Reading.am | Chris Aldrich

🎧 Pull Up A Chair #1 – Jay Rosen & David Fahrenthold | The Correspondent

Listened to Pull Up A Chair #1 - David Fahrenthold meets Jay Rosen by Jay Rosen from The Correspondent on SoundCloud

David Fahrenthold of the Washington Post won a Pulitzer for his Trump coverage, but he couldn’t have done it without help from his readers. In the first episode of our new podcast, Pull up a Chair, David talks with NYU’s Jay Rosen about the power of putting readers at the heart of journalism.

An awesome little start of a podcast. I’d definitely come back to this.

🎧 A cheese place | Eat This Podcast

Listened to A cheese place: One of the pioneers who made West Cork a centre of fine cheeses by Jeremy Cherfas from Eat This Podcast

Durrus is a village at the head of Dunmanus bay, south of the Sheep’s Head peninsula in the southwest of Ireland. Durrus is also the name of an award-winning, semi-soft cheese, while Dunmanus is a harder cheese, aged a lot longer. Both were created by Jeffa Gill and are hand made by Jeffa and her small team up above the village and the bay.

Jeffa is one of the pioneers who turned West Cork into a heaven and a haven for cheese-lovers. One of the special characteristics of Durrus and many West Cork farmhouse cheeses is that they are washed rind cheeses. The young cheese is inoculated with specific bacteria (some cheeses pick their surface moulds up from the atmosphere) and is then frequently washed or moistened with a brine solution, which gives those bacteria a boost and keeps other micro-organisms at bay. The result is what many people call a stinky cheese, although the actual flavour of these cheeses is often mild, sweet and creamy.

The really remarkable thing about West Cork is how an entire food ecosystem has grown up there in the past 50 years or so, each part depending on and encouraging the others. The fact that there are so many outstanding farmhouse cheesemakers is no accident; they all gathered originally and shared their ups and downs, from which each developed their own unique cheeses. They were supported by local shops and restaurants, who created demand not just for fine cheeses but for so many other foods too. Surely someone must have documented it; so where is it?

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I could go on listening to this for ages… though I wish I could have done it with some of the cheeses discussed.

I often wish I could subscribe to this Eat This Podcast along with a delivery service that would include samples of the food items discussed. Hmmm….

🎧 Rethinking the folk history of American agriculture: Earl Butz is not the central villain of the piece | Eat This Podcast

Listened to Rethinking the folk history of American agriculture: Earl Butz is not the central villain of the piece by Jeremy Cherfas from Eat This Podcast

Remember Farm Aid, which launched in 1985? A lot of people do, and they tend to date the farm crisis in America to the 1980s, triggered by Earl Butz and his crazy love for fencerow to fencerow, get big or get out, industrial agriculture. And of course, land consolidation is inevitable, because if you’re going to invest in all that capital equipment to make your farm more efficient, you’re bound to buy up the smaller farmers who weren’t so savvy. Those “facts,” however, are anything but. They’re myths, on which much of the current criticism of American farm policy is built. There are others, too, and they’re all skillfully eviscerated by Nate Rosenberg and Bryce Wilson Stucki in a recent paper.

One villain or two?

And here’s another thing. That first Farm Aid concert apparently raised $9 million. You could presumably help a lot of poor old dirt farmers with that kind of cash. But Farm Aid wasn’t actually about poor old dirt farmers, it was about people like Willie Nelson. He lost $800,000 the year before Farm Aid. Nine million dollars doesn’t go too far when individual people are losing that kind of money.

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An interesting often untold story of agriculture, race, and economics in the United States.

👓 Talk: “Designing away the cookie disclaimer” by Sebastian Greger

Read Talk: “Designing away the cookie disclaimer” (sebastiangreger.net)

This is the transcript of my lightning talk from the beyond tellerrand Berlin pre-conference warm-up on 6 November 2017. It was a condensed version of my longer, work-in-progress and upcoming talk on privacy as a core pillar of ethical UX design. If you are interested in the final talk or know about a conference or event that might be, I’d be thrilled to hear from you.

It’s sad the amount of not caring that both laws and apathy on the internet can make your life just dreadful in ways that it shouldn’t.

I love the fact that people are working on solving these seemingly mundane issues. This is a great little presentation Sebastian!