#sliced-bread — Public Fediverse posts

“The present is the past rolled up for action, and the past is the present unrolled for understanding”*…

As Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr put it, “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” (“the more things change, the more they stay the same”). Case in point: Derek Thompson reminds us that about 100 years ago, America was obsessed with technology, immigration, women, work, and money. Sound familiar?

[Just over] one hundred years ago, on September 26, 1929, President Herbert Hoover gathered a group of social scientists at the White House. He asked them to begin research on the most detailed report ever produced on the state of the nation. Four years later, running more than 1,500 pages long, Recent Social Trends was published, offering an unusually granular look at life in the mid-1920s.

The document is almost entirely forgotten. But today, for America’s 250th birthday, I’m blowing the cobwebs off this sucker and taking readers inside its yellowed pages for a look back at what life was like in the U.S. exactly 100 years ago, when the U.S. was celebrating its sesquicentennial anniversary…

And what a look it is…

… Imagine that you are the typical American in 1926. You are a white 26-year-old. (In 2026, the median age is 40.) Since most immigrants have been male, we’ll say you’re a guy. Your name is John. Born in the first term of William McKinley’s presidency, you are raised on a farm without flush toilets or electric lighting. Too young to fight in World War I, you come of age alongside a generation that sees war in Europe as a “useless colossal blunder,” in the words of historian David M. Kennedy. Your life—indeed, your entire generation—is shaped by several notable developments: education, urbanization, automation, and women’s rights. You are the first person in your family to finish high school.

At 19, you move from the countryside to an urban apartment, as one small drop in the migratory flood from farm to city. Jobs in manufacturing and retail are easy to find. They’re also easy to lose. Temporary unemployment is the norm. You earn $100 a month and put some away for a rainy day, confident that the bustling city will provide another job in a few months. (Unemployment insurance does not exist; neither does Social Security.) In the evenings, you “radio”; yes, it’s a verb, too. Every weekend, you visit a cineplex, where the movies are black-and-white and silent. Sometimes, you down a few prohibited cocktails and go dancing with flappers. Several times a week, you drive around in a black Model T.

The year 1926 has been good to you. City life is a blur of high-velocity machines—cars, assembly lines, and radio broadcasts—and you sometimes miss the ancient rhythms of your farmland home. One year from now, Charles Lindbergh will shock the world by flying across the Atlantic. In two years, at 28, you’ll be married. In three years, you’ll have a baby. And in four years, in 1930, just months after the biggest stock market crash in American history, the world as you know it will be over…

Thompson goes on to unpack the details of the economy and employment, the migration from farm to city, the extraordinary centrality of the automobile, changing mores and gender roles, the primacy of literature and the rise of radio, and so much more. He concludes…

The authors of Recent Social Trends were astonishingly prescient about the direction of technology. In one paragraph, they somehow anticipated the rise of audiobooks, YouTube, Netflix, smartphone cameras, musical software, ubiquitous air conditioning, and the electric battery revolution:

It may be that the world will find much use for talking books; school and college students may listen to lectures by long-running phonographs or talking pictures; moving pictures may be transmitted by wireless into houses; seeing with that new electric eye, the photo-electric cell, and recording what is seen, appear to have almost unlimited applications; new musical instruments different from any now in use may be given to us by electricity; the production of artificial climate may become widespread; an efficient storage battery of light weight and low cost might produce changes rivaling those of the internal combustion engine. And these are only a few of the myriad possibilities from new inventions in the future!

In an equally oracular section, the authors predicted the emergence of remote work and declining geographic mobility, anticipating that “the transmission of goods, of the voice and possibly of vision may act as a retarding influence on human mobility in the future and may cause a development of more remote and impersonal direction and controls.”

But the social scientists did not see these trends as altogether good. They worried that modern life, defined in equal parts by urbanization and technology, obliterated people’s values and their sense of self. Even as they gawked at the increase in patents—which grew more than 20-fold between the 1850s and the 1920s—they worried that a growing number of discoveries would bring “problems of morals, of education, of law, of leisure time, of unemployment, of speed, of uniformity and of differentiation.”

Social scientists of the 1920s saw machines pushing workers off of farms and competing with workers in manufacturing plants. How long, they wondered, until they would replace human workers in all tasks? “A larger proportion of work by machines, and a smaller proportion of human labor, is to be expected in the future,” they wrote. “There are indeed a few cases of wholly automatic factories and automatic stores and many automatic salesmen.” It is extraordinary to read these fears and not reflect on the AI jobs panic of the present, while also marveling at the thousands of occupations that are possible today precisely because machines made old jobs obsolete.

The dawn of the age of the machine drove us mad. Physicians of the day warned that the frail human mind was no match for the car, predicting at the time that “diseases of the wheel” would afflict the youth who rode bicycles and cars without restraint. It was not entirely obvious that they were wrong. In Germany, the number of patients registered in mental hospitals grew from 40,375 in 1870 to 220,881 in 1910. Over the same period, the share of patients admitted to general hospitals for illnesses of the nervous system rose from 44 to 60 percent.

Most perceptively, social critics of the age recognized that the urban-technological revolution of the early 20th century—what we might even call “modernity”—transformed not only our minds but also our values. Machines and systems that pulled Americans off the farm, away from the family home, and into churning markets of people and products threatened to replace the Judeo-Christian values that had bound the country for centuries with a new system of values dictated by markets. In 1903, the sociologist Georg Simmel anticipated the anxieties of the Twenties—ours and theirs—when he observed that in cities “money takes the place of all the manifoldness of things” and becomes “a common denominator of all values.” Money “hollows out the core of things, their peculiarities, their specific values, and their uniqueness and incomparability in a way which is beyond repair.”

One hundred and twenty years after the publication of that essay, the Wall Street Journal asked thousands of Americans what values were still important to them. While a declining share of Americans endorsed the worthiness of patriotism, religion, community, and children, the share who said “money” was “very important to them” went up. It sometimes seems as if markets and money are the last value standing, the final common denominator beneath all human endeavor.

On its 250th birthday, the U.S. similarly defines itself through markets. Those famous words of Calvin Coolidge, America’s president in 1926, could just as well serve this American president and this American moment: “The chief business of the American people is business.”…

Eminently worth reading in full: “America, 1926: What a Forgotten 100-Year-Old Report Says About Who We Are,” from @dkthomp.bsky.social.

You can find the full text of Recent Social Trends in the United States- Report of the President’s Research Committee on Social Trends, from the collection of the remarkable Prelinger Library, at the invaluable Internet Archive: Volume 1 and Volume 2.

* Will and Ariel Durent, The Lessons of History (in which, also: “Progress is an improvement in the means that we use for achieving the same old ends. I sometimes wonder if the progress is only of means without any progress in ends.”)

###

As we hear the echo, we might recall that today marks the anniversary of a signature advance during the period covered by Recent Social Trends in the United States: on this date in 1928, sliced bread was sold for the first time, by the Chillicothe Baking Company of Chillicothe, Missouri.

For more on this seminal development, see “What was the best thing before sliced bread?“

source

“The present is the past rolled up for action, and the past is the present unrolled for understanding”*…

As Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr put it, “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” (“the more things change, the more they stay the same”). Case in point: Derek Thompson reminds us that about 100 years ago, America was obsessed with technology, immigration, women, work, and money. Sound familiar?

[Just over] one hundred years ago, on September 26, 1929, President Herbert Hoover gathered a group of social scientists at the White House. He asked them to begin research on the most detailed report ever produced on the state of the nation. Four years later, running more than 1,500 pages long, Recent Social Trends was published, offering an unusually granular look at life in the mid-1920s.

The document is almost entirely forgotten. But today, for America’s 250th birthday, I’m blowing the cobwebs off this sucker and taking readers inside its yellowed pages for a look back at what life was like in the U.S. exactly 100 years ago, when the U.S. was celebrating its sesquicentennial anniversary…

And what a look it is…

… Imagine that you are the typical American in 1926. You are a white 26-year-old. (In 2026, the median age is 40.) Since most immigrants have been male, we’ll say you’re a guy. Your name is John. Born in the first term of William McKinley’s presidency, you are raised on a farm without flush toilets or electric lighting. Too young to fight in World War I, you come of age alongside a generation that sees war in Europe as a “useless colossal blunder,” in the words of historian David M. Kennedy. Your life—indeed, your entire generation—is shaped by several notable developments: education, urbanization, automation, and women’s rights. You are the first person in your family to finish high school.

At 19, you move from the countryside to an urban apartment, as one small drop in the migratory flood from farm to city. Jobs in manufacturing and retail are easy to find. They’re also easy to lose. Temporary unemployment is the norm. You earn $100 a month and put some away for a rainy day, confident that the bustling city will provide another job in a few months. (Unemployment insurance does not exist; neither does Social Security.) In the evenings, you “radio”; yes, it’s a verb, too. Every weekend, you visit a cineplex, where the movies are black-and-white and silent. Sometimes, you down a few prohibited cocktails and go dancing with flappers. Several times a week, you drive around in a black Model T.

The year 1926 has been good to you. City life is a blur of high-velocity machines—cars, assembly lines, and radio broadcasts—and you sometimes miss the ancient rhythms of your farmland home. One year from now, Charles Lindbergh will shock the world by flying across the Atlantic. In two years, at 28, you’ll be married. In three years, you’ll have a baby. And in four years, in 1930, just months after the biggest stock market crash in American history, the world as you know it will be over…

Thompson goes on to unpack the details of the economy and employment, the migration from farm to city, the extraordinary centrality of the automobile, changing mores and gender roles, the primacy of literature and the rise of radio, and so much more. He concludes…

The authors of Recent Social Trends were astonishingly prescient about the direction of technology. In one paragraph, they somehow anticipated the rise of audiobooks, YouTube, Netflix, smartphone cameras, musical software, ubiquitous air conditioning, and the electric battery revolution:

It may be that the world will find much use for talking books; school and college students may listen to lectures by long-running phonographs or talking pictures; moving pictures may be transmitted by wireless into houses; seeing with that new electric eye, the photo-electric cell, and recording what is seen, appear to have almost unlimited applications; new musical instruments different from any now in use may be given to us by electricity; the production of artificial climate may become widespread; an efficient storage battery of light weight and low cost might produce changes rivaling those of the internal combustion engine. And these are only a few of the myriad possibilities from new inventions in the future!

In an equally oracular section, the authors predicted the emergence of remote work and declining geographic mobility, anticipating that “the transmission of goods, of the voice and possibly of vision may act as a retarding influence on human mobility in the future and may cause a development of more remote and impersonal direction and controls.”

But the social scientists did not see these trends as altogether good. They worried that modern life, defined in equal parts by urbanization and technology, obliterated people’s values and their sense of self. Even as they gawked at the increase in patents—which grew more than 20-fold between the 1850s and the 1920s—they worried that a growing number of discoveries would bring “problems of morals, of education, of law, of leisure time, of unemployment, of speed, of uniformity and of differentiation.”

Social scientists of the 1920s saw machines pushing workers off of farms and competing with workers in manufacturing plants. How long, they wondered, until they would replace human workers in all tasks? “A larger proportion of work by machines, and a smaller proportion of human labor, is to be expected in the future,” they wrote. “There are indeed a few cases of wholly automatic factories and automatic stores and many automatic salesmen.” It is extraordinary to read these fears and not reflect on the AI jobs panic of the present, while also marveling at the thousands of occupations that are possible today precisely because machines made old jobs obsolete.

The dawn of the age of the machine drove us mad. Physicians of the day warned that the frail human mind was no match for the car, predicting at the time that “diseases of the wheel” would afflict the youth who rode bicycles and cars without restraint. It was not entirely obvious that they were wrong. In Germany, the number of patients registered in mental hospitals grew from 40,375 in 1870 to 220,881 in 1910. Over the same period, the share of patients admitted to general hospitals for illnesses of the nervous system rose from 44 to 60 percent.

Most perceptively, social critics of the age recognized that the urban-technological revolution of the early 20th century—what we might even call “modernity”—transformed not only our minds but also our values. Machines and systems that pulled Americans off the farm, away from the family home, and into churning markets of people and products threatened to replace the Judeo-Christian values that had bound the country for centuries with a new system of values dictated by markets. In 1903, the sociologist Georg Simmel anticipated the anxieties of the Twenties—ours and theirs—when he observed that in cities “money takes the place of all the manifoldness of things” and becomes “a common denominator of all values.” Money “hollows out the core of things, their peculiarities, their specific values, and their uniqueness and incomparability in a way which is beyond repair.”

One hundred and twenty years after the publication of that essay, the Wall Street Journal asked thousands of Americans what values were still important to them. While a declining share of Americans endorsed the worthiness of patriotism, religion, community, and children, the share who said “money” was “very important to them” went up. It sometimes seems as if markets and money are the last value standing, the final common denominator beneath all human endeavor.

On its 250th birthday, the U.S. similarly defines itself through markets. Those famous words of Calvin Coolidge, America’s president in 1926, could just as well serve this American president and this American moment: “The chief business of the American people is business.”…

Eminently worth reading in full: “America, 1926: What a Forgotten 100-Year-Old Report Says About Who We Are,” from @dkthomp.bsky.social.

You can find the full text of Recent Social Trends in the United States- Report of the President’s Research Committee on Social Trends, from the collection of the remarkable Prelinger Library, at the invaluable Internet Archive: Volume 1 and Volume 2.

* Will and Ariel Durent, The Lessons of History (in which, also: “Progress is an improvement in the means that we use for achieving the same old ends. I sometimes wonder if the progress is only of means without any progress in ends.”)

###

As we hear the echo, we might recall that today marks the anniversary of a signature advance during the period covered by Recent Social Trends in the United States: on this date in 1928, sliced bread was sold for the first time, by the Chillicothe Baking Company of Chillicothe, Missouri.

For more on this seminal development, see “What was the best thing before sliced bread?“

source

📣 "I'm soooooo bored of #AI," says the tech hipster who probably just figured out how to turn on their smart toaster. 🚬 Comparing AI to vapers and stoners? How edgy! Maybe next time, they'll rant about how overrated sliced bread is. 🙄
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/07/im-just-so-bored-of-ai/ #Overload #TechHipster #Boredom #EdgyHumor #SlicedBread #HackerNews #ngated

📣 "I'm soooooo bored of #AI," says the tech hipster who probably just figured out how to turn on their smart toaster. 🚬 Comparing AI to vapers and stoners? How edgy! Maybe next time, they'll rant about how overrated sliced bread is. 🙄
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/07/im-just-so-bored-of-ai/ #Overload #TechHipster #Boredom #EdgyHumor #SlicedBread #HackerNews #ngated

Ree Drummond’s Mediterranean Tuna Salad Is the Fresh, No-Mayo Lunch You’ll Be Making All Summer

Sun, May 10, 2026 at 12:15 PM UTC I love throwing together a quick tuna salad for lunch because it’s so fresh and filling, and you don’t…
#dining #cooking #diet #food #Lunch #MediterraneanLunch #BellPepper #CannelliniBeans #lunch #Mediterranean #slicedbread #tunasalad
https://www.diningandcooking.com/2645154/ree-drummonds-mediterranean-tuna-salad-is-the-fresh-no-mayo-lunch-youll-be-making-all-summer/

Ree Drummond’s Mediterranean Tuna Salad Is the Fresh, No-Mayo Lunch You’ll Be Making All Summer

Sun, May 10, 2026 at 12:15 PM UTC I love throwing together a quick tuna salad for lunch because it’s so fresh and filling, and you don’t…
#dining #cooking #diet #food #Lunch #MediterraneanLunch #BellPepper #CannelliniBeans #lunch #Mediterranean #slicedbread #tunasalad
https://www.diningandcooking.com/2645154/ree-drummonds-mediterranean-tuna-salad-is-the-fresh-no-mayo-lunch-youll-be-making-all-summer/

Ree Drummond’s Mediterranean Tuna Salad Is the Fresh, No-Mayo Lunch You’ll Be Making All Summer https://www.diningandcooking.com/2645154/ree-drummonds-mediterranean-tuna-salad-is-the-fresh-no-mayo-lunch-youll-be-making-all-summer/ #BellPepper #CannelliniBeans #lunch #Mediterranean #MediterraneanLunch #SlicedBread #TunaSalad

Ree Drummond’s Mediterranean Tuna Salad Is the Fresh, No-Mayo Lunch You’ll Be Making All Summer https://www.diningandcooking.com/2645154/ree-drummonds-mediterranean-tuna-salad-is-the-fresh-no-mayo-lunch-youll-be-making-all-summer/ #BellPepper #CannelliniBeans #lunch #Mediterranean #MediterraneanLunch #SlicedBread #TunaSalad

Slices of sandwich bread topped with a creamy gratin of potato, carrot, Swiss chard, three-cornered leek, garlic, scallion, yellow onion, leek, and Emmental cheese…
Yummy ! 😛 🙂

#cook #cuisine #cooking #veggie #vegetarian #bruschetta #bruschettas #gratin #cheese #emmentalcheese #garlic #scallion #yellowonion #leek #threecorneredleek #potato #carrot #sandwichbread #bread #loaf #slicedbread #crust #crusty #cream

Slices of sandwich bread topped with a creamy gratin of potato, carrot, Swiss chard, three-cornered leek, garlic, scallion, yellow onion, leek, and Emmental cheese…
Yummy ! 😛 🙂

#cook #cuisine #cooking #veggie #vegetarian #bruschetta #bruschettas #gratin #cheese #emmentalcheese #garlic #scallion #yellowonion #leek #threecorneredleek #potato #carrot #sandwichbread #bread #loaf #slicedbread #crust #crusty #cream

Florida glyphosate bread tests put food safety rules to test https://www.diningandcooking.com/2504176/florida-glyphosate-bread-tests-put-food-safety-rules-to-test/ #abundance #baked #baking #Bread #BreadSlice #brown #carbohydrate #CloseUp #ColorImage #CopySpace #DietaryFiber #Eating #FiveObjects #food #FoodAndDrink #FreshBread #freshness #GrainAndCerealProducts #HealthyEating #horizontal #NoPeople #organic #PastryDough #photography #Slice #SlicedBread #stack #StudioShot #WhiteBackground #WhiteBread #Yummy

Florida glyphosate bread tests put food safety rules to test https://www.diningandcooking.com/2504176/florida-glyphosate-bread-tests-put-food-safety-rules-to-test/ #abundance #baked #baking #Bread #BreadSlice #brown #carbohydrate #CloseUp #ColorImage #CopySpace #DietaryFiber #Eating #FiveObjects #food #FoodAndDrink #FreshBread #freshness #GrainAndCerealProducts #HealthyEating #horizontal #NoPeople #organic #PastryDough #photography #Slice #SlicedBread #stack #StudioShot #WhiteBackground #WhiteBread #Yummy

Pre-cut hot dog rolls are the best thing since... Something 🌭 #HotDog #sausages #SlicedBread #Snags

Pre-cut hot dog rolls are the best thing since... Something 🌭 #HotDog #sausages #SlicedBread #Snags

🎉 Breaking news! The most long-awaited event since sliced bread: #EndeavourOS #Ganymede has finally landed. In other news, the sun rose today, grass is green, and absolutely nobody noticed. 🌱😴
https://endeavouros.com/news/the-long-wait-is-over-ganymede-has-arrived/ #Release #SlicedBread #TechNews #LinuxCommunity #HackerNews #ngated

🎉 Breaking news! The most long-awaited event since sliced bread: #EndeavourOS #Ganymede has finally landed. In other news, the sun rose today, grass is green, and absolutely nobody noticed. 🌱😴
https://endeavouros.com/news/the-long-wait-is-over-ganymede-has-arrived/ #Release #SlicedBread #TechNews #LinuxCommunity #HackerNews #ngated

Best thing since itself

https://piefed.social/c/historymemes/p/1454480/best-thing-since-itself

Best thing since itself

https://piefed.social/c/historymemes/p/1454480/best-thing-since-itself

🚀🎩 Behold! The riveting tale of a tech wizard who valiantly simplifies a key-value database, only to discover the revolutionary concept of async I/O on Linux—something the rest of us mortals have been using since the dawn of time. Next up, he’ll reinvent sliced bread, but not before fsync-ing every loaf 🥖🔄.
https://blog.canoozie.net/async-i-o-on-linux-and-durability/ #techwizard #asyncIO #keyvaluedatabase #Linux #innovation #slicedbread #HackerNews #ngated

🚀🎩 Behold! The riveting tale of a tech wizard who valiantly simplifies a key-value database, only to discover the revolutionary concept of async I/O on Linux—something the rest of us mortals have been using since the dawn of time. Next up, he’ll reinvent sliced bread, but not before fsync-ing every loaf 🥖🔄.
https://blog.canoozie.net/async-i-o-on-linux-and-durability/ #techwizard #asyncIO #keyvaluedatabase #Linux #innovation #slicedbread #HackerNews #ngated

Ah yes, another groundbreaking revelation from the folks who brought us sliced bread: buttons should be visible! 🙄🎉 Next, they'll unveil the shocking truth that water is wet. Stay tuned!
https://interactions.acm.org/archive/view/july-august-2025/stop-hiding-my-controls-hidden-interface-controls-are-affecting-usability #slicedbread #innovation #visiblebuttons #technews #humor #HackerNews #ngated

Ah yes, another groundbreaking revelation from the folks who brought us sliced bread: buttons should be visible! 🙄🎉 Next, they'll unveil the shocking truth that water is wet. Stay tuned!
https://interactions.acm.org/archive/view/july-august-2025/stop-hiding-my-controls-hidden-interface-controls-are-affecting-usability #slicedbread #innovation #visiblebuttons #technews #humor #HackerNews #ngated

🌐🔍 Wow, a #directory of #OSINT tools! How revolutionary! It's like inventing sliced bread in a world of smartphones. 🙄 Meanwhile, the rest of us enjoy the cutting-edge thrill of searching usernames on #Reddit like it's 2010. 🚀📉
https://r00m101.com/tools #tools #innovation #slicedbread #nostalgia #HackerNews #ngated

🌐🔍 Wow, a #directory of #OSINT tools! How revolutionary! It's like inventing sliced bread in a world of smartphones. 🙄 Meanwhile, the rest of us enjoy the cutting-edge thrill of searching usernames on #Reddit like it's 2010. 🚀📉
https://r00m101.com/tools #tools #innovation #slicedbread #nostalgia #HackerNews #ngated

Dried out cake, dipped in coffee is the best thing since #SlicedBread.

#JustSaying

:catMusic: Sliced Bread from @BBCRadio4

Fitness trackers

Millions of us use fitness #tracker #watches to count how many steps we take each day - they also claim to tell us how we're sleeping and how stressed we are, as well as a host of other metrics. But how accurate are they - and are they the best thing since #SlicedBread? We've had loads of requests from you to look into fitness trackers. So with multiple watches on each arm, Greg's being put through his paces at Loughborough #University under the watchful eye of Dr James Sanders, senior #research associate in digital health for #lifestyle.

PRESENTER: GREG FOOT PRODUCER: TOM MOSELEY

Sitio web do episodio: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001wqdw

Ficheiro multimedia: http://open.live.bbc.co.uk/mediaselector/6/redir/version/2.0/mediaset/audio-nondrm-download/proto/http/vpid/p0hfm87j.mp3

#fitness #health #wearables

Better put the bread away https://mike-jory.pixels.com/featured/put-away-the-bread-mike-jory.html #mastoart #buyintoart #aYearForArt #FillThatEmptyWall #bread #slicedBread #puttingAwayShopping #domesticLife #homeLife

@skyfire101 better than #slicedBread 👉 #giving

@skyfire101 better than #slicedBread 👉 #giving

@keithwilson
Sliced bread (invented 1928) is a bit of an abomination. Never eat it at home.
I assumed it that it followed on from the Chorleywood Process (invented 1961) which as an innovation is equally important but also an abomination. In fact it was much earlier!

#SlicedBread

@keithwilson
Sliced bread (invented 1928) is a bit of an abomination. Never eat it at home.
I assumed it that it followed on from the Chorleywood Process (invented 1961) which as an innovation is equally important but also an abomination. In fact it was much earlier!

#SlicedBread

When I buy bread for my enemies I have it sliced sandwich instead of toast.
#bread
#slicedBread
#enemies

When I buy bread for my enemies I have it sliced sandwich instead of toast.
#bread
#slicedBread
#enemies

How do you prefer your #bread?

Ready-sliced from the factory? Or do you prefer to slice your own, so you can decide how thick you want each individual slice, and to not dry out the loaf as quickly?
Or do you not care, because someone else prepares your sammies for you? Preferably without crust? 😂

#slicedBread #baking #poll