Doug Mack in Heavy Table, with a genuinely thoughtful meditation on food culture.
“Dorilocos are a fundamentally rebellious food,” Daniela Galarza wrote in Eater a while back. “They’re unglamorous, the opposite of farm-to-table or artisanal or sustainable. They’re not healthy. They’re not traditional. (At least not yet.) But when I took that first bite, I realized something: They taste spectacular.”
An interesting passage in its own right but check out the news from the original release. “Enterprise apps on the network” and “complements Java applets” and “28 industry-leading companies”, the vast majority of which no longer exist.
Amazing to think JavaScript went from this overhyped enterprise client scripting language to being derided as kid’s stuff to now one of the most used programming languages in the world.
Hannah Goldfield, on what is certainly the definitive food blog, now 14-years strong.
Her mission is straightforward: provide recipes you can rely on. Deb, as her friends, family, and most loyal fans call her, deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Martha and Ina, but she is not selling a fantasy of domestic bliss. She simply wants to eat well, and to show you how to do the same. She is guided by her own impulses and never pretends otherwise; she is incredibly honest and careful, both as writer and cook. She tests and tweaks and tests and tweaks in her tiny Manhattan kitchen, all on her own.
Hype Machine, the decade and a half (!!) old music discovery site, built a widget where you drop in a Spotify playlist and they give you links to support the artists directly. This is a wonderful complement (and antidote) to Spotify’s unwrapped meme you’ve no doubt seen on your various feeds. What a great idea.
I was just saying to my wife last night that she and I should almost certainly be last in line for the vaccine once it starts to become available. This tidy visualization from the New York Times confirms it for me — roughly 268 million Americans should be in front of me.
Ted Gioia has been one of my favorite Twitter follows in a year that could use some thought art critique and exploration.
God I bet blogs are amazing now. How do people even know what to read?
Paul had a follow-up that’s less jokey and a bit closer to how things work now.
Smart, succinct podcast from Tim Harford — I was a fan of his previous 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy.
Tim Carmody with a delightful bit of insight into the complex life of Tom Stoppard, including his uncredited drafting of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
Drew Armstrong profiles the truly outstanding Covid Tracking Project in Bloomberg:
The project is a demonstration of citizen know-how and civic dedication at a time when the country feels like it’s being pulled apart. Yet it’s confounding that, almost a year into the pandemic, the Covid Tracking Project is doing what might be expected of the U.S. government. “It’s kind of mind-boggling that it’s fallen to a group of volunteers to do this,” says Kara Schechtman, one of the project’s early volunteers, who’s since become the paid co-lead for data quality.
This is an equally inspirational and maddening story — volunteers with organization and guidance from a team of journalists working for a 150-year-old magazine doing the grueling work in the middle of a pandemic that could and should be managed by a competent federal government.
Pair this one with Delia Cai’s interview with _The Atlantic_’s Ed Yong about the marathon of covering the pandemic for 8 months.