"If you were to simplify how the globe looks through the eyes of a potato crisp, the whole thing is divided down the middle – and one side is labelled “cheese” and the other “fish”"
The fascinating world of chip flavours:
Crucially, however, the expectations of what lasagne should taste like are not as high for a Thai consumer as an Italian. After all, there’s a reason we don’t eat shepherd’s pie crisps. “An Italian would think: how can a crisp taste of authentic mother’s lasagne?” Wade says. Peggy puts it another way: “They’d just think it was horrendous if you put something like lasagne on a potato chip!”
Bizarrely, it seems as though flavour houses take internal walls more seriously than major consulting firms:
In fact, the seasoning house is strictly siloed to guarantee exclusivity. Reuben’s team work on the Pringles account; the team making flavours for PepsiCo is in an entirely different country. “So the recipe, if you will, of the Pringles salt and vinegar can’t be seen by the other team,” Reuben says.
Apple warned Indian journalists and opposition politicians last month that their phones had likely been hacked by a state-sponsored attacker
journalist Anand Mangnale woke to find a disturbing notification from Apple on his mobile phone: “State-sponsored attackers may be targeting your iPhone.” He was one of at least a dozen journalists and Indian opposition politicians who said they had received the same message. “These attackers are likely targeting you individually because of who you are and what you do,” the warning read. “While it’s possible this is a false alarm, please take it seriously.”
Universities are struggling to protect staff from stalking and online harassment
But today, a cadre of academics is now aiming to strengthen the much smaller body of research that exists around faculty who experience stalking and abuse. Victoria O’Meara, a post-doctoral research fellow at Royal Roads University, has been interviewing scholars in the US and Canada for a study on online abuse of faculty. She told me there has been “an increasingly organized attack on academia,” and scholars have told her their universities remain ill-equipped to respond to it or support faculty, let alone to protect them.
The contemporary hunt for hidden messages in film
We retreat into private enclaves, indulging our personal preferences without worrying about what the things we enjoy signify for society writ large. This condition has been especially painful for self-conscious critics, who simply can’t bring themselves to take sides in debates about modernism v. mass culture or Barbie v. Oppenheimer.
I don’t know if this is real or if it’s a beat-up. Either way it’s wild.
Anti-vaxxers are winning local elections across Western Australia
“The appeal of local governments, Harris argued, is that they allow insurgent groups like Stand Up Now Australia to subvert the party-entrenched higher levels of government. He said that he believed his group was tapping into an anti-institutional sentiment that is widely felt, even bragging about having recently received words of support during a phone call with former Liberal Party federal president and campaign director Brian Loughnane. "
Anti-vaxxers are winning local elections across Western Australia - Crikey
CSIRO accused of not disclosing BP input into scientific reports
According to internal documents, the CSIRO reports were eventually published in scientific journals and were used in BP’s legal defence, but first vetted by BP’s lawyers.
“Within at least one of these documents, we have identified nine studies with CSIRO employees listed as either the primary or co-authors – wherein BP’s involvement was either undisclosed or insufficiently disclosed"
CSIRO accused of allowing BP to vet research on catastrophic oil spill
A long overdue movement: Web Revival
“The goal is to find what was best about the early web and what is best about new technologies and merge the two into a model for tomorrow; while kicking all the Zuckerberg’s and Musk’s to the curb so we can get on with our lives. The citizens of the web deserve more respect than to be boxed into cubicles, limited to 280 characters, studied and rebranded.
The Web Revival is about building a sense of mystery, humour, humility and optimism in technology. The Web Revival above all else values action; we avoid perfectionism because it limits action - the Web Revival encourages creating and sharing things, even if they are small, broken, incomplete and Warning Under Construction.”
Intro to the Web Revival #1: What is the Web Revival? - Melon’s Thoughts
Kagi’s Small Web is an interesting effort to fight back against the enshittification of search by bringing back the blogroll.
