The values of Slow Food instruct you to build meals solely on dogma, rather than memory-making. These same values don’t create space for non-binary thinking — that people can truly enjoy a fast-food burger while simultaneously supporting fair labor practices and treatment of animals that may be lacking in a company like McDonald’s. It’s also not the antidote to lack of access to healthy, fresh foods. However, this fast-food empire has perfected what Slow Food has yet to uncover: allowing people the opportunity to enjoy a meal on their own terms, no baptism required.

How the Slow Food Movement Drove Me to McDonald’s - Eater

The bookish life can have no goal: It is all means and no end. The point, I should say, is not to become immensely knowledgeable or clever, and certainly not to become learned. Montaigne, who more than five centuries ago established the modern essay, grasped the point when he wrote, “I may be a man of fairly wide reading, but I retain nothing.” Retention of everything one reads, along with being mentally impossible, would only crowd and ultimately cramp one’s mind. “I would very much love to grasp things with a complete understanding,” Montaigne wrote, “but I cannot bring myself to pay the high cost of doing so… . From books all I seek is to give myself pleasure by an honorable pastime; or if I do study, I seek only that branch of learning which deals with knowing myself and which teaches me how to live and die well.” What Montaigne sought in his reading, as does anyone who has thought at all about it, is “to become more wise, not more learned or more eloquent.”

The Bookish Life, Joseph Epstein

A French Fry Gets Soggy in 5 Minutes. This Company Wants to Keep It Crispy for 60.

One of Lamb Weston’s 13 French fry factories, in Richland, Wash., produces a million pounds of potato products a day. A burst of steam peels the potatoes, and then they’re shot at 75 miles per hour through metal blades that cut them into steak, wedge or straight shapes. Cameras identify imperfections like bruises and black spots, and little puffs of air knock damaged fries off the conveyor belt.

A me piaceva leggere, mica pensavo che qualcuno l'avrebbe mai usato per attaccarmi. Leggere era ed è un fatto privato, non politico, io non leggo per resistenza, non leggo per edificarmi, non leggo per salvare la Cultura, leggo perché mi diverto e leggo quello che mi pare, quando mi pare.

A me dispiace per chi non ha mai letto, perché ha vissuto almeno un quarto di vita in meno. Il tempo della lettura è sempre stato per me tempo guadagnato, un'attività che riproduce la teoria dei mondi paralleli, in cui tutti siamo tutti gli altri e le possibilità sono infinite. 

A me dispiace, davvero, per quelli a cui manca questa esperienza, però pure vaffanculo, dai. Io volevo solo leggere, mica fare la guerra.

Giulia Blasi

Forty-Five Things I Learned in the Gulag

  1. The extreme fragility of human culture, civilization. A man becomes a beast in three weeks, given heavy labor, cold, hunger, and beatings.

  2. I understood why people do not live on hope — there isn’t any hope. Nor can they survive by means of free will — what free will is there? They live by instinct, a feeling of self-preservation, on the same basis as a tree, a stone, an animal.

  3. I discovered that the world should be divided not into good and bad people but into cowards and non-cowards. Ninety-five percent of cowards are capable of the vilest things, lethal things, at the mildest threat.

The pizza effect is a term used especially in religious studies and sociology for the phenomenon of elements of a nation or people’s culture being transformed or at least more fully embraced elsewhere, then re-imported back to their culture of origin, or the way in which a community’s self-understanding is influenced by (or imposed by, or imported from) foreign sources

Pizza effect

and there’s also part 2

What I learned, which is a simple idea, is that if you hold out with your vision a little bit, it’s like a cake being put in the oven. The scene doesn’t work immediately, you have to bake it a little bit. It’s unfair, when you begin to create a shot, say, or a scene, that it’s going to immediately be like those beautiful scenes in the movies. It needs a little bit of time to mature. It’s like taking the cake out without letting it be in the oven for more than a minute. Like, oh no, it’s terrible. So you have to be patient, and then slowly everyone starts to see that the ideas are right, or make the corrections. You have to battle the lack of confidence by giving the scene the chance to solidify.

Francis Ford Coppola

  1. Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.

  2. Do not think it worthwhile to produce belief by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.

  3. Never try to discourage thinking, for you are sure to succeed.

  4. When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.

  5. Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.

  6. Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.

  7. Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

  8. Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.

  9. Be scrupulously truthful, even when truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.

  10. Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool’s paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness.

Ten guidelines for nurturing a thriving democracy by Bertrand Russell

When you don’t fully understand a person’s context — what it feels like to be them every day, all the small annoyances and major traumas that define their life — it’s easy to impose abstract, rigid expectations on a person’s behavior.

Laziness Does Not Exist

General Thinking Tools: 9 Mental Models to Solve Difficult Problems