“Walmart’s army of bakery decorators takes the cake when it comes to hourly store pay” [Associated Press]. “Inside a Walmart store in New Jersey, a worker puts the finishing touches on a cake with an edible ink Sponge Bob on top. A colleague creates a buttercream rosette border for a different cake, while another co-worker frosts a tier of what will be a triple-deck dessert. It’s graduation season, the busiest time of year for the 6,200 employees the nation’s largest retailer trained to hand-decorate cakes per customers’ orders. The cakes themselves come, pre-made, frozen and in a variety of shapes and sizes, from suppliers, not Walmart’s in-store bakeries. But there’s no sugar-coating the importance the company places on its custom cake business. Its army of icing artisans are the highest paid hourly workers in a typical U.S. Walmart, excluding managers. Cake decorators earn an average of $19.25 per hour, compared with $18.25 for all non-managerial store workers, a company spokesperson said. [Melissa Fernandez…] had her eye on a cake decorating job and after spending two months getting trained by a store colleague, she picked up a piping bag full-time in 2021. ‘I love baking at home. I love painting,’ Fernandez said. ‘I love doing anything artistic, and I just always wanted to be a part of it.’ After 11 years with Walmart, she said she now makes about $24.40 an hour.” • Good for her, say I, including “artistic” (once I suppressed a giant twinge from my irony nerve, and the thought that the cake decoration department at Walmart would be a ideal setting for a David Lynch movie).
“This City Was Just Ranked the Happiest in the United States” [AFAR]. “Still, some may find it a bit surprising that New York City is the United States’ happiest city, according to the London-based Institute for Quality of Life’s recently released 2025 Happy City Index. After all, the city has a reputation for being crowded, loud, and chaotic, and it’s also very expensive to live there. But clearly the good outweighs the more challenging: New York has landed in the 17th spot on the list of the world’s happiest cities, and in the top spot for the United States. The Institute for Quality of Life identified six main categories it believes have the most direct impact on happiness: citizens, governance, environment, economy, health, and mobility. Within those are 26 subcategories, such as the availability of green space, educational systems, inclusive policies, and access to culture, including libraries. The organization used open data and interviews with residents and combined the qualitative and quantitative information to rank cities on a point system.” New York City achieved the highest score among the U.S. cities that made the list, particularly excelling in the categories of governance, the economy, the environment, and citizens, for a total of 902 points.” • OK, OK, it’s a travel magazine. And the total list is noticeably light on Asian cities: Only Singapore and Seoul make the list. But I guess there’s something to be said for “crowded, loud, and chaotic”?
“Exclusive: Inside the thriving wild-animal markets that could start the next pandemic” [Nature]. “The wildlife trade acts as a vast global network of unregulated natural laboratories, through which potential pathogens freely circulate, evolve and ultimately congregate in urban centres, says Andrew Cunningham, a wildlife epidemiologist at the Institute of Zoology in London. “It’s the scariest thing we are doing,” he says…. The increasing detection rate of coronaviruses along the supply chain is consistent with another study by [Wildlife Conservation Society] researchers, on rats captured and sold for food in Vietnam. The team found that the proportion of rats that tested positive for coronaviruses was tenfold higher at the markets and restaurants where they’re sold than in the fields where they’re caught…. Researching trade networks, [Hung Nguyen-Viet] says, is sensitive work that requires significant trust-building. A key question his team seeks to answer is: what do people do when the wild animals they capture fall ill? Some people choose to eat them, whereas others try to sell them to unsuspecting customers at a market far away, says Nguyen-Viet. Few, he says, would report it to the authorities, for fear of consequences to their livelihoods.” • It’s not like we don’t have a history here; “It is likely that HIV was initially transferred to humans after having come into contact with infected bushmeat.”
“Anthony Bourdain didn’t say that (but we wish he did)” [Salon]. “One [Bourdain] quote, in particular, tends to surface around this time each year. You’ve probably seen it — shared in restaurant Instagram captions, posterized on Etsy and (according to a deep internet image search) as the basis for at least one tattoo:
“Eat at a local restaurant tonight. Get the cream sauce. Have a cold pint at 4 o’clock in a mostly empty bar. Go somewhere you’ve never been. Listen to someone you think may have nothing in common with you. Order the steak rare. Eat an oyster. Have a negroni. Have two. Be open to a world where you may not understand or agree with the person next to you, but have a drink with them anyways. Eat slowly. Tip your server. Check in on your friends. Check in on yourself. Enjoy the ride.”
Eat slowly, yes, but highly unikely Bourdain would recommend eating only one oyster. But:
Eventually — fortunately, and unfortunately for the guy with the tattoo — a little Googling cleared things up. Once you sift past the Reddit contingent who are certain they remember him saying it, the origin of the quote consistently points to a specific post that came long after Bourdain’s death.
It first appeared on June 27, 2021, in a thread on the WoodenBoat forum, a corner of the internet where fans had been trading reflections about Bourdain for years. The post came from a user named “Joe (SoCal),” who never claimed Bourdain said the words. He presented them as his own—a personal homage, an imagined set of instructions that might have sounded like Bourdain, had he lived to say them.
This, it seems, is the first known appearance of the passage online.
But this isn’t a gotcha. I’m not here to shame anyone for getting swept up in something that feels true.There are real Bourdain quotes that echo this same note. “Your body is not a temple, it’s an amusement park. Enjoy the ride.” Or: “If I’m an advocate for anything, it’s to move. As far as you can, as much as you can… The extent to which you can walk in someone else’s shoes, or at least eat their food, it’s a plus for everybody.”
The fake quote, though invented, captures the rhythm of something Bourdain often returned to: the idea that pleasure, especially when shared with strangers, is a kind of ethic. That trying new things, listening closely, ordering the good stuff off the menu—these are not luxuries, but ways of being alive with intention.
“Alive with intention.” Hmm. Always an unalloyed good? Still, it’s good to know that Google still works for somebody.
“Ghostwriting Scam” [Schneier on Security]. “The variations seem to be endless. Here’s a fake ghostwriting scam that seems to be making boatloads of money…. January, three people were charged with defrauding elderly authors across the United States of almost $44 million by ‘convincing the victims that publishers and filmmakers wanted to turn their books into blockbusters.”” • News you can use!
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