Year: 2013

Ian Steadman considers the copyright implications of 3-D printed food:

Imagine yourself in twenty years sitting down in your kitchen and wanting a glass of cola and a hamburger. You could download Coca-Cola’s classic recipe to go with a McDonald’s Big Mac, but you could also download that extra-caffeinated cola someone’s hacked onto the server along with a Big Mac with a particularly smoky ketchup in place of the banal, “official” version. Or you could knock something new up yourself, a drink that’s sugar- and caffeine-free and with an extra shot of vitamin B and a burger bun that’s gluten-free.

[Open-source soda brand] Open Cola can be [seen as] a first, extremely crude example of this change, in this case. Once the infrastructure for 3D printing is in place — the cultural expectation of being able to get home, slot a cartridge into the machine, and print out anything you want — then the food industry is going to struggle to keep its secrets safe.

The Dish has previously looked at 3-D printed meat and 3-D printed Christmas cookies.

Reviewing Nicholas Roe’s new biography of John Keats, Michael Dirda emphasizes the artistic impact of the poet’s tumultuous childhood:

Roe stresses, in particular, the emotional turmoil resulting from the death, while riding, of Keats’s 31-year-old father, Thomas, when John was just 8 years old. This was followed by the sudden remarriage of Keats’s mother, Frances, two months later to a man “aged twenty, with no income of his own.” Roe even raises the possibility that Frances, known to be lively and “passionately fond of amusement,” may have been carrying on a clandestine affair before her first husband’s death. When she died at just 35 from tuberculosis, her children—John, George, Tom, and Fanny—found themselves thrust upon various relatives, or sent away to school. Financial wrangling within the extended family dragged on for years.

Roe sees aspects of these family tragedies, and possible suspicions about his mother, reemerging throughout Keats’s poetry—as well as being a possible cause of his self-confessed “morbidity” and Hamlet-like melancholy.

Vanessa Veselka hitchhiked 15,000 miles when she was fifteen. Looking back, she wonders why we have “no female counterpart in our culture to Ishmael or Huck Finn”:

During my travels I had literally thousands of interactions with people’s ideas about what I was doing with my life, but almost none of them allowed for the possibility of exploration, enlightenment, or destiny. Fate, yes. Destiny, no. I was either “lucky to be alive” or so abysmally stupid for hitchhiking in the first place that I deserved to be dead. And, while I may have been abysmally stupid, my choice to leave home and hitchhike was certainly no stupider or more dangerous than signing onto a whaling ship in the 1850s, “stealing” a slave and taking him across state lines, burning through relationships following some sketchy dude around the U.S., or accepting rides from drunk people while on hallucinogens. These tales are fictions, yes, but they deeply affect how we see people on the road. And the shadow cast by these narratives—one that valorizes existential curiosity, adventure, individuality, and surliness—does not fall over women. In a country with the richest road narratives in the modern world, women have none.

She connects this to the likelihood of rape and death for women on the road:

A man on the road is solitary. A woman on the road is alone.

It won’t take long:

The first espresso machines — rather steampunk-y brass fixtures — were built for turn-of-the-century hotel bars [in Italy] to accelerate the process of preparing coffee for clientele, mostly visitors from more prosperous European nations who were enjoying Belle Époque mercantilism and mobility. Acceleration was the watchword of early 20th-century Italy, only recently unified as a nation and rocked by a second industrial revolution. Like trains, automobiles, and the thrusting designs of Futurist artists (some of the recipes in the Futurist Cookbook even use espresso as an ingredient), the initial sex appeal of espresso was in speed and efficiency…. [I]n most Italian coffee bars, the small cups of caffé were sipped standing up at a counter, a posture that permitted conversation but no lingering. Customers had to drink up and move out, making room for more customers, and workers had to get back on the clock.

Today on the Dish, Andrew laid out the case for treating AIPAC like the NRA and joined Alec McGillis in questioning Bret Stephens’ Pulitzer prize. He answered more reader criticism of his take on the Boston bombing and jihad, stepped up the conversation with Millman and Dreher, and also noted the fresh case of a religiously motived attack in Canada. Elsewhere, he agreed with Frank Luntz that Republicans are whipped by talk radio ideologues and considered the toll of the hard drive on the sex drive.

In political coverage, Enten fact checked W. Bush’s “comeback” narrative as the curtain went up on Dubya’s presidential library, we kept an eye on the immigration bill and Rubio’s pitch and debated the merits of a bigger Koch presence in media. As the dust began to settle around the details of the Boston attack we recounted Boston’s history of covert jihad networking and connected the industrial tragedies of West, Texas and yesterday’s in Bangladesh. Readers asked Steve Brill how the US can catch up to other nations on health care as we investigated whether Obamacare’s exchanges will work out and Ben Geman noticed Kerry’s squeamishness on Keystone XL.

We realized that human rights still aren’t held in high regard the Afghan military as Shaun McCanna focused on its ongoing opium problem. We also witnessed drug overdoses double since 1999, with about half due to pharmaceuticals, blogs recorded the Mexican drug wars in lieu of old media and Shaunacy Ferro discovered the difficulty of studying psychedelics. Later, Mac McClelland observed gentle butchery and we saw an unsavory pro-hijab PSA in the Cool Ad Watch.

In assorted coverage, Dr. Thomas Murphy VII let A.I. play Super Mario Bros, Aaron Ansarov mashed up jellyfish artfully and mapped the world in carpet patterns. Dan Nosowitz spotlighted some anal-retentive drug mules, we surveyed a green skyline and explained why New York keeps its chic cheap. We looked out at Petaluma, California in the VFYW, glimpsed nature in the Face of the Day and Jimmy McMillan ran for mayor in the MHB.

–B.J.

Shaun McCanna examines the effects of the country’s ever-booming opium industry, which grew over the past ten years from “supplying roughly 50% of Europe’s heroin to over 90% of the world’s”:

The increase in supply of heroin led to a dramatic drop in the domestic price. In Kabul, you can now buy three grams of pure heroin for $5 US. According to the UNODC, there are now over 1 million drug addicts in Afghanistan —roughly 8% of the adult population.

The problem is expected to grow worse as US and NATO troops leave the country:

Currently, foreign funds from US and NATO occupation account for 53% of the country’s Gross Domestic Product; illicit crops account for 26%. With the withdrawal of foreign troops, the amount of cash flowing into the country will dwindle, so illicit crops will become a larger—if not the largest—portion of GDP.