Category: Articles & Essays

On avoiding rare risks

Articles & Essays

Psychologists and risk experts are always telling us that we fixate far too much on unusual dangers and not enough on the hazards that we confront every day. The Glasgow helicopter crash will no doubt provide another opportunity to highlight our supposed irrationality as people demand inquiries to avoid a repeat of an accident that killed at least eight people, while five people die every day on the UK’s roads. But is it really illogical to worry about unusual causes of death and serious injury? I’m not convinced it is…

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Sex, pies and videotape

Articles & Essays, Food

Back 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.

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Milk and alcohol

Articles & Essays, Food

Two 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.

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Review: The Brain Sell

Articles & Essays

The 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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