Finding Inspiration + A Bonkers Lawsuit

Delicious Inspiration

I love food shows that also offer insight into history and cultures and not only does the new season of Chef’s Table do that with the episode Norma Listman & Saqib Keval (s7ep4) but it’s also about a restaurant in Mexico City that fought back against government corruption and created a business model centering their workers and suppliers being paid and treated as they should as a stance against the very toxic way the food industry runs. The food also looks incredible and my lizard brain really wanted to lick the TV.

Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness by Jamil Zaki

I have absolutely been feeling some sort of way lately and this book came to me with perfect timing. Jamil Zaki is a psychologist who isn’t by nature an optimist but his friend Emile Bruneau, who was a neuroscientist, was. Zaki, through grieving his friend’s death, uses studies, real events, and stories from both of their lives to show that not only does cynicism not protect us from harmful things but it usually causes us more harm than being optimistic does. I appreciate that the book is actual studies—it reads like a conversation not like facts being listed at you—that leaves you with a lot to think about in your own life. Zaki narrates the audiobook, if like me you’re a fan of author narration.

This is a lawsuit that if quickly summed up would sound like an Onion article

And yet it’s a very real lawsuit! The Verge dives into the details about one amazon influencer in a “colorless world” suing another influencer in a “colorless world” for “copying her”. There’s so much blandness and beige in this story that my color loving soul died a little but my serious question is, In a landscape where algorithms are borked, the pandemic destroyed everything, and many factors can affect a business how do you prove that the main reason you lost half your revenue was because someone else was doing a similar thing? And where is the line between “stole your art” (my soul died again calling influencing art) and you both just live in boring sad beige worlds and hawk amazon products for money? Anyways this story is so bonkers it reminded me of a new novel, You Will Never Be Me by Jesse Q. Sutanto.