They default to the same bor­ing tropes, says Amy Levin at TheRe­vealer:

Reli­gious wars, reli­gious dress, reli­gious money – these are the real and yet superbly com­plex ele­ments of our cul­tural exis­tence. Scout any crack or cranny of pop­u­lar cul­ture and you find reli­gion cre­at­ing a glo­ri­ous maze of top­ics for writ­ers to dis­cover and sift and sing to the masses.

But lately, I find that a repul­sive plague of rep­e­ti­tion and banal­ity has swept over the dis­en­chanted cyber­sphere. Each day I begin my reli­gion news search with hope­ful eager­ness, sift­ing closely through main­stream and fringe out­lets, hun­gry for signs of a new trend, move­ment, argu­ment, study–anything other than what I con­sumed the day before. But I search in vain, and my dol­drums have led me to take action.

(H/T to David Watt on Facebook)

None other than the NYTimes’s Mark Bittman sounds like a vegan polemi­cist:

Most humans never tasted fresh milk from any source other than their mother for almost all of human his­tory, and fresh cow’s milk could not be rou­tinely avail­able to urban­ites with­out indus­trial pro­duc­tion. The fed­eral gov­ern­ment not only sup­ports the milk indus­try by spend­ing more money on dairy than any other item in the school lunch pro­gram, but by con­tribut­ing free pro­pa­ganda as well as sub­si­dies amount­ing to well over $4 bil­lion in the last 10 years.

These aren’t new argu­ments, but Bittman presents them well, cit­ing his own expe­ri­ences. And of course it makes a dif­fer­ence that he’s a charm­ing, high pro­file Times columnist.