Someone from the Susbtack newsletter is speaking.

Can music be evil ? I never really thought about it until a few years ago, when I listened to an interview with Nick Cave during which he asserted that it cannot—“that music in itself has a moral dimension. That it’s essentially good. That it works to improve matters.”

Cave argued that this is true of music even at its most hateful, violent, inflammatory, abject, nihilistic, etc.—true, for instance, of the misanthropic music he himself made early in his career. Starting out, he explained, he’d sought the “transcendent impulse in chaos.” He’d been “a drug-addicted young guy” with a “jaundiced, contemptuous view of humanity,” and although this view was “extreme,” it was “also the way a lot of young people see the world, and in many ways, from their perspective, quite rightly so.” Jaundiced and contemptuous music, Cave said, contains the same “potential for doing good” as any other kind.

I think back to this interview whenever I encounter music that seems saturated with malevolent energy. Filosofem by the Norwegian neo-Nazi black-metal band Burzum… “Happy” by Pharrell Williams… brat by Charli xcx … I hear music like this and I wonder if, in its foul and airless vision of the human soul, it counts as evil. But I return to Cave’s absolutist stance, that there is a radical, salutary potential in the act of making and listening to music, and that even the most antisocial, insipid, cynical, narcissistic, and otherwise evil-seeming music is, for that reason, good at its root.

I do think it’s possible to affirm this essential goodness, however, while allowing for cases where music can be twisted to evil ends. And recently, I’ve been wondering whether one of my favorite genres—ambient music—is especially well-suited to evil purposes, albeit in a banal and sneaky way that has only become clear in the past few years.

Phia is the shopping startup co-founded by Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni. They called it the Google flights for fashion, a personal shopping assistant for the young woman who is hustling. Phoebe says, “she shops like a genius, but doesn’t want to waste her time doing it.”

But Ben Edelman, an independent researcher who has spent decades digging into deceptive practices in digital advertising, uncovered wild findings. Phia works as a browser extension, and it engaged in a practice called cookie stuffing.

When a user reaches the purchase phase, even if they had arrived at the retailer through their own search or through a completely different affiliate link, Phia’s extension would silently open a background tab, inject its own referral code, and then take credit for the sale.

Translate : Phia was claiming commissions on purchases it didn’t earn, taking credit for sales that other publishers drove.

This is a fundamental violation of rules in affiliate marketing. You are only paid commission if a user really clicks, that too for your own link, but Phia’s code was generating fake clicks.

Bloomberg tested this across more than 50 sites.

During one test, Bloomberg found that clicking on a link to Nordstrom from a Wirecutter article, “The Best 4th of July Deals Still Live,” triggered a background tab that replaced the Wirecutter affiliate link with Phia’s. The same behavior was observed when Bloomberg clicked on a Google ad from a different publisher’s website.

But when Phia released their statement, they just called it a “bug.”

“Within the last 24 hours, we were made aware that in a recent release our codebase was causing misattributions from a subset of users,” the spokesperson said. “As soon as we were notified, our team worked overnight to identify, mitigate, and has since resolved the issue.”

While this is a serious financial crime, Phia is not the inventor of cookie stuffing.

I understand this space pretty well. Before Google and Money Whispers, I co-founded a social impact startup built on affiliate revenue. Early on, I realized the business model was very hard to accomplish. There were minimal returns per purchase, and it required massive volume. So when I saw that Honey was not only surviving but thriving, I was intrigued. Turns out four years later it is the subject of an ongoing class-action lawsuit for nearly identical practices. And one of Phia’s advisors was Honey’s president.

I want to be careful here because I don’t know exactly what was known, when, and by whom, but I do believe the connection matters, because cookie stuffing isn’t some obscure technical glitch. It’s a known practice with a history of legal consequences.

WHY DO FRUIT PRESERVES taste better in Paris ?

And is it possible to go back someplace that once meant something to you and experience that same wonder again ?

These were two questions swirling around in my head in late May when I returned to Paris four decades after being a cooking school student there.

In the early ’80s, sensing the need for a more solid culinary foundation, I took a leave of absence from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and enrolled at La Varenne Ecole de Cuisine, at 34 Rue St. Dominique in Paris’s stately seventh arrondissement.

La Varenne had been founded in 1975 by British-American food writer and cooking teacher Anne Willan and was named in honor of Francois Pierre de la Varenne, the 17th-century author of the founding text of modern French cooking. Classes were taught by French chefs and translated simultaneously into English. I did not know it at the time, but La Varenne graduates would become the editors of food magazines, heads of food and beverage programs, famous chefs and cookbook authors, as well as leading caterers and cooking school teachers.

Julia Child was well connected to La Varenne and would appear out of nowhere at a lunch or Sunday brunch in someone’s nearby apartment. It was truly a pinch-me-to-make-sure-this-is-real kind of experience.

The way I finagled leaving a full-time job and hopping on a plane to Paris was to agree to write weekly for the newspaper while I was gone. This was before email or fax, so I wrote my columns longhand and put them in the mail.

Which might sound like an Eleanor Roosevelt way to live out Emily in Paris, but if it allowed me to be away and learn and grow, so be it. A small hiccup was that Delta Airlines lost my bags for a week. Other than that inconvenience, I lived in an apartment on Quai Voltaire along the Seine River, walked to class each morning like a Parisian, and traveled a bit around Europe after classes concluded.

Back then, I soaked in the small things I still love most about Paris—the morning greetings even when you don’t feel like talking—“bonjour madame” (you do feel better after you say it).

I remember fresh flowers on every corner and how people carried bouquets of flowers to give to other people. I remember thinking that the French dressed with such style and I needed to ditch the American white tennis shoes.

I skinned an eel, made my own croissants, perfected béarnaise, and tasted goat cheese for the first time. I took a weekend train trip to the Champagne region. I was in the same room with Julia Child and her co-author Simone (Simca) Beck. I bought my most favorite copper pans at the legendary cookware shop called E. Dehillerin.