MyAppleMenu Reader by Heng-Cheong Leong

Eat Your Bugs!

Peter Frick-Wright, Sierra Club:

There are many environmental reasons to eat insects. But first you have to get past the ick factor.

Give Spam A Chance

Anna Weaver, Slate:

Why, America, do we treat Spam like the school outcast who’s just too square for our liking? We’ve been buddy-buddy with hot dogs and pepperoni for ages just because they’re the sporty meats at carnivore college. If more people gave Spam a chance, they’d see that it not only tastes better than hot dogs, it also aligns quite nicely with current foodie trends. They’d also see that it’s an exciting ingredient with boundless culinary potential. (Hint: You’re an idiot if you eat it straight out of the can.)

Welcome To The Real Space Age

Dan P. Lee, New York Magazine:

This is not a rendering. It is a launching pad in the New Mexico desert for rocket planes that will send you into space for $200,000. It opens later this year.

Argument With Myself

Mike Jay, London Review Of Books:

Memory creates our identity, but it also exposes the illusion of a coherent self: a memory is not a thing but an act that alters and rearranges even as it retrieves. Although some of its operations can be trained to an astonishing pitch, most take place autonomously, beyond the reach of the conscious mind. As we age, it distorts and foreshortens: present experience becomes harder to impress on the mind, and the long-forgotten past seems to draw closer; University Challenge gets easier, remembering what you came downstairs for gets harder. Yet if we were somehow to freeze our memory at the youthful peak of its powers, around our late twenties, we would not create a polished version of ourselves analogous to a youthful body, but an early, scrappy draft composed of childhood memories and school-learning, barely recognisable to our older selves.

What's The Best Meal I've Ever Eaten?

Jay Rayner, The Observer:

Was it the 42 courses at El Bulli or that freshly boiled crab in West Mersea? Or maybe it's all about the people who were there.

Paul Krugman’s Right: Austerity Kills

David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu, Salon:

Austerity kills -- radical cuts destroy economies and lives, and the honest numbers and economics keep proving it.

What The Hell

Joan Acocella, New Yorker:

Dante in translation and in Dan Brown’s new novel.

A Word From Our Sponsor

Jane Mayer, New Yorker:

Public television’s attempts to placate David Koch.

The Secrets Of Consciousness And The Problem Of God

William Flesch, Los Angeles Review Of Books:

To put the question simply, if God exists, how could “He” know that we existed? How could He know that we weren’t merely animated matter, zombies, or biological machines, like the pedagogical mannequin, a Turing machine affectlessly oppressing the seekers after truth in the dream world of Giulio Tononi’s Phi: A Voyage from the Brain to the Soul? How could God know that we were living souls, and not just perfect simulations?

Some Of My Best Friends Are Germs

Michael Pollan, New York Times:

Medicine used to be obsessed with eradicating the tiny bugs that live within us. Now we’re beginning to understand all the ways they keep us healthy.

The Plane Was About To Crash. Now What?

Noah Gallagher Shannon, New York Times:

I woke to a nudge. “The pilot’s going to make an announcement,” the flight attendant said. I palmed at my eyes, nodded and looked around, feeling my hangover creep back in. The girl next to me was flicking at her nails while she paged through a fashion magazine. I slumped back against the window after the flight attendant passed. White clouds blanketed the sky floor.
I sat up suddenly. Wait — since when do they wake you up for a pilot talk?

Big Data Is Watching You: 'To Save Everything, Click Here,' By Evgeny Morozov

Ellen Ullman, New York Times:

How can you resist a book whose first chapter begins: “Have you ever peeked inside a friend’s trash can? I have.” Trash is like “one’s sex life,” the book continues, “the less said about it, the better.”
Yet the Internet can convert this private affair into an object of public surveillance, and Evgeny Morozov tells you how.

When Words Sing

John Schwartz, New York Times:

If you spend a lot of time with audiobooks, you start paying close attention to the people who read them.

Welcome To The Programmable World

Bill Wasik, Wired:

In our houses, cars, and factories, we’re surrounded by tiny, intelligent devices that capture data about how we live and what we do. Now they are beginning to talk to one another. Soon we’ll be able to choreograph them to respond to our needs, solve our problems, even save our lives.

Welcome To Google Island

Mat Honan, Wired:

“I think as technologists we should have some safe places where we can try out some new things and figure out,” he had said. “What is the effect on society? What’s the effect on people? Without having to deploy it into the normal world.”
I realized I was the only one aboard, and the boat was driving itself.

How Do You Write About Life When It's Lived On Computers?

Damien Walter, The Guardian:

We live more and more of our life through the screens of laptops and smartphones, but how do we represent this on the page?