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Who are we? A collective of writers, editors, and designers who love to cook and eat, bon vivants who aspire to never be boring on the palate or the page. We will be delivering, piping hot or pleasantly cool, a newsletter to your inbox twice weekly. One will contain a recipe from our brilliant squad culinaire; the other will deliver investigations, scoops, dispatches, postcards, love letters, decoder rings, instruction manuals, vibe reports, archival cuts, menu doodles, paeans, diatribes, and gossip from the front lines of the human appetite. We will not use AI, because it has no taste.

Like any good meal, our most basic aspiration is to fill an empty space. Food is the stuff of life, and over the last 20 years has gone from a niche concern (beyond the “everybody eats” of it all) to a pillar of popular culture. And yet we’ve seen the number of outlets devoted to exploring it with genuine curiosity and delight dwindle over that same period. The legacy brands largely botched the transition from print to digital, chasing the pipe dream of infinite glassy eyeballs, and diluted their missions in the process. In an attempt to reach everyone, they no longer speak to anyone. Least of all, us: people who really care about food and cooking. Now, 16 years after it was unceremoniously folded, Gourmet has become a symbol of a food media that once was, a name sighed nostalgically to evoke a delicious absence.

This new Gourmet will be a return to form in some ways—fascinating, well-written, eccentric, delicious—but we will rely directly on our readers to keep the lights on, and avoid the hierarchies, inequities, and bloat of the ancien régime. We would rather write for a cohort of fellow travelers, passionate home cooks and nerds, than chase the dream of infinite scale.

We’re obviously not the only ones seeking alternatives to the Old Ways of Doing Things. Countless individual writers and cooks have set out on their own with a Substack, TikTok, or YouTube channel to disseminate recipes and tell stories about food. We love what many of them are doing.

But not everybody wants to be a singer-songwriter—some of us want to be in a band. There is something about a shared effort, a wobbly but recognizable editorial voice, a publication that is a stage, not a microphone, that we missed, and wanted to try to make. There is something, in other words, about a magazine.

all Civiqs polls use the methodology outline here, which is essentially that they pull a statistically representative subset of that number of people mentioned every day and ask them survey questions

i don’t know if these are going to topple the current government, but they’re in effect the culmination of every protest movement of the past few years and they’re coming after a reformist was elected so it seems something is going to have to give here

this feels like a good example of how rentier capitalism is totally cooking everyone’s brains. what are we doing here

death toll is now at least 15 plus one of the shooters; it appears the duo were father and son and it is the son that is in custody

As reported by Gamemakers and GameSpark and translated by Automaton, Fontworks LETS discontinued its game licence plan at the end of November.

The expensive replacement plan – offered through Fontwork’s parent company, Monotype – doesn’t even provide local pricing for Japanese developers, and comes with a 25,000 user-cap, which is likely not workable for Japan’s bigger studios.

The problem is further compounded by the difficulties and complexities of securing fonts that can accurately transcribe Kanji and Katakana characters.

the interview in question, which opens with the following exchange:

Newton: You have joined us today to talk about this new age-gating policy that Roblox is rolling out to protect kids. And I think we should start by just talking about the scope of the problem here. What has led you to this point? And how do you think of the problem of predators on Roblox?

Baszucki: We think of it not necessarily just as a problem, but an opportunity as well. (emphasis mine) How do we allow young people to build, communicate and hang out together? How do we build the future of communication at the same time? So we, you know, we’ve been, I think in a good way, working on this ever since we started. And when we were — this was almost 18 or 19 years ago — when we first launched the company and we had just four of us sitting in a room, we were literally the moderators, like we would rotate all the time. And so fast-forward to where we are today, it’s just like every week, what is the latest tech? At the scale we’re at, 150 million daily actives, 11 billion hours a month, like what is the best way to keep pushing this forward? And as you correctly note, we’ve just started adding that we’re going to be using facial age estimation with A.I. to complement that.

this is a rare area where not only does AI modeling seem actively useful, but potentially outright better than most of what’s in the field currently; don’t expect this to replace conventional modeling, but based on its solid performance this year DeepMind is almost certainly going to be a name you hear a lot in weather modeling going forward

Serious question: don’t the artists have the ability to remove their music from Spotify if the deal is so bad?

yes, and more than a few prominent ones have such as King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard and Xiu Xiu, but for most artists it requires negotiation with your label (annoying, not ideal, you don’t have much leverage) and the willingness to take a potentially permanent revenue and recognition hit (Spotify has an estimated 700 million users) in an already difficult business

Children can still protest, fundraise, and engage in other forms of direct action. Children are not helpless or incapable.

you are shadowboxing with things i didn’t say and are the only person inserting the terms “helpless” or “incapable” here, but also once again: this is a game marketed at literal children. i stopped playing Roblox at 14 and doing some research i’m led to believe that would be quite old for a Roblox player. probably half or more of the player-base is 13 or younger. do you honestly expect the average 13-year-old (or younger) to be capable of anything other than performative activism relating to the genocide in Palestine?

Holding a pro-Palestine candlelight vigil in Roblox, for example, whilst there are still Palestinian civilians being murdered is a woefully inadequate use of time and effort if you actually want to help.

the people holding a vigil like this are probably literal children, because Roblox is a game for and overwhelmingly played by children, so i don’t understand the criticism here–it’s unlikely they can help in any material way you could as an adult, but they can be politicized into understanding who deserves their sympathy and who is perpetrating harm that must be ended, which such a rally helps affirm

please continue to “device hoard” folks

its founder, Georgiy Gongadze, was a late-90s crusader for freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and anti-corruption initiatives in Ukraine and was likely murdered at the behest of the state for his reporting. i think the name is fairly straightforward

Ukrainska Pravda has no relation at all to pravda.ru as far as i’m aware

now that it’s clear a universal basic income would empower workers (and therefore make it less necessary for people to work to live), it’s very funny to look back on the time period where its biggest boosters were technolibertarian, technocratic Silicon Valley types

yes, it’s not legally contingent on anything that happens in Texas

given that OpenAI has a vested interest in downplaying the severity of this problem (especially relative to its total number of users) i’d treat this as a lower bound of the scale of this exists at–pretty bad!

there’s some real deadpan gold in this one, such as the immaculate:

How do you feel about becoming a political lightning rod?

People occasionally just flip [me] off or whatever, but nobody’s come up to me and tried to make a statement about anything. Personally, it’s kind of dumb. It’s just a vehicle. So it’s ironic that it would even become a political statement, but nonetheless it is. [Editor’s note: Taylor was arrested and pleaded guilty to conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding in the January 6 attack on the Capitol. He was later pardoned by President Trump.]

here’s the website for this initiative:

https://www.eqrdtu.org/eqr-debtors-united