In 2005 A.O. Scott was very critical of Sarah Silverman’s Jesus Is Magic for its reliance on ironic, deliberately offensive jokes about topics such as race and gender. The unexpected result is that the criticism deeply affected both parties.

Silverman, while rightly pushing back on several of Scott’s points, underwent a period of self-reflection that brought about a fundamental change in approach:

Scott acknowledges the projection on to Silverman of his wider complaints about a specific type of comedy, popular at the time, and his own involvement in his criticism:

It’s unusual for a piece of criticism to have such an effect on both critic and subject and for both to come out all the better for it.

In recent issues we’ve had links looking at various aspects and usage of typography, from the grawlix to signposts to watches. Here’s a nicely thorough piece on the history and use of the asterisk in typography and mathematics as well as a signifier of further detail.

Back in the mid 2010s I took a secondment within the university I was working in, moving from an academic-focused unit to a more comms-focused one. In an early meeting my new team were discussing how one of them didn’t like the taste of broccoli, cabbage or cauliflower. I off-handedly mentioned that they were all part of the same family and was met with a reaction that fell somewhere between indifference and sympathy that I would know this appallingly useless information, let alone volunteer it to others. I think it was then that I knew I’d made a mistake in moving. In my previous office the delivery of such a fascinating fact would have gone down like a stoppage-time winner and I’d have been carried out of the office on my adoring colleagues’ shoulders. The secondment was transformative in other ways. Later, one of my new team, generally suspicious me, introduced me to a beautiful girl as “Matthew? Well, he knows a lot about kale.” The joke’s on him because she and I had a baby together! A baby that I feed various kinds of Brassica oleracea to!

As is customary, I digress. This article looks at which branches of the evolutionary tree of plants bear edible leaves and speculates about the reasons why. It’s very interesting—but then, I do know a lot about kale.

Mark Forsyth on the surprisingly slippery concept of the week—when we started using it as a period of time, why it is seven days, and where the names of the days come from.

Josh Benton on a new study of nearly 30,000 Europeans that produced some counter-intuitive results:

Tag yourself: News minimalist, Social media news user, Traditionalist, Online news seeker, Hyper news consumer.

Nik Sharma is a cook and writer who seeks to understand why food tastes the way it does. He’s regularly compared to Heston Blumenthal, but I think a more apt similarity in approach is with that of Kenji Lopez-Alt or even Felicity Cloake—cooks whose science-influenced recipes are achievable in a home kitchen. Sharma shares appealing, accessible dishes that acknowledge their origin and focus on why the ingredients and methods work as they do, allowing for informed experimentation on the part of the cook. Here’s an interview with Julie Merin Varughese about his book The Flavour Equation.

Noah Kulwin on Malcolm Gladwell. A masterclass in evisceration: