Jonathan Gold, Hayek, Jazz, Separation, Delhi
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Every Culture Is Passionate About Food
Andrew Simmons | Believer | 1st September 2012
Classic interview with food critic Jonathan Gold. “In writing, I can get a flavor pretty close. You can’t taste it, but I can get really close. A lot of that was reading Balzac’s twenty-page descriptions of somebody’s socks. The nineteenth-century guys used tons of physical description because there wasn’t photography yet, much less movies. In Dickens, the wrinkles in somebody’s jodhpurs actually meant something. And they would have to be described exactly. That transfers to food writing” (4,050 words)
Hayek And The Market
Linda Yueh | TLS | 23rd March 2018
Introduction to Friedrich Hayek’s ideas. He believed that “the prosperity of society was driven by creativity, entrepreneurship and innovation”, which were possible “only in a society with free markets”. He saw the need for government to maintain order, including the provision of essential welfare, but he was against the redistribution of wealth on principle. “Societal progress in his view was driven by the ideas of a few, who deserved proportionate reward” (2,250 words)
When The Student Became The Master
Fred Kaplan | Slate | 29th March 2018
In 1959 it seemed that Miles Davis had reached a pinnacle of innovation with ‘Kind of Blue’, breaking away from the tightly structured chord-based bebop of his late mentor, Charlie Parker, in favour of a cooler music built around scales and freer rhythms. But on tour just a year later Davis was being left in dust by his saxophone player, John Coltrane, whose music “abandoned not only chord changes but all kinds of structure. These are blizzards of sound, implosions of pure energy” (1,900 words)
How To Poach An Egg And Leave A Marriage
Brandy Jensen | My Recipes | 29th March 2018
“The unbidden urge to poach an egg coincided with the realisation I was thinking about divorce. The upshot is that I became skilled at this one particular culinary feat and that I am now divorced. Doing one thing over and over again — poach an egg, think about leaving — is an obsessive and perhaps unhealthy way to become good at something, but it worked for me. When you find a suitable egg the sensible thing to do is make it yours and enjoy it. I found one, and I was breaking it” (890 words)
The Explosion Of Delhi
Branko Milanovic | Global Policy | 20th March 2018
Rana Dasgupta’s story of Delhi, ‘Capital’, is “a metaphor for the story of global capitalism and the energies that it unleashed”. You would go to Manchester to see the Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century; you go to Delhi to see the globalist revolution in the twenty-first century. The spectacle is no prettier. “The system we are part of feeds on desperation. And each system that demands such levels of desperation will produce more and more disorder” (1,030 words)
Video of the day Dark Patterns
What to expect:
Evan Puschak explains how websites use design to manuipulate your behaviour online (6’54”)
Thought for the day
When we look at the world rationally, the world looks rationally back
G.W.F. Hegel
Podcast of the day Stephen Dubner | Writers We Admire
Robert Cottrell talks to Freakonomics co-founder Stephen Dubner about economics and podcasting
(22m 30s)