WELL, THAT’S DISAPPOINTING. There is no magic diet.
The Way You Sleep Can Reveal Your Risk of Heart Failure Up to 10 Years in Advance.“All that is needed is the data from one electrocardiogram (ECG) lead, placed on the chest during sleep. With that, artificial intelligence can predict someone’s risk of an irregular heartbeat, stroke, heart failure, or death from any cause in the next 10 years.”
The Chocolate Conspiracy
New York Magazine: no paywall – “The Chocolate Conspiracy. Everyone in my life agreed: It tastes different now. I ventured into the molten belly of our crumbling world to find out why. Rachel Handler, a features writer at Vulture and New YorkOn a recent afternoon, somewhere near the tail end of the American empire, I went to the movies. On a whim, I bought a box of Sno-Caps; they’d been my favorite movie candy as a kid.
I mindlessly ate at least 19 of the semisweet-chocolate nonpareils until I realized I could barely taste them. What I did taste was somehow both neutral and vaguely unappetizing, like I was chewing on shaved-off pieces of a plain bar of soap. I internalized the problem and blamed myself. Maybe my tongue’s physical properties had changed and it was no longer a reliable source. Or my childhood memories, blurred by nostalgia and brain damage from drugs and the internet, were not to be trusted. Sno-Caps had probably never tasted like chocolate but always like soap. Regardless, it was my fault and not the fault of a multinational conglomerate that had my best interests at heart and would never betray me.
I forgot about the experience, a fleeting and common one in our era, until this past Valentine’s Day, when a 71-year-old man named Brad Reese — previously unknown to me but with whom I now regularly text — fired up LinkedIn from his one-bedroom condo in West Palm Beach, Florida. Reese is the proud grandson of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups inventor H. B. Reese and an earnest and affable retiree who often wanders around wearing a bright-orange Reese’s T-shirt, talking to people about his family’s much-beloved candy. He’s been doing this for years, despite the fact that he does not work for the brand and never has. (Hershey bought it in 1963.) On that February 14 morning, Reese opened a bag of Reese’s Mini-Hearts, a seasonal variant of the product, and found them “inedible.”
He threw them out, then posted a scathing open letter to Todd Scott, manager of corporate brand and editorial at Hershey, accusing Hershey of unforgivably altering many of Reese’s products by replacing real chocolate with compound chocolate — basically using vegetable oils instead of cocoa butter to lower costs and replacing real peanut butter with “peanut-butter-style crèmes” (also using vegetable oil). Others weighed in to share similar horror stories. “As a 61 yr old consumer who has eaten Reese’s as long as I can remember,” wrote one man, “I knew it wasn’t the same.
Everyone said oh your taste buds have changed nope, the candy changed.” In every LinkedIn shitposter’s fantasy come to life, the missive escaped containment, getting picked up by everyone from Stephen Colbert to the New York Post. The Post shared texts from one of Reese’s furious and baffled relatives, many of whom were apparently still living quite comfortably off the Hershey’s sale. “Brad, this is your cousin Becky. You have created a nightmare for our family and the company,” wrote one. “It’s embarrassing to the entire Reese clan. Please stop!”…
I would spend the next several months tumbling down a chocolate vortex, encountering dozens of eccentric characters, all disagreeing about the fundamental question of what chocolate even is and who it should be for. I entered a terrifying fun house of American enshittification. I learned that — not to sound like a LinkedIn guy — what’s going on with chocolate is a parable for the modern world. That at this particularly bleak end stage of capitalism, everything we once treasured has or will lose its essential essence and MrBeast will always be involved somehow…”
Scientists Discover Exercise Changes the Body in Ways We Never Fully Understood.