The Guardian: The unstoppable rise of veganism: how a fringe movement went mainstream

The high street is adapting with incredible speed. Big chains such as Marks & Spencer and Pret a Manger have introduced vegan ranges, Wagamama has a new vegan menu, Pizza Hut recently joined Pizza Express and Zizzi in offering vegan pizzas, while last year Guinness went vegan and stopped using fish bladders in its brewing process, after two and a half centuries. Scrolling through Twitter’s popular #veganhour (an hour of online recipes and ideas running 7-8pm every Tuesday, and trending at number seven nationally when I looked), alongside less surprising corporate interventions from Holland & Barrett and Heavenly Organics is a tweet from Toby Carvery, trumpeting its vegan cherry and chocolate torte. Sainsbury’s and Tesco have introduced extended new ranges of vegan products, while the latter recently appointed American chef Derek Sarno to the impressive job title of director of plant-based innovation.

If this is the year of mainstream veganism, as every trend forecaster and market analyst seems to agree, then there is not one single cause, but a perfect plant-based storm of factors. People cite one or more of three key motives for going vegan – animal welfare, environmental concerns and personal health – and it is being accompanied by an endless array of new business startups, cookbooks, YouTube channels, trendy events and polemical documentaries. The traditional food industry is desperately trying to catch up with the flourishing grassroots demand. “What do you mean, weak, limp and weedy? In 2017, the vegan category is robust, energetic, and flush with crowdfunding cash,” ran an article headlined “Vegan Nation” in industry bible the Grocer in November, pointing to new plant-based burger company Vurger, which hit its £150,000 investment target in little more than 24 hours. [...]

There’s been a knock-on effect to their success, he says, with numerous other restaurants in the city beginning to offer vegan options on their menus – and White is preparing to open the first vegan food shop in Blackpool, too. One of the main drivers, he says, is the critical mass of information available online, both motivating people to change in the first place and making it easier than ever to do so. “When people see documentaries like Cowspiracy, one is enough. The fact social media is as big as it is now, it spreads things so much faster. I think that’s why it’s mushrooming right now. And it is mushrooming.” [...]

Tim Barford, manager of Europe’s largest vegan events company, VegfestUK, has been vegan for three decades and points to the deeper roots of this recent explosion of interest. “There is a big plant-based shift culturally,” he says, “a systemic change in the way that we’re approaching food and the way that we feed ourselves. Remember that successive governments over 15 years have been ploughing money into persuading people to eat more fruit and vegetables, with the five-a-day campaign. Then you’ve got a real cultural change among millennials, which is very much built around justice and the way we look at animals.”

read the article

Nautilus Magazine: Is Facebook Really Scarier Than Google?

“The algorithmic biases feed into social and cognitive biases, like confirmation bias, which in turn feed into the algorithmic biases. Before, people were looking at the evening news on TV, or reading the local paper, for example. But the fact that the medium has changed to online social networks, where you shape the sources of information to which you are exposed, now means that you become even more vulnerable,” he said. “Search engines and social media, for example, try to predict what content may be most engaging for someone. Ranking algorithms use popularity as one of the ingredients in their formulas. That means that the more people in your group interact or engage with a piece of fake news, the more likely you are to see it. The social network can act as an amplifier because the people near you have opinions similar to you, so they are more likely to be tricked by a certain kind of fake news, which means you are more likely to see it, too.”

For Chollet, though, the sort of danger Facebook poses is unique. “There’s only one company where the product is an opaque algorithmic newsfeed, that has been running large-scale mood/opinion manipulation experiments, that is neck-deep in an election manipulation scandal, that has shown time and time again to have morally bankrupt leadership. Essentially nothing about the threat described applies to Google. Nor Amazon. Nor Apple. It could apply to Twitter, in principle, but in practice it almost entirely doesn’t,” he said. What seems to clinch it for him is that Facebook is ambitiously pursuing advances in A.I. “What do you use AI…for, when your product is a newsfeed?” he wondered. “Personally, it really scares me. If you work in A.I., please don’t help them. Don’t play their game. Don’t participate in their research ecosystem. Please show some conscience.” [...]

This is worth keeping in mind, though: That, also at the end of the day, “The motivation for Facebook is not to make you a better person—to improve you morally or intellectually—and it’s not even designed to improve your social group,” Simon DeDeo, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University, where he runs the Laboratory for Social Minds, and external faculty at the Santa Fe Institute, told Nautilus. “It’s designed to make money, to show you things you want to see to hopefully induce you to purchase things.”

read the article

Al Jazeera: Gaza is Soweto revisited

ut, hear this: This column isn't a "rant". It's the truth. And, like me, countless people, in countless places, aren't going to be polite or agreeable any longer to describe - using blunt, simple language, rather than jargon-laced, diplomatic embroidery - the truth about how Israel has turned Gaza into Soweto - while Israel has become South Africa - circa 1976.

Countless people, in countless places, remember when South African policemen - turned willing executioners in service of a dying apartheid regime - shot and killed scores of unarmed black students who marched defiantly in defence of their freedom, dignity and land on June 16, 1976.

Countless people in countless places watched as Israeli soldiers - turned willing executioners in service of another doomed apartheid regime - shot and killed 17 unarmed Palestinians who marched defiantly in defence of their freedom, dignity and land on March 30, 2018. [...]

We're angry because, on cue, the same servile establishment media, quoting the same Israeli officials, regurgitates the same lies that thousands of unarmed Palestinians are simply "human shields" for Hamas and have, in effect, invited their own deaths.

read the article

Nautilus Magazine: The Key to Good Luck Is an Open Mind

The experimental design may seem a little silly, a superficial way to distinguish the fortunate from the unfortunate. Yet this was the kind of result that Wiseman found in several related experiments over the course of about 10 years, from about 1993 to 2003. In one such study, Wiseman provided a group of volunteers with a newspaper and instructed them to count the photographs inside. Written in large font on half of the second page was this message: “Stop counting—there are 43 photographs in this newspaper.” A similar insert placed halfway through the paper read, “Stop counting, tell the experimenter you have seen this and win $250.” Overall, the self-identified unlucky participants were left counting. It suggested that luck could have something to do with spotting opportunities, even when they were unexpected.  

Wiseman didn’t stop there. He turned these findings into a “luck school” where people could learn luck-inducing techniques based on four main principles of luck: maximizing chance opportunities, listening to your intuition, expecting good fortune, and turning bad luck to good. The strategies included using meditation to enhance intuition, relaxation, visualizing good fortune, and talking to at least one new person every week. A month later, he followed up with participants. Eighty percent said they were happier, luckier people. [...]

“If you’re anxious that you won’t find a parking place, then literally your vision narrows,” says Carter. “You lose your peripheral vision the more anxious you are because your flight-or-fight mechanism creates binocular vision.” Anxious people bias their attention to potential threats, and are predictably less likely to converse with strangers. “We teach our kids not to talk to strangers and we teach them to fear other people, and that shuts them down to the opportunities that people might bring, but also creates anxiety,” says Carter.

read the article

CityLab: A Brexit Bridge Too Far

Delusions are often encouraged rather than cured by impending doom. And the tendency for otherwise conservative figures to suddenly believe in grand, expensive, almost utopian schemes has made its way into infrastructure. Why it has done so is more revealing than the details of the plans themselves. [...]

Today, the most likely risk is a colossal waste of public money. Given the proponents of the bridges, the signs are not encouraging. Boris Johnson’s tenure as Mayor of London was most notable for a series of expensive follies, from the Boris Bus and the ArcelorMittal Orbit to the Garden Bridge and the equally ephemeral Boris Island. Meanwhile, previous pronouncements by Sammy Wilson have been less “blue sky thinking” and more ominous thunderclouds on the horizon, once commending an Ulster Defense Association (UDA) plan for ethnic cleansing in Northern Ireland as a “very valuable return to reality.” [...]

The second problem is more concerning. In dealing so much in vague speculative projects without adequate planning or consultation, there is a risk of leading politicians losing touch with reality. A hundred years of dystopian literature and films have provided humanity a healthy skepticism towards those promising utopian futures. Conservatives are not immune from this tendency. Whether it’s the result of naivety or cynicism, they too can believe in fictional golden ages, in pasts that never really existed or in long-lost positions of glory that can be recovered. The resurgence of a British imperial mentality during and after the Brexit vote marks a worrying departure from objectivity, whether it’s looking outwards with unrealistic visions of replacing trade with Europe with that of the Commonwealth, or an inflated self-regard that can be traced to an alarming increase in xenophobic attacks.

read the article