Lotteries, raffles and the like are not generally my friends. But last night, I was lucky enough to win not one but two Regency Wraps reusable parchment sheets, which unlike other reusable baking sheets can be cut to size. This happens so seldom I just had to share my good fortune. There will be a...

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Garret Hardin's idea that the emotion of shame can help to manage a common resource has always been a favourite for me. Up to 150 people, as Hardin suggested, can help one another do the right thing (for them all) by instilling a feeling of shame in transgressors. Seems he and I have been wrong. Not about the role of shame, but about what to call it. Brené Brown told me so in her TED talk, listening to Shame.

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That’s the title of an article in the New York Review of Books blog by Tim Parks.

My laconic friend Luigi’s answer was “No”.1 Parks comes to much the same conclusion, but in support he adds a great deal of insight and historical learning, which I am sure Luigi shares, internally.

I’ve yet to...

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Nature recently carried a Comment setting out A market approach to saving the whales. It got a fair bit of traction, which is nice.

The authors, Christopher Costello, Leah R. Gerber and Steven Gaines, admit that their proposal is complex and could be hard to administer. Rendered down, it is simp...

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Damien Petit and his “Boîte A Pain,” photo by La Dépêche du Midi

Marvellous story.

"A compelling example of the potential that de-anchoring services from the static cartography of a fixed storefront holds to reconfigure diet, public space, and the food system itself."

In essence, baker delivers.