The Critics: How Caffeine CR e A Ted The Modern Wor LD
The original coca-cola was a mixture of wine, coca, and coca, the raw ingredient of cocaine. In the nineteen-thirties, a commercial artist named Haddon Sundblom posed a friend in a red Santa suit with a Coke in his hand. In Gere Many right after the second world war, cigarettes briefly and suddenly became the equivalent of crack cocaine.
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The Critics: How Caffeine CR e A Ted The Modern Wor LD
The original coca-cola was a mixture of wine, coca, and coca, the raw ingredient of cocaine. In the nineteen-thirties, a commercial artist named Haddon Sundblom posed a friend in a red Santa suit with a Coke in his hand. In Gere Many right after the second world war, cigarettes briefly and suddenly became the equivalent of crack cocaine.
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derer sentenced to a lifetime of tea
THE CRITICS drinking, as a control. (Unfortunately,
the two doctors in charge of the study died before anyone else did; then Gus- tav was murdered; and finally the tea drinker died, at eighty-three, of old age—leaving the original murderer alone with his espresso, and leaving c o f fe e’s supposed tox i c i ty in som e doubt.) Later, the various forms of caf- feine began to be divided up along so- A CRITIC AT LARGE ciological lines. Wolfgang Sch i ve l- busch, in his book “Tastes of Paradise,” argues that, in the eighteenth century, JAVA MAN coffee symbolized the rising middle classes, whereas its great caffeinated How caffeine cr eated the modern wor ld. rival in those years—cocoa,or, as it was known at the time, chocolate—was the BY MALCOLM GLADWELL drink of the aristocracy. “Goethe, who used art as a means to lift himself out he original Coca-Cola was a late- many right after the Second World of his middle class background into T nineteenth-century concoction known as Pemberton’s French Wine War, cigarettes briefly and suddenly be- came the equivalent of crack cocaine. the aristocracy, and who as a member of a courtly society maintained a sense Coca, a mixture of alcohol, the caffeine- “Up to a point, the majority of the ha- of aristocratic calm even in the midst rich kola nut, and coca, the raw ingre- bitual smokers preferred to do without of immense productivity, made a cult dient of cocaine. In the face of social food even under extreme conditions of o f ch o c o l a t e, and avoided coffe e, ” pressure, first the wine and then the nutrition rather than to forgo tobacco,” Schivelbusch writes. “Balzac, who de- coca were removed, leaving the more according to one account of the period. spite his sentimental allegiance to the banal modern beverage in its place: car- “Many housewives . . . bartered fat and monarchy, lived and labored for the lit- bonated, caffeinated sugar water with sugar for cigarettes.”Even a drug as de- erary marketplace and for it alone, be- less kick to it than a cup of coffee. But monized as opium has been seen in a came one of the most excessive coffee- is that the way we think of Coke? Not more favorable light. In the eighteen- drinkers in history. Here we see two at all. In the nineteen-thirties, a com- thirties, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s fundamentally different working styles mercial artist named Haddon Sund- grandfather Warren Delano II made and means of stimulation—funda- blom had the bright idea of posing a the family fortune exporting the dru gt o mentally different psychologies and portly retired friend of his in a red Santa China, and Delano was able to sugar- physiologies.” Today, of course, the Claus suit with a Coke in his hand, coat his activities so plausibly that no chief cultural distinction is between and plastering the image on billboards one ever accused his grandson of being coffee and tea, which, according to a and advertisements across the country. the scion of a drug lord. And yet, as list drawn up by Weinberg and Bealer, Coke, magically, was reborn as caffeine Bennett Alan Weinberg and Bonnie K. have come to represent almost entirely for children, caffeine without any of the Bealer remind us in their marvellous opposite sensibilities: weighty adult connotations of coffee new book “The World of Caffeine” and tea. It was—as the ads with Sund- (Routledge; $27.50), there is no drug Coffee Aspect Tea Aspect Male Female blom’s Santa put it—“the pause that re- quite as effortlessly adaptable as caf- Boisterous Decorous freshes.” It added life. It could teach feine, the Zelig of chemical stimulants. Indulgence Te m p e r a n c e the world to sing. At one moment, in one form, it is Hardheaded Romantic Topology Geometry One of the things that have always the drug of choice of café intellectuals Heidegger Carnap made drugs so powerful is their cultural and artists; in another, of housewives; Beethoven Mozart adaptability, their way of acquiring in another, of Zen monks; and, in yet Libertarian Statist Promiscuous Pure meanings beyond their pharmacology. another, of children enthralled by a fat We think of marijuana, for example, as man who slides down chimneys. King a drug of lethargy, of disaffection. But Gustav III, who ruled Sweden in the That the Am e ri can Rev o l u t i on in Colombia, the historian David T. latter half of the eighteenth century, began with the symbolic rejection of Courtwright points out in “Forces of was so convinced of the particular per- tea in Boston Harbor, in other words, Habit” (Harvard; $24.95), “peasants ils of coffee over all other forms of caf- makes perfect sense. Real revolutionar- boast that cannabis helps them to quita feine that he devised an elaborate ex- ies would naturally prefer coffee. By el cansancioor reduce fatigue; increase periment. A convicted murderer was contrast, the freedom fighters of Canada, their fuerza and ánimo, force and spirit; sentenced to drink cup after cup of a hundred years later, were most defi- and become incansabl,etireless.” In Ger- coffee until he died, with another mur- nitely tea drinkers. And where was 76 THE NEW YORKER, JULY 30, 2001 TNY—07/30/01—PAGE 7 6—LI VE ART AT TOP—PLS INSPECT AND REPORT ON QUALITY—133SC. By enabling people to coör dinate their work sc hedulesthe , favored drug of café society helped lead to the industrial olrev ution.
Canada’s autonomy won? Not on the safe. (Caffeine in ordinary quantities blood-soaked fields of Lexington and has never been conclusively linked to Concord but in the genteel drawing serious illness.) rooms of Westminster, over a nice cup But how quickly it washes away dif- of Darjeeling and small ,t riangular cu- fers dramatically from person to person. cumber sandwiches. A two-hundred-pound man who drinks a cup of coffee with a hundred mil- ll this is a bit puzzling. We don’t ligrams of caffeine will have a maxi- A fetishize the difference between salmon eaters and tuna eaters, or people mum caffeine concentration of one milligram per kilogram of body weight. who like their eggs sunny-side up and A hundred-pound woman having the those who like them scrambled. So why same cup of coffee will reach a caffeine invest so much importance in the way concentration of two milligrams per people prefer their caffeine? A cup of kilogram of body weight, or twice as coffee has somewhere between a hun- high. In addition, when women are on dred and two hundred and fifty mil- the Pill, the rate at which they clear ligrams; black tea brewed for four min- caffeine from their bodies slows consid- utes has between forty and a hundred erably. (Some of the side effects experi- milligrams. But the disparity disappears enced by women on the Pill may in fact if you consider that many tea drinkers be caffeine jitters caused by their sud- drink from a pot, and have more than den inability to tolerate as much coffee one cup. Caffeine is caffeine.“The more as they could before.) Pregnancy reduces it is pondered,” Weinberg and Bealer a woman’s ability to process caffeine write, “the more paradoxical this duality still further. The half-life of caffeine in within the culture of caffeine appears. an adult is roughly three and a half After all, both coffee and tea are aro- hours. In a pregnant woman, it’s eigh- matic infusions of vegetable matter, teen hours. (Even a four-month-old served hot or cold in similar quantities; child processes caffeine more efficiently.) both are often mixed with cream or An average man and woman sitting sugar; both are universally available in down for a cup of coffee are thus not virtually any grocery or restaurant in pharmaceutical equals: in effect, the civilized society; and both contain the woman is under the influence of a vastly identical psychoactive alkaloid stimu- more powerful drug. Given these differ- lant, caffeine.” ences, you’d think that, instead of con- It would seem to make more sense trasting the caffeine cultures of tea and to draw distinctions based on the way coffee, we’d contrast the caffeine cul- caffeine is metabolized rather than on tures of men and women. the way it is served. Caffeine, whether it is in coffee or tea or a soft drink, ut we don’t, and with good reason. moves easily from the stomach and in- testines into the bloodstream, and from B To parse caffeine along gender lines does not do justice to its capacity there to the organs, and before long to insinuate itself into every aspect of has penetrated almost every cell of the our lives, not merely to influence cul- body. This is the reason that caffeine ture but even to create it. Take coffee’s is such a wonderful stimulant. Most reputation as the “thinker’s”drink.This substances can’t cross the blood-brain dates from eighteenth-century Europe, barrier, which is the body’s defensive where coffeehousesplayed a major role mechanism, preventing viruses or tox- in the egalitarian, inclusionary spirit ins from entering the central nervous that was then sweeping the continent. system.Caffeine does so easily. Within They sprang up first in London, so an hour or so, it reaches its peak con- alarming Charles II that in 1676 he centration in the brain, and there it does tried to ban them. It didn’t work. By a number of things—principally, block- 1700, there were hundreds of coffee- ing the action of adenosine, the neuro- houses in Lon d on , their subversive modulator that makes you sleepy, low- spirit best captured by a couplet from a ers your blood pressure, and slows down comedy of the period: “In a coffeehouse your heartbeat. Then, as quickly as it just now among the rabble / I bluntly builds up in your brain and tissues, asked, which is the treason table.” The caffeine is gone—which is why it’s so movement then spread to Paris, and by 78 THE NEW YORKER, JULY 30, 2001 TNY—07/30/01—PAGE 78—133SC. the end of the eighteenth century cof- feehouses numbered in the hundreds— most famously, the Café de la Régence, BRIEFLY NOTED near the Palais Royal, which counted among its customers Robespierre, Na- poleon, Voltaire, Victor Hugo, Théo- Little America,by Henry Bromell (Knopf; ate student whose interest in Johnny is phile Gautier, Rousseau, and the Duke $24). In 1958, the C.I.A. agent Mack romantic without being sexual: Darlene of Richelieu. Previously, when men Hooper is posted to the desert kingdom becomes a kind of relationship coach, had gathered together to talk in public of Kurash to save one small corner of the offering him counsel in matters of the places,they had done so in bars, which world from Communism. While Mack heart. Wolcott,known for his nasty and d rew f rom specific socioecon om i c befriends its ruler, a twenty-two-year- hilarious journalistic criticism, is signif- niches and, because of the alcohol they old playboy enamored of fast cars, his icantly more housebroken in his début served, created a specific kind of talk. ten-year-old son, Terry, plays doctor as a novelist. His wit remains intact— The new coffeehouses, by contrast, with the daughters of other spies in the particularly when skewering the world drew from many different classes and Kurashian suburbs. Forty years later, of out-of-work actors—but in the end trades, and they served a stimulant,not Terry hunts through declassified doc- Johnny’s romantic life doesn’t make for a depressant. “It is not extravagant to uments for the truth about his father’s compelling reading: like much else here, claim that it was in these gathering role in the assassination of the king he is at once too familiar and too blurry spots that the art of conversation be- and the ultimate erasure of Kurash from to leave much of an impression. came the basis of a new literary style the map.Bromell’s critique of Cold War and that a new ideal of general educa- culture is more wistful than outraged, Afterimage, by Helen Humpher ys (Met - tion in letters was born,” Weinberg and and his generosity makes his characters ropolitan;$23). It’s 1865, in England, Bealer write. ring true: the C.I.A. station chief break- and both Isabelle Dashell and her hus- It is worth noting, as well, that in ing down at a cocktail party while play- band,Eldon,are making pictures. She’s the original coffeehouses nearly ev- ing charades; the boyish king struggling intent on mastering a new medium, eryone smoked, and nicotine also has to reconcile his nomadic heritage with photography, and he’s seeking renown as a distinctive physiological effect. It his shiny Corvette. a cartographer. When Annie Phelan, a moderates mood and extends attention, sober beauty orphaned by the Irish fam- and,more important, it doubles the rate Flight of the Swan, by Rosario Ferré ine, answers their ad for a housemaid, of caffeine metabolism: it allows you to (Farrar, Straus & Giroux;$24). In the she becomes Isabelle’s muse and Eldon’s drink twice as much coffee as you could tumult of 1917, a touring Russian ballet confidante,and finds herself pressed into otherwise. In other words, the original troupe is stranded in Puerto Rico, where the service of art. Inspired by the work coffeehouse was a place where men of the dancers, bred in ice and snow, blos- of Julia Margaret Cameron, this urgent, all types could sit all day; the tobacco som in the island’s perpetual heat. Even well-made novel charts the boundaries they smoked made it possible to drink the company’s imperious star, Madame where light becomes shadow, and the coffee all day; and the coffee they drank Niura, enters into a folie à deux with known can suddenly appear awful and inspired them to talk all day. Out of Diamantino, a dashing revolutionary astonishing. this came the Enlightenment. (The eighteen years her junior. But this de- next time we so perfectly married phar- lightful novel, waspishly narrated by Fearless Jones, by Walter Mosley (Little, macology and place, we got Joan Baez.) Madame’s acolyte Masha (who turns out Brown;$24.95). Mosley’s latest mystery In time, caffeine moved from the to have an agenda of her own), is more is narrated by Paris Minton, a black man café to the home. In America, coffee than pure froth; Ferré’s subject, which who sells used books in nineteen-fifties triumphed because of the country’s she handles with great delicacy, is really L.A. Paris’s life is perfect—he reads all proximity to the new Caribbean and the intricate demands of loyalty amid day without interruption—until a be- Latin Am e ri can coffee plantations, extenuating circumstances. witching young woman named Elana and the fact that throughout the nine- Love walks through his door. She’s look- teenth century duties were negligible. The Catsitters, by James Wolcott (H arper - ing for a religious group called the Mes- Beginning in the eighteen-twenties, Collins;$25). Johnny Downs is a New senger of the Divine, but the thug who Courtwright tells us, Brazil “unleashed York bartender who longs to be a success- bursts in after her is looking for a bond a flood of slave-produced coffee. Amer- ful actor. Dumped by his girlfriend for worth thousands of dollars. Mayhem i ca n per capita consumption, t h re e reasons that he can’t quite grasp, Johnny and seduction ensue, and when Paris’s pounds per year in 1830, rose to eight licks his wounds and takes solace from bookstore is burned to the ground, he pounds by 1859.” Darlene Ryder, a straight-talking gradu- knows it’s time to seek the aid of the in- What this flood of caffeine did, ac- comparable Fearless Jones. The unlikely cording to Weinberg and Bealer, was to friendship of these men—Fearless is all abet the process of industrialization— fists and testosterone, Paris is a gun-shy to help “large numbers of people to co- truth-seeker—is the source of the novel’s ordinate their work schedules by giving humor, and propels the reader through them the energy to start work at a given the plot’s knottier moments. THE NEW YORKER, JULY 30, 2001 79 TNY—07/30/01—PAGE 7 9—133SC.—LIVE SPOT #28142—PLEASE INSPECT AND REPORT ON QUALITY—3 COLOR PAGE!!! time and continue it as long as neces- ments reflect a greater natural talent and yet, if his consciousness was so sary.” Until the eighteenth century, it than his less productive forebears had? great, why was he so intent on altering must be remembered,many Westerners Or did he just drink a lot more coffee? it? More important, what exactly were drank beer almost continuously, even Paul Hoffman, in “The Man Who we supposed to be tuning in to? We beginning their day with something Loved Only Numbers,” writes of the were given hints, with psychedelic col- called “beer soup.” (Bealer and Wein- legendary twentieth-century mathe- ors and deep readings of “Lucy in the berg helpfully provide the following matician Paul Erdös that “he put in Sky with Diamonds,” but that was eighteenth-century German recipe: nineteen-hour days, keeping himself never enough. If we are to re-create “Heat the beer in a saucepan; in a sepa- fortified with 10 to 20 milligrams of ourselves, we would like to know what rate small pot beat a couple of eggs. Benzedrine or Ritalin, strong espresso we will become. Add a chunk of butter to the hot beer. and caffeine tablets. ‘A mathematician,’ Caffeine is the best and most useful Stir in some cool beer to cool it, then Erdös was fond of saying, ‘is a machine of our drugs because in every one of its pour over the eggs. Add a bit of salt, for turning coffee into theorems.’ ” forms it can answer that question pre- and finally mix all the ingredients to- Once, a friend bet Erdös five hundred cisely. It is a stimulant that blocks the gether, whisking it well to keep it from dollars that he could not quit ampheta- action of adenosine, and comes in a curdling.”) Now they began each day mines for a month. Erdös took the bet multitude of guises,each with a ready- with a strong cup of coffee. One way to and won ,b u t ,d u ring his time of absti- made story attach e d , a mixture of explain the industrial revolution is as nence, he found himself incapable of history and superstition and whimsy the inevitable consequence of a world doing any serious work. “You’ve set which infuses the daily ritual of adeno- where people suddenly preferred being mathematics back a month,” he told his sine blocking with meaning and pur- jittery to being drunk. In the modern friend when he collected, and immedi- pose. Put caffeine in a red can and it world, there was no other way to keep ately returned to his pills. becomes refreshing fun. Brew it in a up. That’s what Edison meant when he Erdös’s unadulterated self was less teapot and it becomes romantic and said that genius was ninety-nine per real and less familiar to him than his decorous. Extract it from little brown cent perspiration and one per cent in- adulterated self, and that is a condition beans and, magically, it is hardheaded spiration. In the old paradigm,working that holds, more or less, for the rest of and potent. “There was a little known with your mind had been associated society as well. Part of what it means to Russian émigré, Trotsky by name, who with leisure. It was only the poor who be human in the modern age is that we during World War I was in the habit of worked hard. (The quintessential pre- have come to construct our emotional playing chess in Vienna’s Café Central industrial narrative of inspiration be- and cognitive states not merely from every evening,” Bealer and Weinberg longed to Archimedes, who made his the inside out—with thought and in- write, in one of the book’s many fasci- discovery, let’s not forget, while taking a tention—but from the outside in, with nating café yarns: bath.) But Edison was saying that the chemical additives. The modern per- old class distinctions no longer held sonality is, in this sense, a synthetic cre- A typical Russian refugee, who talked too true—that in the industrialized world ation: skillfully regulated and medi- much but seemed utterly harmless, indeed, a pathetic figure in the eyes of the Viennese. there was as much toil associated with cated and dosed with caffeine so that One day in 1917 an official of the Austrian the life of the mind as there had once we can always be awake and alert and Foreign Ministry rushed into the minister’s been with the travails of the body. focussed when we need to be. On a bet, room, panting and excited, and told his chief, “Your excellency . . . Your excellency . . . In the twentieth century, the pro- no doubt, we could walk away from caf- Revolution has broken out in Russia.” The fessions transformed themselves ac- feine if we had to. But what would be minister, less excitable and less credulous cordingly: medicine turned the resi- the point? The lawyers wouldn’t make than his official, rejected such a wild claim and retorted calmly, “Go away . . . Russia is dency process into an ordeal of sleep- their billable hours. The young doctors not a land where revolutions break out. Be- lessness, the legal profession borrowed would fall behind in their training. The sides, who on earth would make a revolution a page from the manufacturing floor physicists might still be stuck out in the in Russia? Perhaps Herr Trotsky from the Café Central?” and made its practitioners fill out time New Mexico desert. We’d set the world cards like union men. Intellectual hero- back a month. The minister should have known ics became a matter of endurance. “The better. Give a man enough coffee and pace of computation was hectic,” James hat the modern personality is syn- he’s capable of anything. ♦ Gleick writes of the Manhattan Project in “Genius,” his biography of the phys- T thetic is, of course, a disquieting notion. When we talk of synthetic per- 1 Letter from the Lincoln County School Dis - trict, in Oregon. icist Richard Feynman.“Feynman’s day sonality—or of constructing new selves Dear Parent or Guardian, began at 8:30 and ended fifteen hours through chemical means—we think of We are working diligently to address the later. Sometimes he could not leave the h a rd dru g s , not ca f fe i n e . Ti m o t hy attendance problem but we need the involve- computing center at all. He worked Leary used to make such claims about ment of the parents. We need your help get- through for thirty-one hours once and LSD, and the reason his revolution ting the students to school. We cannot provide an education to a student that is not here to the next day found that an error min- never took flight was that most of us receive it. Students who attend regularly have utes after he went to bed had stalled the found the concept of tuning in, turning an advantage over students who have psori- whole team. The routine allowed just a on, and dropping out to be a bit creepy. atic attendance. few breaks.” Did Feynman’s achieve- Here was this shaman, this visionary— More than one advantage.