* “Fiction, like sex, is messy. It’s complicating. Achieving softness and fluffiness doesn’t seem like much of a substitute.” Alain de Botton is so good. The book he is reviewing sounds less good.
* “Whole Foods’ John Mackey: Why Intellectuals Hate Capitalism,” a question that has interested me as long as I’ve heard English professors’s irrational slams on markets and commerce. “Understanding Elite Discontent” is also good on this subject.
* “New design could finally help to bring fusion power closer to reality.” Commercial-scale fusion would ameliorate numerous political and environmental problems.
* New York Review of Books Fills a Niche by Reviving Forgotten Works.
* “Take your unwanted dog to a shelter. If you have no other choice euthanize him. PLEASE, PLEASE, don’t “drop him off in the country.” A brutal story, which I’m tempted to quote from.
* “The Nearest Thing to Life by James Wood review – ‘the foremost literary enthusiast of our time.’” The book is excellent.
* “How RED Cameras Changed The [Movie] Game.”
* “Why Are Millennials So Obsessed With Food? The author Eve Turow argues that a generation’s taste for natural ingredients will shape the future of restaurants, grocery stores, and agriculture.” Still, I’m not convinced the underlying trend is correct; it’s always dangerous to generalize based on friends and acquaintances, but I appear to cook more than anyone else I know, and by a lot.
* The most interesting piece I’ve seen on the Ashley Madison hack, which is by Megan McArdle (the piece, not the hack; at least so far as I know she’s not behind the hack). Perhaps the least surprising point is that the site has almost no women on it. Edit: “Almost None of the Women in the Ashley Madison Database Ever Used the Site” provides more detail, especially how virtually none of the “millions” of supposed accounts created by women had ever checked their internal mail or chat.
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That Turow interview is interesting, but I think she overlooks one important angle: the fact that eating something rare or weird or special has replaced a number of other experiences, like collecting some unique or rare object (now easily located and purchased online), knowing some unusual bit of trivia (now easily googled), or attending an ephemeral event like a concert (now recorded and uploaded online for everyone to enjoy). She’s right about the status and signaling aspects of food, but she doesn’t really explain the “why” of it; I think the irreproducibility of the eating experience is a big part of it—but I guess there’s a good possibility she covers that in her book.
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