4. Sales of instant coffee are on the rise, which the author of this piece attributes partly to Zoomer budget-consciousness and the rising cost of coffee (perhaps a “looming” recession as well?), but I wonder how much of this is also because anecdotally third wave coffee culture is now seen as kind of lame.
5. Ray Dalio's chicken nuggets.
6. Something I think about from time to time is how there is no equivalent of the Armani suit in fashion today - something that instantly communicates good taste, that is en vogue but still has an air of timelessness, and that is - importantly! - good quality. Almost anyone - man or woman, big and tall or short and lithe - could buy an Armani suit and look good in it. The Armani suit-as-signifier is basically without parallel today - labels are namedropped all the time, but none encapsulate quite what Armani did in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Anyway! I've been saying this for years, but I think it's finally time I get a suit...
7. "During the 10 years that Smith has been in charge at Portland, there have always been a fair number of picky eaters. A degree of 'fussiness' about food is nothing new for this age group – it can be an entirely natural developmental stage. It’s called neophobia: fear of the new. Smith says it was a normal part of nursery life to have children who struggled with certain vegetables or ones who 'liked dry food but not wet food.' The difference now, Smith says, is that the nursery is seeing a lot of three-year-olds for whom follow-on milk plus commercial baby food and other packaged snacks form '100% of their diet'. At the same time, Smith says there has been a “massive increase” in toddlers with tooth decay, as well as a rise in the number of children reaching the age of three who are more or less nonverbal. She attributes this speech delay to the fact that the skills and muscles needed for chewing are related to those needed for speech." Ultra-processing comes for the baby food aisle.
9. Magnolia trees have been around for so long (100 million years!) they're pollinated by beetles, because bees didn't yet exist.
10. Was watching a recent Anne Carson interview and learned that the full Cartesian maxim is "dubito, ergo sum, vel, quod idem est, cogito, ergo sum" - "I doubt, therefore I am - or what is the same - I think, therefore I am." Dubito!
11. Incredible Flickr (miss u) album of photos of Imperial China.
12. Turns out there's been almost no tracking of the 2.4 billion dollars Los Angeles has been given to deal with homelessness. I'm well acquainted with the myriad failures of this city and LAHSA but this report shocked me. What do you mean you can't verify the existence of 2,300 providers? What the fuck?
13. If you are vegan and in Los Angeles (as I am, for Greek Orthodox Lent, which is at once fine and also a massive, self-inflicted pain in the ass) you MUST check out Maison Macha, a vegan patisserie that makes better sweets than many non-vegan bakeries here.
14. "Need to move swiftly – Near term target needs – Go massive – sweep it all up. Things related and not. Need to do so to get anything useful." - The Iraq War in photos in the NYT (extremely graphic, obviously) and Andrew Cockburn for the LRB on Saddam Hussein's quarter century-long relationship with the United States. As an aside - I always forget Saddam was a novelist.
15. Sea lions in California are being poisoned by domoic acid from algae blooms and becoming demonic???
Recently read and currently reading: Spring and All by William Carlos Williams (as I do at the start of every spring), Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets by Todd McGowan, the latest issue of Smoke Signal, a very cool comics paper, and Novel 11, Book 18 by the recently deceased Dag Solstad (read his Art of Fiction temporarily without a paywall here).
