Posted inNonfiction, Quotes

Olive Oil Trouble

Olive-oil fraud was already common in antiquity. Galen tells of unscrupulous oil merchants who mixed high-quality olive oil with cheaper substances like lard, and Apicius provides a recipe for turning cheap Spanish oil into prized oil from Istria using minced herbs and roots. The Greeks and the Romans used olive oil as food, soap, lotion, […]

Posted inNonfiction, Quotes

The Sale of the FT and an Oral History of the News Business

The FT Group, which includes standout business newspaper the Financial Times, is being sold for $1.3 billion to Nikkei, Japan’s largest media company. Established in 1888, the FT has been lauded for its digital transition as the newspaper industry has declined. “Riptide” is an oral history project that was first launched in 2013 about what “really happened to […]

Posted inNonfiction, Quotes

The Rise of Independent Travel Magazines

Subject matter can be almost self-consciously esoteric. The latest issue of Ernest includes a piece by Queen guitarist Brian May on diableries (19th-century stereoscopic photographs of clay model demons). Cereal has 10 pages on Anglepoise lamps; Avaunt has a feature headlined “Politics of map projections”. The new magazines also move away from the traditional “colonial” […]