Taste

Taste · The Curriculum · No. 14 The End of History Illusion Everyone agrees they have changed enormously in the past ten years. Almost nobody expects to change much in... Read more...

The Third Wearing

Taste · The Curriculum · No. 13 The Third Wearing Familiarity alone produces liking, with no new information involved. It is the most underrated force in taste, and the reason... Read more...

The Peak and the End

Taste · The Curriculum · No. 12 The Peak and the End People do not remember experiences as averages. They remember the most intense moment and the last one, and... Read more...

Twenty Four Jams

Taste · The Curriculum · No. 11 Twenty Four Jams A tasting table in a California supermarket produced the most quoted finding in retail psychology, then spent twenty years being... Read more...

The Reminiscence Bump

Taste · The Curriculum · No. 10 The Reminiscence Bump Ask anyone over forty to recall their life and the answers cluster, hard, around a single decade. The years between... Read more...

Nostalgia Was Once a Disease

Taste · The Curriculum · No. 09 Nostalgia Was Once a Disease For two centuries doctors treated longing for home as a lethal medical condition, complete with symptoms, autopsies and... Read more...

Small Nations Punch Above Their Weight

Taste · The Curriculum · No. 08 Small Nations Punch Above Their Weight Singapore, Denmark, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Estonia. Countries too small to do everything, forced into choosing, and then... Read more...

Soft Power Is Made of Small Things

Taste · The Curriculum · No. 07 Soft Power Is Made of Small Things Not embassies and campaigns, but convenience stores, passports, uniforms and trains that arrive. How a country... Read more...

A street vendor grilling satay over charcoal

Maillard, the Chemistry of Delicious

One reaction connects the satay grill, the coffee roaster, the bakery, and half the molecules in a perfumer's organ. The Curriculum takes on browning. Read more...

Reading a Perfume Backwards

GC-MS can list every molecule in a perfume by teatime. Why the machine that can copy anything still cannot compose, and what a self-taught nose learned from it anyway. Read more...

Comparative Advantage, or Why the One-Man House Survives

An 1817 idea about English cloth and Portuguese wine explains why a one-man fragrance house in Jakarta can exist at all. Ricardo, read from the bench. Read more...

Veblen Explains Your Feed

An 1899 economist named the engine behind drops, flexes and quiet luxury before any of them existed. Economics, taught through the wardrobe. Read more...