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December 27, 2021: Mark Schatzker, author, "The End of Craving"

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Tonight: Mark Schatzker, author, "The End of Craving"

Links:

• The End Of Craving: Recovering the Lost Wisdom of Eating Well, by Mark Schatzker

• MarkSchatzker.com - author site

• @MarkSchatzker - Twitter

• ‘The End of Craving’ Review: Why You Can’t Eat Just One (WSJ book review, Nov 3, 2021)

• ‘Warning: ultra-processed’ — A call for warnings on foods that aren’t really foods (BMJ Global Health, Dec 21, 2021): "With more than half the total calories consumed in high-income countries coming from ultra-processed foods and rapid increases in low- and middle-income countries, these products are exposing billions of people to a higher risk of type 2 diabetes, heart disease, stroke, depression and death. Your grandparents wouldn’t have used or even recognised them. In the half century or so since ultra-processed foods became available, diets high in those products have largely displaced traditional and healthier diets, and ultra-processed foods have been among the most aggressively promoted and marketed products in the world. In addition, their intensive marketing has led to rapidly growing sales in low- and middle-income countries. Worldwide, palates (and brains) have been trained to crave these foods while the food industry invests many millions in formulating and marketing them to be highly desirable."

• Thread accompanying the James Webb meme - see also this explainer video (on toxic YouTube, unfortunately)

• $10bn James Webb space telescope launches on ‘eternal search’ mission (The Guardian, Dec 25, 2021): $10B successor to the Hubble telescope takes off on board rocket from ESA’s launch base in Kourou, French Guiana

• Mark Zuckerberg Is TNR’s 2021 Scoundrel of the Year (by David Roth in The New Republic, Dec 22, 2021): “There are many things to abhor about Mark Zuckerberg and his works, but the fundamental mediocrity of it all - the lack of vision, the absence of any moral sense or shame, the inability and unwillingness not just to fix but even reckon with the dangerous and ungovernable thing he’s made - is what feels both most egregious and most of this moment. It is embarrassing and not a little enraging to realize that you are subject to the whims of an amoral and incurious capitalist posing as a visionary optimist. It is especially humiliating when the all-bestriding and inevitable figure in question is such a dim, dull nullity. . . . The nitwit founder of Facebook has created the worst, most damaging website in the world. And we’re just supposed to accept it.”

• ‘I do surfing’: an AI-generated Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook’s bad year (by Julia Carrie Wong and Botnik Studios in The Guardian, today, Dec 27, 2021): "we worked with Botnik Studios to create a predictive keyboard trained on the past two years of Zuckerberg’s public statements (archived by Marquette University’s Zuckerberg Files). ... Guardian journalists provided the questions; Botnik used the predictive keyboard to generate the answers." (See also Jamie Brew and Bob Mankoff on TT Feb 12, 2018; and Jamie Brew on TT Oct 8, 2018.)

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