The Meatball Sub
While so much of the internet prioritises the new — skipping insightful stories for hot takes — I’m pleased to say that the following links have had good time to mature.
For this week’s bake we tried a new recipe: Ethan Chlebowski’s finger-lickin’ meatball subs.¹ Turns out the secret to that ‘Subway smell’ is diastatic malt powder or, as Ethan refers to it, ‘magic pixie dust’… 😋
Links
🚉 Wireless headphones suck²… But Japan has a gadget for sucking up wireless headphones 🙄
💰 South Korea has been using the pandemic as an opportunity to trial Universal Basic Income for 13 million people.³
🌲 “there are 75 million cattle in the Amazon, but it’s really not that great a place to raise cattle…” — The Simple Economics of Saving the Amazon Rainforest.
🌱 Despite the Amazon’s importance, planting trees is not always the answer!⁴
🍟 Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History is full of great stories. I hope this episode pulls you into the rest of the podcast: McDonald’s created the world’s best chip, and then ruined it to make it healthier while drastically increasing portion sizes!
🍎 A guy walks into an Apple Store…
🏛 Wouldn’t it be great if voting were as easy as swiping through TikTok? That’s César Hidalgo’s plan to replace politicians. It’s self-driving cars but for democracy.⁵
Projects
My card game app for covid times — Stir Crazy — has gained some fresh illustrations thanks to my wonderful sister. Hit reply if you’d like to play a round some time!
Are you not Entertained?
I discovered the other day that my girlfriend had never heard of Blue Man Group.⁶ I share their wonderful Tiny Desk Concert to save you from the same fate.
¹ IKEA’s new veggie meatballs are such a good imitation, I’m convinced that they’re actually magical.
² Bluetooth. Need I say more? And AirPods are designed to only play nice with Apple devices — it’s so much worse than the good old cables that you could plug into anything! Roll on Bluetooth LE Audio, maybe they’ll finally get it right! Maybe…
³ If they keep it up, a trial of this size should finally tell us whether basic income’s most valuable long-term benefits are real — encouraging risky new ideas and supporting people who need help without means testing, to name a couple!
⁴ 99% Invisible’s vivid description of the colourful, squishy Flow Country makes me really want to visit once we’re all travelling again.
⁵ Right now it’s hard to see how this would work without all the same problems as electronic voting but it’s an interesting idea: a couple of notifications come through to say which way you voted each day; tap one to change your vote; your AI gets better and better at voting exactly as you would without you having to intervene.
⁶ Robots is another classic, as is Shake your Euphemism.
Got suggestions, comments, criticisms? Hit reply!
Not a subscriber? Sign up here.