Food, cities, language, and the strange histories of ordinary things.
Joined October 2026
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Salon des Refusés retweeted
taiwanese hot grass jelly soup beats everything (grass jelly itself is basically zero calories). There's also Douhua which is a sweet tofu pudding that can be served hot
Taiwanese street food is the best in Asia. Not close.
Everything’s snack-sized, so one meal becomes twelve. Desserts made from sweet potato and taro. Wheel cakes.
I’d fly back for the wheel cakes alone.
Jensen Huang showing Lex Fridman around Taiwan is the happiest thing on YouTube. Night markets, oyster pancakes, and a man who handles fame better than anyone I’ve seen.
I grew up on Larry David, Fran Lebowitz, and Jerry Seinfeld asking, “Why are people like this?” So much Gen Z content stops at “That’s so me.” I miss comedy that takes something familiar and makes me question it.
Now it’s a mirror. It used to be a window.
Bats aren't blind. Pigs barely sweat. Goldfish remember things for months. And I have a bone to pick with the English language.
Salon des Refusés retweeted
Imagine that. Harvard is reinventing a great books college. And the students do really want to put down the phones and pick the classics up.
“A lot of what we get out of this class is the human experience, and you can’t get that out of AI,” said Peggy Urdan, a government and neuroscience major from Lexington, Mass. “The only way to get anything out of this class is to not use AI.”
wsj.com/lifestyle/harvard-cl…
Europe’s rescue fund is about 20% French money. A French bailout means France guaranteeing its own rescue. The safety net only works if the people holding it aren’t the ones falling.
paulkrugman.substack.com/p/w…
Childhood used to end when you learned what adults knew. Now kids know everything by eleven, and adults never quite arrive. Maybe childhood didn’t disappear. Maybe adulthood did.
When a food is suddenly good for you, ask who has too much of it.
I’ve been finding it really hard to hit my protein every day. And somewhere in the middle of forcing down another shake, I started wondering: do I actually need this much? Where did this even come from?
In 1958 he launched Chicken Ramen. Instant noodles.
It’s strange to think one of the most eaten foods in the world grew partly out of another country’s extra grain.
“I’ve been eating out too much” would have confused the man behind one of Paris’s first restaurants.
In the 1760s, Mathurin Roze de Chantoiseau sold broth to people with delicate stomachs. Making you feel better was the whole point.
The wealthy get to make the whole journey: pay for abundance, tire of it, then pay for carefully prepared simplicity.
Maybe that’s where having money takes you. You can have whatever you want, so you do. Then you pay someone to help you want less.
The article that prompted this:
nationalgeographic.com/histo…
