Author Archives: Scott Bowles

Happy Gobble Gobble!


Evidentialism factslap: Sweet potatoes aren’t actually potatoes.

Sweet potatoes and common potatoes share part of a name and the spotlight at Thanksgiving meals, but the two are entirely different plants — and sweet potatoes aren’t even potatoes. While both root vegetable species are native to Central and South America, they’re classified as unrelated. Sweet potatoes belong to the Convolvulaceae family, a group of flowering plants that’s also called the morning glory family. Potatoes belong to the nightshade (Solanaceae) family, and are cousins to peppers, tomatoes, and eggplants. 

Both species get their name from an Indigenous Caribbean term, batata, which eventually morphed into the English “potato.” By the 1740s, “sweet” was added to the orange-fleshed tuber’s name to differentiate the two root crops.

Then there are yams. Although they’re often served interchangeably with sweet potatoes at Thanksgiving dinners, this third root crop is biologically unrelated to either sweet potatoes or common potatoes. These tubers belong to the Dioscoreacea family, a group of flowering plants usually cultivated in tropical areas. Luckily, you don’t have to know their scientific classification to distinguish between the two non-spuds at the grocery store: Sweet potatoes have tapered ends and relatively smooth skin, while true yams are generally larger with rough bark and a more cylindrical shape. At most U.S. grocery stores, what you’re seeing labeled as a yam is probably actually a sweet potato.

An Open Letter to The New York Times


Dear The New York Times,

You are the one publication I fancied working for and never did, so these may be sour grapes. They’re most certainly fermented.

However, you did run blurbs from my reviews and covered my last day at USA Today fairly and accurately, so I consider us even.

But you’re dead wrong about Donald Trump’s presidential run, particularly the headline. Another Trump run is EXACTLY what America deserves.

What did you think you were watching the past six years? Downton Flabby? You have always flouted privilege as an option, from real estate to vegan food to theater tickets.

Yet you seem to think the privilege to choose extends to politics. It does not. Politics is like health: You make dumb choices early, you pay for them later. There’s no skirting consequence.

But all America has done in the 21st century is skirt, hem and haw. When it comes to inconvenient facts, the U.S. has proven itself Jim Crow backward. We’re competing with superpowers and oil barons over who can rot fastest.

Did you not watch the January 6th 2021 attempted overthrow of the United States government? It was in all the papers. Half our nation thought that was no big deal. How long does an American sit in the corner for trying to impose white make rule on everyone else in the room?

Under Trump, we became a nation of denial. Deny science. Deny equality.Deny data. Deny counting. Deny choice. Deny assistance.

He sprung a new dunce confederacy on the electorate (though Republicans gave him a mile head start), including Elon Musk, a Trump III mini-dunce. He made surgical masks look like political oppression. Dumbass stares at the sun: Do we even want to know how many yokels now do the same thing while driving?

Probably not. But do we deserve to have that idiot — who represents half of our union — on public display to reveal what we look like as a nation? Hell yes. We broke it, we bought it.

I didn’t deserve diabetes. But I did — and do — deserve every complication that comes from my mismanagement of it. Cleanup, Aisle Me. Try it sometime.

We’ve had political cancer for a while. The chemo may work, but we don’t get to decide when it’s over.