Five links on Friday – 8 August 2016

  1. “Every coffee place looks the same,” Schwarzmann says. The new cafe resembles all the other coffee shops Foursquare suggests, whether in Odessa, Beijing, Los Angeles, or Seoul: the same raw wood tables, exposed brick, and hanging Edison bulbs.”: Kyle Chayka takes on the creeping sameness spread by the global middle-class.
  2. On the “bourgeois nostalgia” that pervades the food-reform movement.
  3. If you’re the sort of person left unimpressed by a backyard pizza oven, then it’s time to build a compost-powered hot tub.
  4. The plan of two spies in the 1910s to solve America’s food crisis with hippopotamus meat.
  5. Legendary film critic Roger Ebert’s deep love for the rice cooker