I was already vaguely interested, and when I was desperate for a pandemic hobby, it was a fairly natural choice. I can recommend “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat” by Samin Nosrat as a good introduction - recipes, but, more importantly, explains a bunch of basic concepts and “whys”. Then, if you can stomach youtube (ublock origin or some other adblocker + sponsorblock are basically mandatory), check out e.g. Food Wishes (Chef John, aside from a râthër wéîrd spèàking style, is good at explaining things in an accessible way), Helen Rennie, Frank Proto and others.

Trial and error is a must eventually, but starting off that way is very likely just wasting food, effort and motivation because failing at cooking can be pretty demoralizing.

Same, I guess. But then I also didn’t really expect the “AI” to be a bunch of overhyped nonsense snake oil bullshit, with tremendous practical and ethical problems… so I’ve got to say I feel pretty comfy with the stance.

Access to voting is the foundation of democracy. Sane systems try to minimize any “pressure” to not vote, for any reason, because any such pressure is very likely to hit some demographics harder than others. The Republicans in particular rather blatantly rely on weaponizing this as a way of subverting democratic principles, by making it disproportionately hard to vote if you’re working, or poor, or young, or a minority of pretty much any kind.

Therefore, anything that increases access to voting, and levels the playing field, is worse for the GOP than being able to keep up the status quo of voter suppression. Hence their extremely shrill opposition to mail, and also the (“hilarious”) claims of “fraud” - painting the picture of your democracy being subverted is a handy talking point while you’re busy subverting your democracy.

So the boring answer is that your question is sort of back-to-front: it’s not that the mail ballots are skewed as such, it’s that access to in-person voting is. Mail ballots favor the Democrats because it is their voter base that’s (in this case, anyway) being suppressed.

You know a fad genre is well and truly dead when Forbes is reporting on it

They don’t.