The have your cake and eat it too theory of culture

Netflix's 'Is it Cake?,' a cooking show based on a meme, slices open the conflicting incentives driving contemporary media.

In addition to the podcast, we like to write things. This is an essay by Emilie.

Lately, whenever I open Facebook, I’ve been noticing a new type of viral video popping up in my feed. In one example of the format, someone ties a bunch of matches together with a rubber band, carefully deposits a number of egg yolks on top, and then tries to light the matches on fire. The point of the gag, presumably, is to see if it is possible to cook egg yolks in this way; in some versions of it I’ve seen, it’s billed as an experiment. But then, either by accident or orchestrated accident, all sorts of things get in the way.

Egg yolks slide off of the side of the bundle of matches, or burst in a cascade of yellow goo. Matches self-extinguish before the fire can take hold, and the video’s creators struggle, somewhat implausibly, to figure out how to light them — for example, sticking the end of a match into a yolk. By the time the moment of truth arrives and the bed of matches goes up in flames, 17 or 1…