The article is titled “Lard: The New Health Food?“. Lard seems to getting more and more press these days:
Lard, he cheerfully reported, contains just 40 percent saturated fat (compared with nearly 60 percent for butter). Its level of monounsaturated fat (the “good” fat) is “a very respectable 45 percent,” he noted, “double butter’s paltry 23 or so percent.”
Apparently it’s great for crusts:
After hanging out in your mouth for a minute, though, a lard-fried crust becomes soft and creamy, as voluptuous as a Rubens nude but not as heavy. All my kitchen slipups didn’t stop me from recognizing that lard is the most elegant fat I’ve ever met…
My euphoria lasted about 10 minutes. Then I wanted to hunt down the villains who’d kept me away from my beautiful lard all these years.
Apple’s attention to detail in the new iCloud icon is astounding.
Striking narrated video from the Shuttle.
Data from the future
A time traveler comes to you from the future (perhaps in a blue box) and offers you three sets of data. Which do you choose?
My choices:
1. Everything related to successfully bettering third-world living conditions.
2. The closing stock prices for each day.
3. A copy of every standardized test I would ever have to take, but without the answers.
I’m curious to hear your answers in the comments.
Mark Bittman on the meat brain: “At some point our bodies may adapt to consuming unlimited quantities of meat or — a better alternative — our minds will crave less. Right now, primal urge and modern availability form a deadly combo.”
Boswell recounts his introduction to Johnson:
Mr. Davies mentioned my name, and respectfully introduced me to him. I was much agitated; and recollecting his prejudice against the Scotch, of which I had heard much, I said to Davies, “Dont tell where I come from.”—”From Scotland,” cried Davies roguishly. “Mr. Johnson, said I I do indeed come from Scotland, but I cannot help it.” I am willing to flatter myself that I meant this as light pleasantry to sooth and conciliate him, and not as an humiliating abasement at the expense of my country. But however that might be, this speech was somewhat unlucky; for with that quickness of wit for which he was so remarkable, he seized the expression “come from Scotland,” which I used in the sense of being of that country; and, as if I had said that I had come away from it, or left it, retorted, “That, Sir, I find, is what a very great many of your countrymen cannot help.”
Paul Theroux on travel and strangeness: “Until I went to live in Africa, I had not known that most people in the world believe that they are the People, and their language is the Word, and strangers are not fully human—at least not human in the way the People are—nor is a stranger’s language anything but the gabbling of incoherent and inspissated felicities.
Here’s a shock: Congress gets ridiculously high returns on their stock investments. Find me a mutual fund that tracks their portfolios, and I’m in.
Why hasn’t the Tappan Zee bridge in New York been replaced, given that it’s consistently on the verge of collapse? A case study in political failure.
Interestingly, “employers in the United States are not obligated under federal law to offer any paid vacation, so about a quarter of all American workers don’t have access to it.”
Virgin Galactic’s first reentry test flight. Astounding.
Harvey Mansfield on the humanities: “It is the job of the humanities to make non-science into something positive that could be called human in the best sense.”