Keeping TaB

The New Yorker has a great little piece on the release of Tab Energy drink (about which I care very little) and what, if anything, that means for its beloved saccharin cousin (about which I care deeply).

The original Tab, which appeared in 1963, is still produced, though in dwindling quantities. You’d be unlikely to find it at Gristedes [Editor's note: You can actually find it at Gristedes], however, because Coke stopped promoting the drink in the mid-eighties, after the cancer scare involving saccharin, an artificial sweetener used in Tab.

[Ellipsis.]

Steve Isaacs, a self-described “Tab nut” and former Washington Post editor who teaches at the Columbia Journalism School, has been told by several doctors not to drink it. “I tell them to go to hell,” he said recently. Isaacs used to work at CBS, where his boss, Van Gordon Sauter, often drank two Tabs at breakfast. Now Isaacs may be the most influential Tab advocate in the business: he begins each semester by holding up a Tab and asking students to come up with a hundred story ideas inspired by the can.

At the end of last term, Isaacs threw a party for his students, at which he served Tab. “I was surprised at how many of them drank it,” he said. “One was putting Scotch in it. I mean, that sounds fucking awful.”

More from The New Yorker here. More on Isaacs -- take notes kids; if you want to be a professor this is undoubtedly the kind of person you should first be -- here. Tab Energy stuff here and here.