I wrote a couple of months ago about the rise of low-stakes fake news, which appears to have taken over Facebook recently. It’s “news” stories meant to go viral that are blatantly untrue and not about politics or matters of national importance but rather dumb pop culture ephemera. For some reason, it often seems to involve either Roseanne Barr, The View, or the fictitious idea that Roseanne will get a talk show opposite The View.

Everyone wants investment from venture capitalists. It’s the validation that catapults you onto the cover of Forbes. Your seat at the pantheon of famed tech bros like Adam Neumann, Elizabeth Holmes, and Sam Bankman-Fried. VCs can be a curious bunch, however. They have a special secret language—a dialect that’s borderline incomprehensible to the uninitiated. For instance, much like the Inuit people, who have many words for snow, were you aware that venture capitalists have more than 400 words for “no”?

Here is a tree that goes by many names. Portulacaria afra is a shrubby succulent native to South Africa, where it’s called elephant bush, porkbush, and spekboom in Afrikaans. The fast growing foliage is an important source of food for local elephants, and as the animals graze, they inadvertently propagate the plant by spreading cuttings that root into the soil. Isn’t that nice? The leaves are edible to us humans, too; they’re faintly sour and crunchy, like a dialed-down granny smith apple.

Happy last week of January, everyone! I mean, I guess next week is technically the last week, but who cares about reality when it gets dark at 4pm? Today, I’m thrilled to be running an interview with one of the wisest developmental psychologists I know: Dr. Aliza Pressman, whom you might know from her popular podcast, Raising Good Humans. (Which I was a guest on, once up on a time!

This is a bit of an unconventional topic for this blog, and if it’s not your cup of tea, I’ll certainly understand. If you have no interest in reading a niche academic meta-review takedown of a China historian, please just carry on with your day as usual. I’ll get back to the travel content soon enough. If you are unfamiliar with Frank Dikötter, he’s a well-known and high-selling Dutch historian based in Hong Kong with a broadly revisionist approach to modern Chinese history.