As far as I can tell, patient zero was a Swedish 24-year-old named Elsa Thora. 'Why did no one tell me ranch sauce is like crack'' she posted to X earlier this month, apparently hours after landing in Indianapolis for a monthlong World Cup trip. 'EUROPE WE NEED RANCH ASAP.' The post received 49,000 likes and propelled Thora to a very specific kind of fame. ('I guess I'm that Ranch girl now,' says her bio on Instagram, where she is also doing sponsored content for a Curacao-based online casino that takes only cryptocurrency. She was also, as my colleague Will Oremus recently pointed out, a star of both OnlyFans and the British tabloids before any of this.) Soon enough, ever more World Cup visitors were being charmed by ranch, and more Americans were being charmed by them being charmed. By late last week, the TSA had issued a statement: 'If you're visiting for a very large sporting event & you happen to discover RANCH while you're here' pls pack it in your CHECKED BAG on the way home' (92,000 likes). Shortly thereafter, Kraft posted a partially AI-generated image of supposedly-TSA-compliant mini-ranch packets, plus a promise that more details on how to buy them would be coming soon. No matter that the product did not actually exist yet, and that the desire for it had been ginned up in the internet's post-truth hall of mirrors; news stories about Kraft's stunt sprouted up like weeds after a summer rain. The cycle continued: more videos, more coverage, more social-media posts. There's no real reason that a police department in suburban Northern California needed to post on Facebook about 'a coordinated international enthusiasm for ranch dressing,' except for the obvious: They wanted to get in on the fun....
Once again, Americans are in a panic over what we eat. More than two-thirds of those surveyed now regard the industrially produced, ultra-processed foods, or UPFs, that dominate the U.S. food supply as addictive, according to a study published earlier this month in the American Journal of Public Health. That's just the start of it. Most respondents said that UPFs are a major source of type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and obesity. At least one-third blame these foods for causing cancer, ADHD, depression, and anxiety. And nearly half'corresponding to some 130 million American adults, if the survey's findings can be extrapolated'believe that UPFs are simply 'not what God intended for people to eat.' For the past couple of years, concerns about the potential health effects of UPFs have been highlighted in the media, and at nearly every level of the public-health establishment. New restrictions on the sale of UPFs have been introduced or passed in blue- and red-state legislatures alike. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said repeatedly that UPFs are 'poisoning' Americans. And the World Health Organization is planning to put out global guidance on the problem....
In recent days, founders and founders-turned-investors took to X to share horror stories about being mistreated by VCs. Their complaints ranged from VCs falling asleep during pitch meetings to investors suggesting a founder fire a co-founder. 'The 'sequoia scam' is worse than a single horror story,' Foody wrote on X. 'in the last 6 [months] ive seen a half dozen rounds where sequoia invests in 2 tranches. everyone pretends they only did the higher valuation. founders misrepresent this to their employees & then shop it to angels too.' TechCrunch has previously reported on VCs investing in the same round at different valuations. Under this mechanism, the lead VC firm invests a significant chunk of its capital at a lower, preferential valuation, while putting a much smaller portion of capital in at a drastically higher price. The massive 'headline' valuation that gets announced manufactures the perception of a dominant market winner, masking the fact that the lead investor's actual average entry price was significantly lower....
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