Interesting Links for 13-11-2022

[andrewducker]

1. A material normally only found in meteorites has now been made artificially, and may solve our issues with some rare earth metals

(tags:materials meteor space technology viaSwampers )

2. German transphobe also a Holocaust denier

(tags:Holocaust transgender Germany viaSwampers LGBT )

3. Iran Votes to Execute Protesters (there are 15,000 in prison right now)

(tags:Iran protest death_penalty OhForFucksSake )

4. English people encounter pizza for the first time

(tags:pizza history )

5. Discovery of bronze statue rewrites Italy's Etruscan-Roman history

(tags:history archeology Italy )

6. Why do so few women excel at maths? Sexism, of course

(tags:sexism women mathematics )

7. Major ad firm Omnicom recommends clients pause Twitter ad spend (clients include Apple and McDonalds, and 5,000 more)

(tags:Twitter advertising Doom )

8. How "Wordle editor" became a real job at The New York Times

(tags:games language )

Comments

[calimac]

4) I've had pizza in England, several times at different places, and it was uniformly vile. (Can't speak to Scotland.) It appears you have to go to Italy to get good pizza. (Or America, where the pizza is unlike Italian but can also be very good.)

[alithea]

I am not vastly experienced in Scottish pizza but I can say that I've never had a take away pizza in Scotland that was a patch on either American or Italian pizza. You can buy some nice stone baked pizzas in supermarkets to cook at home these days though, which are at least nice rather than vile (which is also my experience of the likes of Dominoes).

[anef]

I like Zizzi's pizzas, to the extent that I will actually order one in preference to other things on the menu. My Italian class went there for a meal once and I believe my Italian teacher thought they were reasonable.

[jducoeur]

There's really no single concept of American Pizza at this point. There's a lot of old-fashioned neighborhood pizza (much of which is kind of terrible), and many home-grown styles like Detroit Pizza or Chicago Deep Dish that are weird but delightful when made well, but variations of Italian varieties are pretty common at this point, including some places that make solidly good Neapolitan-style. (Albeit less often with an authentically Italian selection of toppings.)

[calimac]

This is why I said "American pizza can be very good." There's lots of really lousy American pizza, especially from major chains, which tend to specialize in "crackers with melted cheese on top." But there is also lots of truly awesome American pizza out there, and I'm talking basic New York-style pizza, which is related to Neapolitan but not the same thing, and leaving out things like Chicago deep-dish, which is really a different dish derived from pizza. I've never had trouble finding good stuff anywhere in the US west coast or northeast, which is where I've done most of my pizza-eating.

[jducoeur]

Right -- my point is mainly that sometimes (although by no means always) it is Italian-style. (This is a thing for me mainly because my favorite weeknight restaurant does very good Neapolitan pizza, and I have it often.)