Category: Text

The Food Scientists Working to Change the Colors You Eat

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Illustration credit: Nicholas Konrad | The New Yorker

Do you notice or pay attention to the color of the foods you eat? If not, it may be high time to think again, as changing or dropping such colors can apparently make once-relished foods seem “repulsive.” That’s one of the findings reported by Shayla Love in her August 2025 synthesis in The New Yorker of current food science research into viable substitutes for non-natural dyes, some of which may pose health hazards for consumers. Read Love’s report—and see if you feel differently about those oh-so-blue M&M’s. 

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Wicked Review—Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande Make the Magic Happen

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Image credit: Universal Pictures/AP

Spectacular! Visually stunning! Way too long! Good, but not great! Exhausting! This is just some of what’s been said about Wicked. Have you seen it? If so, what did you think of it? If you loved it, what did you love about it? If not, why not? Or maybe you liked some of it but not all of it. See what Wendy Ide, the chief film critic of the Observer, says in a review published in The Guardian on November 24, 2024.

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How Bluey Became the Best Kids’ Show of Our Time

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Image credit: Ludo Studios 2019

What was your favorite TV show when you were 5 or 6 years old? Did it essentially tell the same story over and over again? Just what was it about the show that kept you watching episode after episode? According to Kathryn VanArendonk, a critic who writes about TV, what makes Bluey the “best kids’ show of our time” is its refusal to take such a formulaic approach. Instead, Bluey’s unpredictability and quirky humor convince her that “these are real children,” ones she can learn grown-up lessons from. This review was first published in Vulture in 2021; this updated version was published on April 15, 2024, as Bluey’s popularity in the US reached a new peak.

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I Feel So Ugly without My Makeup On

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Image credit: Buse Koldas

Throughout history and in widely differing cultures around the world, people have used various kinds of makeup to mark or adorn themselves. Why? Answers to that question vary according to time and place, of course, but how about in our time and place: twenty-first century college campuses in the US? Enter Buse Koldas, a student from Istanbul who was in her first year at Johns Hopkins University, studying computer science and engineering, when she wrote about what makeup has meant to her for the Johns Hopkins News-Letter in 2024.

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Astro Bot Review: All History Lessons Should Be This Fun

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Image credit: Team Asobi

Think you’ve seen everything imaginable in video games? If so, you might want to read Harold Goldberg’s review of Sony’s Astro Bot. Goldberg speaks as an expert who has been playing, analyzing, and reviewing video games for over 15 years, most recently in this regular column for the New York Times that was launched in 2024. Let’s see if he intrigues you enough to give this game a try!

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Philip Gove and “Our Word”

Closeup view of a large dictionary viewed from the side. The book is open, and the yellowed edges of pages with thumb tabs are visible.
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Image credit: Rosmarie Voegtli (rvoegtli/Flickr)

If we think about dictionaries at all, we mostly tend to think about them in a fairy tale way—that is, they simply appear, whole and complete, in the fullness of their power, delivered by some mythical being, probably one with wings. But where do dictionaries come from? Who writes them? What words are worthy of inclusion? Who knows? Their very authority defies questioning. But that’s silly, isn’t it? Of course humans make dictionaries, and it’s no small task. Like other grand human activities, dictionary-making involves a lot of debate, controversy, and passionate argument. In this November 2023 essay from American Scholar, writer, editor, and language scholar David Skinner shares a dictionary story that is, well, f*ckin’ epic.

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That’s Not Actually True

A charcoal drawing with Kiese Laymon’s face in the center surrounded by four smaller images from the essay: a person behind a computer screen, Laymon in stocking feet sitting with a microphone, confederate soldiers doing lawn work, and a figure in stocking feet standing in a doorway behind a Welcome mat.
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Image credit: Billy Dee

Today is Tuesday. That’s not actually true. Well, it might be. It depends. The truth is, well, complicated sometimes. Kiese Laymon, who describes himself as a “Black southern writer,” is an English professor and winner of several prestigious awards including the 2022 MacArthur Genius Grant. His novels and essays explore conditions of race, class, body image, and more. In this 2019 essay from Scalawag magazine, he deftly employs the refrain “that’s not actually true” to explore some of the jagged boundaries between experience and expectation, reality and perception, and history and possibility, all regions where everything gets tossed together in a jumble of contradictions. His conclusion makes clear, however, that what he is actually addressing are the effects of centuries of racism embodied in the inner life of a 21st century Black southern writer.

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The Washington Post Takes the “Unusual Step” of Publishing Graphic Photos from Mass Shootings

A flat, grassy field lined with rows of simple grave markers that form a geometric pattern; the Washington Monument stands in the background.
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Image credit: Joe Flood

It’s not news to any of us that mass murders are alarmingly common here in the US. Most of us can rattle off place names—Sandy Hook, Uvalde, Parkland, Las Vegas, and numerous others. Many of us can name shooters, and sometimes we remember the names of the people whose lives were so senselessly ended. But those are names and words; what about images? For many good reasons, news organizations seldom publish photos or video of the grisly scenes. In November 2023, however, the Washington Post, a large-circulation daily newspaper, published mass shooting photos and interview snippets in a report titled “Terror on Repeat: A rare look at the devastation caused by AR-15 shootings.” The Post’s report was so unprecedented that Nieman Lab, a journalism watchdog and research organization affiliated with Harvard University, documented the process that the Post followed in a November 2023 report written by Nieman Lab’s deputy editor, Sarah Scire.

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