Everything Lies Except the Broth
Eva Biringer wrote about ramen for Zeit Magazin this week, and she got it right: slurping is not just permitted but expected, the broth is fat and hot and overwhelming in the best way, and the queues outside the new ramen bars are full of people who want to signal that they know what’s good. Sushi did this twenty years ago. Now ramen has completed the same journey—from Tokyo everyday staple to the dish that tells everyone else how cultured you are. I find it hard to be cynical about something that genuinely tastes that good. The performance around it is a different matter.
Which connects directly to Sarah Stendel’s piece for NEON on what Coachella is actually like. The conclusion is blunt: if you’re seeing someone’s festival photos and feeling inadequate, they’re lying. They’re sweating through a carefully chosen outfit in a California field, slightly sunburned, performing a good time for an audience that isn’t physically there. The gap between the documented experience and the lived one has never been wider, and Coachella is basically the central lab for that experiment.
And that connects, with uncomfortable tidiness, to Brian Resnick’s piece for Vox about deepfakes and false memory. We’ve always known still images can be manipulated—the retouching, the angles, the digital enhancement of things that didn’t need it—but AI-fabricated video is a different category of lie. The brain treats moving images as inherently more credible than stills. Manufactured footage doesn’t just deceive you in the moment; it can rewrite what you think you remember. The evidentiary value of video is collapsing faster than any institution is equipped to handle.
Nana Baah asked three objectively attractive people for VICE whether their looks have actually given them better lives. The answers are more ambivalent than you’d expect: yes, doors open faster, yes, people are warmer, but there’s also the specific exhaustion of being constantly perceived, and the low-grade anxiety of knowing any advantage is temporary. One woman mentioned that her boyfriend talks all the time about how much he’d love to be a hot woman. The desire to briefly inhabit a different body and see what the world looks like from inside it—I understand that completely.
Lisa Blechschmitt’s column in the Süddeutsche Zeitung on smart home surveillance is quieter in its dread. Alexa is convenient, obviously. The question she asks is what happens when a device that’s always listening becomes a legal witness. The future she describes isn’t dramatic dystopia—it’s just a world where ambient domestic conversation can, under certain conditions, be subpoenaed. Somehow that’s worse.
Steven Pinker spoke to Spektrum about his thesis that global violence has been declining for centuries—murder rates, war deaths, rape, all down in historical terms. It runs against the emotional grain of reading the news, but he’s measured about it: Violence still exists, and where it breaks out, it’s unbearable. But relative to the vast number of killings that have marked human history, there is less of it in the world today than in past eras.
I find myself wanting to argue with it even as the numbers hold. Maybe that’s the point.
The piece I read twice was Marit Blossey’s account for Mit Vergnügen of an afternoon at a homeless aid center in Berlin’s Wedding district. A sunny spring day, the door standing open, the quiet ordinary work of people helping people who fell through the cracks. No grand thesis. Just the thing itself.
Two more Berlin pieces. A writer on Im Gegenteil explored why making real friends in the city is so much harder than making acquaintances—anyone who’s spent time there will recognize the phenomenon without needing it explained. And I Heart Berlin collected perspectives from young residents on how they actually experience the place. Some see a playground. Some see a gentrifying trap. Both are correct, depending on the week.
Then there’s Peter Rubin’s piece for Wired on VR porn, which feels like the logical endpoint of a week spent reading about reality and its substitutes. The standard argument still holds: every major media technology—videotape, DVD, the internet itself—was adopted faster because porn drove demand, and VR is next. You put on the headset and you’re spatially inside the scene in a way flat screens can’t fake. Rubin takes the medium seriously as cultural technology rather than a punchline, which is the right call. The form is going to matter regardless of what you think about the content.