2026-04-26

Janteloven

Is the Scandi ethos of Janteloven broken?

I have been hearing this term for a while now, and I started to pay attention to it because I work for a Danish company nowadays.

Janteloven — or Law of Jante — is an informal, often misunderstood, set of rules taken from the satirical novel A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks (1933) by the Danish-Norwegian novelist Aksel Sandemose. The ten rules, all variations on not acting ostentatiously, were a critique of oppressive rural communities in Norway.

In the years since, Sandemose’s fictional creation has become conflated with broader ideas of Scandinavian equality, a regional brand of solidarity and togetherness recognised around the world. Viewed positively, Janteloven can be linked to Dugnad, the Norwegian tradition of communal volunteer work in parks and schools, while a lack of overt competition lessens loneliness. But it has also been criticised for stifling innovation. And if being transparent in one’s ambitions is frowned upon, one might be tempted into shady territory.

While the article above 👆🏽 doesn't go into what the exact laws are, I found this article which does.

What is Janteloven? The Law of Jante in Scandinavian Society

According to this article:

Janteloven’s social code dictates emphasis on collective accomplishments and well-being, and disdains focus on individual achievements. It is an underlying Scandinavian philosophy principle that applies across Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Iceland. Understanding Janteloven is paramount to understanding both the history and modern-day cultures of these countries.

The ten rules of Janteloven are:

• Don’t think you are anything special.
• Don’t think you are as good as we are.
• Don’t think you are smarter than we are.
• Don’t think you are better than we are.
• Don’t think you know more than we do.
• Don’t think you are more important than we are.
• Don’t think you are good at anything.
• Don’t laugh at us.
• Don’t think anyone cares about you.
• Don’t think you can teach us anything.

Random (but good) Advice from Ava

some things I've learned about dealing with people - by Ava

Being comfortable in large groups and parties is just a learned skill. For many years, I identified as someone who was very comfortable in one-on-one settings, but unsure of how to socialize in groups. Then I started hosting more parties and events for work and realized I’d mythologized this “comfortable in small groups/comfortable in big groups” thing way too much. It’s literally just a thing you teach yourself how to do. Assume a normal and friendly affect! Talk to people sincerely and unpretentiously! Circulate! If needed, break it down into a set of procedural steps—this is how I enter a conversation with a group of people I don’t know, this is how I leave the conversation when I’m bored.

would love to adopt this 👆🏽

Don’t let not texting someone back for a very long time stop you from doing the above.

Glennon Doyle: “Your job throughout your entire life, is to disappoint as many people as it takes to avoid disappointing yourself.”

2026-04-27

Marriage and Settling

Are on-screen relationships normalising settling? | Dazed

Very similar themes to the New Yorker podcast I logged last week.

What is marriage for? It’s an interesting question in our day and age, when marriage feels less and less necessary. Women are no longer as dependent on men for financial security (although many still are), and there is far less social stigma around having children or living together outside of wedlock. We also know that a significant amount of marriages don't last, with approximately 42 per cent in the UK projected to end in divorce before their 25th year. So why are we still so drawn to the fantasies of this institution?     

This is one of the underlying questions of season two of award-winning Netflix drama Beef. Several answers are explored through the series’ three main couples: Josh and Lindsay (Oscar Isaac and Carey Mulligan), Ashley and Austin (Cailee Spaeny and Charles Melton), and Chairwoman Park and Dr Kim (Youn Yuh-jung and Song Kang-ho). In episode six, Chairwoman Park, bogged down by efforts to cover up her husband’s culpability in a patient’s death, speaks candidly about why she married him: “This is such a headache! The whole reason I remarried was because he was fun. Someone to eat with. To travel with. That’s all.”

People get married for all kinds of reasons: family and societal pressures, visas, economic and financial security, and, of course, love. But one of the most common motivations is the simple fact that people don’t want to be alone. A 2024 survey commissioned by Forbes Advisor, which polled 1,000 divorced Americans, found that companionship was the second most common reason for getting married, with financial security first and love third. On Reddit, marriage forums are full of questions about marriage and loneliness, with one user questioning whether the idea that “you should never marry out of fear of ending up alone” makes any sense. “Isn’t [that] really the only reason to get married?” they ask. “If people seek stability and companionship, they get married.”

In a climactic exchange in the final episode, Chairwoman Park offers a jaundiced view of love under capitalism: “Love lives in this system. All relationships exist in this system. They are all the same, another way to serve the self.” Marriage is supposed to save you from loneliness. It is supposed to grant you rights and signal to the world that you are lovable, desirable, chosen.

I don’t want to spoil the ending of Beef – it is messy, complicated, depressing and unsatisfying, in ways both good and bad. But it shows that while marriage is often an attempt to ameliorate the loneliness of being alive, it can sometimes make that loneliness even worse. It is only in allowing ourselves to be seen and known, helped and supported by others in our best and worst moments, that we can, as Lindsay tells Ashley, “finally give our existence some semblance of meaning.” This might also teach us how to genuinely love one another: not by force, or out of desperation, but truly by choice.

Geopolitics and Economy

Came across a couple of podcasts related to this theme.

Fertilizer 101 How the war with Iran and Hormuz crisis is upending fertilizer supply chains. However, beyond just the current news cycle, this episode goes really deep into how the fertilizer supply chain is organized.

• Episode: Fertilizer 101 - The Jacob Shapiro Podcast
• Transcript: The Jacob Shapiro Podcast - Fertilizer 101 | Transcript Reader

Rare Earths and China Traces the history of the discovery of these rare earths and how eventually China came to dominate them.

• Episode: Battlefield rare earths: How the U.S. lost to China - YouTube
• Transcript: Planet Money - Battlefield rare earths: How the U.S. lost to China | Transcript Reader

2026-04-28

Most People Dont Have a Type

Most People Don’t Have a ‘Type’ #dating #relationships

This is not an uncommon trajectory. Many people think that they have a set type, and that all they need for eternal bliss is to find someone who matches it. When people peruse dating profiles, they’re often looking for someone who has specific interests, qualities, or hobbies. But according to a growing body of relationship research, many people end up marrying someone with few of their must-haves and a lot of “haves” they didn’t think they desired. A person might say that they’re looking for a partner who’s funny and conscientious, but then end up in a happy relationship with someone who is neither of those things. “People don’t know what they want,” Samantha Joel, a psychologist at Western University in Ontario who studies relationships, told me, “and people don’t know what they’re going to like until they meet someone.”

That said, shared values do seem to matter to people: A 2020 report found that only 3 percent of American adults were married to someone from the opposite political party, for instance. Eastwick says that this happens because so many people either immediately screen out or simply never interact with a potential date who has opposing values—a hard-core Democrat might live in a neighborhood populated mostly with other Democrats, for example, or swipe left on all Republicans on Tinder. But if two people get together not knowing that they’re political opposites and the relationship takes off for other reasons, they might compartmentalize their differences or move closer to each other’s ideology. (“He’s probably going to become a libertarian,” Eastwick said, referring to the hypothetical Republican.)

The problem is: The way people actually become attracted to each other can be hard to predict, Joel said. Not even scientists who have dedicated their life to studying chemistry can totally pin down its essence. Do you like the guy from Tinder and the joke he cracked about The Big Lebowski just because you were in an unusually good mood on the day you met up with him? If you’d been in a rotten mood, would you have liked him (and his stupid joke) less?

…

All of this might help explain why many people who use dating apps struggle to find a long-term partner. With their emphasis on photos and profiles, Eastwick writes, “apps cater to our ideas about what we like much better than they cater to what we actually like.” Chemistry grows, and love is built on shared experiences and memories, but the apps tend to keep people trapped in small talk. Many users find themselves swiping endlessly without ever meeting up with someone. What’s more, Eastwick told me, apps can encourage people to judge their dates too quickly—and perhaps move on prematurely. “You might have a middling first impression of somebody,” he said, “but then you meet them again, and you end up really liking them.” The apps, however, present so many options that if a date is “anywhere south of great,” people may be inclined to hastily decide “I’m not gonna do the second date.”

2026-04-29

Post-romanticism

Podcast: 🆕 Never Post! Why No One Wants to Hard Launch Their Man #relationships #dating

Transcript: Never Post - Why No One Wants to Hard Launch Their Man | Transcript Reader

The whole podcast is worth listening to, but this term "post-romanticism" caught my eye. This is probably the first time I am encountering it.

There's a cheery fatalism here. If the marketplace of love offered you a freedom of endless choices, then this new mindset offered freedom from choosing it all. And Carolina explained to me that this ushered in a new kind of dating landscape. Some refer to it as heterofatalism or heteropessimism. But in our conversation, Carolina called it post romanticism.

This post romantic vibe or mood is characterized by sort of a loss of faith in romanticism, of a disbelief in romanticism or at least a performative disbelief in the romantic plot, which is seen not only as a myth, but also as a potentially danger of oppressive one.

Post romanticism trades the emotionally ruinous experience of situationships and ghosting and gaslighting for a completely sanitized view of dating that does not allow for any risk of getting hurt at all. The simplest solution would be to never date men ever. But under post romanticism, you can date. You can have sex. You can have fun if you want to.

But you do so with a kind of intense vigilance that borders on the hypochondriac.

think what is at stake, it's a reversal of the romantic idea of love. Roland Barthes in the Fragments of a Lovers Discourse says that the lover, the 1 who love wants to be loved back so that to become perfect. It is the love I receive that makes me perfect. Whereas in the post romantic discourse, you have to be perfect in order to deserve to be loved.

I don't think there is ever a world where you will dine at the table of post romanticism and leave with your belly full. It's a crash diet of avoidance to vulnerability, a commitment to your own misery and the expected misery of others as if it's an intellectual win. But all it really does is make everything so much harder for everyone.

Tech bros and Gutka

The Tech Bros Are All In on Zyn

Everytime I hear Zyn, my mind goes to Gutka.

Gutka is a type of betel quid and chewing tobacco preparation made of crushed areca nut (also called betel nut), tobacco, catechu, paraffin wax, slaked lime (calcium hydroxide) and sweet or savory flavourings, in India, Pakistan, other Asian countries, and North America.

The article is kinda wild.

Entrepreneur Garrett Campbell has a 6-mg “cool mint” Zyn tucked under his lip at all times during his mammoth 15-hour workdays, aside from when he is eating.

“I was always very against nicotine,” says the software company founder. The 26-year-old saw his peers using nicotine pouches at college, when they first emerged as a potential productivity-boosting hack, and considered it a “degenerate thing to do.”

But then all of his fellow founders started fueling themselves with nicotine pouches, of which the Philip Morris International–owned Zyn is the market leader. The company distributed 794 million cans in the US in the last financial year, a 37 percent increase over the previous year. Now, Campbell says “every single one” of his friends that runs a company does so with a nicotine pouch in their mouth.

“The brand marketer person [is] doing a hell of a job,” says Campbell, who has slicked-back dark hair and usually wears plain T-shirts in black, white, or gray. He also has ADHD and sold a sales recruitment company last year for a “good chunk of change.”

Nicotine’s core mechanism hasn’t changed in the journey from puff to pouch; the compound still floods the brain with dopamine. Dependence develops quickly, but for some users in the tech sector, the rush of productivity balances out the risk of dependency.

But how “clean” really are the pouches? A gulf is swiftly emerging between nicotine advocates who use the pouches and those who use toothpicks, lozenges, pills, patches, or sprays. Biohacking guru and author Dave Asprey describes nicotine as being close to a perfect psychotropic. “If you're under-aroused, it brings you up; over-aroused, it brings you down,” he says.

…

Nicotine is perhaps the only “biohacking tool” that encounters such strident opposition in other circles. Fellow biohacker Bryan Johnson is against nicotine entirely, and not only due to his claims that the pouches can cause gum recession, oral lesions, and irritation.

2026-04-30

This Japanese art of breaking from routine

This Japanese art of breaking from routine will do wonders for your mind, on cherishing life and more

Life is meant to be experienced, not endured.

If everything feels predictable or mechanical, I wake myself up with awe or an element of surprise. I give myself a break from monotony to bring wonder back. And keep life from becoming stagnant.

The Japanese call it datsuzoku.

Datsu means “to escape”, “to flee” and zoku can be translated as “routine” or “convention”. It’s a practice of breaking out of routine, “escaping from the usual” or “stepping outside the ordinary.” Also of freeing yourself from patterns that take away that “alive” feeling of being human.

Datsuzoku is all about surprise.

Freedom from the usual. The kind of break that shocks you into awareness. It’s not just unwinding; it’s reconnecting with a side of life that’s alive, unpredictable. Breaking patterns keeps the mind alert and excited.

Investing

The Robots Make the Predictions - Bloomberg

I wrote last week that, in investing, “There’s no magic, no dark matter, no other source of gains. Everyone’s gains come from (1) economic growth and (2) other people’s losses.” In the aggregate, everyone gets the market return, which comes from allocating capital to economic growth. Some people get more and others get less, but they necessarily cancel each other out. People invest anyway, though, because allocating capital to economic growth is a good long-term proposition.

Prediction markets don’t have that. People put $1 into a prediction market event contract, and at resolution it pays out $1 to the winner. There is no investment in economic growth, no source of long-term returns; everyone’s winnings come from someone else’s losses.

2026-05-01

Maladaptive Frugality

Maladaptive frugality - Herbert Lui

When you default to the lowest cost option without considering the drawbacks, procrastinating or hesitating on spending, or guilt tripping yourself about an essential expense or making a recoverable mistake, you’re engaging in maladaptive frugality. 

The most useful thing you can do is be mindful of it and try to draw yourself into the present moment. As Tim Ferriss asks, “What does your last year—not your childhood beliefs—tell you about where you might invest more for a higher quality of life?”

When you make frugality your servant, it can offer you freedom. When you make frugality your master—maladaptive frugality—it traps you and limits your possibilities.

2026-05-02

The Permanent Underclass

Silicon Valley Is Bracing for a Permanent Underclass

Whether you talk with engineers, venture capitalists, founders or managers, or with doomers, accelerationists, lefties or libertarians, the so-called San Francisco consensus on the impact of A.I. for workers is bleak. Many are convinced that advanced A.I. will soon surpass human capabilities. This would produce tremendous growth and scientific achievement, but it would also displace millions of jobs as fewer humans are needed to make the economy run. The technology will depress economic mobility and exacerbate inequality, while ferrying power and wealth to the A.I. companies and the existing owners of capital.

Some even believe that artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., will create a permanent underclass. In the United States, the term “underclass” gained currency in the 1960s to describe the factory workers left behind by the postwar automation boom. Today, it has become repopularized as a viral term for a theory that posits that people have a limited window of time to build wealth before A.I. and robotics are advanced enough to fully replace human labor. At that point, we will get frozen in our current class positions: The rich will be able to deploy superintelligent machines to do their bidding, and everyone else will be rendered useless and unemployable, left to live off welfare scraps.

Has taste in music been hijacked?

Has taste in music been hijacked?

In March, two of the co-founders of digital marketing agency Chaotic Good sat down for a live podcast recording with the music trade publication Billboard to discuss their company’s strategies for making songs go viral. Their approach, they explained, is designed to manipulate social media algorithms using thousands of fake accounts. They specialise in “trend simulation” — creating hundreds of posts, with tracks by their clients playing in the background, to manufacture the feeling that a song is everywhere.

This is also known as paid-for “user-generated content”, or UGC, and is increasingly common in today’s online media. “We can drive impressions on anything,” one of the co-founders explains in the podcast. “At this point, we know how to go viral.” Chaotic Good also runs what it calls “narrative campaigns”, where it purports to shape public sentiment around an artist by saturating algorithmic feeds and flooding comment sections with positive reactions. An artist playing on Saturday Night Live, for example, might hire the company to ensure that when clips from the performance are shared online, there will be hundreds of positive comments posted by Chaotic Good, perhaps from the large collection of phones in their office.

Match

The Real Truth About Expensive Matcha #matcha #cafe #education

This is a succinct but really good explanation of what makes matcha special among the green tea varieties.

Full transcript below. Other videos from this creator are worth checking out as well (I really loved this one about nail cutters.)

This 1oz tin costs $100 for some weird green dust that your favorite influencer goons to sleep over. But why does a powder made from the exact same plant as your Lipton tea bag cost more than a prime steak dinner? This is episode 8 of Chasing Beauty, and today we're looking at the story behind matcha.

Matcha originates from the Camellia sinensis plant. If you pick the leaves and let them fully oxidize, you get black tea. If you steam them immediately to stop that oxidation, you get green tea. Matcha is actually green tea with a very specific kind of manipulation. It's born in the dark. 20 to 30 days before harvest, farmers cover the tea bushes with black netting or straw, effectively removing 90% of sunlight from the plant. This forces the chemical composition of the plant to shift: higher chlorophyll, brighter color, and a sweeter, more umami profile.

The highest grade of matcha, ceremonial, is typically pulled from the first spring harvest — the cleanest, softest growth of the year. Once picked, the leaves are steamed, air-dried, and then de-veined and de-stemmed. If you've ever wondered why cheap matcha tastes like literal grass and dirt, it's likely because the whole leaf was tossed in. High-grade ceremonial matcha uses only the meat of the leaf, called tencha. It's the culinary equivalent of a filet mignon versus a hot dog.

To get that ultra-fine, silk-like texture, the tencha is ground between two granite stones. This is not a high-speed industrial process. If you go too fast, the friction cooks the matcha and ruins the delicate flavor profile. It takes a traditional stone mill roughly 1 hour to produce just 30g of matcha. This results in a powder so fine it doesn't dissolve in water — it suspends, creating a frothy, creamy beverage that hits your tongue with a wave of umami.

But matcha has another secret: L-theanine. It's packed with this unique amino acid that promotes relaxation without the drowsiness. When paired with matcha's high caffeine content, you don't get the coffee jitters. It's a 4-hour steady burn instead of a 30-minute spike and then a crash 4 hours later.

Next time you see that goon whisking their bright green bowl on your feed, now you know. They're drinking time-honored craftsmanship, 20 days of darkness, and an hour of stone-cold patience. But they honestly probably have no idea. Peace.

Women Drone Pilots in the Ukrainian Army

‘I’m fighting two wars. One against the Russians. And one inside myself.’

Hidden in the inner pages of Life and Arts section of this weekend's FT was a long and beautiful story about women drone pilots in the Ukranian army. Its main focus is a woman drone pilot who goes my the codename Multik.

Some weeks later, on a chilly February evening, I met Multik at a chic Lebanese restaurant in Kyiv. Yana Viktorivna Zalevska does not conform to any archetype of a modern soldier. She’s 25, about five-foot-four, lean and strong, with the posture of a trained dancer. Blade-straight dark hair frames her oval face. Her blue-grey eyes stare piercingly from behind prescription lenses in oversized hipster frames. At that first meeting, I noticed a deliberate femininity in how she presented herself. She wore matching pink athleisure wear with clean white sneakers, a nose ring, thick eyeliner, lacquered Kiko Milano lip gloss. Her manicured fingernails were filed to points and painted a deep ruby red. If “Multik” was built for the front line, it seemed Yana was meant to blend into the world behind it.

A few times during our conversation, she noted how odd it had begun to feel for her to be so far from the front, and I sensed her anxiety as she twisted uncomfortably in her seat. The tables around us filled up. To one, where a large family was sitting, a waiter brought out a cake and half of the restaurant began singing “Happy Birthday” to a young woman. Not for the only time, Zalevska excused herself to smoke outside. She confessed she felt like the war had split her personality in two. “There is Multik, who is definitely around more now,” she said, referring to the front-line persona who emerges when she dons her uniform and straps on her metallic-red pilot goggles. “And there is Yana . . . Yana wouldn’t do what Multik does, you know? She wouldn’t . . . No way in hell. But Multik — she loves to punish her enemies.”

To that end, Multik is in the process of forming an all-women FPV drone unit within Ukraine’s 141st Separate Mechanized Brigade. She calls her crew of half a dozen pilots and trainees the Amazon Banshees, after the warrior daughters of Ares, the Greek god of war, and a female spirit in Irish folklore who portends imminent death.

Zalevska’s mind has been tuned by war to function in conditions of survival and extreme stress. “My psyche has been protecting me like this for a long time,” she told me. Over three long interviews with her in Kyiv and closer to the front line, as well as with her parents and several of her sisters-in-arms, I would come to learn that she often speaks about war in this way, as if to keep it contained, away from her civilian life, where she hopes one day to live unburdened by it.

“You could say I am fighting two wars,” she told me. “One against the fucking Russians, and one inside myself.”

The videos are a key propaganda tool, instilling fear and paranoia in the enemy while boosting morale at home. For Kyiv, they also serve a practical purpose. Working towards its strategic goal of killing or catastrophically wounding 50,000 Russians each month, Ukraine’s defence ministry has gamified the war with a macabre point system. For each confirmed kill captured on video, military units earn points that can be exchanged for new equipment through an Amazon-like platform called Brave1 Market. Killing a Russian soldier may be worth 12 points, while wounding one might earn eight. Eliminating a Russian FPV drone pilot is around 25 points.

There is a physical distance between FPV drone pilots and the killing machines they control, but the psychological impact of directing violence on another human being, even one’s enemy, is heavy. And because of their effectiveness, drone pilots themselves are high-value targets, further increasing the stress they are under. “Right now our pilots are really burning out,” Zalevska admitted. She couldn’t estimate how many ask for mental health leave, but some military psychologists and doctors told me there are “dozens” ordered to take leave each month due to burnout, acute stress and symptoms consistent with post-traumatic stress disorder. Ukraine’s Ministry of Defence and the General Staff of the Armed Forces did not respond to my requests for official information and comment. They typically do not disclose information about the number of troops struggling with mental health disorders.

Zalevska’s superior officers have approached her about taking a break in the past, but she pushed back. She wants to see the war out, however long that takes, from the thick of it. She says Multik is still needed as long as the Russians remain hell-bent on destroying her country.

circularity of need

friendship is a series of affordances offered and accepted #relationships

Real closeness requires a circularity of need.

Those of us with a hyper-independent, high-functioning bent often find it hard to want from other people, but are equally happy to give. We work towards a kind of frictionless existence where we give maximum utility to others but need zero maintenance ourselves. We want to be the sun, but the sun is a lonely thing. It sits at the centre of a system, but is not a part of it.

When I refuse to need anything, I’m signalling to friends that there is no shape in my life that they’re required to fill. The circularity of need is the realisation that my messy middle is the gift of agency to a friend. Inviting them in is handing them a tool and saying, “your presence here can change the outcome”. The question of much to ask of them is always a gamble, and one I can’t offer sure-footed advice about. But what I do know is this: To be loved is to be seen, but to be known is to be needed.

Why I Don't Vibe Code

Why I Don’t Vibe Code

Lots of reasons listed, but I liked this one.

Weirdly, nobody seems more miserable than LLM boosters. I might be more swayed if developers were using their newfound productivity gains to finally live that 4-hour workweek that nerds were pretending to idolize 10 years ago. But perversely, it seems like many in Silicon Valley are outsourcing work to the AI agents and then using their newfound spare time to do even more work. Instead of using their time for relaxation or art or joy, they’re embracing 9-9-6 work schedule and a hyper-quantified workplace that would make even Frederick Taylor blanch in horror. It’s possible that the LLM revolution will finally come for me and my job, but I’d rather not work myself into the grave first.

Hany Farid on the erosion of shared reality

Transcript: The Machinist - Hany Farid on the erosion of shared reality in the age of deepfakes | Transcript Reader

The whole lecture is fascinating, and worth hearing (or reading the transcript of) in full. But this is the bit that struck me especially. It is great to get validation from a researcher/expert on deepfakes on how mainstream news is far from irrelevant.

Audience Member

Yeah. You were talking about social media and being very concerned about anything you see there or digest from there. What about regular media? How accurate is stuff that we're seeing on networks and

Hany Farid

Good. I think that's the right question to ask. So here's what I can tell you. Everybody makes mistakes. Mainstream media makes mistakes.

The New York Times, The Post, everybody makes mistakes. But here's the difference. First of all, they're trying to get it right and you can't say that about Elon Musk and social media. People aren't necessarily trying and there's no consequence for getting it wrong every single day. So I have much, much more confidence in what I read in the large networks than I do what I see on social media because first of all, they have standards, they have ethics, they have consequences.

They have an unbelievably smart people who work incredibly hard every day to bring you reliable information. Do they get it right a 100% of the time? Of course not. Alright. So, what do you do?

You don't just pick one newspaper. You read three of them and you wait. You don't need to get your news in the first 30 seconds of something happening for God's sake. This isn't a race. We're not sprinting.

Take your time. And by the way, you got to read past the first paragraph. This is for the young people in the audience. You know, TikTok is not going to give you news about what's happening in Gaza or in Iran. You got to like you got to dig in.

This is really complicated and it's hard. And you got to reserve judgment. You got to keep your biases aside. But do I think they do better than social media? A 100 times better.

A hundred times better. I would much rather get my information from BBC, NPR, New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal than anywhere else. I feel like I'm definitely better informed about what is going on in the world.

Food Noise

When did food noise get so loud?

TIL about "food noise". It's kinda fascinating because it seems like a portal to a whole subculture, that I simply cannot relate to. How can people be okay with this?

Kate “absolutely loves” watching food content on social media. “Sometimes I’ll find myself deep in a rabbit hole, watching an influencer eat six vegan pastries in Taiwan or something,” she says. Sometimes, though, that kind of content can trigger intense, incessant cravings. “I’ll realise that all day tomorrow, I’m going to really struggle with wanting something sugary, because I’ll be thinking about the video I watched.” The 32-year-old says that, at times, her relationship to food has been “a very difficult thing” to navigate, adding that she experienced binge eating disorder in her 20s. While she now has “more of a handle” on things, “the deluge of advertising” doesn’t make it easy. “It’s become immeasurably more difficult to resist thinking about food,” she says.

Kate has a point. Today, images of food are everywhere – not only in traditional advertising spaces like billboards and TV, but all over social media too. Platforms like Instagram, TikTok and YouTube are saturated with pictures and videos of food designed and edited to appear extra indulgent: think Wingstop mukbangs with creators drenching their tenders in ranch, or the endless hype around limited-edition sweet treats (like M&S’s ‘speckled egg cookies’). At the same time, as the cost of living creeps ever higher, many of us are finding it harder to resist small luxuries like Uber Eats deliveries or expensive chocolate, a phenomenon sometimes referred to as the “lipstick effect”.

At the same time, Brown says, “consumer culture has intensified the constant availability of food. Digital platforms, delivery apps, and targeted promotions mean that food is now accessible and promoted 24 hours a day. The result is an environment where food cues are not only everywhere, but also highly personalised and difficult to opt out of.”

Experts agree that these drugs are far from a silver bullet. According to John Warner, emeritus professor of paediatrics at Imperial College London, using Ozempic to treat food noise is akin to “shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted”. It is ultimately a short-term sticking plaster for an issue with much deeper roots; as Higgs says, while Ozempic’s appetite-dulling effects “can be helpful at an individual level, [they do] not change the broader context in which eating takes place.” In Brown’s view, “addressing food noise in a meaningful way requires reconsidering the scale and nature of food marketing, product placement, and digital food environments.”

None of this is to say that all food-related content on social media is an insidious ploy to sell highly processed foods or extreme dietary trends. Many foodie influencers have helped viewers embrace intuitive eating and normalised nourishing yourself across a broad range of food groups (case in point: Maddi Neye-Swift’s popular series “carbs before a night out are a must”, where the creator shares videos of her favourite stomach-lining dinners). But equally, many creators do push distinctly _un_balanced ideas about food. Warner’s suggestion? “Be critical of all you read and hear” online. Which, really, is sound advice for any kind of content — food-related or otherwise.

Friendship and the art of hanging out

I fear I’m doing friendship wrong: why do we lose the art of just hanging out? | Carolin Würfel

There’s a black and white image of the photographer and war correspondent Lee Miller and her friend Tanja Ramm. The two are having breakfast in bed at Miller’s studio in Paris, casually reading newspapers. Their faces are framed by untamed hair and they’re dressed in cotton shirts, with coffee cups in front of them. The image, captured in 1931, is quiet and intimate. They share a blanket, their arms touch. There’s no rush, no urgency. It’s a scene about love but, above all, it’s about friendship.

When was the last time I lay in bed with a friend like that? For most of us, it was probably during school or university, when staying over or crashing at someone’s house was a regular occurrence – sometimes a necessity, but mostly just part of our routines. It kept us close. Staying in a friend’s room or apartment felt like being on an island – safe, cosy and fun. It was about whispering, giggling and sharing secrets. And sometimes it was about nothing at all except being together.

As an adult whose usual habitat is a large European city, when I meet friends now, it starts with a text that goes something like: “Hey, how are you? Would love to see you. Maybe we can grab dinner or drinks?”

Then the struggle begins to find a date. It’s a messy process, especially in Berlin. Days pass. Sometimes, weeks. Finally, if we are lucky, the day arrives and we meet – at a restaurant or a bar, somewhere public, where we’re expected to behave, sit properly and engage in “polite” chat. We update each other on our projects, gossip a little, sigh, complain about circumstances at home or work and then we part ways.

Sometimes, a few hours later, or the next morning, I’ll send or receive a message: “I’d missed you. It was so good to see you. We should do this more often.” An honest message, but an empty one at the same time. Because we won’t do it more often. We’ll continue rushing through our daily lives and responsibilities, fitting each other in where we can.

How close can you really be to someone you only see for a couple of hours every now and then? What can you actually share? In these meetups, we present condensed versions of ourselves. So much of who we really are stays in the dark. We talk. And talking is the only way to feel connected and to bond.