“Friends of Cameron said he had inadvertently outlined his private thoughts on two fronts in the unusually frank interview. They said he had made clear that he would like to stand down as prime minister at the end of the next parliament, assuming he is able to remain at No 10 after the election on 7 May…. Cameron’s vivid choice of language in his BBC interview, in which he suggested that two Shredded Wheats were better than three as a way of illustrating that he would stand down after two terms, showed that he had given a great deal of thinking to his plans, according to allies.”

It is not wholly coincidental or unexpected that the same week it was declared that Uber-affiliated “black and luxury cars” outnumbered medallion cabs in New York City, a venture capital-backed private bus service began operating in San Francisco that directly competes with public transit for “regular commuters who are doing a predictable route every day.”

The niceties of the six-dollar-per-ride Leap bus — “finished [reclaimed!] wooden planks adorning the back wall”; “soft mood lighting”; local “Happy Moose Juice,” whatever the fuck that is; Blue Bottle coffee; Wi-Fi and USB ports; and bar stools — are only just beside the point, which is that its handful of buses complete a circuit “from the Financial District and the edge of Soma to the Marina” and run during “morning and evening rush hours.” This, Leap CEO Kyle Kirchhoff told Nitasha Tiku, complements San Francisco’s existing public transit system, Muni, by “handling some of the overflow.” In fact, he told her, Leap wants to be “the best way to interface with mass transit” and “help mass transit infrastructure expand.”

These are slightly curious clusters of words! One might ask, for instance, how does shoveling the money of more affluent passengers, who can afford to pay up to six dollars per bus ride — and seven dollars per Moose Juice — into an alternate, semi-private, semi-mass transit system that directly competes against public mass transit help the latter expand? Even when the Leap buses inevitably grow beyond their current circuit — probably mostly to other areas where “there’s a high concentration of people who work downtown and a high concentration of smartphone users,” as Kirchoff told Tiku — taken to the logical conclusion, where anyone who can afford the Leap buses takes them instead of Muni, the proportion of public mass transit riders composed of the city’s neediest residents — the poor, the handicapped, and the elderly, who frequently pay less than Muni’s current fare price of $2.25 — would grow dramatically, leaving the system ever more overburdened and reliant on tax dollars, rather than fares. (These people do not even enter into Kirschoff’s point of view; he positions Leap as a “low-to-mid tier” option in public transit. If Leap is a low option, what’s below that?) Less drastically, if one of the primary appeals of Leap — as a “friendly commuter next to me in a Burberry scarf and khaki trench” who “usually takes the same bus line that this Leap route mirrors” told Lauren Smiley — is that it has “shorter lines [and] cleaner buses” that Muni is apparently not providing, it is unclear how Leap’s siphoning of money directly out of the city transit system is the “best way to interface with mass transit” or will allow Muni to improve its services.

Wholly relieving the more affluent of the woes of public mass transit by shuttling them in luxury bus lines and in the vehicles of app-employed humans is not inconsequential for its long-term future: It removes any direct incentive for the affluent to apply political pressure for improved transit, and the research is startingly clear that the affluent have a great deal more influence in governance than ordinary citizens or even popular interest groups — especially in times and places of heightened inequality, like San Francisco in 2015. This is perhaps the most magical side effect of the new category of services made possible by the convergence of a new kind of logistics, a chronically underemployed labor force, and apps: It allows society’s most influential class to remove themselves from civic discussions at will.

I heard some birds on the way to work today. They had probably been there for a week, at least, but I hadn’t noticed, because cities unclench before their people do. Further evidence of unclenching? The office is too warm because the heat was set, by humans, to anticipate deathly cold. And look: Sunday might be the last day the air dips below freezing! At least until we all go through this serotonin deprivation ritual again in like seven months.

A few more signs:

— Watched The Slap yesterday and thought, “actually not bad!”
 — This “rural pop” (?) song I just heard
 — New Kendrick Lamar still good
 — Jon Hamm out of rehab
 — Shorts talk
 — That whole Fran Lebowitz interview
 — Left work before dark
 — Yesterday coffee guy made iced coffee out of espresso and today he had it in a jug
 — Gyms crowded again after customary Jan-March dip
 — Some bugs

Friday was the first day of spring but it brought no relief. Now — just now, at this very moment! — it is time to unclench.

When something works this well all you can do is put it out there and say, “anyway, enjoy.” So anyway, enjoy.

“Traditionalists consider the proper credentials for a Manhattanite to include a 212 home phone number and a 917 cell number.”

★ It was time to focus maybe on the sun-flushed pinkish haze of buds in the crowns of the trees far below. Little phenomena. Not to listen to the women in the elevator commiserating about their heavy coats. The singing of the birds — or was that too agitated? The cold was the cold, the same defeating cold. Enough of the cold. Notice the blues of the sky and the river and the hills, subtly different, not unworth looking at. The blinding spark of an airplane. The sun could be transformative, if you were a thing made of metal. No denying, it was a good day to be ductwork on a roof. The edging of windows. Wonderful conditions for the shiny and insensate.

“I have to say that one of the biggest changes in my lifetime, is the phenomenon of men wearing shorts. Men never wore shorts when I was young. There are few things I would rather see less, to tell you the truth. I’d just as soon see someone coming toward me with a hand grenade. This is one of the worst changes, by far. It’s disgusting. To have to sit next to grown men on the subway in the summer, and they’re wearing shorts? It’s repulsive. They look ridiculous, like children, and I can’t take them seriously.”
 — This woman is right. This woman is usually right, but boy is she ever right here.

“In recent months, Facebook has been quietly holding talks with at least half a dozen media companies about hosting their content inside Facebook rather than making users tap a link to go to an external site,” reports the New York Times. The writers add: “The Times and Facebook are moving closer to a firm deal.”

Posting journalism directly to Facebook will be great for those publishers who do it early. They will enjoy a set of small privileges that will express themselves in major ways: their stories will load faster than links to outside sites; their posts will merge more seamlessly into the addictive News Feed. Engagement, views, sharing, time spent — pick whatever metric makes you feel the best! — will increase.

A Facebook that treats native posts without favor will still inherently favor them because they are closer in form to the things that Facebook users share the most — and any link that would be widely shared on Facebook would be more widely shared if it weren’t a link to a website. Publishers early to accept Facebook’s proposition will enjoy an additional, larger advantage: For a short and glorious time, they alone will reap enormous the benefits of this heightened context. Their presence in News Feed will seem slightly easier and more natural than the presence of their competitors, whose manipulative headlines — which have been carefully optimized to convince you to leave Facebook to go to another site — will read an awful lot like spam. By serving as shining examples to those on the outside, they will create additional pressure to come in, given the opportunity. Publishers who join later will enjoy a perpetually diminishing advantage, gaining access to an audience pursued by ever more publishers instead of a few. Eventually, publications that once competed with each other for Facebook’s audience from the outside will find themselves doing the same from the inside, using Facebook’s platform not just to reach their audiences but to turn those audiences into revenue.

How exactly this will go remains to be seen. But Facebook has been pushing native video for months. It has been wildly successful — the raw numbers achieved by Facebook videos are enormous. My feed is now filled with auto-playing Facebook videos. Many of them are from sources I’ve never heard of; an increasing number, however, come from professional publishers. Meanwhile, YouTube videos appear in my feed like this:

They expand and play within the News Feed with a single click — a behavior that gave them an advantage until a few months ago. But Facebook videos play on their own, and, at least at the moment, contain no advertising. Whether or not Facebook removes YouTube embeds — and why wouldn’t they? — might not even matter. Facebook users will do it for them.

That the New York Times and BuzzFeed are said to be participating in this program speaks to its appeal. BuzzFeed is growing fast and charges a lot of money for sponsored content; the Times has a paid subscriber base and a favorable relationship with advertisers, at least compared to much of the online publishing world, which is facing harrowing declines in advertising rates. BuzzFeed and the Times are making their decisions from positions of relative comfort and security. If Facebook publishing is attractive to healthy companies, imagine how appealing it will be to dying ones.

Publishers will act based on a preemptive fear of being left behind. It’s a reasonable fear! But it’s also a consuming, existential one. It’s powerful enough to overcome worries that Facebook, an internet platform and publicly traded company with an overriding interest in its own growth and survival and a history of profound and rapid change, may not share a common set of goals. It’s powerful enough to counter protests that of course platforms develop ideologies of their own. It’s powerful enough to rehabilitate the memory of the Facebook app economy and Zynga and OMGPop and to drown out conversations about King, maker of Candy Crush and one of the most shorted stocks on the market. It’s powerful enough to challenge the much longer history of software and web platforms, which in the last two decades have rarely deviated from the classic theology: embrace, extend, extinguish.

Years of free referral traffic from Facebook have posed the question: When will Facebook want to keep this traffic for itself? Supposing years of future success — and putting out of mind that another law of platforms is eventual death — partner journalism poses its own version of this question: If Facebook knows what works, why outsource it?

The publishing industry is gloomy and threatened and increasingly claustrophobic. Most publishers, even the ones who claim otherwise, are not tech companies in any meaningful way (though one might ask, “How would you describe a company that designs, produces, and distributes branded content for advertisers for enormous fees?”), so any access to the world of tech is an intoxicating prospect. It’s a cynical oversimplification to say that news organizations and apps exist for the same reason — to gather human attention — but their revenue models suggest that this is at least their shared business model. Facebook — that is, News Feed — is succeeding on a different scale than any publication can dream of. That it is willing to share some of this time and attention is understandably very exciting.

So Facebook offers to let publishers into News Feed. It offers, probably, a great CMS — better than most publishing companies could come up with on their own. It offers a revenue sharing plan that offers at least partial participation in Facebook’s sector of the attention business. It offers ways to target stories like never before. And so the publishers feel like they’ve made it. That they have crossed over, at least a little, from a dying industry to a booming one.

Native publishing will be good — maybe great! — for Facebook’s News Feed, which is by far its most lucrative product. If it works, it will increase the amount of time Facebook users spend scrolling and engaging and reading — and it will create new opportunities to turn human boredom into cash. It will make Facebook feel like a better place, one that doesn’t just link you to interesting things but that is home to them. The Times, in its reported writeup of these deals, promotes the idea that the relationship will be mutually beneficial:

To make the proposal more appealing to publishers, Facebook has discussed ways for publishers to make money from advertising that would run alongside the content.

Facebook has said publicly that it wants to make the experience of consuming content online more seamless. News articles on Facebook are currently linked to the publisher’s own website, and open in a web browser, typically taking about eight seconds to load. Facebook thinks that this is too much time, especially on a mobile device, and that when it comes to catching the roving eyeballs of readers, milliseconds matter.

What’s harder to see from this perspective is that News Feed is Facebook’s present, financially speaking — the vast majority of its revenues, some $3.59 billion, came from advertising (69 percent of which came from mobile advertising), and the product most responsible for this revenue by a wide margin is News Feed — and also the closest thing Facebook has to a legacy product. It was introduced in 2006. It’s a feed. It is the largest of the last generation of internet platforms, and of the social feeds; its lucky compatibility with the smartphones that took over its world — the iPhone didn’t exist when it was first announced — ensured a prolonged period of dominance. Facebook is giving publishers the keys to its oldest product — the product it is spending billions of dollars to attempt to replace. Facebook, rightfully anxious about the speed at which its industry changes — especially having been the beneficiary of such a change itself — is staking its future on Instagram and WhatsApp and virtual reality helmets and literally becoming the internet in the developing world and god knows what else. Facebook’s developer conference, which starts tomorrow, should be instructive. According to TechCrunch:

Next week at its F8 developer conference, Facebook will announce new ways for third parties to offer experiences through its Messenger app, according to multiple sources. Facebook hopes to make Messenger more useful, after seeing Asia’s chat apps WeChat and Line succeed as platforms that go beyond just texting with friends.

At first, Facebook will focus on how third parties can build ways for content and information to flow through Messenger. Depending on the success of the early experiments, Facebook may then mull bringing more utilities to Messenger.

Facebook has been trying to find the next Facebook for years now. In 2013, before it purchased WhatsApp and fitness tracking company Moves, it purchased a company called Onavo. Onavo, which offered a free app that reduces data usage, was ostensibly valuable to Facebook’s international Internet.org project. But it had also built an enormously valuable app analytics service. With a rare and nearly complete view of its users’ internet activity, Onavo was able to see which apps were succeeding before anyone else but Apple and Google — it was, I was told in early 2014, the only outside firm that knew exactly how big Snapchat was. This analytics service — once widely used by venture capitalists and tech companies — was shut down shortly after purchase.

There is a helpful symmetry here, if you’ll grant it. Online publishers, with more readers than ever, are looking desperately for the next thing; Facebook, with more people using its core product than ever, is doing the same. The difference, of course, is that publishers’ next thing already belongs to someone else. Their future belongs to Facebook’s past.

The Content Wars is an occasional column intended to keep a majority of Content coverage in one easily avoidable place.

Tomato soup is the chicken noodle soup of non-meat-based soups: an overlooked and underappreciated as a cornerstone of American comfort food. Though its frequent partner, the grilled cheese sandwich, has received its due in the cyclonic world of food trends, tomato soup has yet to be really embraced by food bloggers and Good Morning America hosts. This is fine with me! Get away from my soup, you awful swooping buzzards.

Spring is the worst season. Its only positive attribute is that it isn’t winter, and even winter, in its early months, is festive and pretty and you can go skiing and there’s a long vacation for Christmas and New Year’s. When we “look forward to spring,” we are actually looking forward to summer. Anyway, there’s basically nothing to eat in March, but I’ve been making tomato soup like a couple times a week lately and it’s done a pretty decent job of blunting my seasonal depression. It’s a perfect dish for this season: It’s warm and soothing and soulful to get us through the cold dampness, but it isn’t actually all that heavy of a dish; it’s a transitional food, reminding us that times will get better.

There are many famous tomato-based soups — minestrone, gazpacho, cioppino — but these differ fundamentally from what I think of as the classic American tomato soup. For one thing, in minestrone and cioppino, the tomato is a broth to support the real focus of the soup — either vegetables and beans and pasta or seafood. And gazpacho is, of course, cold and also very rustic: big chunks of tomato and cucumber and who knows what else. American tomato soup instead draws its inspiration from — I think — the Polish zupa pomidorowa, a strained or pureed tomato soup often served with rice. But it really came into its own with Campbell’s ridiculously successful canned tomato soup, which is basically just tomato paste to which you add water. I love Campbell’s tomato soup; most canned soups suffer from the process of either removing water to create a concentrate or overcooking ingredients to become shelf-stable, but tomatoes take to concentration just fine. That said, we can very easily make a tomato soup that hits the Campbell’s notes but packs more, or different, flavors.

The key for making tomato soup hit that nostalgic, mom-cooked-it feeling is in the texture. American tomato soup is smooth above all else, a puree to end all purees, silky and homogenous throughout. A classic tomato soup does not have chunks of tomatoes. (That’s some kind of Italian shit; get it out of here!) Your tools to achieve the right texture are two-fold: fat and a good immersion blender.

(Immersion blenders, or stick blenders, are great tools because you barely have to wash them. Have you ever washed a blender or a food processor? I would rather just eat a chickpea salad than be bothered to make hummus because I know hummus requires cleaning the god damn sharp blades and irregular containers with weird holes and contours all over them. Most of my recipes have some kind of idiot sacrifice in them that I made to keep the number of dirty dishes as low as possible. When shopping for one, don’t get the cheapest one; you want your blender to have at least two speeds and some decent power, or else you’ll never get as smooth a puree as you want. I have this one from Cuisinart and it works pretty good, though The Sweet Home recommends this one from Breville if you want a fancy one.)

You should get the best canned tomatoes you can for this, but honestly if all you can find is, like, Hunt’s, that is also totally fine. It doesn’t matter as much as you might think, and, as Serious Eats proved, the fact that a can says “San Marzano” on it means precisely nothing about the quality of the tomatoes within. I have a couple of favorite brands — Muir Glen, Cento, the Whole Foods house brand — but, especially if you’re going to be adding a lot of spices, don’t worry about getting real pricey ones. Definitely get the kind that’s whole plum tomatoes; you’re going to break it down anyway and I think the whole ones always taste more tomato-y than the cans of diced or pureed or crushed tomatoes.

These are ultimately all quibbles, because tomato soup is really easy to make. And cheap. And healthy. And very flexible: It’s a great base to experiment with spices to find out just how many different cuisines you can make out of a very simple dish. Here’s the basic recipe and some of those variations.

Basic Tomato Soup

Shopping list: can of whole plum tomatoes, garlic, onion, chicken stock, olive oil, tomato paste, sugar, whole milk or cream

In a heavy pot, preferably a dutch oven, pour in a tablespoon or two of olive oil and heat it up. Toss in a few chopped cloves of garlic and half an onion, also chopped. Cook over medium-low heat until onion is translucent. Open can of tomatoes and pour ’em all in. Stir and cook for about twenty minutes. Add in a spoonful of tomato paste and about half as much stock as tomatoes, stir, and cook for another ten minutes. Then add in small glug of whole milk. Do not use reduced-fat milk because it will separate like soy milk in coffee, which is gross. If you’re using cream, use very little — no more than a tablespoon. Stick your immersion blender in there and blend the shit out of the whole thing. Keep blending. Don’t stop. Who told you to stop? I know you think you’ve blended it completely. You haven’t. Keep blending it. (Okay you’re done now. Maybe.)

Taste it. If your reaction isn’t “hell yeah, that’s some smooth soup,” go back and blend it some more. Once it’s like velvet, it’s time for seasoning. This is very important. It needs salt; it needs black pepper; and it needs sugar. Be careful with these. Add them a little bit at a time, stir them in carefully, and taste. Keep tasting. Eventually you’ll take a spoonful and go, “Huh. That tastes right.” That’s when you’re done.

Variations

For a sort of Mexican soup: At the beginning, when the onions are just getting translucent, add in cumin and turmeric and fry until the onions are getting a touch burnt-looking and the pan looks maybe a little dry. Pour in a small glug, maybe a quarter cup, of beer (one on the light side, any Mexican beer will do) and scrape up all the bits from the bottom of the pan, and cook until the beer has reduced a little. Pour in your tomatoes as usual. Then take a cast iron pan and set it on the stove and turn it to medium-high. Take some dried chile peppers — guajillo would be good — and when the cast iron is hot, throw on the peppers, turning a few times until soft and pliable and smoky-smelling. Then break off and discard the stem, place the chiles in a bowl of hot water and cover. After a few minutes, take them out and put them in a food processor or blender, along with a little bit of the water they soaked in, and puree thoroughly. Add this chile mixture to the soup when you add the stock. Complete the soup as usual and then top with cilantro and, if you want, some tortilla chips.

For a sort of French soup: Add chopped carrots, celery, and fennel at the beginning, along with the onions and garlic. When translucent, add in a little sweet paprika. Stir until everything is coated, then pour in a small glug of white wine. (A glug is a unit of measurement equal to when you overturn the bottle into the pot and then very quickly turn it back upright. I think in boring standard measurements it would be maybe three tablespoons or so.) Turn the heat up to high and scrape everything off the bottom of the pan, and let the wine reduce a bit, then turn it to medium-low and add the tomatoes as usual. But when you do, also add in some sprigs of fresh thyme and rosemary (and sage and marjoram, if you have it). Before you blend the soup, take out all the herbs and discard. At the end, top with basil chiffonade (take a bunch of leaves of basil, stack them one on top of another, roll them up like a sleeping bag, and slice width-wise into tiny ribbons) and some heavy cream.

For a sort of Caribbean soup: Add one chopped habanero at the beginning, along with the garlic and onion. BE CAREFUL. Add in about a quarter teaspoon of cinnamon and a quarter teaspoon of allspice. When you add the tomatoes, also add a bunch of fresh sprigs of thyme, as well as about a half a small orange’s worth of orange peel. Go easy on the sugar with this one; it already has a lot of sweetness. Take out the orange peel and thyme when you add the stock and tomato paste. At the end, use coconut milk instead of cream. Top with chopped parsley.

There are about a billion other variations of the classic tomato soup: Try pimenton for a Spanish soup, or harissa and ras el hanout for Moroccan, or curry powder for any of the countries that use curry. But it’s pretty hard to mess up, because at its core, tomato soup is such a simple lovely thing: pureed tomatoes and broth. Also, please include grilled cheese with all tomato soups. And please use sourdough for all grilled cheeses.

Photo by Jules

Lee Kuan Yew, the ninety-one-year-old “founding father” of Singapore, died yesterday. There are many ways to remember his legacy. For instance:

How Lee Kuan Yew transformed Singapore http://t.co/g6YlUBf284 pic.twitter.com/1Kx35rCEas

— World Economic Forum (@Davos) March 23, 2015

A political giant, Lee Kuan Yew transformed the lives of generations of Singaporeans. My thoughts are w/his family & the people of Singapore

— Mike Bloomberg (@MikeBloomberg) March 23, 2015

The greatest leader of the 20th century died today. http://t.co/M2gsoPH3SR

— Balaji S. Srinivasan (@balajis) March 23, 2015

Fortune classic from 1974: How Lee Kuan Yew turned Singapore into a nice place to do business http://t.co/4GsX6K7XVh pic.twitter.com/hlkhYf5pG7

— Fortune (@FortuneMagazine) March 23, 2015

Wow, RIP Lee Kuan Yew. Amazing vision and conviction to establish a model country http://t.co/HXDptSCIoR pic.twitter.com/hxMvsFpBel

— Rob Go (@robgo) March 23, 2015

My thoughts on the great statesman, and @Forbes columnist, Lee Kuan Yew http://t.co/vpLGz6p1TS

— Steve Forbes (@SteveForbesCEO) March 23, 2015

Stunning “@nxthompson: Singapore’s amazing growth under Lee Kuan Yew. (http://t.co/ApSko4sYGl) pic.twitter.com/WzLxTN4H9U”

— Shervin Pishevar (@shervin) March 23, 2015

Or there is yet another:

Singapore’s government limits political and civil rights−especially freedom of expression, peaceful assembly, and association−using overly broad legal provisions on security, public order, morality, and racial and religious harmony. It continues to use the Internal Security Act and Criminal Law to arrest and administratively detain persons for virtually unlimited periods of time without charge or judicial review. And although the scope has been narrowed, a mandatory death penalty for certain crimes is still in effect as is mandatory caning for some classes of crimes. In 2014 top government leaders reiterated that Singapore society is not yet ready to accept LGBT rights.

And another way still:

Nothing is allowed that the government fears might threaten public order or social stability; and the government’s sensitivities on this score are very delicate indeed. Spitting, chewing gum, yelling, or failing to flush a toilet in a public place; overstaying your visa; depicting (never mind engaging in) certain sexual acts; rashly employing irony or sarcasm; and, most important, criticising the government in ways the government deems not constructive — all these are swiftly and severely punished. Petty offenders are fined or caned; overzealous opposition politicians or trade unionists tend to be imprisoned for long stretches. Indiscreet newspapers or blogs are served with defamation suits. The local media is almost entirely under the control of state-owned companies, and even international publications like the Economist and the Far Eastern Economic Review watch their steps very carefully to avoid being charged in court. As Kampfner observes, Singapore “requires an almost complete abrogation of freedom of expression in return for a very good material life.”

On the other hand!

.@starkness Ultimately, one could leave SG if you didn’t like it. No way to escape international, ongoing US/NSA violations of human rights.

— Balaji S. Srinivasan (@balajis) March 23, 2015

You know, whichever.