"Gentrification": the term evokes the political and mental life of two generations of city-dwellers. On one interpretation, it was the forced displacement of the urban working class by mobile, college-educated professionals. On another, it was the restoration of city life in the imagination of a West that had supposedly given it up for suburban sprawl. An entire understanding of what cities were for and where they were going was bound up in the ambiguous word. All the energies of urban thought went into debating its meaning.

The "landed gentry" alluded to in "gentrification" emerged as a new class in England in the late eighteenth century—a group of petit bourgeois possessed of country estates, but lacking the economic clout of the true aristocracy. Ricardo despised the gentry: they acquired land and sat on it, lazily and unproductively. But the gentry did have aspirations. Think of the Bennetts in Pride and Prejudice: lacking any obvious form of advancement besides marriage, they might also have considered revolution as a way of improving their lot. And to the English aristocracy, the gentry did represent a threat of the uprising that had engulfed their brothers in France. But not to worry. "To be mistress of Pemberley might be something!" the gentry concluded instead; the image of Fitzwilliam Darcy—or marrying up—symbolizes the alternative, individualistic means of social advancement. Likewise, the gentry of the late twentieth century: they were always uncertain whether their true interests lay with the people below or above them. Read More

The beginning of the end for trans fats came in 1994, when the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) petitioned the FDA to add trans fats to the Nutrition Facts panels on packaged foods. CSPI, a consumer watchdog that receives most of its funding from subscribers to its consistently alarming Nutrition Action Healthletter, based its petition on evidence that trans fat consumption increases the risk of heart disease. Subsequent research has also suggested associations with diabetes, infertility, and brain damage. In 2003, the FDA announced that, beginning in 2006, packaged foods companies would have to list the trans fat content of products on their Nutrition Facts panels.