S’more! S’more!

“This is the story of the Theranos of marshmallows” is an undeniable line. Irresistible, even. So what if the parallels are tenuous? Adam Rogers’ tick-tock about the rise and fall of Smashmallow might lack the manipulation and villainy of Silicon Valley’s Potemkin startup, but the lesson at its core is the same: scale at your own risk.

The problems cascaded, one sugar-coated disaster after another. The conveyor belt that carried individual marshmallows to the bagging station turned out to be too short, so they didn’t have time to dry, which caused the marshmallows to stick together in the bag. The machine’s die and cutting blade couldn’t replicate Smashmallow’s handmade irregularity; it could only turn out perfect, identical-size marshmallows. When the machine tried to re-create Smashmallow’s most popular flavor, churro, the cinnamon coating didn’t stick and blew into the air. Workers had trouble breathing through the thick clouds of spice. Once they figured out how to get the cinnamon settled onto the belt, it turned out to be heavier than starch, and the motors couldn’t handle the extra weight. They replaced the motors, but then the cut ends of the marshmallows didn’t get as much cinnamon coating. So they had to take the cinnamon and sugar off the line and put it into a drum that could toss the marshmallows in the mixture. “It took about six or seven months to come up with that,” Hoj says. And even that didn’t work, because the cinnamon — heavier than starch, but lighter than sugar — prevented the sugar from sticking to the marshmallows.

Read the story

from Longreads https://ift.tt/ZLq0g3p

---

Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/t6fuxra

Memento Mori

For The Baffler, Tamara Kneese considers the good, bad, and downright creepy uses of Artificial Intelligence and the multitude of philosophies at odds around its use. Can humans overcome their flawed selves to create AI to for the betterment of humanity? Only the bots know for sure.

IN JUNE 2022, Amazon advertised a new feature of the virtual assistant Alexa with a demo designed to prove that the device could resurrect the voices of dead relatives. At the re:Mars conference in Las Vegas, Rohit Prasad, head scientist for Alexa, showcased a video of a dead grandmother’s disembodied voice reading The Wizard of Oz to her grandchild. Noting the immense loss of life during the pandemic before launching into the demo, Prasad stressed that what the audience was seeing was merely a prototype. He framed the project as “a voice-conversion task and not a speech-generation task.” But Prasad was suggesting that grandma’s voice, filtered through Alexa’s speakers, was a sufficient proxy for grandma herself.

Intergenerational communication with dead family members is a canny selling point for a smart device, provided you’re not concerned with the mass manipulation of a grieving public. It is also a fantasy that barely covers for Amazon’s real goal: harnessing and selling data produced in intimate home settings and maintaining customers and their data by whatever means necessary.

Read the story

from Longreads https://ift.tt/sIQAE7P

---

Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/t6fuxra

Kate Winslett Pushes Her Characters, and Herself, to the Edge

For this endearing piece, Susan Dominus spends time with Kate Winslett in a freezing hut by the sea. Winslett comes across as both tough and very fair, and I came away feeling I got to know her personality better—not always the case with a profile.

Winslet is not precious or easily rattled; on set, over the years, she has broken a toe, suffered hypothermia and fainted, but very little slows her down when she’s shooting. She’s not a fan of a lunch break. Her sturdiness works its way into her performances onscreen: Even in many a period drama, Winslet, for all her femininity, conveys the impression of someone who could hold her own in a street fight. On one occasion when she actually found herself in peril, during a house fire at Richard Branson’s home in the British Virgin Islands, Winslet, efficiently assisting the evacuation, picked up Branson’s nearly-90-year-old mother and carried her down several stairs. (Winslet is married to Branson’s nephew, Edward Abel Smith.)d

Read the story

from Longreads https://ift.tt/3fvSudy

---

Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/t6fuxra

The Last Days of Mezcal

In this Bloomberg feature, Rowan Jacobsen presents a current snapshot of the mezcal industry. Mezcal’s allure has been in its artisanal nature, produced in small batches and by families in Mexico, and in Oaxaca in particular, the country’s largest producer. But, as Jacobsen reports, Big Liquor is changing that. As mezcal grows in popularity, the region’s old-school distilleries and agave farms are feeling the threat of “tequilization” as the demand for the spirit increases around the world.

At least five centuries ago, Indigenous Mexicans learned to make spirits from those sugars. At the first sign of a quiote, the plant’s pineapple-shaped heart, known as a piña, is harvested, roasted, mashed, fermented and distilled. The resulting spirit was always known as mezcal, but in the 20th century a handful of wealthy producers in the tequila region moved to differentiate themselves from the rustic versions made by Indigenous mezcaleros elsewhere in Mexico. It was a time when mass-produced goods held more cachet than handmade, and the tequila families invested in factories that could churn out a modern, predictable product. Out went the wood-fired ovens, clay stills and open-air fermentations. In came the gas-powered autoclaves and steel distillation tanks.

One of the things that makes mezcal unique is that all these specs are listed on the back label, beneath the name of the mezcalero responsible. That nerdy tradition has protected mezcal’s authenticity—aficionados know to avoid any bottle that doesn’t dish—and has given some old mezcaleros a rock star status they never expected.

Read the story

from Longreads https://ift.tt/a59UiEF

---

Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/t6fuxra

An Ice Climbing Disaster on Mount Katahdin. A Desperate Race to Save Lives.

David Goodman recounts a terrible night on Pamola’s Fury and the difficult decisions a group of climbers had to make. It’s a fast-paced adventure, which also tackles the undercurrent of animosity felt between climbers and rangers as climbing culture developed in the seventies.

In the fading light. Proudman realized they could not make it off the mountain and prepared to bivouac overnight. He used his ice ax to chip a ledge out of the ice and snow — 3 feet wide by 5 feet long — for everyone to gather. He estimated they were within a few hundred feet of the top, but he wouldn’t attempt making it there. He wanted the group to remain together.

A later AMC report included an evaluation of this moment. “In all probability, Bob, Mike, and Doug could have climbed to the ridge by dark and descended back to camp had they not waited,” the report concluded. “It is also quite possible that as a result of such action, all three of the others would have perished.”

Read the story

from Longreads https://ift.tt/ywKgCxA

---

Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/OkRhsHm

The Hot New Luxury Good for the Rich: Air

The latest must-have for the wealthy? The freshest, cleanest air. For The New Republic, science journalist Shayla Love toured some of New York City’s high-end buildings to learn about their sophisticated and state-of-the-art filtration systems. (At one complex on the Upper West Side, “[o]utside air is brought in, filtered, treated with an ultraviolet-C light that kills 99.9 percent of pathogens, and completely changed out once per hour.”) In a time of pandemics and wildfires, the desire and demand for excellent indoor air quality has surged, and many luxury real estate listings today attract people with “the promise of an exceptional breathing experience.” In this piece, Love discovers—unsurprisingly—that if you have money, your air will be better.

At night, when Roe’s family is sleeping, it “smells like you’re camping, because the fresh air is getting pumped in at such a rapid rate,” he said. You know the air is good, he told me, because the hydrangeas last. Typically, when cut at the stem and arranged in a vase, the delicate flowers wither and droop in a few days. In his apartment, the blooms will stay perky for nearly two weeks.

In China, the sociocultural anthropologist Victoria Nguyen reported, underground bomb shelters have been converted into communal breathing areas, while wealthier Chinese can afford to go on “lung wash” vacations. For many others, on bad-air days, activities that used to take place in parks—playing cards, exercising, reading the paper—now take place below ground.

Read the story

from Longreads https://ift.tt/mzoaSVw

---

Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/OkRhsHm

Why Are Pants So Big (Again)?

Of all the types of garments we wear, our pants make a big statement—and signal so much about our culture. In this entertaining read on pants trends and fashion, Jonah Weiner explores the shift to baggy and wide-legged after a period of small and skinny at the helm.

In some ways, this shift felt entirely predictable, as if a rubber band stretched tight had snapped back to laxity. And yet it was disconcerting too, as if the rubber band had immediately become a balloon. It could be hard to trust your own eyes. I’d been feeling the rumblings of a Return to Big Pants since about 2017, when I remember worrying about the fact that I was 36 and still wearing essentially the same pants I’d worn at 26. There’s constancy, I thought, and then there’s becoming a relic of yourself — the balding guy still trying to make his high school haircut work. I made the conscious decision to resist fossilization and buy roomier pants, and over the next couple of years, I thought that’s what I did. My wife and my friends tell me they thought I did, too, having seen some of the new pants in question and deemed them conspicuously, if not laughably, large. And yet photographs confirm that, in absolute terms, my pants remained fitted for a while. I couldn’t see it clearly at first, but I was locked in an arms race against my own mounting pants dysmorphia. Trousers that struck me as audaciously large yesterday looked correct today. By tomorrow I would wonder if they weren’t actually a bit close-clinging.

Read the story

from Longreads https://ift.tt/BsYnMo6

---

Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/OkRhsHm