PS: Follow me on Twitter!
*************************
Thirteen ways to make Hummus. I'm loving the "Cheater's Classic" variation. (Shape, via Joy Manning) Related: Don't forget Casual Kitchen's popular Hummus Blogroll!
My restaurant went "tipless" and our service only got better. Read critically. (Slate, via Bing Wu)
Here's how calorie counts can backfire on policy makers. Badly. (Washington Post, via Rich Litvin)
Why do people insist on believing that things are getting worse? (Mostly Harmless) Bonus post: How I Stopped Eating Food (h/t: Alosha's Kitchen)
Keeping a time log changed my life... and fixed my attitude. From the blog of the author of 168 Hours.
(Laura Vanderkam) Human fertility is falling way faster than anyone thought. (Aleph Blog)
Seven ways to be insufferable on Facebook. (Wait But Why, via Brian Marquez)
Do you have an interesting article or recipe to share? Want some extra traffic at your blog? Send me an email!
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com
via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.
10 comments:
Re: "Mostly Harmless," I agree wholeheartedly with most of this but find the dismissal of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, etc to be disappointing. There is plenty of evidence that agricultural runoff is responsible for enormous damage to water supplies, clean earth, and all the creatures that use them.
Re: "Insufferable on Facebook": LMAO.
Wanted to read the fertility article but the link broke. :-( I haz a sad.
I think the link should be good now Chacha! Not sure what happened there.
DK
The fertility article presented some good information, but it was strange to read it as a woman. Women were referred to as 'females.' Here's a quote: "Educating females makes many of them want to have fewer kids, whether the reason is pain, effort, wanting to work outside the home, etc." This makes women sound non-human, that women are only good for having babies.
I agree with Megan, and would take it further: the stats may add up, but the egocentricity of the writing is objectionable. Adjectives are important! Women, Africans, religious leaders are all treated in a reductionist and condescending way, primarily as a result of poor word choice but also in that none of the contributing factors in population reduction listed give them any three-dimensional agency. The role of education is not just about employability, and the role of AIDS here is insanely complex, involving attitudes towards women, financial opportunity for both sexes, provision of social services, breastfeeding rates... (all of which interplay with the education issue) and not just about killing off "females" before they can bear and launch viable offspring.
This kind of thing is what gives statisticians a bad name and gets them banned from dinner parties - the author may have meant to be brief but ended up being rude, which obscures the content.
I agree with Megan, and would take it further: the stats may add up, but the egocentricity of the writing is objectionable. Adjectives are important! Women, Africans, religious leaders are all treated in a reductionist and condescending way, primarily as a result of poor word choice but also in that none of the contributing factors in population reduction listed give them any three-dimensional agency. The role of education is not just about employability, and the role of AIDS here is insanely complex, involving attitudes towards women, financial opportunity for both sexes, provision of social services, breastfeeding rates... (all of which interplay with the education issue) and not just about killing off "females" before they can bear and launch viable offspring.
This kind of thing is what gives statisticians a bad name and gets them banned from dinner parties - the author may have meant to be brief but ended up being rude, which obscures the content.
Meghan and Lauren, I hear you both. I'd actually like to try and write a post on the concept of "tone" at some point. What obligation does an insightful writer have to choose the words, phrases and tone that we require?
Just remember, the author doesn't know who we are! :)
Maybe he's writing with the specific goal of reaching an audience of stats geeks, or investment geeks or whatever. Generally I try and give particularly insightful writers (and this author is one very insightful guy) a lot of rope on this issue.
DK
Recently I've become aware of how much of a traditionalist I am. The only "hummus" that appealed to me is the classic variation. Some of the spreads sound tasty, but they aren't "hummus." "Hummus" means chickpea in Arabic.
I was expecting something totally different in the article about fertility. I agree with Meghan and Lauren, but to me the article is more about our decisions whether or not to reproduce and not our fertility, our ability to reproduce.
okay, fertility link worked that time ... I especially wanted to read it after seeing these comments!
oh and how very annoying it was.
Seriously ... because the birth rate in Saudia Arabia is holding at 2.2 children per woman, that somehow signifies that women are gaining the upper hand? In SAUDI ARABIA?! Are you on crack?
Ahem. Anyway. Birth rate and fertility are not actually the same thing, and that one piece of carelessness would keep me away from this blogger in the future all by itself. I know statisticians conflate the two all the time but I won't stand for it. :-)
Daniel, I don't think authors have the "obligation" not to use a tone that degrades and condescends. But neither do I have the "obligation" to read the work of someone who addresses me as if I a sub-human and only exist for baby-makin. Tone matters in that an inappropriate tone alienates readers (well, unless the author's only targeting white, male chauvinist racists, in which case, rock on, I guess) and degrades your ideas.
I read the facebook article a few days ago, and all I could think was... What does this guy actually use facebook for? If basically any form of social sharing and conversation (even big life things, like acceptance to medical school) are "gauche" to discuss... how do you have meaningful interactions with anyone online? (Apparently, only amusing anecdotes and pictures of cats are acceptable?)
I'd see everyone in my life I care about in person every week to share life news off-line, but unfortunately, I live 10,000 miles from nearly everyone I care about. (Even before I moved, it was about 1000, which is equally far for a weekly in-person catch up.) Social media is less unwieldy than series of emails and who writes letters any more? Facebooks is pretty much the primary way I stay in contact with my friends and family's day-to-day lives. No, you aren't insufferable if you actually talk about things in your life that matter to you.
You know how to really be insufferable, online or in real life? Complain about other people's harmless behavior passive-aggressively/for your own gain while apparently making zero effort to actually avoid the behavior you dislike. (If you really don't care about someone's life happenings, why have you friended them? If you don't want to unfriend them for Reasons but don't want to hear about them, hide their feed. If you really hate the very idea of facebook... log off and delete your account. These things aren't hard.)
/endrant
On the "How To Be Insufferable on Facebook" post, I'd encourage you to take it with a sense of humor. :)
I'm guessing anyone who read that piece probably thought twice--if not three times--the next time they put something up on Facebook (Hmmm, is this "image crafting"? "Attention craving"? "Narcissistic"?). For that, and that alone, this writer did a gigantic service to humanity.
DK
Post a Comment