Jeremy Cherfas

Eat This Newsletter 115 is up. Full version at buttondown.email/jeremyche…

John Naughton’s view of the huge NYT investigation into smartphone tracking. And to people who moan that the NYT is complicit in enabling tracking, I say, sure, but that doesn’t diminish the importance of the report.

“TikTok versus Instagram is pretty much the perfect synecdoche of domestic cozy versus premium mediocre.“Found via philgyford, I think I understand what this is all about, and I’m a little bit guilty as charged. I wonder what Grant McCracken would say.

I have absolutely no problem shilling for Flickr, so if you’ve been considering signing up to a Pro account, use this link and save 25% www.flickr.com/account/u…

Reddit’s Best Mindblowing Facts of All Time at lifehacker.com/reddit-s-…

My favourite: “Hitler, Trotsky, Tito, Freud and Stalin all lived in Vienna in 1913.”

h/t jgordon

What gets me about Jason shaving in the shower is not that he thinks he looks too young, but that he might have solved the problem of a mirror that does not fog up. If I could shave in the shower, gosh, how much more time I’d have to be productive the rest of the day.

Very peeved. Time Machine can no longer see my Time Capsule and neither can I. Tried restarting the computer, but that didn’t help. Don'[t really want to do a factory reset. What else can I try?

“UK podcast listeners willing to pay £4 average for monthly subscriptions” it says here: podnews.net/press-rel…

Standing by, here: www.eatthispodcast.com/supporter…

I do not believe that consumers are the main beneficiaries of recent trends in the centralisation and industrialisation of food production. Convenient, perhaps, but safe and affordable? At what price?

Podcasts are not radio shows. Or at least, they didn’t used to be. Now, judging by how almost all awards lump them together, there is no meaningful distinction. Except that, in our hearts, we know that there is.

The big problem with the “all food is processed” and “everything is a chemical” arguments is that they fail to speak the same language as the people for whom “processed” and “chemical” have other meanings. I prefer to ask who benefits from the processing and the chemicals.

Tim Harford certainly belaboured the point that safety systems may make things more prone to failure, what with the Oscars fiasco (two systems bad; three systems worse). Wheeling out Galileo was a masterstroke. Little could he have anticipated that someone who actually knew about statics would be listening..Dr. Drang kindly shared his expertise.I think we can forgive Galileo this lapse. He was creating new knowledge and, given his trouble with the Vatican, was desperate to get it published. Editing was of secondary concern at best.I’m less forgiving of Tim Harford. Anyone who’s taken a statics class could have told him that the story on which he was basing “Galileo’s Principle” didn’t demonstrate that principle.I wonder whether Tim Harford will even see that. Probably not; comments are closed.