Jozef Imrich, name worthy of Kafka, has his finger on the pulse of any irony of interest and shares his findings to keep you in-the-know with the savviest trend setters and infomaniacs.
''I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.''
-Kurt Vonnegut
The media offer a contrasting view of life this morning. The New York Times has a story about homelessness in the USA reaching record highs. It Read the full article…
Moon – Bartosz Ciechanowski- “In the vastness of empty space surrounding Earth, the Moon is our closest celestial neighbor. Its face, periodically filled with light and devoured by darkness, has an ever-changing, but dependable presence in our skies. In this article, we’ll learn about the Moon and its path around our planet, but to experience that journey first-hand, we have to enter the cosmos itself.
Let’s take a look at the Moon as seen from space in all its sunlit glory. You can drag it around to change your point of view, and you can also use the slider to control the date and time…”
Network Of Time is an idea proposed on this website: the largest network of people who appear together in photos that currently exist which can be connected through peoples’ recurring appearances in different photos. This website, currently in a beta stage, represents the beginnings of a visualization of the Network. Match any two people on the front page and you will see how they have “met” through a series of (sometimes nonlinear in time) meetings or chance appearances, in the fewest number of photos possible based on our database. While the idea that all people have no more than six degrees of separation has been widely studied, this website is the first (public) project to visualize the effect exclusively through evidence of actual meetings in physical space and not other documentation of associations. If you have ever appeared in a photo with anyone who has appeared as an option on the lists on the front page of this site, or with anyone who has appeared in a photo with anyone as an option on these lists to X degrees – you are on the Network. (You probably still do not appear on the representation shown here, but you can submit photos to join!)”
– Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, December 21, 2024 – Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, finance, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and online security, often without our situational awareness.
Four highlights from this week: The Breachies 2024: The Worst, Weirdest, Most Impactful Data Breaches of the Year; Lawmakers tell Apple, Google to prepare for TikTok ban; CISA lays out how agencies, industry should respond to major cyber incidents; and Warning: A New Scam Targets Consumers with Unsolicited Gifts and Malicious QR Codes.
But it is no use to justify yourself. It is no good to explain. It is weak to be anecdotal. It is wise to conceal the past even if there is nothing to conceal. A man's power is in the half-light, in the half-seen movements of his hand and the unguessed-at expression of his face. It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.
Why are we so attached to the severities of the past? Why are we so proud of having endured our fathers and our mothers, the fireless days and the meatless days, the cold winters and the sharp tongues? It's not as if we had a choice.
snow queen’s castle was in pieces. In the darkness behind the stage at the Theatre Royal, one of the largest and oldest of London’s West End theatres, the set for the long-running hit musicalFrozen had been disassembled to make way for two historians. Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook stood in the ruins of Elsa’s palace, awaiting their cue.
Suddenly there was a wave of noise. Thousands of fans cheered as the theme to the duo’s podcast, The Rest is History, started playing. Sandbrook shook his head, thinking: “What on Earth?… This is like a weird parallel universe! This doesn’t happen to historians.”
It has continued to happen, however. Sandbrook and Holland have played venues from New Zealand to New York, Los Angeles and London’s 5,000-seat Albert Hall, where they are accompanied by a full orchestra. In any major city in the Anglosphere, large crowds will turn outto hear two chummy, middle-aged British men talk about the Visigoths or Admiral Nelson.
The Rest is History is downloaded 12.5 million times per month, making it more popular (by nearly a million downloads a week) than This American Life. The company that makes the show, Goalhanger, has signed a deal — to be announced later this month — with a Hollywood production company to develop TV and film formats based on it. At the core of the show’s fanbase are tens of thousands of paying subscribers, the most dedicated of whom meet socially and refer to themselves (in homage to both internet fandom and the first Anglo-Saxon ruler of England) as “Athel Stans.”
The Rest is History hosts Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook.Photographer: Chris Floyd
More broadly, the history business is booming. In 2023, people in the UK and Ireland spent more on history books than at any point since Nielsen BookData’s records began in 1998. Ancient history sales rose 67% from 2013 to 2023, while books focusing on “specific subjects” — individual stories of lives, events or movements — climbed 70% over the same period. In the US, where the overall book market is flat, history has grown by 6% in the past year alone, according to Circana. For the first time in an election year, history as a category outsold politics (by two to one).
Google’s Ngram viewer, which covers printed sources up to 2022, suggests a significant increase in writing about history over the past decade. Historians are reaching huge audiences via email newsletters — Boston College history professor Heather Cox Richardson is one of Substack’s most successful authors, with 1.8 million subscribers — and social media. TikTok’s year-long interest in the Roman Empire, and how often men claim to think about it, has been the subject of more than 85 million videos.
It is in podcasts, however, that history has the greatest success. The Rest is History competes with Hardcore History, Revisionist History, The History of Rome, Stuff You Missed in History Class, Tides of History, History Hit and hundreds more to satisfy the public’s seemingly insatiable appetite for amiable discourse about war, monarchy, empire, plague and revolution.
The fate of peoples is made like this, two men in small rooms. Forget the coronations, the conclaves of cardinals, the pomp and processions. This is how the world changes: a counter pushed across a table, a pen stroke that alters the force of a phrase, a woman's sigh as she passes and leaves on the air a trail of orange flower or rose water; her hand pulling close the bed curtain, the discreet sigh of flesh against flesh.
The path to the history podcasting’s world domination began in the early 1990s. While Francis Fukuyama declared (in his 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man) that history was over, a new concept was emerging on the nascent internet: “asynchronous radio.” By the early 2000s, internet radio stations were uploading episodes and discussions — “audioblogs,” as they were briefly known — that could be downloaded and listened to at any time on a computer or one of the new personal media players, such as Apple’s iPod, which was first released in 2001.
Within a few years, podcasts became a niche area of broadcasting. Dan Carlin, then a radio journalist, was an early convert to their potential. He knew that in traditional broadcasting, a certain mass appeal was needed to reach an audience. But the addressable market for podcasting was the entire English-speaking world. “If you even have a tiny little slice of that pie,” he remembers thinking, “that’s still a lot of human beings.”
Carlin was also a historian. As a history major at the University of Colorado in the late 1980s, he had snuck into the journalism school to see a talk by the great broadcast journalist Connie Chung. During the Q&A, a student asked Chung which module would best prepare them for life in the news media. Carlin recalls Chung gave what she acknowledged would be an unpopular reply. Everything the journalism students were learning would be re-taught to them by their employers, she told them, and they would be better off working on the fundamental skills of critical thinking, analysis and research — by studying history.
Carlin proved her right, becoming a journalist in Los Angeles, where he was adept at the research behind stories. He moved into radio, and in the summer of 2006 began recording the podcast he has been running ever since, Hardcore History.
The first episode was just 16 minutes long. He remembers reaching 5,000 downloads, which felt like a “huge victory” at the time. But in the decades that followed, as his audience grew into the many millions, Carlin found there was practically no limit to his audience’s appetite for historical storytelling.
Episodes can now last for more than six hours, and although Carlin produces only one or two per year, Hardcore History remains one of the most popular history podcasts in the world. (It was at the time of writing No. 2 in the US.) Carlin says advertising is only a small part of his revenue; the bulk of his income comes directly from listeners, who pay for individual episodes or packages of shows for up to $100. His early episodes still sell — one advantage of the history business is that old material doesn’t go out of date.
Carlin’s success perhaps comes down to his authenticity. He spends six to eight months on an episode, two months of which will be spent entirely on reading and research. During recording, his mornings are spent improvising on a subject in the studio, and during the afternoons he will continue to read. At a time when so much media is quick and conversational, audiences respond to a speaker who is genuinely immersed in their subject.
Classical Civilization
Why history, though? What is it about the present moment that makes the past so enticing?
Carlin suggests this could be one symptom of an aging society. As people get older, the past becomes more meaningful. “We start to realize our own personal stake in history, the more of it we have in our lives,” he says.
Perhaps it is also a symptom of the fact that we live in interesting times. Other periods of profound technological and political change have been accompanied by a mania for the past. The Victorians, as their society was transformed by the industrial revolution, became obsessed with dinosaurs, ancient Egypt and classical civilization. Amid the social revolutions of the era after World War II, Hollywood’s biggest blockbusters were historical epics: War and Peace, Ben-Hur, The Ten Commandments, Spartacus, Cleopatra.
Popular history may also be filling in for the decline of academic history. Higher education data for the UK shows that while overall student numbers have risen by almost 20% over the past five years, the number studying history has fallen 10%. In the US, spring enrollment for history by undergraduates on four-year courses has fallen by more than 15% since 2019. As students are pushed by the high cost of education to study subjects that offer a more obvious route to employment (US dental school enrollment has risen 14% in the last decade), their fascination with history may be finding an outlet in books and podcasts instead.
Different Conversations
Among those who do study history, a few are fortunate enough to do so with Mary Beard, perhaps Britain’s best-known historian. For many years her classics lectures at Cambridge were attended by scores of students from other departments, who would sneak in to enjoy her lively and fascinating evocation of the distant past. History, Beard told me, is far from a redundant skill: It gives us a means to understand the present.
A few years ago, Beard spoke to a class of secondary school students in the UK about the freedom of speech. The teenagers thought of this as a modern problem, something that had emerged from social media. They were visibly uncomfortable; as the conversation moved to the Harry Potter author JK Rowling’s views on gender, no one wanted to say the wrong thing. So Beard told them about Socrates, who was condemned to death for his political views.
She recalls the students “were amazed” to learn that this was an issue as old as history itself, but what happened next fascinated her: “Their ability to talk interestingly about these issues grew enormously,” she said.
“Socrates had some fairly spicy takes on democracy — of which he wasn’t the biggest fan — and he was forced to commit suicide, but the distance of time made him safe for discussion,” Beard said. “It was a different level of conversation to when they were looking over their shoulders at whether they were saying the right thing.”
Global Interest
In 2019, a small London-based TV production company, Goalhanger Films, branched out from sports documentaries and began recording a World War II podcast called We Have Ways of Making You Talk, hosted by the historian James Holland and the comedian and historian Al Murray. Goalhanger co-founder Jack Davenport says the team was surprised by the audience the podcast received; before long it was reaching a million downloads a month.
Comedian Al Murray and historian James Holland drive a 1940s tank across London’s Lambeth Bridge to promote We Have Ways Fest, the companion festival of their podcast We Have Ways of Making You Talk.Photographer: Imageplotter / Alamy Stock Photo/www.alamy.com
To grab a bigger audience, however, Davenport knew they would need a show that was broader and more accessible; not everyone can focus on a single six-year period for hundreds of episodes. So he and his co-founder, Tony Costa, devised a format for a show that an audience could join any time; it might focus on Henry V one week, Eva Perón the next. They took the idea to James Holland’s brother, Tom — well known for his written histories of Rome, Islam and medieval Europe — and asked him which historian he would most like to be sat next to at a party. It was this question that opened the door to the globe-spanning success of The Rest is History.
Podcast listeners form parasocial relationships with the hosts who speak, for hours at a time, into their ears; they begin to feel as if they know them. Davenport says this is “absolutely deliberate — that’s what we want.” Goalhanger, which now produces many of the UK’s most popular podcasts, including The Rest is Politics and The Rest is Entertainment, avoids interviews and focuses primarily on the chemistry between hosts. “We want to make shows that people feel they want to spend a lot of time with, and that means effectively feeling like you’re part of their relationship,” Davenport says.
What comes through from the best history podcasts is not only the on-air rapport between hosts, but a transparent and authentic affection for the subject. Audiences, says Sandbrook, “love the stories. They love the characters. They love the feeling of being catapulted back to the past. So in a weird way, I think they’re not really there for us, so much as they’re there for what we represent — the richness of the past, the amazing adventures that people have had, the vanished world that we will never encounter again.”
The same can be said of the hosts that have made history podcasts so successful. It is Mary Beard’s passion for her subject that enables her to teach it in such a compelling way: “For me,” she said, “the ability to think about the world 2,000 years ago is as exciting and as mind-blowing, as our speculation about life on Mars.”
The shift piqued my interest. Does this represent a growing trend, and if so, what does that mean for efforts to nudge people toward more plant-based diets?
Lara Williams is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering climate change.
For many, the real meaning of Christmas lies in sharing meals with family and friends. These feasts are often extravagant in style or size (or both) and are designed without our gut microbiomes and arteries in mind: Such is their joy.
They’re also often laden with tradition. My family’s festive table, however, has been through a series of evolutions. My pescetarian childhood Christmas was celebrated around an enormous bowl of pesto pasta. We had a few years of the traditional roast turkey, followed by beef when it was decided a big bird wasn’t worth the stress. Then the feast was vegan until last year, when my parents decided to welcome small amounts of dairy back into their lives.
All the meals were suitably celebratory, but the transition back toward dairy was notable because it echoes a shift I’ve seen multiple times among my peers. Several vegetarian and vegan friends have reverted to eating meat or are considering it, while — at least in my limited experience — no one seems to be going the other way. There’s also been a spate of celebrities renouncing plant-based diets too, including Lizzo, Miley Cyrus and Bear Grylls. Full disclosure: I’ve been a vegetarian for the last seven years, but I sometimes eat fish, and on a few occasions, I have eaten meat. (Some might call me a flexitarian.)
It’s tempting to dismiss a preoccupation with others’ food choices as nosy. But it matters, at least on a macro scale. UK agriculture accounted for an estimated 12% of UK greenhouse gas emissions in 2023, a proportion that has been growing in significance as other sectors’ emissions decline. And as the UK imports around half of its food, our diets have effects beyond those associated with domestic farming.
Beef, Dark Chocolate and Lamb Have Big Carbon Footprints
Carbon dioxide-equivalents per kilogram of food
Looking at it from a consumption perspective, food makes up about 30% of the carbon footprint of a typical household in high-income European countries. Most of that footprint comes from animal products, with livestock farming accounting for 14.5% of global emissions. Governments seeking to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions will have to clean up their nations’ plates.
This doesn’t mean that everyone must go vegan. Given food consumption is highly personal, influenced by numerous factors including culture, allergies and health, that would be an unrealistic goal. But coupled with improvements in production practices and food waste, big reductions can be achieved with small lifestyle shifts. The Climate Change Committee (CCC), an independent advisory body, has recommended that UK meat consumption should come down by 20% by 2030. A 2019 report written by Richard Carmichael, a research fellow at Imperial College London, for the CCC says that halving consumption of animal products by avoiding the highest-impact producers would achieve 73% of the emissions reduction made from switching to entirely plant-based diets.
A few years ago it felt like there was a lot of momentum behind the transition to plant-based (or at least plant-heavy) diets. New alternative proteins from companies including Impossible Foods Inc. and Beyond Meat Inc. were hitting the market, and there was a boom in specialist vegan eateries. These days, Beyond Meat’s stock price has plummeted, and there’s a rash of storiesabout vegan restaurants having to add meat to their menus in order to survive.
The Highs of Plant-Based Meat Are Over, For Now
Beyond Meat Inc share price
So what’s happening to our eating habits?
A YouGov tracker survey shows that the proportion of respondents in the UK identifying as eating fewer or no animal products — from flexitarianism to veganism — largely hasn’t changed over the past five years:
The Proportion of People Identifying As Something Other Than Meat-Eater Is Fairly Static
Responses to the question: “Which of these best describes your diet?”
As you’d expect, vegans and vegetarians skew slightly younger — but the differences aren’t huge:
Vegans and Vegetarians Skew Slightly Younger
Responses to question “Which of these best describes your diet?” by age
Plant-based/vegan
Vegetarian
Flexitarian
Pescetarian
Meat eater
None of these
18-24 year olds
25-49
50-64
65+
Source: YouGov
Note: Average of 2024 surveys.
But what people identify as is less important than what they actually eat. Here, data from the UK’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs’ Family Food Survey has interesting insights. Total meat consumption has been slowly declining, falling to a record low in 2021:
Meat Consumption Has Been Slowly Declining Since the 1980s
Average quantity of meat purchased per person per week
While cheese consumption has increased slightly, consumption of semi-skimmed milk peaked in 2012. Meanwhile, non-dairy milk substitutes have climbed to about 110 milliliters (around 4 ounces) per person a week in 2022 from less than 25 milliliters in 2004, when it was first broken out as a separate category — this still represents only a fraction of cow’s milk being quaffed, but it’s an impressive growth rate.
Dairy Consumption Has Changed Over the Past 50 Years
Amount of dairy produce purchased per person, per week
In the last few years, price has almost certainly been a factor influencing our shopping baskets. As the sticker shocks caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine hit in 2022, you can see drops in consumption of categories including fish and cheese. But our diets have changed a lot since the 1970s, and I suspect the long-term declines in meat consumption are thanks in part to the globalization of food — we didn’t just start importing more produce from overseas (which has enabled us to eat fresh tomatoes, for example, all year), but we’ve been more exposed to plant-based recipes from different cultures.
In that half-century, there’s no doubt that vegetarianism and veganism has become far easier and more socially acceptable. That has ripple effects as meat eaters can also now enjoy more flexible dining selections. But left to society and markets, things are moving too slowly to meet targets for meat consumption, and Carmichael’s work reveals that clear barriers to eating more vegetarian and vegan dishes remain.
Several things swayed my friends back to animal products, including romantic partners, concerns over ultra-processed foods or merely feeling that they were alone in their endeavors. Given governments have generally avoided policies nudging people toward more sustainable diets, it’s no surprise that people are returning to what those around them are doing.
There’s also a lesson for policy in this shift. The failure of vegan restaurants reflects the fact that an exclusive approach is less effective. Vegans and vegetarians socialize with those who eat meat. A social group would likely pick a location where everyone can eat happily. Having both options also normalizes plant-based meals — they are, after all, just food — and makes them more accessible to those who don’t identify as vegan but may want to try a particular dish. Such an approach could be taken with catering at government-funded institutions such as schools and hospitals, which, according to Carmichael, provide 30% of meals in the UK.
But with meat drawn into the culture wars and farmers already angry about a range of policy changes, this is an area that lawmakers are nervous about. At the United Nations climate conference in Azerbaijan, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer insisted that he won’t “tell people how to run their lives.”
In the end, the impetus to coax people further toward a more flexitarian practice — where meals are more heavily plant-based but meat, dairy and fish are enjoyed in moderation — may come from another source: public health.
Although meat consumption has declined overall, there’s been a steady rise in ready meals and processed meats, which has led to overconsumption of saturated fat and salt. In England, 64% of adults were estimated to be overweight or living with obesity in 2022 to 2023. This puts strain on the National Health Service. Obesity costs it £6.5 billion ($8.1 billion) a year and is the second-biggest preventable cause of cancer.
The UK Is Eating More Chicken and Ready Meals
Amount of meat bought per person, per week to eat at home
Helping people eat healthier diets with more fruit, vegetables and fiber would have enormous benefits for human well-being and the planet. Research suggests that reducing average meat consumption to two to three servings a week could prevent 45,000 deaths and save the NHS £1.2 billion a year. Starmer may not want to push the envelope, but the government can’t ignore the diet question forever.
Perhaps Christmas isn’t a time to dwell too much on what’s healthy. Enjoy your dinner, whatever is on your plate. But come 2025, we should all reflect on whether our diets are serving our best interests.
