Writing on Joe Pantuso

What I Think About When I Think About Wine Headaches

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

If they think about it at all, people will commonly claim wine headaches come from sulfites. This is almost certainly wrong, and it’s been wrong so confidently and for so long that it’s become received wisdom. (Dehydration is implicated too, but I think that’s not the main case unless you go on an actual bender.)

Sulfites are a preservative added to most wine, and they sound like the kind of thing that would cause headaches. The problem with the sulfite theory is empirical: dried apricots contain roughly ten times the sulfite concentration of most red wine, and nobody reports apricot headaches. People with genuine sulfite sensitivity - a real condition, primarily affecting asthmatics — experience respiratory symptoms, not headaches. If sulfites caused wine headaches, white wine (which has higher sulfite content than red) would cause more headaches than red. It doesn’t. The pattern is exactly backwards.

It's Not Remote Work. It's Online Work.

Tue, 03 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The phrase “remote work” frames the thing wrong, and it matters.

“Remote” implies a center. There’s a place — an office, a headquarters, a room where the real work happens — and you are remote from it. You’re the outlier. The person calling in from somewhere else while everyone else is together.

This framing was accurate when the minority of people weren’t in the office. It made sense to call them remote. But it stops being accurate the moment the distributed model is the primary model. When 70% of your team is “remote,” there is no center. The office is just another node.

Why Agile Works (And It's Not What You Think)

Thu, 15 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The standard story about why Agile works is wrong. It goes something like: Agile is better because it’s iterative, because it surfaces requirements earlier, because it gets working software in front of users faster. All true, but none of it is the reason Agile works.

The reason Agile works is Gall’s Law.

Gall’s Law, from John Gall’s 1975 book Systemantics, states: A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse is equally true: a complex system designed from scratch never works, and cannot be patched into something that works. You have to start over with a working simple system.

Fossil Fuels in 2025 Are A Moral Hazard

Sat, 28 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This is a moral claim, not a policy claim. I’m not making an argument about carbon taxes or the Green New Deal or what the federal government should mandate. I’m saying that choosing to burn fossil fuels when viable alternatives exist is, at this point, a morally wrong choice — the same way it was morally wrong to choose a discriminatory vendor when non-discriminatory alternatives were available, even before it was illegal.

The Gas Stove Lie

Tue, 20 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Gas stoves are not better. They never were. The “chefs prefer gas” narrative is a fossil fuel industry marketing success story that got so deep into culinary culture that people now defend it as though it were a principle rather than a preference built on a manufactured consensus.

Let me be specific.

What gas is actually good at

Gas provides instant visual feedback. You can see the flame, and the flame responds immediately when you turn the dial. This is psychologically satisfying and does provide some real precision for certain tasks — charring peppers directly on the burner, for instance. Some professional kitchens use very high BTU burners that can achieve temperatures impossible on residential equipment, gas or otherwise.