Welcome to Open Tab, a weekly roundup of the news, gossip, and stories that have stayed open in my tabs all week. Last time we covered the Cornell bear butchery saga.
Welcome back to Open Tab. While the rest of the world waits in lines for frozen yogurt—inexplicably, the latest thing—I am still standing stubbornly by soft-serve. This week on a quick jaunt to Montreal, I found myself double-fisting both a chocolate-blueberry swirl and a cantaloupe cone from Dalmata. Soft-serve swirls from Leo, Caffe Panna, and Hani’s are still on my to-visit list, and every summer without a Ninja Creami moves me closer to buying my own so I can have some whenever I want.
Goop founder Gwyneth Paltrow is celebrating summer by hosting “a private, off-the-record alfresco dinner at her home in honor of Sam Altman” next weekend. I think it’s fair to read this dinner as a ringing endorsement of Altman’s OpenAI despite its many controversies, and its, uh, existential threat to humanity. Although the event was verified, the invite itself seems to have been made using AI, and Paltrow herself responded to all the online kerfuffle by trying to meme herself out of it. Interesting decision! If you’re attending this dinner, do me a favor and write in. I need to know what’s on the menu.
Did you read the long (long!) story on the Major Food Group guys in GQ? More is more, world domination, riches and excess—those were the main points. But when I reported on the MFG trio earlier this year, I was struck by the careful calibration behind that excess. They spoke to me at length about technique and the finer points of service. That kind of thinking is what keeps Carbone (and the many, many other MFG projects) from feeling like a Dave & Busters.
Also in this week’s Open Tab: Jason Kelce comes out as anti-data center in a charmingly weird way, there are blueberries that can kill you, beef prices may finally be too high for American consumers, and the Catskills getaway serving unique, hyper-seasonal fare.
This week, in an ad for his beer company, Garage Beer, and in association with Liquid Death, Jason Kelce starred in a video in which he joyfully sang a call to action for his audience to ship their pee to data centers. This kind of marketing gimmick isn’t completely unexpected from Liquid Death, but it’s a bit of a departure for Kelce to be, you know, singing about pee on the internet.
The day after it went live, the video had more than 1.5 million views, and the accompanying pee jars (to send your pee to the data centers, of course) were sold out.
Kelce is not alone in his anti-data center sentiment. In fact, protesting against new construction of data centers (which are used to power AI programs, mostly), is one of the only issues uniting Americans politically. So far, I haven’t read reports of any data centers actually receiving jars of piss, but there’s still time!
The lettuce is making you sick. Jalapeños pose a risk of salmonella. Now, some blueberries sold at Publix are being recalled due to a risk of E. coli. The FDA recently upgraded this recall to Class 1, which means, according to the agency, that there’s a “reasonable probability” that being exposed to or eating these blueberries “will cause serious adverse health consequences or death.”
