Europe gets extra points for all the outdoor seating, but loses all of them because it's impossible to sit outside and enjoy a coffee or a meal without someone lighting up a cigarette next to them.

I do wish Europe would discover non-smoking rules near food & drink.

That's very interesting. I'd love to see the comparison between the stats on smoking related diseases in those places that prohibit public smoking and those that do not, given that both places have a similar number of smokers.

Is spending time with your kids in front of the fireplace similarly bad parenting? Because the health effects of an open fire indoors are worse.

To answer your actual question, yes, doing something that is worse than smoking near your kids is bad parenting (unless it's a rare enough event to cause negligible harm).

I will happily have my fireplace burning all day long on a subzero winter day, throwing on the occasional fresh log. But if I have a bonfire outside in summer, I need to be standing upwind.

It would be really surprising to me if it were the case, because secondhand smoke certainly seems like it creates more particulates in a house, since most wood smoke goes up the chimney. Plus, if you smoke, you're probably not only smoking for part of the year, like with fireplace use.

But, my intuition is not a strong argument, so that's why I'd love to see the study.

Also, how is one other (potentially bad or not) activity germain to the one being discussed? What about clowns? What about how Swedish fish candies are made?

Most of it, yes, but there's still a very large increase in particles in the air, far more than when smoking.

> how is one other (potentially bad or not) activity germain to the one being discussed?

My parent was saying "given the health effects, you should not smoke in front of your children". I was asking how they squared this with an activity with much larger health effects that I suspect they think is fine to do with your kids.

Do you have any evidence that indoor wood fires are more damaging that cigarette smoke?

For the author, certain info (such as him very his usual briefs or she climaxing or someone smoking) is just to add "reality" to the scene. It doesn't say anything about the character per se. Yet, to Americans, it does. To them if it wouldn't say anything about the scene, it wouldn't be included. But that's only true for a subset of topics, them being body/sex stuff and smoking. Nobody would raise an eyebrow if the character was watching a football game.

> American readers need body/sex stuff to be told as stories and not as facts (so says my friend Sara Marzullo, about whom more later). The problem is that even if sex always requires storytelling, you can still just show a body—or a feeling, a glitch in the software of life where sex transpires—in a way that is not easy to interpret, or in a way that maybe doesn’t need to be interpreted at all, but that only needs to ring true. And even if this thing I just wrote sounds wholesome and real, somehow American literature—writers, editors, critics, readers—needs sex always to be contextualized. It should be raunchy. Or loving. Or a cautionary tale. It cannot be open-ended.

> This is a good chunk of what literature is for me. An opaqueness that affords us openendedness. Openendedness that is based on a feel for the world where details create facts so vivid you can touch them. They make you say « that’s real ». If stuff is put in a story only to create the sense of a story, then often it won’t coalesce into a simulacrum of reality.

It's one thing for an editor to say 'this passage is confusing or boring,' quite another to add in personal opinions of fictional or historical characters.