(Roughly) Daily

Rachel Handler weighs in with a deep dive on the enshittification (and here) of a couple of storied brands…

… Everyone in my life I spoke to agreed that something was amiss, that Reese’s — and commercial chocolate in general — didn’t taste the way it used to. Plus everything from Smartfood popcorn to HVAC to mattresses to car-door handles sucked now. Why wouldn’t Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, whose entire reason for being was to taste good, also suck? And why was it so hard to know how — and why — they tasted worse?

I would spend the next several months tumbling down a chocolate vortex, encountering dozens of eccentric characters, all disagreeing about the fundamental question of what chocolate even is and who it should be for. I entered a terrifying fun house of American enshittification. I learned that — not to sound like a LinkedIn guy — what’s going on with chocolate is a parable for the modern world. That at this particularly bleak end stage of capitalism, everything we once treasured has or will lose its essential essence and MrBeast will always be involved somehow…

Into the molten belly of our crumbling world: “The Chocolate Conspiracy” (archived version), from @rachelhandler.bsky.social in @nymag.com. Eminently worth reading in full.

Via the ever-illuminating Ingrid Burrington (@lifewinning.com) and her wonderful newsletter, Perfect Sentences, the most recent edition of which included these bangers from Handler’s article:

It was a classic American story about men and the things they will do to cheat death (betray their fathers) and how, with enough drugs, you could lose the ability to taste or feel things.

Polling the average Hersheypark consumer had taught me a lot about individual taste preferences within the increasingly deteriorating conditions of the imperial core and about how hot I could get before I started to weep.

* Frank Rich

As we remember the real, we might note that today is National Chocolate Day.

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