Reading archive 2023-09-18

Lab to table: The promise and the perils of cell-cultured chicken - "It was the first time in five years that Crenn, the three-star Michelin chef, had served meat other than fish. She had stopped serving meat after she 'saw what factory farming was doing to our planet,' Crenn wrote on a note card that greeted every diner. 'Yes, the flavor is important, but the food also has to stand for something.'

"The Upside bird at Bar Crenn is composed of 99 percent chicken cells: It’s a dense, meaty nugget that, according to a recent Wired story, isn’t even grown in traditional suspension bioreactors, but in single-use plastic flasks called roller bottles, an apparently expensive and wasteful process." [ed. note: lol wait until she finds out what fishing fleets and plastic bottles do to the oceans]

Opinion  The ‘replace Kamala Harris’ chatter is off-base. And futile.

With democracy on the ballot, the mainstream press must change its ways: US news organizations have turned Biden’s age into a scandal and continue to cover Trump as an entertaining side show

A desperate appeal to newsroom leaders on the eve of a chaos election

Opinion  Mitt Romney and me

A couple was sick of mowing. Now their wildflowers are a local attraction.: ‘We started this as not wanting to mow grass, never expecting it would become what it has,’ Jonathan Yacko said about his Vermont field

What makes TikTok so thirsty for Joe Burrow?: Social media has harnessed the sex appeal of quarterbacks for thirst trap videos. After years of avoiding the obvious, the NFL has started to play along.

The scorched-earth activist trying to take down Hunter Biden: Garrett Ziegler, an often-provocative former Trump White House staffer, seeks to influence House investigations and the public discussion - "In his White House role, Ziegler wrote reports about Chinese tariffs (which he argued the U.S. should reciprocate), the covid-19 pandemic (which he argued was planned) and the 2020 election (which he argued was stolen)."

‘Our man in Georgia’: How a bail bondsman aided Trump and got indicted: Scott G. Hall’s quest to find evidence of voter fraud shows how off-book activity fueled campaign to subvert 2020 election

Mythbusting: Trees and Utilities

Mythbusting: The “Trees and Crime” Myth

Police balked at giving Michael Fanone his badge back. Then a reporter called.

There will be blood: Inside the U.S. Army’s mosquito breeding program

NEW: it’s become popular to say that supply and demand simply don’t apply when it comes to housing, but the evidence is clear: When you build lots of homes — affordable or market-rate — prices and rents flatten and even fall [ed. note: Twitter thread]