Our roster of experts explain what makes the best chopping board, and give tips on how to care for them

I saw an influencer advocating for titanium chopping boards. Are they really the way to go? If not, which material is best? My wooden one has some black mould.
Lenka, by email
“From the off, no!” says Itamar Srulovich, whose latest cookbook, Honey & Co Daily, co-authored by Sarit Packer, is published later this spring. “The technology of chopping boards works, it’s bulletproof – this is criminal!” Sam Clark, co-founder of London’s Moro and Morito, couldn’t agree more: “The idea of chopping on a titanium board, with metal against metal, sends shivers down my spine,” he says.

Of course, the surface on which you choose to chop will impact your knife, and for Milli Taylor, who is behind the When in Rome Substack, she “couldn’t imagine anything worse than titanium”. As Hugh Worsley, founder of knife brand Allday Goods, puts it: “Every time you cut, the very fine edge of your knife, which is microscopically thin, meets the chopping surface. If that surface is too hard, it damages the edge, causing it to dull faster.” A titanium board, which has no give, is just going to slowly destroy your knives: “I can see the benefit of it from a cleanliness point of view,” Worsley concedes, but, other than that, “it just makes no sense”.

Got a culinary dilemma? Email feast@theguardian.com

Continue reading...

• World Snooker Tour agrees long-term deal with venue

• 500 seats to be added to the theatre in major revamp

Snooker’s world championship will remain at the Crucible for at least the next two decades after the World Snooker Tour agreed a long-term arrangement with the venue to keep the sport’s most prestigious tournament in Sheffield.

The future of the event at the 980-seat venue has been in doubt for years, with Matchroom’s president, Barry Hearn, repeatedly hinting the tournament may have to leave its spiritual home in favour of a bigger venue when their previous deal expired next year. As recently as 2024, Hearn said there would need to be a new Crucible built to resist the lure of Saudi Arabia and others.

Continue reading...

In het verlengde van de ongemakkelijke conclusie rond Israël en het World Happiness Report, dringt zich een tweede vraag op. Minder comfortabel, omdat die dichter bij huis komt. Het blijft ook voor ons namelijk verleidelijk om naar internationale ranglijsten te kijken en onszelf een schouderklopje te geven: Nederland hoog in het World Happiness Report, opnieuw.

Alleen komt dat comfort nergens uit het niets.

Welvaart heeft een geschiedenis, en die geschiedenis is zelden neutraal. De Nederlandse positie in de wereld is mede gevormd door eeuwen van handel die zelden gelijkwaardig was, door koloniale extractie waarbij grondstoffen en arbeid elders werden onttrokken en hier werden verzilverd. Dat verleden is geen afgesloten hoofdstuk, maar werkt door in hedendaagse verhoudingen.

Ook in het heden is geluk geen gesloten systeem. De mondiale economie waar Nederland in opereert, is gebaseerd op ketens waarin kosten structureel worden verschoven. Productie vindt plaats waar arbeid goedkoper is, waar milieuregels minder streng zijn, waar de prijs van grondstoffen lager kan worden gehouden. Het resultaat is een vorm van welvaart die lokaal zichtbaar is, en elders wordt gedragen.

Dat maakt de vraag naar geluk minder onschuldig dan ze lijkt. Want als geluk wordt gemeten binnen nationale grenzen, verdwijnen de externe effecten uit beeld. De uitstoot, de uitputting, de arbeidsomstandigheden elders die onze welvaart en daarmee geluk dragen: ze tellen niet mee in de tevredenheidsscore van de consument die profiteert.

Het verschil met meer expliciete vormen van onderdrukking is evident. Er is geen directe militaire controle, geen formeel systeem van ongelijkheid binnen de eigen staatsgrenzen, zoals in Israël. Toch blijft de afhankelijkheid bestaan, zij het diffuser georganiseerd en minder zichtbaar.

Misschien is dat de werkelijke beperking van dit soort rapporten. Ze meten hoe goed het leven voelt binnen een afgebakend kader, en laten buiten beschouwing wat dat kader mogelijk maakt. Geluk wordt zo een bijna nietszeggende interne variabele, losgekoppeld van de wereld die eraan ten grondslag ligt.

WebinarTV, a company that bills itself as “a search engine for the best webinars,” is secretly scanning the internet for Zoom meeting links, recording the calls, and turning them into AI-generated podcasts for profit. In some cases, people only found out that their Zoom calls were recorded once WebinarTV reached out to them directly to say their call was turned into a podcast in an attempt to promote WebinarTV’s services. 

WebinarTV claims to host more than 200,000 webinars. It’s not clear how it’s recording so many Zoom calls without permission, but in some cases the stolen videos posted to WebinarTV can put call participants at risk. 

Tom Rademacher, a teacher and editor, told me he organized a Zoom call for educators and education advocates in the months after Donald Trump was elected to discuss keeping kids safe from ICE.

“I very intentionally did not record the webinar since we'd be talking politics and there were some local electeds and district leaders that were on,” Rademacher told me. “There were definitely people on there who it would have been bad politically and professionally to be, especially at the time, linked to being anti-Trump in an education space.”

Rademacher received an email on October 7, 2025, from WebinarTV VP of communications Sarah Blair, whose profile image appears to be AI-generated and who has no online presence. 

“Your webinar is featured on the Phil & Amy Show,” Blair said in her email. “They talk about the highlights from your webinar - without giving away too much - to entice viewers. To listen to the show, click Highlights tab on the OnDemand page or click here.”

The link sent Rademacher to a page on WebinarTV.us which featured a full recording of the Zoom recording, an AI-generated video summary of the meeting, “chapters” that sent the viewers to different parts of the meeting, and an AI-generated episode of the “Phil & Amy Show,” in which two AI-generated personalities discuss the content of the call, including quips and rapport between Phil and Amy. 

“By suddenly having the whole meeting be public so you could see what [participants] were saying, after all the talk about safe spaces, it just felt super gross,” Rademacher told me.

Rademacher asked Blair how she got the recording of the meeting and asked that WebinarTV take it down, which it did. 

“If you ever decide to expand your webinar audience and take advantage of valuable automated features—such as translation into eleven languages, chapter creation, preview clips, and searchable content within your webinar—we’d be happy to support you,” Blair told Rademacher. 

“Search, browsing and playback are all free for viewers,” a page on WebinarTV’s site says. “There is no cost for a webinar to be included in WebinarTV. There are additional optional marketing opportunities available for hosts who want additional interest and attendees for their webinar.”

Searching for WebinarTV and Sarah Blair shows that other people online had very similar experiences to Rademacher. On Reddit and Linkedin, people say they found out that Zoom meetings they thought were private were uploaded to WebinarTV once they got a similar pitch from Blair. I searched for 404 Media on WebinarTV and found that they had recorded a Zoom call Joseph did with the Freedom of the Press Foundation last year. Freedom of the Press told me that it didn’t give WebinarTV permission to record the call but that it “concluded that it is more of a nuisance than a threat and probably inevitable given that our events are public.”

I clicked on a random Zoom call hosted on WebinarTV’s site about “AI, Equity & Access to Justice” hosted by the Ontario Association of Black Paralegals.

“This is really odd/unsettling to learn about,” Dayna Cornwall, a project manager at the National Self-Represented Litigants Project, who hosted the Zoom call, told me when I asked her if she knew it was recorded and uploaded to WebinarTV. “We were not aware that our webinar was being recorded by Webinar.TV, and have never heard of it before.”

“We are aware of reports involving independent third-party services such as WebinarTV.us / MeetingTV.us that appear to capture and redistribute content from online meetings,” a Zoom spokesperson told me in an email. “These services are not affiliated with Zoom, and the activity described is not the result of a vulnerability or security issue within Zoom’s platform.”

Zoom said that based on its review WebinarTV accesses meetings using links that have been shared publicly, then records the sessions using browser extension or “other tools.” 

“Because these recordings occur on the participant’s device and outside of Zoom’s environment, no platform—including Zoom—has the technical ability to fully prevent third-party screen recording,” the spokesperson said. 

All the people I talked to who found their Zoom meetings on WebinarTV did not use strict privacy settings, and shared links to the meeting because they invited a large number of people to attend. 

People who complained about WebinarTV on Linkedin also speculated that WebinarTV was finding the meetings by scraping the web for Zoom links. Freedom of the Press Foundation speculated that WebinarTV is using a Zoom API to scrape for public webinars, but noted that this would probably violate Zoom’s terms of service, which doesn’t allow people to use the API “To scrape, build databases, or otherwise create copies of any data accessed or obtained using the Zoom APIs by your Application.”

CyberAlberta, an organization dedicated to improving cybersecurity in the Canadian province, published a report about WebinarTV when it noticed that it was stealing its Zoom calls. 

“CyberAlberta’s investigation found that WebinarTV primarily gains initial access to Zoom webinars via third-party browser extensions. These extensions can access webinar links when a user either inadvertently grants calendar permissions—exposing meeting invitations—or willfully submits meeting details into the WebinarTV platform,” the report said. “WebinarTV is believed to leverage a range of browser extensions that provide functionalities such as AI powered transcription and note-taking tools, or tools to automate the joining of online meetings. The platform mostly relies on the widespread use of these tools by end users, rather than operating them directly. However, at least one of the known extensions is listed on the Chrome Web Store as developed by WebinarTV.”

We’re not naming the plugins because we were unable to independently verify that they were actually serving WebinarTV’s scraping of Zoom calls. None of the companies that produce these plugins responded to requests for comment. 

WebinarTV did not respond to a request for comment, but its FAQ page states that: “WebinarTV is a DMCA compliant service and a good internet citizen. We only want to promote webinars that want more viewers. If a copyright owner or a person authorized to act on the owner’s behalf requests content to be removed, then WebinarTV will promptly remove it. Send requests to remove@webinartv.us Please be sure and include the URL to the content in question and an admission that you are the copyright owner or a person authorized to act on the owner’s behalf.”

The Zoom spokesperson said that users who want to keep their calls private should avoid publicly posting meeting links when possible, require registration and manually approve registrants to carefully vet participants, and enable available deterrence features such as watermarking.

Het was dé hitfilm van 2024, ‘Loverboy: Emoties Uit’. Deel twee – ‘Vertrouw Niemand’ – blijkt opnieuw een pooierfilm die troebele fantasieën van de manosphere bevestigt.

In deze rubriek kijken we naar opvallende beelden in de hedendaagse cultuur, en wat ze te zeggen hebben. Deze week: kogelgaten als cultuur.

BrianFagioli writes: Canonical has joined the Rust Foundation as a Gold Member, signaling a deeper investment in the Rust programming language and its role in modern infrastructure. The company already maintains an up-to-date Rust toolchain for Ubuntu and has begun integrating Rust into parts of its stack, citing memory safety and reliability as key drivers. By joining at a higher tier, Canonical is not just adopting Rust but also stepping closer to its governance and long-term direction. The move also highlights ongoing tensions in Rust's ecosystem. While Rust can reduce entire classes of bugs, it often depends heavily on external crates, which can introduce complexity and auditing challenges, especially in enterprise environments. Canonical appears aware of that tradeoff and is positioning itself to influence how the ecosystem evolves, as Rust continues to gain traction across Linux and beyond. "As the publisher of Ubuntu, we understand the critical role systems software plays in modern infrastructure, and we see Rust as one of the most important tools for building it securely and reliably. Joining the Rust Foundation at the Gold level allows us to engage more directly in language and ecosystem governance, while continuing to improve the developer experience for Rust on Ubuntu," said Jon Seager, VP Engineering at Canonical. "Of particular interest to Canonical is the security story behind the Rust package registry, crates.io, and minimizing the number of potentially unknown dependencies required to implement core concerns such as async support, HTTP handling, and cryptography -- especially in regulated environments."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mensen met een hoge intelligentie in hun jeugd ontwikkelen later vaker progressieve opvattingen. Maar dit blijkt sterk afhankelijk van één cruciale factor: of ze naar de universiteit gaan.

Al langer is bekend dat intelligentere volwassenen minder vasthouden aan traditionele normen en hiërarchieën. Ze zijn doorgaans minder dogmatisch en staan meer open voor alternatieve ideeën. Wat tot nu toe onduidelijk bleef, is wanneer en hoe deze houding ontstaat. Zijn slimme kinderen van nature al vrijdenkend of worden ze dat pas later door hun omgeving?

Psycholoog Joshua Isen en zijn team van de University of South Alabama zochten het uit. Hun hypothese: hoger onderwijs fungeert niet simpelweg als tussenstap, maar als katalysator. Met andere woorden, intelligentie leidt niet automatisch tot progressieve ideeën. Die komen pas tot bloei in een academische omgeving.

De onderzoekers analyseerden eerst gegevens van ruim 3200 ouders uit de Minnesota Twin Family Study. Ze keken naar intelligentiescores, opleidingsniveau en opvattingen over zaken als religie, gehoorzaamheid en moraal. Daaruit bleek dat hoger opgeleiden met een hoge intelligentie significant minder traditioneel dachten dan hun minder geschoolde tegenhangers.

Om de ontwikkeling beter te begrijpen, volgde het team vervolgens bijna 2800 jongeren van hun 17e tot hun 29e. Opvallend: op 17-jarige leeftijd was er geen enkel verband tussen intelligentie en progressieve attitudes. Sterker nog, toekomstige studenten waren aanvankelijk juist iets traditioneler.

Onderwijs nodig

Pas tijdens de twintiger jaren begonnen de verschillen zichtbaar te worden. Jongeren die geen hoger onderwijs volgden, bleven grotendeels bij hun oorspronkelijke overtuigingen of werden zelfs iets traditioneler. Hun intelligentie speelde daarbij geen rol.

Heel anders verliep het bij studenten. Hoe hoger hun intelligentie, hoe sterker ze tijdens hun studie afstand namen van conventionele normen. Vooral tijdens de studiejaren vond de grootste verschuiving plaats.

Volgens de onderzoekers wijst dit erop dat vooral het academische klimaat – en mogelijk de invloed van docenten en het curriculum – deze verandering stimuleert. Slimmere studenten lijken beter in staat om complexe ideeën te verwerken en kritisch te reflecteren op bestaande sociale structuren.

Toch plaatsen de auteurs kanttekeningen. Omdat het om observationeel onderzoek gaat, kan geen directe oorzaak worden vastgesteld. Ook andere factoren, zoals gezinsvorming op jonge leeftijd bij niet-studenten, kunnen bijdragen aan behoudendere opvattingen.

Maar uiteindelijk lijkt het er dus wel sterk op dat intelligentie alleen mensen niet progressief maakt. Daar is ook hoger onderwijs voor nodig.

Bron: PsyPost

by_no_means_a_photographer has added a photo to the pool:

Sunset on the "flats" west of Port Pirie. I had been a little further out along this track and then made my way back to this spot a little closer to town. The dust that had been thrown up by my car on the dirt roads, was still hanging in the air when I got out to take the sunset shots.