."   He flipped his phone down into his lap and looked at me.   "Bout what?"  "It's a story I've been thinking about. Haven't written it down yet. Too much effort." "That's a mood. Let's hear it." "Okay, cool, will you tell me if you agree afterward?  Maybe I'll write it down after all."  He didn't respond, but I was already deep in thought.  The scrap of a...

     Though nowadays an ubiquitous comestible, by historical standards, bread is a modern invention.  First conceived by Adam Smith in his treatise The Theory of Moral Sentiments, bread was theorized by Smith to be an economical replacement for Caviar d'Aubergine which, since the early 1600s, had served as a staple for the American working class.  (Smith, with surprising prescience, also predicted the decline in popularity of two other common foods of the time: apple pie à la mode, which he correctly identified as too sloppy to eat on lunch break; and the durian, of which he perspicaciously observed enjoyment was merely a social pretense.) The work was considered quixotic in academic circles and received little attention at the time.   W. W. Wilson, typically one of Smith's staunchest defenders, wrote on the subject in the January 1760 issue of 'The Ipswich Journal',        "Bread? What's this about bread?"      Smith...