James' World 2

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Last month, Blake Chandlee, TikTok’s president of global business solutions, was asked if he was concerned about competition from existing social-media networks like Facebook. Chandlee, who spent more than twelve years at Mark Zuckerberg’s company before moving to TikTok, dismissed the idea. “Facebook is a social platform. They’ve built all their algorithms based on the social graph,” he said, referring to the network of links to friends, family, and casual acquaintances that Facebook users painstakingly assemble over time. “We are an entertainment platform. The difference is significant.” Chandlee appeared to be responding to recent moves made by Facebook. Last year, the company integrated a TikTok-style short-video format called Reels directly into its main app. Then, in an internal memo sent this spring, Tom Alison, a senior executive at the social-media giant, announced a plan to modify the platform’s news feed to focus more on these short videos, tweaking the algorithm to display the most engaging content, even if these selections are “unconnected” to accounts that a user has friended or followed. Facebook, it seems, is moving away from its traditional focus on text and images, spread among people who know one another, to instead adopt TikTok’s emphasis on pure distraction. This shift is not surprising given TikTok’s phenomenal popularity, but it’s also shortsighted: platforms like Facebook could be doomed if they fail to maintain the social graphs upon which they built their kingdoms.

To understand Facebook’s current danger, it helps to better understand its original success. In the spring of 2004, when my college friends signed up for TheFacebook.com, as it was then called, they did so because other people they knew were signing up as well. (One of the platform’s early killer features was the ability to check the “relationship status” of classmates.) By the end of 2006, the year in which Facebook opened to the general public, the service had already gathered twelve million active users. At that point, network-effect advantages made it hard for a competitor to emerge; two years later, when Facebook hit a hundred million active users, competition became all but impossible. Why would you join a new network dedicated to connection with people you know if everyone you knew was already on Facebook?

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Illustration by Tim Enthoven

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Cauliflower is great for grilling. Its sturdy structure and ability to absorb sauce and spice make it a natural choice for a main grilled vegetarian dish. The problem is, we have recently been asking too much of cauliflower. It is now our flour, our rice, our chicken, and our steak, and its overexposure mostly leads to groans among both vegetarians and anyone who would like to introduce a second vegetable into their system.

“Whenever I do an offsite event, the cop-out dish is cauliflower for vegetarians,” says Greg Baxtrom, chef and owner of Olmsted, Patti Ann’s, and Maison Yaki in Brooklyn. “There’s, like, four courses of some poor vegetarian getting cauliflower for everything.” So for your summer grilling plans, it’s time to look for flavor where no one wants it. It’s time to grill weird, unpopular root vegetables.

Baxtrom says his favorite vegetables to grill are things like kohlrabi, turnip, and rutabaga. “They’re usually pretty cheap because nobody wants them,” he says. They work because, like cauliflower and so many other vegetables, they are all members of the brassica family. They are sturdy and can easily take on the flavors of whatever you use to season them. But they also each have distinct flavors and textures. Rutabaga is both sweet and bitter, with a somewhat creamy texture. Kohlrabi is crunchy and zesty. Turnips and parsnips are like nuttier and earthier potatoes. And of course, there’s the ever-popular sweet potato, which you should freeze before you bake and grill.

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Niki Waters/Eater

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As restaurants and bars slowly open back up and group outings have returned, I, Jazmín Aguilera, find myself wondering how it is that we as a society have lived through a deadly pandemic and reorganized our whole way of life — and have yet to definitively decide on what’s acceptable etiquette for splitting a dinner check.

Of course, that’s not for the lack of options available. There are countless tools and resources for money transfers or bill sharing, and very little resistance to incorporating Venmo or cash apps into our social lives. But those tools come into play after a group has decided on how to settle up.

Despite how easy it is to pay for your share, the social nuances of deciding how the check will be split are not so easy to sort out. Some folks want to pay for themselves only. Other folks don’t mind an even split to make the server’s life a little easier. Others prefer the most chaotic option: Oh, don’t worry about it. You just get the next one.

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Sol Cotti for NPR

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https://www.npr.org/2021/12/02/1060996322/how-to-talk-about-money-privilege?utm_source=pocket_collection_story

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