Six Ideas That Made Us Think

1. Are Americans Really Addicted to Food?

Matthew Rees demonstrates how to write an excellent book review. His subject is Michael Moss’s Hooked, which argues that the American food industry engineers addictive foods by making them high in sugar and fat. Rees reviews Moss’s key claims, then quietly casts doubt on his thesis:

Moss portrays individuals as having little or no capacity for reasoned judgment or for controlling their desires and replacing bad habits with good ones. It’s an uncomfortable fact that many Americans recognize they’re eating unhealthy food and continue to do so for reasons other than addiction. Mr. Moss briefly mentions research showing that only 15% of us meet the food-addict criteria.

2. God Save the Boring Queen

In the wake of Oprah’s interview with Prince Harry and the Duchess of Sussex, it’s hard to quarrel with The Economist’s stiff upper lip:

Being a royal is about serving an institution. It does not work for those who crave individual attention. The job requires self-effacement, at which the queen, who has not said a single interesting thing in public in her 70 years on the throne, has excelled. That’s not because she is a boring person, but because she understands the demands of the job. The Duchess of Cambridge, aka Ms Middleton, is, similarly, brilliantly bland.

3. The Revolution Inside Your Company

Stephen Miles and two co-authors analyze what employee activism might mean for large companies. They conclude that while no company can ignore social issues, leadership should tread lightly:

The elevation of non-workplace issues can be distracting to employees and reduce productivity. It can alienate employees who disagree with the proposed stances of their colleagues or wish to keep social and political issues separate from work. From a commercial standpoint, it can impact corporate or brand reputation and harm customer perception of the company’s value proposition, leading to lower purchase intent. To this end, a 2018 survey on CEO activism found that customers are more likely to stop using a product of a company whose CEO takes a stance that they disagree with than they are to start using a product whose CEO takes a stance they agree with.

A post-2020 update of the survey would be in order.

4. How Competitors View Google’s Advertising

Daring Fireball, a closely followed Apple fan-site by John Gruber, assesses Google’s enormous role in advertising, concluding it “just doesn’t feel justified that Google should be involved with this much of the world’s advertising spend.” Gruber continues:

A world where Google sees, say, 25 percent of the world’s ad spending sounds like an amazing business, in principle. Unless you’re comparing it to the world we’re in today, where they see 50 percent – then 25 percent looks like a collapse. Privacy-invasive user tracking is to Google and Facebook what carbon emissions are to fossil fuel companies – a form of highly profitable pollution no one in the mainstream cared about, but now, seemingly suddenly, care about very much.

5. Armed, Dangerous, and Fearless

Patti Morton, who passed away earlier this month, earned the nickname Pistol Packin’ Patti soon after she became the first female security officer at the U.S. embassy in Saigon. Morton set the tone when Marines started preparing to evacuate Vietnam:

A male supervisor thought the situation was too dangerous for a woman and ordered Morton to leave the embassy several weeks before the evacuation. Morton resisted, so the male supervisor demanded the medical officer order her to leave. Morton once again stood her ground and asked for a physical exam, insisting the results be put in writing and attached to her medical order to leave. “I had the physical examination because I did not want women, forever after, to have to carry the burden of people saying, ‘See, women can’t stand up to an emergency crisis situation,’” said Morton. “I passed the physical with flying colors.”

6. The Science of Progress

Noah Smith conducts a wide-ranging interview with Patrick Collison, the co-founder of digital payment behemoth Stripe and possibly the most interesting modern CEO. Much of the discussion centers on why technology is now advancing so slowly:

The avionics you see in cockpits are bafflingly primitive because it's so hard, slow, and expensive to get the FAA to approve new technology. As a result, pretty much every pilot flies with an iPad running sophisticated flight planning software – their connection to a world that the FAA doesn't encumber.

Websites Worth Reading

Excel Never Dies: History of spreadsheets

What to Eat at the Master’s: Timeless food at Augusta National

Best Courses on Coursera: NY Mag’s collection of student recommendations

Feeds We Follow

@50YearsAgoLive: Re-living 1971

@JohnSandoe: London bookshop

@John__Phipps: Cultural essayist