How to save Cracker Barrel in 4 easy steps

🍘 Grandpa’s out, outrage is in: how a logo change made America agree on something

The Cracker Barrel rebrand no one asked for.

The debate that finally united the left and right came from, of all places, Cracker Barrel. The down-home chain quietly ditched its iconic grandpa-and-barrel logo for a sleek, corporate-looking typeface, and the internet had some feelings. Conservatives cried “cultural erasure,” liberals called it a design crime, and Reddit basically staged a sit-in on the porch.

But don’t let the font fury fool you, this is about more than branding. Cracker Barrel’s been slipping for years. Tanking investor trust, tone-deaf pricing, unhappy customers, grumpy employees... the rebrand just put a shiny lid on a simmering mess.

Still, we’re not just here to complain. Mark Wales has put together four suggestions that could help Cracker Barrel (and other flailing legacy brands) turn things around.

🐝 Scientists may have just solved a crisis so bleak we’d stopped thinking about it

Honey, let me tell you, it’s a sticky situation.

Remember when the dying bee population was the existential crisis? Then, like the despair that followed climate change or the last season of Game of Thrones, the world collectively shrugged and moved on. Whadayagonnado, right? Who needs fruit and flowers anyway?

But scientists weren’t ready to give up. They rolled up their sleeves (or more likely, zipped up their bee suits) and got to work.

As Mark Wales reports, there has been a beeautiful turning of the tables. Scientists are now feeding bees a lab-made “superfood” that makes baby bees 15 times more likely to survive, while smart farms and rewilding projects are helping colonies thrive in the wild. The tech is real and the results are buzzworthy. Read the whole story to see how we might actually bee alright.

And what did we learn?

Yesterday we covered a cure for hiccups and asked you to guess how miserably long the worst case ever recorded was. A shocking 67% of you guessed correctly. The longest recorded case lasted 68 years!

🏡 Developer imports the idea of walkable cities to Tempe, Arizona

Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads. 

If you’ve ever wandered through a walkable European neighborhood and thought, “Why don’t we have this in the U.S.?”, you’re not alone. Architect Daniel Parolek had the same thought, and instead of just tweeting about it, he built it. In Arizona. A no-car, no-roads community in the desert sounds wild, but for residents of Culdesac*, it’s the dream.

Despite the name, there are no cul-de-sacs in Culdesac. No roads, no cars, no traffic. For some Americans, that sounds like a nightmare. For residents, it’s a daily dose of morning strolls, bike rides, and chance encounters you just can’t get from behind a windshield. As Erik Barnes reports, this “no-car utopia” could be coming soon to a city near you.

* Culdesac comes from French and means “bottom of the bag”. Thanks, Duolingo 121-day streak!

💬 From the group text…

It’s Friday, and I can’t find our lawyer, so I’m just gonna guess that I have to put some disclaimer here about not petting your local Raccoon even though THEY’RE SO CUTE! Look at the little hands.