Big Potato & Subscription Addiction

Featured Articles

The Rise Of Big Potato

The Lever • 2 Jan 2025 • ~2600 words

Allegations of price collusions among the potato cartel reveal the new, sophisticated methods food corporations are using to keep prices high.

The four companies now stand accused of operating as a “cartel” and conspiring to hike prices, jacking up the cost of french fries and Tater Tots around the country. But they’re hardly alone. The case against Big Potato is a window into how consolidation has crept into every corner of the food industry — and how these firms are finding new, sophisticated methods to keep prices high.

It's Time to End our Subscription Addiction

Future Proof • 1 Jan 2025 • ~4450 words

Can the media survive the inevitable horrors of 2025?

. . . two things happened in the past couple of years to disrupt Jeremy’s cashflow. The first is that more publications and journalists introduced hard paywalls for their content. This meant that Jeremy’s readers were now having to make an active choice about what they subscribe to. Could they afford to spend £10 on The Normalbloke Manifesto, a bi-weekly email, when they also had to spend $25 a month for the New York Times? Plus, when Jeremy launched TNM, his subscribers, on average, signed-up to 2.5 Substacks. Now, that average has risen to 10.

Recommended Articles

Will you ever be able to talk to your dog?

The Economist • 3 Jan 2025 • ~4250 words • Archive Link

The tech world is on the case – but there’s no guarantee that our pets will have anything interesting to say.

There’s a long, grubby history of animals being trained to “speak” in ways that humans have claimed to understand. This time felt different, though. Bunny is one of a growing cohort of dogs worldwide who are now using these buttons, known as Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) boards, to express themselves. It’s an open question whether they are intentionally communicating, memorising combinations of actions or doing something else entirely – but an answer may be forthcoming.

How Sweden Became a Transnational Crime Hub

New Lines Magazine • 31 Dec 2024 • ~6000 words

The murder of two British businessmen turns a once-quiet seaside port into a symbol of unbridled gangland criminality.

Niklas’ story was the story of Sweden’s evolving crime scene. It went from the indigenous biker gangs of the 1980s to the Yugoslav-Serbian gangs of the ‘90s to this hybrid transnational crime network that was very “inclusive.” Swedes fell in love with cocaine. Traces of it have even been found in the Swedish parliament. Cocaine coursed through Stockholm’s veins, or rather its sewage system, as researchers discovered. During just one week in October 2019, Stockholmers smoked nearly 1.8 million doses of cannabis, snorted 33,670 lines of cocaine and took over 451,000 doses of amphetamine. That was $3 million spent on drugs, much of it passing through Malmo.

How Much Does Our Language Shape Our Thinking?

The New Yorker • 23 Dec 2024 • ~3750 words • Archive Link

English continues to expand into diverse regions around the world. The question is whether humanity will be homogenized as a result.

For English speakers, time is understood spatially, with the past typically “behind us” and the future “ahead.” Aymara, an Andean language spoken by millions of Indigenous Bolivians and Peruvians, likewise uses space to talk about time but favors a metaphor about sight. In Aymara, nayra, or last year, translates literally to something like “the year I can see.” The past, visible, thus stands in front of the speaker, while the future, unseeable, looms behind. Ancha nayra pachana, or a long time ago, can roughly be translated as “a time way in front of me.” When researchers analyzed videos of people chatting, they noticed that the metaphors inform gesture, with fluent Aymara speakers pointing backward to talk about the future and forward to talk about the past. Spanish speakers from the same region show the opposite patterns, suggesting that language configures how speakers map time onto space.