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In his fifth work of nonfiction, Mark Kurlansky turns his attention to a common household item with a long and intriguing history: salt. The only rock we eat, salt has shaped civilization from the very beginning, and its story is a glittering, often surprising part of the history of humankind. A substance so valuable it served as currency, salt has influenced the establishment of trade routes and cities, provoked and financed wars, secured empires, and inspired revolutions. Populated by colorful characters and filled with an unending series of fascinating details, Salt is a supremely entertaining, multi-layered masterpiece.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis on Apr 3, 2019 - 1 comment

Chef Samin Nosrat travels to Italy, Japan, Mexico, and California to learn about and demonstrate four of the fundamental building blocks of cooking, to teach and encourage home cooks how to think about their food beyond just following recipes. [more inside]
posted by dnash on Oct 29, 2018 - 16 comments

Can you pass the marshmallow test? You're a little kid. A marshmallow is placed on the table in front of you. You're told you can eat it any time, but if you wait a little while, you'll be given two marshmallows to eat. [more inside]
posted by eotvos on May 8, 2016 - 0 comments

The pundits we all listen to are no better at predictions than a "dart-throwing chimp," and they are routinely surpassed by normal news-attentive citizens. So Philip Tetlock reported in his 02005 book, Expert Political Judgement—and in a January 02007 SALT talk. It now turns out there are some people who are spectacularly good at forecasting, and their skills can be learned. Tetlock discovered them in the course of building winning teams for a tournament of geopolitical forecasting run by IARPA—Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity. His brilliant new book, SUPERFORECASTING: The Art and Science of Prediction, spells out the methodology the superforecasters developed. Like Daniel Kahneman's THINKING, FAST AND SLOW, the book changes how we think about thinking.
posted by eotvos on Nov 26, 2015 - 3 comments

Infrastructure decisions—and failures to decide—affect everything about a society for centuries. That long shadow, James Fallows points out, is what makes the decisions so difficult, because "We must choose among options whose consequences we can't fully anticipate." What we do know is that infrastructure projects are hugely disruptive and expensive in the short term, and neglecting to deal with infrastructure is even more disruptive and expensive in the long term. What would a healthy civilization do?
posted by eotvos on Nov 10, 2015 - 1 comment