Today's Articles (2/9/2025)
THE WORLD WANTS MATCHA. JAPAN’S FARMS CAN’T KEEP UP.
It’s easy to picture the verdant powder, whisked to froth in glazed chawan before being tipped, streaming, into a glass of cold milk [...]
Much of the confusion stems from the fact that the vast majority of Japanese people don’t drink matcha—at least, not in the way everyone else is now, in lattes spiked with strawberry jam and blanketed with creamy foam.
Matcha as a flavouring—in ice creams, in coffee-adjacent drinks—only began in Japan in the 1990s when Western corporations like Haagen Dazs introduced products using lower grade matcha. “If you talk to an older Japanese person, they only drink matcha when they go to temple and there’s a special ceremony, like a wedding,” said Liu, adding that it was mostly white yoga moms, rather than her Asian customers, who sought out matcha at Miro when she first started the business.
The phenomenon isn’t all bad. Farmers are finally being rewarded for artisanal products that were becoming locally obsolete, and beyond bottled teas peddled by major conglomerates like Coca Cola, Ito En, and Kirin, the industry as a whole was on its last legs.
MAID [medical assistance in dying] now accounts for about one in 20 deaths in Canada—more than Alzheimer’s and diabetes combined—surpassing countries where assisted dying has been legal for far longer.
To work in medicine is to step each day into the worst days of other people’s lives.
Although cost savings have never been mentioned as an explicit rationale for expansion, the parliamentary budget office anticipated annual savings in health-care costs of nearly $150 million as a result of the expanded MAID regime.
The elimination of that protection with the creation of Track 2 [legalized MAID for adults whose deaths were not reasonably foreseeable] reinforced their conviction that MAID would result in Canada’s most marginalized citizens being subtly coerced into premature death.
National disability-rights groups warned that Canadians with physical and intellectual disabilities—people whose lives were already undervalued in society, and of whom 17 percent live in poverty—would be at particular risk. As assisted death became “sanitized,” one group argued, “more and more will be encouraged to choose this option, further entrenching the ‘better off dead’ message in public consciousness.”
Before dying by MAID in 2022, at the age of 44, Kovac wrote her own obituary. She explained that life with ALS had “not been easy”; it was, as far as illnesses went, a “shitty” one. But the illness itself was not the reason she wanted to die. Kovac told the local press prior to being euthanized that she had fought unsuccessfully to get adequate home-care services; she needed more than the 55 hours a week covered by the province, couldn’t afford the cost of a private agency to take care of the balance, and didn’t want to be relegated to a long-term-care facility. “Ultimately it was not a genetic disease that took me out, it was a system,” Kovac wrote. “I could have had more time if I had more help.”
The problem is that learning handwriting might be necessary to learn everything else.
But nearly all agree that knowing how to write has cognitive benefits. It helps students learn to read, and chances are if they have to think about something long enough to write it down, they’ll remember it more thoroughly than if it’s typed.
[...] it’s a mistake to think that writing isn’t necessary. Mathematicians need to jot down problems; scientists need to take notes in the lab. These things can be done digitally, but they still require base-level communication skills. “Science, technology—we don’t proceed in those things without reading and writing,” he says.
As AI creeps into schoolwork, handwriting won’t die so much as, once again, provide proof of life.