Ahoy there lovely email friends, I hope you’re well and starting to ease into something approaching a festive period. No 💥BLAST! next week, so I’ll see you next year. Meanwhile here’s a mix of interesting seasonal and non-seasonal things to keep you ticking over:
🥗 What humanity should eat to stay healthy and save the planet: More than 2 billion people are overweight or obese, mostly in the Western world. At the same time, 811 million people are not getting enough calories or nutrition, mostly in low- and middle-income nations. Unhealthy diets contributed to more deaths globally in 2017 than any other factor. Meanwhile the current industrialised food system already emits about one-quarter of the world’s greenhouse-gas emissions, as well as 70% of freshwater use and 40% of land coverage. What we eat needs to be both nutritious and sustainable, so researchers are trying to figure out what that looks like around the world.
😑 How to channel boredom: We’re fast-approaching that weird week of anticlimax between Christmas and New Year. Area 52 is my favourite week to go away, but once again it’s imperative to support public health measures. So instead, here’s an idea for tackling boredom head-on: learning how to use that discomfort to switch up a gear and regain control over your life and your interests.
🎼 The Best Songs of 2021: Long-standing blog Said the Gramophone has been compiling this list every year for almost two decades, and this is this year’s batch. It’s a funny time for popular music in ways that may only make sense retrospectively.
🏭 The fraud supply chain: The business of fraud is almost as diverse as the business of… business. And it really is a business. Organised fraud has many of the accoutrements of professionalised systems with differentiated labour, like finance itself has. There are HR departments, professional fora, certifications, headhunters, and the like. This is a surprising fact about the world, and not at all obvious. The mental model most have for crime is that it is largely committed by impulsive, not-terribly-well-organised individuals or small groups. That happens in finance, too, but the bulk of the work is done by professionals.
🎄 Life inside Britain’s worst winter wonderlands: They are the festive fairgrounds where no one is a winner. Santas, elves and bouncers discuss the Christmas gigs that made them question their life choices.
💩 Is Web3… anything? The term seems pretty fluid and is being used as a label for a bunch of disparate ideas. Its decentralised nature means it’s going to end up being different things to different people. Most descriptions focus on mechanisms—block chains, smart contracts, tokens—but this smart post argues those are just implementations. The real question is what fundamental capability are people pointing to when they talk about web3? See also: Web3 is going just great. See also, also: This is Your NFT Wake-up Call.
🎬 How Jonny Greenwood Wrote the Year’s Best Film Score: In making Radiohead albums, Greenwood became more excited by the prospect of scoring simple, sparse string arrangements. I’ve watched a handful of films recently that I thought were all excellent, only then to realise they all had a Greenwood-penned score.
🎁 Dumb presents I shouldn’t give people: a spectacular Metafilter thread of dumb products that shouldn’t exist, including something that is proud to call itself ‘the first hot tub for your testicles’.