The microwave is quite possibly the most derided appliance in any kitchen, especially be self-styled foodies. Consigned to reheating leftovers or melting chocolate, it’s commonly held the microwave isn’t for serious cooks. I’ve tended to roll my eyes at that kind of snobbery, especially as those very same people gush over sous vide setups and pressure cookery, but I must admit I’ve never really put my own magnetron oven through the paces.

Helen Rosner wants you to learn to love the microwave.

It took the upheaval of the past year to bring me back to the old idea that my microwave might be a cabinet of wonders. Through the window of my iPhone screen, I watched friends and cooks and colleagues admit to their own microwave love. At Eater, the recipe writer Aaron Hutcherson wrote a piece titled “The Time Has Come to Embrace Your Microwave,” in which he describes reheating leftovers, of course, but also crisping bacon, poaching fish, and (as suggested by the chef Preeti Mistry) effortlessly crisping up pappadam. The chef David Chang, a longtime evangelist for the appliance, solidified his position as the high priest of the Church of Microwave with dozens of photos and videos, posted to Instagram, that display techniques both straightforward—reheating rice, par-cooking vegetables—and mind-expanding. In one revelatory post, he explained how he nuked some onions and garlic in olive oil, added crumbled sausage to the mix and microwaved again until the meat was cooked through, then tossed the result with greens and cooked pasta. “Doesn’t matter if the sausage doesn’t brown,” he explained in the comments. “It’s getting wet anyway.”

Like any kitchen tool (or any tool at all), the microwave is exactly as useful as you make it. Rosner, for example, keys in on what I’ve long thought is an under-appreciated secret — simply setting the power level to finesse your cooking, rather than simply “nuking” your food at full strength.

I don’t know that I’ll be serving that microwaved scallop mousse any time soon but I’m certainly going to try some more ambitious microwave recipes soon.

The techniques used by the Covid-19 vaccines to help bring an end to the pandemic have been researched for years. Now that we’re turning a corner, it seems like we’ve got more to look forward to.

The first vaccine to fight the malaria parasite uses self-amplifying RNA, similar to the messenger RNA in the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, with the added bonus of being cheaper and easier to distribute.

Making a vaccine for malaria is challenging because its associated parasite, Plasmodium, contains a protein that inhibits production of memory T-cells, which protect against previously encountered pathogens. If the body can’t generate these cells, a vaccine is ineffective. But scientists recently tried a new approach using an RNA-based platform.

Their design circumvented the sneaky protein, allowed the body to produce the needed T-cells and completely immunized against malaria. The patent application for their novel vaccine, which hasn’t yet been tested on humans, was published by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office on Feb. 4.

“It’s probably the highest level of protection that has been seen in a mouse model,” said Richard Bucala, co-inventor of the new vaccine and a physician and professor at Yale School of Medicine.

Even before the pandemic, mRNA was being researched as a vector for combatting parasitic diseases. Now it looks like mRNA might be able to help fight sickle cell and AIDS as well. A year ago, there were no mRNA drugs in the world, other than some lab trials; now it’s one of the more promising technologies for fighting all manner of disease.

Katalin Karikó, who persisted for over two decades to make mRNA therapeutics viable, should be as celebrated as Louis Pasteur and Jonas Salk.

Australia is currently making plenty of noise with its truly awful new link tax, but there’s something potentially more interesting happening in New Zealand. Stuff, a media organization that includes stuff.co.nz, the local news hub Neighbourly, and nearly a dozen other news sites, stopped publishing to Facebook last July; and they don’t really miss Big Blue. Stuff’s CEO, Sinead Boucher, from a symposium hosted by the Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford:

In July 2020, Sinead decided Stuff would walk away from its audience of over a million followers on Facebook and Instagram. This followed a move to stop advertising on the platform the year before. It was meant to be a quiet, internal experiment, but word of the decision was leaked to the public.

There are several interesting aspect to this story. The first is they stopped advertising on all Facebook properties back in 2019, following the Christchurch terror attack that was broadcast live on Facebook. Boucher says she was dissatisfied with Facebook’s response after the attack, essentially making a moral argument against supporting the social network.

Traffic to Stuff’s network is roughly flat over the past seven months — Boucher predicts being off Facebook has cost them 5-10% in traffic. This is certainly a measurable impact, but by no means existential, and it also means homepage and search traffic are up. There is a concern that Stuff isn’t able to serve some communities, particularly indigenous people, as well by being off Facebook, though. When they reached out to Facebook to see how they could work together, Facebook basically responded with an offer to help them use their paid marketing tools better.

All of this is coming as Stuff, and other media organizations, are dealing with how to build more trustworthy, self-sustaining organizations. Certainly seems like Facebook doesn’t need to be a part of the solution.

The truly astonishing vaccines are upon us. You doubtless know someone who’s been vaccinated by now and hope abounds that by this summer we could start see what life is going to look like on the other side.

As incredible as the vaccines are, we always knew the hard work was going to be distributing billions of them. Even with all of the massive problems facing the U.S. — in terms of infrastructure, healthcare, and equity — the rollout is going … well it could always be worse.

One manifestation of America’s distribution problem is getting signed up in the first place. The scourge of federalism means there are at least fifty different websites for Americans to navigate, all built to different standards and levels of accessibility, struggling to stay up. The additional scourge of “public/private partnerships” means there are also the websites of pharmacies like CVS to track down for appointments, which often means people are constantly refreshing half a dozen websites at 2am trying to get appointments for their parents, like sneakerheads waiting for the next drop of Yeezys.

Diligent volunteers are pulling together open source websites that aggregate all this info, an effort that is as kind and hopeful and frustrating as it is wholly American.

There is, of course, a better way: a single, nationwide clearinghouse that anyone can log on to and find vaccination appointments, public or private, near them. Barry Patterson, writing for the blog of the govtech consultancy Ad Hoc, lays it out:

A better way is for the federal government to provide a single COVID-19 vaccination website with consistent information about when people can get the vaccine, where, and at what cost. This website should go beyond providing accurate information to help people take action and sign up for a vaccination.

In our discussions with state governments and our explorations of the issues surrounding vaccinations, we’ve landed on a handful of principles that could shape a federal vaccination website and core features the website should provide on launch. These principles are grounded in our work creating action-oriented digital experiences for federal websites including HealthCare.gov, Medicare.gov, VA.gov, and more.

As Hoc’s approach is everything you’d want from such a herculean and important project — thoughtful, detailed, and built on real-world experience. There are even solutions to those built-in scourges of federalism and privatization, instead of just kvetching.

Yesterday, 2.2 million Americans were vaccinated, a record that I hope we will continue to build on. We should also be building infrastructure to handle the myriad problems of American healthcare, not just to tackle future pandemics but all sorts of problems, starting with a nationwide front door to how to get vaccinated today.

Can a delightfully low-fi, three-dimensional, spatial, customizable immersive space save us from the uncanny valleyness of Zoom conferences? Andy Baio wants to find out.

After the pandemic cancelled XOXO last year, I started attending a bunch of virtual events, mostly out of boredom and longing for connecting to other people.

Unfortunately, many of them were pretty uninspiring, basically just fancy webinars with breakout rooms for Zoom. Others were just livestreams with little room for social interaction beyond a global chat room.

Almost all of them left me feeling like I’d either sat through a long meeting or watched a long YouTube video. Was this even an event? Did I actually attend anything?

In so many ways, this really is a perfect project for Andy, and maybe only Andy could have built this having cofounded the beloved XOXO conference and promoted a truly indie vision of the internet for going-on two decades. Everything about this looks delightful, playful, thoughtful, fun, and just different from what you’d expect from today’s platform mediated internet — the kind of virtual event you might actually want to attend, as The Verge puts it. I love it.

The obvious comparison is to something like Second Life but it honestly feels more like Game Neverending, er, Glitch — in all the best ways. Or maybe the kind of virtual conference Shigeru Miyamoto might have designed.

From its founding through its very public reckoning in 2017, Uber completely upturned how tech platforms interface with the real world, in particular labor. They were so successful that uber became a stand-in for the glib euphemism “gig economy” and a spate of “Uber for X” (where x could be dogwalkers, grocery shoppers, or dry cleaners) startups followed in its toxic wake.

To Silicon Valley boosters and VCs, this was some kind of bold new re-imagining of work and they (once again) appropriated the language of progressivism to sell their story of worker empowerment and freedom. To anyone with an understanding of how capital has historically exploited labor, it looked like the same ole’ arbitrage exploiting weakened labor laws and the desperate austerity of the post-Global Recession economy, gilded with ascendent mobile platforms.

Uber is now an eleven-year-old company that has since replaced its awful founder CEO, gone public, expanded into other complementary services like food delivery, made a big acquisition, and generally avoided the drama that plagued the company just a few years ago.

They also hired one of their biggest critics¹, author and labor researcher Alex Rosenblat, to head up “marketplace policy, fairness and research”. Brody Ford first reported about Rosenblat’s hire for Bloomberg:

Rosenblat is best known for her 2018 book, “Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work,” for which she interviewed hundreds of drivers about their working conditions. The book highlights driver stories of pay disparities, pervasive surveillance and the lopsided power dynamics in algorithm-mediated work.

As an Uber employee, Rosenblat said her responsibility is to “get the company to take into consideration the experiences and point of view of drivers, especially at the product level” and that her work will be informed by past research.

The cynical take is this is a move to silence a detractor, or maybe just good PR, but I don’t think that’s quite it. Most of the more egregious claims against Uber’s labor relations — like stiffing them on tips or surveilling them — aren’t a requirement for Uber to succeed today; they were just as likely extensions of the wholly toxic culture that was bred from top of the company. There’s enough obvious stuff for Roseblat to address that she’ll be busy for months if not years.

The bigger question facing Uber, like so many platforms, is how to actually succeed as a business without exploiting the conditions that made them so successful. It’s clear the labor grift was meant to be a stopgap on the way to driverless cars, but Uber’s given up on owning that space outright and the dream of robot drivers remains out of reach for the foreseeable future.

The situation for Uber is less dire than, say, Facebook’s business model of surveilling their users, but Uber has also struggled with profitability since going public. I’m convinced it’s possible to build a ride hailing app that treats the drivers with respect. Probably not with the returns venture capital demands, though.

Last May, when the U.S. was approaching 100,000 deaths due to Covid-19, the New York Times printed the name of every person on their front page. It was a stark and unsettling visualization of the toll of the catastrophe.

This week, the U.S. passed 500,000 deaths and the Times once again sought to visualize something so incomprehensible, this time using dots as stand-ins for the names. The difference between the two front pages is its own kind of infographic, the shift from 100,000 names that filled up the entire page to indistinguishable points in a broad column down the middle.

The graphic this week is more informative, if that’s what we’re looking for, showing the ebbs and flows, the surges of the virus, and how it’s compounded in growth. It’s also too many, Francis Gagnon writes:

This graph is confronting us with the limitations of data visualization to convey tragedies.

Tragedies like COVID-19 deaths happen at the individual level. One death is a person who did their 2nd grade homework, helped their brother out of a ditch, broke up on New Year’s Eve, lied to their kids and then apologized. To their relatives, friends and coworkers, they are a full person. To a chart, they are a dot.

Gagnon is right, this really does hit the limits of what can, or maybe even should be visualized. Each dot is a person, a life, and there it is next to headlines about tennis and confirmation hearings. It’s effective at conveying information but fails to fully account for what’s ultimately missing — those 500,000 souls.

National Geographic used comparisons, but it felt almost glib to know the entire city of Atlanta or every U.S. Postal worker would be gone today. Reuters provided some of the emotional heft that was missing from the cold numeracy, overlaying actual lives among the dots.

At the start of my journalism career, I got tapped to build a memorial project for the first remembrance of the September 11 terrorist attack. It included a lot of archival coverage, bits that we’d never published before, profiles of victims, analysis of how much everything changed. It was a terribly emotional project to work on, less than a year after the world shifted irrevocably, with the usual deadline pressures — that’s very much the territory of working in news. We included a “database” of people, really it was just a CSV file of names of the nearly 3,000 people who were killed. I’d often go through them late at night and inevitably end up crying at my desk, alone in the basement of a tower in Chicago.

I’ve been a fan of Defector since the former Deadspin staff launched their seemingly brash experiment in a collectively owned media company last year. Margaret Sullivan, one of our sharpest media eyes, checks in how its going:

In a world of endlessly distressing media news, the Defector story is a bright spot and maybe a small miracle.

The staff remains small but growing, they recently put out a refreshingly humane freelancer policy written in partnership with the National Writer’s Union, and have enough subscribers to sustain their operations. And it was news to me the staff could choose to fire editor Tom Ley with a 2/3 vote.

It says a lot about the state of things that launching a subscriber supported blog owned by the writers and editors who produce it is seen as either doomed to failure or brave, or both. I’m optimistic about Defector and want to see them do well, not just because it’s an excellent site, but a model I hope works for others.

Last week, I decided I needed new pajama (er, “sleep”) pants — or rather it was decided for me when a rip emerged rather inconveniently along the left cheek. This sent me down a rabbit hole of searching and comparisons for an everyday item I might pick up in line at a department store on a whim. This is the reality of being slightly neurotic by nature paired with the fact that shopping sucks now.

These are cotton pants I sleep in, not exactly a lifesaving necessity. Apply these same dynamics to buying a protective mask during a pandemic, which is quite literally a necessity and lifesaving these days. Brian X. Chen decided to find out what happens when one sets out to buy an actual N95 mask online:

I recently spent hours comparing masks online and almost bought a pack of counterfeits on Amazon. Thankfully, I avoided falling into the trap and eventually found legitimate, high-quality masks from a trustworthy online retailer.

Along the way, I learned plenty about how to spot fraudulent mask listings and how to sidestep fake reviews.

It turns out a huge part of the problem is Amazon, which is still full of counterfeit masks being hawked by third parties gilded by fake reviews, a year into this. Amazon has obviously been a huge part of how people are coping right now but it’s completely shameful that they haven’t solved the problem of how to easily buy a mask that will work from a reputable source.

Of course it’s not just online retailers, as we’ve basically gotten zero guidance on what an effective mask even is — one of the many failures of a year of no real leadership.

If you want a mask, it seems like the solution is to buy direct from one of the manufacturers who spun up production at the beginning of the pandemic. I’m hopeful that the Biden administration will put the Defense Production Act into full force and send every American enough masks to get through the year.

As for my sleep pants, my wife finally got fed up with my dithering and ordered me a set from The Gap.

In February 2015, Senator James Inhofe stood on the floor of the United States Senate and argued that because it was cold outside — in February — global climate change could not be real. He brought a snowball with him as evidence. The previous month, Senator Inhofe had been made chair of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works when Republicans took the Senate following the 2014 election.

The senior senator from the great state of Oklahoma was rightly and roundly mocked for this asinine bit of stagecraft, bold only for its stupidity. Inhofe has a long history of climate change denial that’s representative of the GOP’s larger and more deliberate protectionism of the oil and gas industry, now morphed into its own front in the culture war.

Which brings us to Texas. A massive cold front — a “polar vortex” — descended on the entire Midwest, what’s been called a once-in-a-generation storm that includes freezing temperature, snow, and at least one snownado. The storm overwhelmed the power grid in Texas and left millions without power or heat.

Emily Atkin, writing in her excellent Heated blog, explains why this storm happened and why it may not be so once-in-a-generation because of climate change:

The polar vortex—or, rather, the jet stream—is drunk again, bringing frigid and dangerous Arctic weather to millions of Americans. And the situation is worse than it was in 2014.

It is worse in the strictly meteorologically sense. The extreme cold pummeling the U.S. right now is, according to Accuweather, “the most active winter weather pattern across the country likely since the mid-1990s.”

I remember first learning about how climate change would lead to more and more intense polar vortexes and thinking, glibly, how deeply ironic it was that global warming would be responsible for harsher winters in the very part of the world where climate change denial was most prevalent. It seriously made me question my disbelief in god and that maybe we truly were meant to suffer the whims of a cruel and vicious deity.

The situation in Texas, where at least 20 people have died, perfectly and succinctly offers a view of a fairly dire future. Climate change doesn’t just mean hotter summers but more unpredictable weather. We know this. We’ve known this for years and we’re already living it.

The kind of infrastructure we were good at building through the middle of the 20th Century was not built to handle this unpredictability — and it’s been failing anyway due to old age and forty years of neglect. There will be more failures on the scale of Texas’s power grid.

And when these systems fail, the failures will be exploited by cynics and craven idealogues, which will only make the core problems harder to solve. Imagine how much damage the outright lying on Fox News¹ about this storm — just this storm — has done.

This is a future driven by chaos, and the cycle only seems to be accelerating.