America’s test kitchen best meat tenderizer

Yes, America is america’s test kitchen best meat tenderizer wounded giant—but it always has been, and the case for optimism is surprisingly strong. Negativity is by now so deeply ingrained in American media culture that it’s become the default frame imposed on reality.

In large part, this is because since the dawn of the internet age, the surest way to build an audience is to write stories that make people terrified or furious. This is not rocket science: Evolution designed humans to pay special attention to threats. If any event deserves negative coverage, the terrible coronavirus pandemic is it. And in the international media, 51 percent of stories in the first year of the pandemic were indeed negative, according to a 2020 study. But in the United States, a stunning 87 percent of the coverage was negative.

This permanent cloud of negativity has a powerful effect on how Americans see their country. When Gallup recently asked Americans if they were satisfied with their personal life, 85 percent said they were, a number that has remained remarkably stable over the past 40 years. According to Ryan Streeter, the director of domestic-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and an expert on poll data, the people who are most pessimistic about the country are not the working class but highly educated and affluent people—the people, that is, who spend more time engaging with news media. The American right, for instance, finds itself in a state of perpetual apocalyptic alarm these days.

The first problem with all this pessimism is that it is ahistorical. Every era in American history has faced its own massive challenges, and in every era, the air has been thick with gloomy jeremiads warning of catastrophe and decline. Pick any decade in the history of this country, and you will find roiling turmoil. But in all of those same decades, you will also find, alongside the chaos and the prophecies of doom, energetic dynamism and leaping progress.