 Rojak is a colloquial Malay word for “eclectic mix,” and is the name for a Javanese dish that typically combines sliced fruit and vegetables with a spicy dressing. Golden Week loses some shine Thailand once again rolled out the red carpet for Chinese tourists looking to get away for the Golden Week holiday, but this year’s spending blitz was tempered by China’s bumpy post-COVID economy. Bangkok and other Asian destinations courting Chinese travelers have realized that tourism marketing is now all about “enabling lifestyles,” according to Gary Bowerman, a Kuala Lumpur-based writer whose newsletter Asia Travel Re:Set focuses on the continent’s tourism landscape. For Bangkok, this entails a week of fashion shows, a concert by a Singaporean pop star, and endless retail deals exclusively for Chinese passport holders. But Golden Week in the Thai capital this year was “a little low-key,” and not as packed as it usually is, Bowerman wrote. One big beneficiary of the tourist influx: the Bangkok bakery Butterbear, which recently gained a cult following in China thanks to its dancing mascot on social media. The brand has since featured in the Thai government’s tourism promotion campaign within China. It’s a party outside the USA American cultural influence on the global stage hasn’t diminished as much as some doomerist elitists would have you believe, according to the eponymous writer of the travel Substack Chris Arnade Walks the World. Arnade, whose dispatches are based on his walks in off-the-beaten-path locations, dismissed the notion that a large part of the world has grown to hate the US because of its foreign policy — instead, he argued, the country’s soft power is ascendant in the age of Netflix and Instagram. Arnade recalled meeting a man at a Seoul LP bar whose knowledge of the 1970s rock group The Allman Brothers Band far surpassed his own; a Swedish bartender on the Danish Faroe Islands who was obsessed with US skate punk aesthetics; and a man in a Ugandan fishing village obsessed with country singer Travis Tritt. With the internet and pop culture cementing English’s dominance as the global lingua franca, American culture is the “cultura franca of the world,” Arnade wrote. The admiration for the US persists because most people “are not obsessed with current events, and more importantly, are capable of separating politics, and the policies of a political class, from a country’s citizens.” Say it ant so The asteroid strike that killed the dinosaurs 66 million years ago was the equivalent of a “farm-to-table feast” for ants. That’s the finding of a new study that traced ants’ relation to fungus back to that mass extinction event, Becky Ferreira reported in The Abstract, a 404 Media column that recaps scientific studies. After the asteroid strike filled the sky with dust clouds and killed plants that relied on the sun, fungi ate the scraps, kicking off a mutualistic system in which ants cultivate fungi like humans farm crops today. “The dinosaur-killing asteroid has always fascinated me because it was a dual purveyor of apocalyptic oblivion and supercharged evolutionary creativity,” Ferreira wrote. “Scientists have shown that this colossal impact also provided the conditions for ants to pioneer agriculture, the same innovation that has fueled the modern human domination of the planet.” | 
