I can be lazy. I was famous for it as a child. I didn't bother to walk, I didn't bother to talk. When I got older, if I had to do a chore, I found a way to be a screw-up and break something. I had unlimited time for D&D and art and sports, though, and I did well enough in school to get a scholarship to college. Because those things weren't work.

If only I had Alicia Silverstone as a mom, who knows how much more brain power I could have devoted to higher pursuits? Because Silverstone has figured out how to optimize everything. 

She doesn't even require her kids to chew food, so they can focus on being awesome. She chews it for them, (and, what, spits it into their mouths?), which is such a kooky kind of naturalistic fallacy (if birds do it, it must be better for you) that I almost circle all the way back around and find it endearing. And everything else she recommends is just as evidence-based. She claims her health tips will make women more fertile and give them a flawless pregnancy. And that's just getting started.

Take that, Vani Hari. All you promise is that if we buy your stuff, we'll be pretty.


This has nothing to do with Alicia Silverstone. I just love the creative ways people who understand no science find to sell diets books. Link: Original Eating. H/T: Sign With An E

She doesn't stop with birth. After that, she proves that diapers are pseudoscience and that vaccines are embalming fluid, she shows how you can prevent getting multiple sclerosis.

She's full-on nuts. She is the anti-Amanda Peet. I use Peet because she seems to understand modern science without ever having been in an Aerosmith video. She is, you know, not insane.


Thanks for caring, Amanda Peet!

None of this great stuff is due to me diligently researching the seamy underbelly of the crackpot Hollywood community, though it sounds like it would be a fun book to write. Lizzie Crocker at Daily Beast reviewed this gem of a health book. She skewered it in a way that I am surprised to read on Daily Beast because I mostly assume their writers are science-as-fever-dream mystics like what we get on the New Yorker (Rachel Aviv - at least once, anyway) or the New York Times (Mark Bittman) and here they had someone who made me laugh and also made solid points.

He reads the Daily Beast, you ask? Well , no, I only saw the Daily Beast thing because Signe Rousseau of Sign with an E (get it??) linked to one of the numerous shots we have taken at Vani Hari - the Food Babe - and also linked to Daily Beast.

I read your stuff when you link to me, people. I promise! That's how the Internet works.