Love locks
A gate in Venice, April 2017.
Quote of the Day
”The state of AI today feels a lot like the web in 1997 or mobile in 2007: we know this is big but we don’t know how any of it is going to work.”
- Benedict Evans
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
The Traveling Wilburys | Handle With Care
Long Read of the Day
Who was the foodie?
I’m not a foodie and never read books about food, and I’m consistently amazed by how much attention it gets in magazine and newspapers (including the one I write for). And I am pissed off when I find myself in a restaurant where the first thing other diners do when their food arrives is to Instagram it. And of course chefs now pandering to this obsession by producing dishes that look as if they have been constructed by microsurgeons. (My late lamented brother-in-law used to call this “starvation at £100 a plate”.) So you can perhaps see why I was riveted by Alicia Kennedy’s essay in The Yale Review: it made me think about things I’ve avoided thinking about for years.
The spur for the piece was the arrival of some new books on the subject.
Two books that landed on shelves this fall attempt to change this dynamic, rounding up the foodie troops and bringing rigor and research back to the fore. In All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now, Ruby Tandoh, former star of The Great British Bake Off, embraces the “we” of her subtitle to explain that “we” have all had our tastes controlled by media, whether traditional or social, to push “us” toward various trends in home and restaurant cooking. At the opposite end of the spectrum, in What to Eat Now, a newly updated version of her 2006 classic, Marion Nestle — author of Food Politics and originator of New York University’s Food Studies program—writes about how corporate consolidation, a government susceptible to industry lobbying, and poor economic conditions across the country drive people’s choices more than anything we see on our screens.
Taken together, these books model what we’ve lost and point toward reclaiming it. They go far beyond the globe-trotting travel and food porn we’ve come to scroll to ask deeper questions, such as why, despite food’s popularity on social media, on shows like The Bear, our understanding of where it comes from, and how it reaches our tables, is at an all-time low…
Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
My commonplace booklet
12 essential building of Frank Gehry RIP.
Nice tribute to a great architect.
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