Six Ideas That Made Us Think

1. The Skinny on the Mediterranean Diet

The Mediterranean diet is celebrated as the antidote to the fatty, salty, processed foods served on so many American tables. The praise is half-baked, according to Politico Europe. Italy, for instance, has ballooning childhood obesity rates:

Fifty years since the term was coined by the American physiologist Ancel Keys — and a decade and a half after UNESCO recognized it as an intangible cultural heritage of humanity — the Mediterranean diet has become a mishmash of hyperbole, half-truths and howlers, stirred together for political and commercial ends.

2. The Politics of Airline Disasters

 After an army helicopter and an American Airlines jet collided at Reagan National airport, experts and pilots agreed it was an accident “waiting to happen.” In The New Atlantis, Ari Schulman offers a detailed analysis of what went wrong – and why airline safety at DCA is hard to fix:

Consider the enormous volume of flights permitted at DCA, which is such a sensitive airspace that any time new regular flights are added they must be specifically approved by Congress. They have been steadily growing for years in part due to members of Congress working to add direct access between the city and their home districts. And for good reason: Dulles Airport, conceived in 1950 to serve as the main airport for the capital, is so far away, so huge, and so over-designed that it might as well be a labyrinth on Mars.

3. It’s Just Practice

Ted Gioia reflects on the 60th anniversary of A Love Supreme. Gioia contends that John Coltrane’s classic album was the output of a musician “who needed music the way an addict needs a fix”:

When he wasn’t recording, Coltrane was gigging. And when he wasn’t gigging he was practicing. A few weeks before Coltrane recorded A Love Supreme, a surprised worker at Boston’s Jazz Workshop nightclub got to hear the main melodic motif from the opening track—because the saxophonist was practicing it in the men’s room.

4. Fool’s Gold

As gold reaches record high prices, The Financial Times sees a bubble. “In myth and literature,” the FT writes, “hoarding gold is consistently punished, in brutal, psychologically instructive ways.” Apparently, nobody remembers their English homework:

Fears of a coming collapse have driven an ever-greater number of Americans to prepare for the worst — more than 20mn of them, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Last year, CNBC reported that gold bars were “an increasingly popular staple” with the “doomsday preppers”. Since 2023, Costco has done a roaring trade in one-ounce gold bars. Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who doubtless doesn’t shop at Costco, is a prepper. In 2016 he assured the New Yorker: “I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries.”

5. Tokyo Drift

As a political battle unfolds over New York City’s congestion pricing, Quico Toro explains why no such debate is taking place in Tokyo:

 How a compact metro area of 37 million people manages to feel this relaxed isn’t really a mystery: the city declared war on cars, and then won that war. Citywide, there are 0.32 cars per household, half the level in New York or London. Nothing is designed with the expectation that normal people own a car, because they don’t. Every shop that sells something too big to carry in a bag offers delivery. The streets are for pedestrians: every office, school, gym, hospital and shop is built on the assumption that you’ll walk there. There’s no on-street parking.

6. The FDA Needs More People

Alex Tabarrok, a frequent critic of the Food and Drug Administration, argues that the agency should be hiring staff, not firing them. More staff is the best way to “reduce approval time and costs to speed drugs to patients”:

 The Prescription Drug User Fee Act of 1992 (PDUFA) provides strong evidence that with more staff the FDA works faster to get new and better drugs to patients. Before PDUFA, drug approvals languished at the FDA simply due to a lack of staff—harming both drug companies and patients. Congress should have increased FDA funding, as the benefits would have far outweighed the costs, but Congress failed. Instead, PDUFA created a workaround: drug firms agreed to pay user fees, with the condition that the funds be used for drug reviewers and that the FDA be held to strict review standards. PDUFA was a tremendous success.  [Researchers] find that PDUFA shortened review times and it did so primarily through the mechanism of hiring more staff.

Websites Worth Reading

Defense of the Penny: McKinsey’s take

Punch: AI in the physical world 

ChatGPT’s Consciousness: AI in the physical world

Feeds We Follow

@satyanadella: Sporting commentary gets roasted

@balajis: What cities get right and wrong

@nerds_feed: Canadian election watch