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Soda’s Rebound Moment

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2025 › 01 › sodas-rebound-moment › 681367

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For a few years in the 2010s, America seemed to be falling out of love with soda. But some blend of price-conscious shopping, kooky social-media trends (milk and coke, anyone?), and perhaps a streak of fatalistic behavior on the part of Americans has made the beverage newly relevant.

Soda consumption declined consistently over the decade leading up to 2015, in part because of backlash from a health-conscious public and a series of soda-tax battles; some soda drinking was also displaced by the likes of energy drinks, coffee, and bottled water. However, in 2017, the CDC announced that rates of sugary-beverage consumption had plateaued—at a rate far above the government-recommended limit. Now soda sales are ticking back up modestly: Coca-Cola and Dr Pepper both saw soda-case sales rise in the past year, and total sales volumes for soft drinks have risen, according to the investment-bank advisory firm Evercore ISI; last year, Coca-Cola was among the fastest-growing brands for women, Morning Consult found. Soda is having a cultural moment too: Addison Rae’s “Diet Pepsi” was a, if not the, song of the summer. And the U.S. president-elect is famously a fan of Diet Coke, reportedly drinking a dozen a day during his first term.

Compared with 20 years ago, Americans are drinking far fewer sugar-sweetened beverages, particularly soda—but compared with a decade ago, they are drinking almost as much, Dariush Mozaffarian, a physician and a nutrition expert at Tufts, told me. Researchers have suggested that there are links between drinking large amounts of sugary drinks and a range of negative health outcomes, but the people most open to changing their soda habits may have already changed them, Mozaffarian noted. In order for cultural norms around soda to shift, drinking it needs to become uncool, he argued. That’s not an impossible goal, but it can be achieved only through a combination of sustained policy efforts, strong messaging from public-health officials, and perhaps even a bit of help from celebrities.

Public-health messaging alone can’t get people to change their behavior. Soda brands have been “a part of our cultural life for decades,” my colleague Nicholas Florko, who covers health policy, told me. “And so there is going to be some reluctance if you tell people” to ease up on “this thing that your parents, your grandparents, your great-grandparents, have been drinking forever.” Part of the draw of soda is that it’s generally quite cheap. To undercut that appeal, activists and politicians have pushed to implement taxes on sugary drinks; in many cases, they have received major pushback from industry and business groups. Researchers have found that, in places where sugary-drink taxes managed to pass, they do help: One study last year found that sales of sugary drinks went down by a third in American cities with soda taxes, and there’s no evidence that people traveled beyond the area looking for cheaper drinks. But these taxes require political will—and pushing for people’s groceries to cost more is not always an appealing prospect for politicians, Nicholas pointed out, especially in our current moment, when Americans are still recovering from the effects of high inflation.

Soda taxes are controversial, but a soda tax isn’t just about cost: Part of the reason such policies work, says Justin White, a health-policy expert at Boston University, is that they can make sugary drinks seem less socially acceptable. “Policies affect the norms, and norms feed back into people’s choices,” he told me. Now new soda norms are emerging, including a crop of sodas that claim to be gut-healthy (although, Mozaffarian said, more research needs to be done to confirm such claims).

Soda feels like an intrinsic part of American life. But generations of canny advertising and celebrity endorsements, Mozaffarian noted, are responsible for embedding soda in so many parts of America—think of its placement in ballparks and other social spaces—and in the day-to-day rhythms of offices and schools. Curbing soda consumption would require a similarly intentional shift.

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Today’s News

The Supreme Court upheld a law that will effectively ban TikTok in the United States if the social-media platform’s Chinese parent company does not sell it by Sunday. The Israeli cabinet voted to approve a cease-fire deal with Hamas, which is expected to take effect Sunday. South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem testified in her Senate confirmation hearing for the role of secretary of Homeland Security.

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The Books Briefing: Two novels take different approaches to resurrecting the dead, Maya Chung writes. Atlantic Intelligence: TikTok is set to be banned in the U.S., following a decision by the Supreme Court. But the legacy of its algorithm will live on, Damon Beres writes.

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Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

‘I Won’t Touch Instagram’

By Kaitlyn Tiffany

If TikTok does indeed get banned or directly shut off by its parent company, it would be a seismic event in internet history. At least a third of American adults use the app, as do a majority of American teens, according to Pew Research Center data. These users have spent the past few days coming to terms with the app’s possible demise—and lashing out however they could think to.

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The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Should Not Exist

found 2 Jan The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2025 › 01 › the-rock-roll-hall-of-fame-should-not-exist › 681201

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On New Year’s Day, while looking for something to watch, I came across a channel with a loud, gray-haired British guy in a nice suit and a scarf bellowing about something or other. I assumed that I had turned to CNN and was watching its ebullient, occasionally shouty business and aviation correspondent, Richard Quest. I wasn’t even close: It was Roger Daltrey of the Who, and he was excitedly introducing the new Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee Peter Frampton in a condensed version of the October ceremony.

Frampton’s music was, for a moment in the 1970s, the soundtrack to my misspent teenage nights; on the broadcast, Keith Urban joined him to perform his megahit “Do You Feel Like We Do,” and I remembered every word. And Frampton seems like a man who is genuinely loved by his peers. It was a nice moment. But when 80-year-old Daltrey—who, at 21, famously sang, “Hope I die before I get old”—is introducing a man whose biggest hits were produced nearly 50 years ago, it’s a reminder that the entire Rock & Roll Hall of Fame concept is utterly wrongheaded.

As the saying goes, good writers borrow, and great writers steal. I was once a professor, however, and professors give attribution, so let me rely on John Strausbaugh, who wrote a wonderful 2001 jeremiad against Boomer music nostalgia, Rock ’Til You Drop, to explain why the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame shouldn’t exist: Because it’s “as true to the spirit of rock’n’roll as a Hard Rock Cafe—one in which there are way too many children and you can’t get a drink.”

The Hall of Fame is about old and dead people; rock’n’roll is about the young and living. The Hall of Fame tries to reform rock’n’roll, tame it, reduce it to bland, middle-American family entertainment; it drains all the sexiness and danger and rebelliousness out of it …

Strasbaugh winces especially hard at the Rock Hall tradition of “honoring” classic acts by “dragging their old butts out onto a stage” and then making them “go through the motions one more time” as they pretend to feel the music the same way they did when they were kids. Writing almost 25 years ago, he said that the Rolling Stones were way past their retirement clock, and that Cher in her late-1990s performances “was so stiff in her makeup and outfits, that she looked like a wax effigy of herself.”

Last year, the Rolling Stones went on tour again and were sponsored by—I am serious—the AARP.

And Cher was also just inducted into the Rock Hall in October, at 78 years old. When you’re asking Cher to suit up so that she can be lauded by the young-enough-to-be-her-granddaughter Dua Lipa, you may be trying to honor the artist, but you’re mostly just reminding everyone about the brutal march of time.

I am sometimes blistered on social media for my bad music takes, and I will confess that with some exceptions, I didn’t really develop much of a taste in music beyond the Beatles, Billy Joel, and Top 40 ear candy until I was in college. (My musical soul was saved, or at least improved, by the old WBCN in Boston and by my freshman-dorm neighbor at Boston University, who introduced me to Steely Dan.) But you don’t need a refined taste in music to cringe when a bunch of worthies from the music industry assemble each year to make often nonsensical choices about what constitutes “rock and roll” and who did it well enough to be lionized for the ages. Look, I sort of like some of those old Cher hits from the ’70s—“Train of Thought” is an underrated little pop gem, in my view—but Cher as an inductee into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame? If she, and Bobby Darin, and the Lovin’ Spoonful, and Woody Guthrie, and Willie Nelson are all “rock,” what isn’t?

This is where I must also admit that I’ve never been to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, or even to Cleveland, for that matter. But I’d argue that seeing it all up close—as Strausbaugh notes in his book, it’s full of this rock artist once wore this shirt and that rock artist once touched this mic stand—isn’t the point. Trying to trap the energy and spirit of youthful greatness behind the ice in some sort of Fortress of Rock Solitude is nothing more than a monument to nostalgia. Worse, it’s an ongoing tribute not to music, but to capitalism. Perhaps the music business was always a business, but most rock and roll was about opposing the establishment, not asking for a nice table at its Chamber of Commerce ceremonies.

Don’t get me wrong: I love both rock music and capitalism. I am also prone to a fair amount of my own nostalgia, and I will pay to see some of my favorite elderly stars get up onstage, wink at the audience, and pull out a few of their famous moves—as long as they do it with the kind of self-awareness that makes it more like a visit with an old friend than a soul-crushing pastiche of days gone by.

But even when a return to the stage is done with taste, age can still take its toll on both the performer and the audience: I’m now in my 60s, and as much as I liked seeing Peter Frampton get a big round of applause, I didn’t feel warm or happy; I just felt old, because he was obviously old. (Frampton has an autoimmune disease that causes muscle weakness, so he had to sit to perform his arena anthem.) And when Keith Urban is playing along as the representative of the younger generation at 56 years old, it makes me feel a certain kind of pity for people who gave me the musical landscape of my youth.

Maybe America doesn’t need to commercialize every Boomer memory. Artists become eligible for the Rock Hall 25 years from the release date of their first commercial recording, but rock can’t be distilled in 25-year batches like some sort of rare whiskey. Rock is more like … well, sex. Each generation has to experience it for themselves; later, each generation thinks they invented it; eventually, we all realize that no generation can fully explain their feelings about it to the next one.

Speaking of sex and rebellion, one of the best arguments against the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is that Warren Zevon isn’t in it. His continuing exclusion is one of the great ongoing controversies of the selection process, but the point is not that Zevon should be in it; rather, the question is whether Zevon would ever want to be honored in such a place. The man who wrote “Play It All Night Long” and “Mr. Bad Example” simply doesn’t belong on a pedestal next to Mary J. Blige and Buffalo Springfield. And that’s reason enough that the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame should not exist at all.

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

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Today’s News

The FBI said that the attacker who killed 14 people in New Orleans on New Year’s Day appears to have acted alone. Military officials said that the driver of a Cybertruck that exploded in front of the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas yesterday was an Army master sergeant who was on leave from active duty. Federal agents searched the home of former NYPD Chief of Department Jeffrey Maddrey, who was accused of sexual misconduct last year. Maddrey has denied the allegations.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: The poet Julia Ward Howe wrote an anthem of fervent patriotism in 1861—and it’s remained the soundtrack to American conflict ever since, Spencer Kornhaber writes.

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Evening Read

Illustration by Giacomo Bagnara

We’re All in “Dark Mode” Now

By Ian Bogost

Dark mode has its touted benefits: Dimmer screens mean less eye strain, some assert; and on certain displays (including most smartphones), showing more black pixels prolongs battery life. Dark mode also has its drawbacks: Reading lots of text is more difficult to do in white-on-black. But even if these tradeoffs might be used to justify the use of inverted-color settings, they offer little insight into those settings’ true appeal. They don’t tell us why so many people suddenly want their screens, which had glowed bright for years, to go dark. And they’re tangential to the story of how, in a fairly short period of time, we all became creatures of the night mode.

Read the full article.