Poor Farmer

Aaron E. Carroll The New York Times, The Upshot May 11, 2015 When I was a kid, my parents refused to let me drink coffee because they believed it would “stunt my growth.” It turns out, of course, that  this is a myth . Studies have failed, again and again, to show that coffee or caffeine consumption are related to reduced bone mass or how tall people are. Coffee has  long had a reputation  as being unhealthy. But in almost every single respect that reputation is backward. The potential health benefits are surprisingly large. When I set out to look at the research on coffee and health, I thought I’d see it being associated with some good outcomes and some bad ones, mirroring the contradictory reports you can often find in the news media. This didn’t turn out to be the case. Just last year, a systematic review and meta-analysis of studies looking at long-term consumption of coffee and the  risk of cardiovascular disease was published . The resea...

The chain is a punching bag for those who distrust big business, but it has helped revolutionize the US coffee scene and paved the way for smaller businesses to flourish Nina Roberts The Guardian May 2, 2015 Three years ago, Elias Gurmu and his wife, Sarina Prabasi, spotted a shuttered shoe repair shop in their new Manhattan neighborhood. They had moved only a year earlier from Addis Ababa,  Ethiopia . And they thought the tiny vacant space was the right spot for an Ethiopian coffee shop. Their gentrifying pocket of Washington Heights, dubbed “Hudson Heights” by realtors, had no coffeehouses despite New York City’s more than 280 Starbucks and a slew of small boutique coffee chains like Stumptown Coffee Roasters and Blue Bottle Coffee. The closest specialty coffee shop, a  Starbucks , was a seven-minute walk south, a world away by New York City standards. Gurmu, a serial entrepreneur, and Prabasi, both 42 years old, took a gamble. They invested their s...