Six Ideas That Made Us Think

1. Here’s the Beef

When the campaigns arrived for Burger King’s Impossible Whopper and Beyond Meat’s “find it in the meat aisle,” a rush of regulatory activity followed. The Wall Street Journal explores how “the modern meaning of meat” is changing, and how farm-based meat producers have begun defending their turf:

Early meat alternatives weren’t much of a threat. The target market for tofu, tempeh, seitan and veggie burgers was vegans, vegetarians and hippies. Tofurky had the decorum to say what it was: a self-ridiculing impostor happy even to have a spot at the Thanksgiving table. The claims made by Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat are far brasher. They call themselves meat, they sell burgers at Burger King and sliders at White Castle, and they jostle for space in the meat aisle at the supermarket.

The evangelists for meat alternatives are fighting back, at least rhetorically: “The meat industry attempting to define meat as something that comes from a slaughtered animal is every bit as absurd as trying to say that your phone is not a phone because it does not plug into a wall anymore.”

2. The Critic

For more than 50 years, John Simon was a controversial, frequently offensive, but never forgettable drama and movie critic. Following his death at 94, Vulture’s Christopher Bananos described Simon as the Hannibal Lecter of Broadway. “When he saw something he hated, he eviscerated it and ate its liver, and those meals were not infrequent.” Bananos compiles a list of Simon’s most damning reviews, including this one:

When, some years ago, I saw Nilo Cruz’s Dancing on Her Knees at the Public, it felt like the worst play ever. Cruz’s latest, Two Sisters and a Piano,again at the Public, is a step forward; it feels like the second-worst play ever.

Also worthwhile is Owen Glieberman’s assessment in Variety: “For Simon, toxic negativity wasn’t a tool for reviewing an art form; itwas the art form.”

3. Needed: More Gentrification

Jason Segedy’s blog, Notes from the Underground, has become the go-to source for contrarian thinking on urban planning. His latest post argues that the greatest threat to low-income city dwellers isn’t gentrification, but economic decline:

The most common form of American neighborhood change, by far, is poverty concentration, rather than wealth concentration. Low-income residents are exposed to neighborhood decline far more than gentrification. In fact, there was no metropolitan area in the nation where a low-income person was more likely to live in an economically expanding neighborhood than in an economically declining neighborhood.

Another perspective: Harper’s has published a long, colorful memoir on trying to live poor in San Francisco.

4. The Coming Electric Scooter Crash

Now that electric scooters have overrun Paris, resident and tech commentator Frederic Filloux is fed up. He sorts through the abundant research showing that the “micromobility economy” makes no sense:

Micromobility is not an innovation. It is a bad remedy to a failure of the public apparatus – at the state or the municipal level – unable to develop adequate infrastructure despite opulent fiscal bases…Like in every other city where they are deployed, scooters are also an economic disaster. There is simply no sustainable model for shared micromobility at this point.

Look for his chart on scooter fleets: it shows a loss of $486 per scooter over its lifetime.

5. New Frontiers in Phishing

Internet security firm Kaspersky has published its latest quarterly report on internet phishing. It finds a significant uptick in attacks on corporate email, Amazon Prime subscribers, and university students. Scams through YouTube ads are growing more sophisticated:

Scammers continue to exploit traditional schemes on new platforms, and Q3 was a bumper quarter in this regard. For instance, YouTube ads appeared offering the viewer the chance to earn a lot of quick and easy money. The video explained to users that they had to take a survey and provide personal details, after which they would receive a payout or a gift from a large company, etc. To add credibility, fake reviews from supposedly “satisfied customers” were posted under the video. What’s more, the enthusiastic bot-generated comments did not appear all in one go, but were added gradually to look like a live stream.

Coming quick to politics: deep fake videos. Check out this fabricatedvideo of President Nixon delivering a speech announcing the death of the Apollo 11 astronauts.

6. Free Trade, Empire, and The Economist

Gavin Jacobson’s review essay on a new history of The Economistargues that "the newspaper" might be the most influential publication of all time:

over in the chancelleries of Europe, admired on US university campuses, wielded in the business class lounges of Asia and endorsed by Steve Bannon, theEconomist is singular both in its commercial reach and ideological self-assurance. Former subscribers range across the political and intellectual gamut from Marx to Mussolini, and have also included Woodrow Wilson, Friedrich Hayek, John Maynard Keynes, Franklin D Roosevelt and Hitler’s finance minister. Boasting a print circulation of 859,000, no journal has remained so resolute in its status as the ur-mag of Anglophone liberalism.

Websites Worth Reading

Food Supply Chain Map: Breakthrough study of how American food moves from farm to table

Suspicious Russian Deaths: USA Today’s spellbinding list of unexplained deaths

Narwhal Tusks: Must-read after London terrorist attack

Feeds We Follow

@Alex: Breakdown of WeWork investment thesis

@USA_vs_UK: Anglo-isms

@oren_cass: Manhattan Institute analyst of labor force