I woke up at 4:30 today. Right now, the end of September, this is right in the middle of walnut harvest season. I’m still wearing my work clothes every day, going out into the field every day. So the shaking operation comes …Continue reading
How hybrid maize helps farmers get through dry spells
I’ve been a farmer for six years, mainly of maize, but also coffee and sweet potatoes. Two years ago, I started using a hybrid maize seed called SAWA, which was developed specifically for drought-like conditions by scientists from the International Maize and …Continue reading
How technology rewrites your diet
Wherever you live, the last meal you had probably looked and tasted different from meals served in the same place 50 years ago. Advances in the way we grow, process, and transport food have given more people more options for what to …Continue reading
Pakistan’s video gaming industry continues to be a dungeon crawler for women
Ever since the invention of video games, they have been the target of criticism when it comes to appropriate gender representation. From the early days, the only female representation in video games has been that of princesses calling upon the hero to …Continue reading
Breeding the right kind of cow
Since last year, I’ve had some trouble with our calves’ health. We’re not sure what’s going on. We think it might be extreme heat. You’ve probably heard of Certified Angus Beef, a real popular brand of meat—when you sell cattle that qualify, …Continue reading
Autochocolate
We get our beans from the Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Ecuador, the Dominican Republic, Peru, Colombia, and right here in Mexico. Since we are between harvests, we are in the middle of buying all the beans for next year. When we plan production …Continue reading
Kids are sick of Zoom too—so their teachers are getting creative
A few times a week, Vincent Buyssens’s students in Mechelen, Belgium’s Thomas More University College get on Instagram while he’s lecturing about creative strategy. They swipe through stories, add posts to their profile, and get lost in rabbit holes. But they’re not …Continue reading
How an internet lie about the Capitol invasion turned into an instant conspiracy theory
Just as well-known, easily identifiable far-right figures livestreamed themselves invading the Capitol in Washington, DC, a lie started spreading around the Trump-supporting internet: What if the mob was actually a group of antifa activists trying to make the president’s supporters look bad? …Continue reading
The biggest technology failures of 2020
This was a year we needed technology to save us. A pandemic raced over the land, there were wildfires, uneasy political divisions, and we gasped in the miasma of social media. In 2020, the ways in which technology can help or hurt …Continue reading
Technology can help us feed the world, if we look beyond profit
We won’t easily forget how we worried about food in the first days of the pandemic: empty shelves, scarce products, and widespread hoarding became an alarming reality around the world. While being reassured that the disruptions were “temporary,” Americans also heard troubling …Continue reading