It takes great illusions of personal potency to deny the role that luck plays at many key junctures in life, and in history. Nonetheless, few look hard enough to see that luck lurks in pretty much every nook and cranny of our existence…
ReadBack in 1977, Alexander Cockburn coined the term “gastroporn” to describe the way in which looking at food and cooking provides a kind of substitute pleasure – and a titillation – for actually eating. The cinema has been a rich source of another kind of gastroporn, a fantasy world in which we watch the sometimes literal coming together of food and sex. It has provided some wonderful movie moments as well as some truly cringeworthy ones, but it provides as little insight into actual sex as Oompa-Loompas do into the day-to-day working lives of chocolatiers.
ReadTwo pieces commissioned by the New Zealand Food and Drink Council, published at Food Navigator Asia. The first is on the comparative price of milk and sugary sodas (14 October), the second on regulation as a tool to reduce alcohol consumption (21 October). I had complete editorial control of both pieces.
ReadLife is therefore like a dream, not because it is an unreal nothing, but because it is a very real something which will vanish into nothingness the moment our consciousness ceases.
ReadThe clearest evidence that neuromarketing is not such a game changer is that all the key techniques used to package and sell the book itself predate any insights that the brain sciences may have brought. If even David Lewis has to rely on the same old methods tried and tested by people who wouldn’t know a synapse from a neuron, then neuromarketing may indeed be new and improved, but not quite as much as we are led to believe.
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