Raphael Saadiq

Dennis Zilber

[ed.  This gallery is really worth a visit.]

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Which Stay, Which Fail

by Anne Hays

The woman who works at Athena, the Greek restaurant two blocks from my apartment, forgets everything. She forgets the specials, so she reads them, stumbling over her words, from the notepad in her pocket. She forgets to bring us water, or silverware. She forgets my girlfriend’s bread, when she orders more, and she forgets to ask if we want desert once we finish. The woman apologizes. She’s older than us—maybe mid-forties. Her dark hair is streaked through with dusty silver (so is mine) and she wears it in a ponytail, waitress-style. She has pale skin, a sharply hooked nose, stringy-long arms. When the woman apologizes we say No! Of course! It’s not a bother! but we both think she’s a terrible waitress, that she won’t last long, and then we think maybe the restaurant itself won’t last long either. It’s new, after all—it’s only been here a few months—and the economy is wretched, after all, and anyway most restaurants fail: this we all know. So many other restaurants have failed, up and down our street, many of which were our favorite restaurants, and when this happens Jill and I think It wasn’t our fault! We were regulars! We tasted the baklava! Every day when we walk down the street we catalog the newly failed restaurants, strange dark holes in our once lit streets, and then murmur to each other about what went wrong. These restaurants—which stay, which fail—are a major source of daily anxiety.

And so when construction began on another new restaurant down the street from our apartment, we felt the excited stirrings of speculative anticipation. What would this empty space, so long a vacant corner store, become? Every time Jill and I passed by, en route to wherever lay beyond, we would muse over the construction and comment casually about the likely new occupant, the way people discuss the gender or name of a friend’s unborn baby. Will they name it Greg, or Allison? Will the baby be cheerful, cranky, spunky, shy, or impossibly stubborn like its mother? The sign they hung up along the brick was classy, almost contemporary, with its pale background, its bold red and black lettering. We were so entranced by the newness of it all that it took an extra moment to register their ludicrous name: The Park Slope Bistro Restaurant Bar & Grill. We wondered: what made them stop at bar, grill, restaurant and bistro and what force of self control held them back from adding the words diner, cafe, boulangerie, speakeasy, and chop house? The establishment’s identity crisis was the first indication of its inevitable doom to failure, but we didn’t want to think about that.

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BackDormBoys

[ed.  A true classic, and apparently one of the 20 oldest or most-viewed videos on YouTube, or something like that.  It always makes me smile. They should get some kind of royalties or something.]

Wikipedia: BackDormBoys

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Failure Notice

216.219.254.203 does not like recipient.
Remote host said: I’m sorry
Unresolvable address: alexj@hottype.com.
Giving up on: 216.219.254.203.

Hi alexj@hottype.com. This is the automated qmail-send program [68.142.199.112], at yahoo.com. I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following address: joan@pja.com. This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn’t work out.
----

216.219.254.203 does not like recipient.
Remote host said: I need to see you.
Unresolvable address: alexj@hottype.com.
Giving up on: 216.219.254.203.

Hi alexj@hottype.com. This is the automated qmail-send program [68.142.199.112], at yahoo.com. I’m afraid I wasn’t able to deliver your message to the following address. joan@pja.com This is a permanent error; I’ve given up. Sorry it didn’t work out. Time to move on.
----

216.219.254.203 does not like recipient.
Remote host said: It doesn’t have to end like this
Unresolvable address: alexj@hottype.com.
Giving up on: 216.219.254.203.

Hi alexj@hottype.com. This is the automated qmail-send program [68.142.199.112], at yahoo.com. I'm afraid I still wasn't able to deliver your message to joan@pja.com. Sorry it didn’t work out. But seriously, alexj@hottype.com, move it along now.
----

216.219.254.203 does not like recipient.
Remote host said: I can’t eat. I can’t sleep. I am lost.
Unresolvable address: alexj@hottype.com.
Giving up on: 216.219.254.203.

Hi alexj@hottype.com. This is the automated qmail-send program [68.142.199.112], at yahoo.com. Again. I’m afraid I wasn’t able to deliver your message. The truth is, joan@pja.com does not want to hear from you right now. She feels free for the first time in years. Last night she did eight shots of Patron and then totally mashed with a hipster dude from Williamsburg who was wearing a kilt. This is a permanent error; I’ve given up. And so has joan@pja.com.
----

216.219.254.203 does not like recipient.
Remote host said: Do you want your copy of The English Patient?
Unresolvable address: alexj@hottype.com.
Giving up on: 216.219.254.203.

Hi alexj@hottype.com. This is the automated qmail-send program [68.142.199.112], at yahoo.com. Okay, so maybe I haven’t been completely upfront with you here. It isn’t just your address that is unresolvable. If only it were that simple. It’s just that joan@pja.com is looking for somebody with certain core attributes. A job, for example. Someone whose bed has made it off the floor. Someone whose life ambition is not just to own a crepe truck. Please try to understand. It’s not you, it’s joan@pja.com. I was unable to deliver your message. This is a permanent error. Sorry it didn’t work out. And no, she doesn’t want her goddamn copy of The English Patient.

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Avett Brothers

TaskRabbit

 

by Alexia Tsotsis

Genius, as Thomas Edison famously declared, may owe far more to perspiration than to inspiration, but Leah Busque’s revolutionary startup was born in a moment of profound laziness. It was a wintry night in February 2008, when Busque, a 28-year-old engineer at IBM in Cambridge, Massachusetts, realized that she needed dog food for her yellow lab, Kobe. She wanted nothing more than to get someone else to trudge outside in the snow. “I thought, wouldn’t it be nice if there were a place online you could go,” she says. “A site where you could name the price you were willing to pay for any task. There had to be someone in my neighborhood who was willing to get that dog food for what I was willing to pay.”

Inspired, she quit her job four months later and started a company, originally called RunMyErrand, with money from angel investors and an incubator. The site launched in September 2008, and by the following March, its roughly 100 registered “runners” had performed hundreds of tasks. Today the site, since renamed TaskRabbit, has more than 1,500 runners in San Francisco, Boston, Los Angeles, and Orange County fulfilling up to 3,000 tasks per month—everything from assembling IKEA furniture to making a beer run.

Think of TaskRabbit as an eBay for real-world labor. When users, called senders, post a task, they also invisibly declare the maximum amount they’d pay to have it completed. Runners then bid on the task by declaring the minimum amount they would accept. Unlike on eBay, though, senders can choose freely from among the bids, since the reviews and experience levels of runners can vary significantly: Highly rated runners—or those who happen to be available immediately for a rush job—can command significant premiums. Tasks range from courier assignments that can take just a little while to jobs like moving help that can take hours and are often scheduled up to a week in advance. TaskRabbit takes a 12 to 30 percent cut of each transaction; the higher percentages are deducted from lower-value jobs. Customers pay by credit card, and the runner’s share gets deposited into a TaskRabbit account, with checks cut every Friday.

To keep the rabbits scampering, the site employs some serious game mechanics. A leaderboard ranks the top runners, displaying the level that each has achieved and their average customer review. The runners also see a videogame-style progress bar showing the number of additional points they need to jump to the next level. Points are awarded for everything from bidding accurately on a task (15 points for being within 15 percent of the sender’s maximum price) to bidding quickly (15 points for bidding within the task’s first 30 minutes) to emailing friends and urging them to join TaskRabbit (three points per email). The level system is exponential: Moving from level 0 to level 1 takes only 60 points, while going from level 20 to 21 requires adding roughly 1,700 points to your tally. The highest level reached so far is 23, achieved only by a 58-year-old former military officer in San Francisco named Alex K. (All the runners are known by their first name and last initial.)

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Pat Metheny

[ed.  Another Pat video.  Watching this and other performances the amazing thing is that he doesn't appear to be a particularly fluid player - he really grips that fretboard - but his tone, technique and phrasing are always exquisite.  There's a lot going on beneath those fingertips.]

Char Siu Pork or Ribs

I love the "barbecued" pork and ribs in Chinatown. They have a distinct pork flavor, a glossy sheen that implies the sweet glaze beneath, and a glowing red-pink color that penetrates the surface (that's barbecue pork loin above, not ribs).

Unlike traditional Southern American low and slow smoke roasted barbecue, there is no smoke flavor, even though there is a pink ring beneath the surface of the meat. How do they do it?

Well, it turns out that Char Siu, even though it sounds like charcoal, is not grilled or smoked. It is roasted in a special oven, usually gas fired. And most of the time it gets its ruddy tone from red food coloring (some chefs use a red bean paste, but that's not common). Sigh.

But it still tastes great. You can buy Char Siu sauce in Chinese specialty stores, and it makes a fine glaze, but it doesn't make ribs that taste like Chinese restaurant ribs. That's because you need to marinate the meat first. I've worked on this recipe for a while and I think I've finally nailed the technique for making Chinatown Char Siu Ribs at home in the oven or on the grill. Here's how to do this dizzingly delicious favorite. 

Recipe

Serves. 4
Preparation time: 20 minutes to make the marinade, 3 to 12 hours to marinate
Cooking time. About 90 minutes

The meat
2 slabs of baby back ribs, cut in half lengthwise, or 4 pounds pork loin cut into strips about 1" wide, 1" tall, and 6" long

The marinade
1/2 cup hoisin sauce
1/2 cup brandy (or rum or bourbon)
1/4 cup honey
1/4 cup soy sauce
2 tablespoons toasted sesame oil
2 tablespoons hot sauce such as Tabasco
2 tablespoons powdered ginger
1 tablespoon powdered garlic
1 tablespoon five spice powder
2 tablespoons powdered onion
2 teaspoons red food coloring

The glaze
About 1/4 cup of honey or Char Siu sauce

About the meat. Many Chinese restaurants use spareribs that are chopped into 3-4" riblets with a cleaver. If you want, your butcher can make you riblets with her band saw. If not, you can do them whole. I like baby backs for this recipe because they are a bit meathier.

About the Chinese ingredients. There are no substitutes for hoisin sauce, five spice powder, or sesame oil. They are responsible for most of what we think of as the flavor of Chinese food. Five spice powder is easy to make at home, but the others are not easily made. Click on the links for more info on these ingredients. If you have trouble finding them in your grocery store, try AsianFoodGrocer.com or Amazon.com.

About the hot sauce. If you have an Asian chili sauce you can use it, but any old hot sauce will work fine in this marinade since it provides more heat than flavor.

About the food coloring. Food coloring is necessary for the authentic color. I am told by readers that you can substitute beet root powder for the red food coloring, but I've never tried it.

Serve with. The classic accompaniments are Chinese beer or jasmine tea. If you can find it, try hibiscus tea or Pinot Grigio from Oregon (most of the California Pinot Grigios are borrrrring).

Do this

1) Mix the marinade thoroughly in a bowl. Don't skip the booze. It helps penetrate, and even if you're a teetotaler, don't worry, there isn't any measurable alcohol in the ribs. Yes, I know alcohol can dry meat out, but I just think it works well in this case. If you must skip it, use apple juice or water, but booze is better. You can substitute fresh ginger and garlic for powdered ginger and garlic if you wish.

2) Marinate the meat for at least 3 hours in zipper bags. Overnight is better.

3) As much as I am a fan of outdoor cooking, this meat tastes great cooked in an indoor oven. Either way, heat your grill or oven to about 300°F. If you are grilling, set up in a 2-Zone or Indirect system. Make sure the meat is not directly over the flame on a grill. If necessary, put a pan of water with a rack on top of it under the meat. Roast for about 60 minutes.

4) After about 60 minutes for ribs and about 45 minuted for loin meat, paint one side with a coat of the glaze (honey or Char Siu sauce). Cook for 10 minutes, glaze side up. Turn them over, paint with glaze. Cook another 10 minutes. Remove them, let them sit for 5 minutes, cut ribs into individual bones, and serve. I like to sprinkle them with chopped fresh chives.

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Anime Eyes

From Wikipedia:

Many anime and manga characters feature large eyes. Osamu Tezuka, who is believed to have been the first to use this technique, was inspired by the exaggerated features of American cartoon characters such as Betty Boop, Mickey Mouse, and Disney's Bambi.  Tezuka found that large eyes style allowed his characters to show emotions distinctly. When Tezuka began drawing Ribbon no Kishi, the first manga specifically targeted at young girls, Tezuka further exaggerated the size of the characters' eyes. Indeed, through Ribbon no Kishi, Tezuka set a stylistic template that later shōjo artists tended to follow.

Coloring is added to give eyes, particularly to the cornea, some depth. The depth is accomplished by applying variable color shading. Generally, a mixture of a light shade, the tone color, and a dark shade is used. Cultural anthropologist Matt Thorn argues that Japanese animators and audiences do not perceive such stylized eyes as inherently more or less foreign.

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Couches in a Pig Barn

by Penelope Trunk

If you ask the Farmer, he would tell you that I was really really nice to him last week while he was in bed, immobile, strung out on six Percocet a day. I made him pies, and French toast, and meat at every meal because there is no amount of Percocet that would make him not want to eat meat.

I watched gunslinger movies with him when he was groggy and I made sure to talk only about innocuous topics like the state of world politics, something that we’d never fight about.

I can’t tell you everything went smoothly. I forgot to let the chickens out a few days. I lost the new bag of Cat Chow and served ground beef for two days of heaven on earth for the cats. And, there were a few times the goats got into the house. But we figured out how to handle everything.

Until the Farmer felt better: His back didn’t hurt so he wanted to work. So, he just stopped taking the Percocet. Cold turkey. And because we live in the country, the doctor gave the Farmer sixty Percocet pills with no instructions for how to go off narcotics.

For those of you who know nothing about Percocet, first of all, if you ever get that many pills prescribed, sell them on the streets of New York City to fund your child’s education. That’s how hard they are to come by.

And there’s a reason: They are highly addictive. I’m linking to some stuff about getting off high dosages of Percocet, but I’m summarizing: You can’t go cold turkey. You have to go slowly or you make yourself crazy.

So the Farmer was crazy and I had to have a drug intervention to tell him he was a total jerk and having withdrawal and he couldn’t tell and he needed to do it more systematically.

I convinced him. But he is not a guy who lays in bed all day. And he had already done it for five days. He wanted to work. On Percocet. I told him we agreed no machinery on Percocet. He told me how it’s not fair that I want him to taper and I want him to not work.

Then we have a screaming match about how life is not fair. That is the first topic. Which slides into:

Me: Don’t scream at me—

The Farmer: No you’re screaming at me—

No. Fuck you.

I told you I don’t like swearing.

I told you I don’t like you being mean.

This did not happen. I mean it did. It has happened so many times that it’s like the bass beat in the background of our everyday life.

So we did that and then he told me he had to work. It was a work emergency.

Here’s what he said: “I have to check cows.”

You might think I know nothing about farming, but I have actually learned a lot precisely for figuring out if the Farmer is BSing me or not.

Me: Your dad can check them.

The Farmer: I don’t want to call him. It’s a masculinity thing.

I swear to God. He said this.

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"Moon Indigo" by Ellen Granter 
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Abbey Road Revisited

Painting by  dubossarsky & vinogradov
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The Trillions of Microbes That Call Us Home

by Michael Tennesen

In the intensive care nursery at Duke University Medical Center, doctors and nurses attend to premature infants in rows of incubators surrounded by ventilators and monitors. As new parents holding packages of breast milk watch their tiny babies, neo­natologist Susan LaTuga makes her rounds, checking vital signs and evaluating how the infants tolerate feeding. She consults with nurses, dietitians, and pharmacists about the course of the day’s treatment for the babies, some of whom weigh as little as one pound and were born as much as 17 weeks early.

At the end of her shift, LaTuga stops at a freezer and inspects stool samples from some of the infants that are at the center of a remarkable new study. Across the Duke campus, technicians are waiting to analyze them with a powerful gene sequencer capable of penetrating the hidden world of the billions of microorganisms growing inside each infant.

LaTuga is one of several medical researchers at Duke working with microbial ecologists to study the development of the human microbiome—the enormous population of microbes, including bacteria, fungi, and viruses, that live in the human body, predominantly in the gut. There are 20 times as many of these microbes as there are cells in the body, up to 200 trillion in an adult, and each of us hosts at least 1,000 different species. Seen through the prism of the microbiome, a person is not so much an individual human body as a superorganism made up of diverse ecosystems, each teeming with microscopic creatures that are essential to our well-being. “Our hope is that if we can understand the normal microbial communities of healthy babies, then we can manipulate unhealthy ones,” LaTuga says.

The Duke study is just one of many projects begun in the past five years that use genetic sequencing to explore how the ­diversity of the microbiome impacts our health. Two of the largest efforts are the Human Microbiome Project, funded by the National Institutes of Health, and the European Union’s Metagenomics of the Human Intestinal Tract. Although these groups have only just begun to publish their findings, it is already clear that the micro­biome is much more complex and very likely more critical to human health than anyone suspected. Understanding and controlling the 
diversity of our germs, as opposed to assaulting them with anti­biotics, could be the key to a range of future medical treatments.

In-depth analysis of the human body’s microflora has been possible only in the past few years—a by-product of the same new gene sequencing techniques that have allowed scientists to cheaply and accurately identify the DNA of the human genome. “Gene sequencing has opened a huge door to how complex these communities are,” says Patrick Seed, a Duke pediatrician specializing in infectious disease, who with biologist Rob Jackson is a lead investigator of the premature infant study.

Before sequencing was available at a reasonable price, microbes were identified by growing them in a petri dish. But “not all microbes will grow in culture,” LaTuga says. “It identifies only about 20 percent of the microbes in the gut.”

Like a lush rain forest, a healthy microbiome in the human gut is a diverse ecosystem that thrives only when all the interdependent species are healthy too. “In an ecological sense, more diverse communities are healthy on land and in the seas,” Jackson says. “No one species is dominant, and the ecosystem is more productive and resistant to major changes.” The comparison is more than just a convenient analogy. Jackson was studying microbial communities around the world, including in the Amazon, when he realized that the ecological balance in those environments was not so different from the balance present in a healthy human gut. (One of his more counterintuitive findings is that microbial communities are more biodiverse in the American Plains than in the Amazon rain forest.)

Jackson’s work on microbial diversity caught the attention of Seed, who was already interested in the microbiome in the guts of preterm infants but who did not have a background in ecology. He sought out Jackson, and the two decided to collaborate on what they call the Preemie Microbiome Project. The Duke medical researchers and ecologists who have joined that project hope to identify which species flourish in early stages of the human microbiome, how they are influenced by the consumption of breast milk, and what role they play in critical diseases affecting infants as well as in chronic diseases that occur later in life.

“The classical view of infectious disease is that a single organism invades and produces an infection,” Seed says. “But then we found that certain diseases, like irritable bowel syndrome, seem to be caused by imbalances in the organisms that communicate with the host. So then people asked, ‘Why is this not the case for many other states of human health?’ ” Preliminary work by other groups, similarly made up of both biomedical researchers and microbial ecologists, suggests that imbalances in the microbiome might also be linked to allergies, diabetes, and obesity.

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Cinemagraphs

by Elizabeth Flock

It’s somewhere between a photo and a video, a piece of artwork that seeks to perfectly capture a fleeting moment in time.

New York City-based photographer Jamie Beck and Web designer Kevin Burg “hand-stitch” together her photos and his Web design to make animated gifs they now call “cinemagraphs.”

Beck and Burg first started making cinemagraphs at Fashion Week in New York earlier this year, spending a day or two to capture Vogue magazine’s Anna Wintour examining the catwalk, or the fluttering of a fashion model’s hair. People loved their work so much that Beck and Burg soon expanded to longer narratives, about how Dogfish Brewey makes its beer (below), or profiles that captured a moment in the life of a couple in love in Brooklyn (above). Companies even asked their help in making food come alive.

“It’s taken over our whole lives,” Beck says.

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Digital Meltdown

by Tracy Mayor

I am not cool. My husband is not cool. But like a pair of nags that has somehow managed to produce thoroughbreds, we have cool children. So cool, in fact, that the older one managed to secure for himself an invitation to Google+ -- Google's new social networking space and would-be Facebook killer -- on the first day it launched.

Because we have taught him to be compassionate and take pity on the uncool, he shared a Google+ invitation with me. The moment was the digital equivalent of his preschool days, when he'd arrive home to proudly gift me with a handmade object of unknown utility. "This is lovely," I'd say, my heart swelling as I considered the lump carefully, trying to figure if it looked more like a candy dish or a paper clip holder. "What's it for?"

When I ask the 17-year-old version of that boy what Google+ is for, he says -- texts, actually -- "its pretty sick, there're a lot of cool features thatll be awesome once more people get on. like better chatting and you can really control who sees what."

Alrighty then. Feeling positively hip, I head over, activate my invitation, upload a good-hair-day picture and type in a few simple words for my profile that seem to fit well with the spare, airy Google interface: "Writer, editor, public school advocate, parent, lover, friend, walker of dog." So far, so good.

I click "Circles" and a lovely row of them appears for me to populate -- Friends, Family, Acquaintances, Following and one helpfully left blank for me to label (Frenemies? Mean Girls? Former Crushes?) -- along with a phrase in red awaiting my click: "Find and Invite (560)."

Whoa, Google+ wants to find and invite 560 of my contacts? Hold up. Even though my son would tell me, with eyes rolling, that only losers click on "find all" menu options like that, it's a potent reminder that I'm starting down the slippery slope of adding yet another social medium into my already overwhelmed digital life.

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We’re Spent

by David Leonhardt

There is no shortage of explanations for the economy’s maddening inability to leave behind the Great Recession and start adding large numbers of jobs: The deficit is too big. The stimulus was flawed. China is overtaking us. Businesses are overregulated. Wall Street is underregulated.

But the real culprit — or at least the main one — has been hiding in plain sight. We are living through a tremendous bust. It isn’t simply a housing bust. It’s a fizzling of the great consumer bubble that was decades in the making.

The auto industry is on pace to sell 28 percent fewer new vehicles this year than it did 10 years ago — and 10 years ago was 2001, when the country was in recession. Sales of ovens and stoves are on pace to be at their lowest level since 1992. Home sales over the past year have fallen back to their lowest point since the crisis began. And big-ticket items are hardly the only problem.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York recently published a jarring report on what it calls discretionary service spending, a category that excludes housing, food and health care and includes restaurant meals, entertainment, education and even insurance. Going back decades, such spending had never fallen more than 3 percent per capita in a recession. In this slump, it is down almost 7 percent, and still has not really begun to recover.

The past week brought more bad news. Retail sales in June were weaker than expected, and consumer confidence fell, causing economists to downgrade their estimates for economic growth yet again. It’s a familiar routine by now. Forecasters in Washington and on Wall Street keep saying the recovery’s problems are temporary — and then they redefine temporary.

If you’re looking for one overarching explanation for the still-terrible job market, it is this great consumer bust. Business executives are only rational to hold back on hiring if they do not know when their customers will fully return. Consumers, for their part, are coping with a sharp loss of wealth and an uncertain future (and many have discovered that they don’t need to buy a new car or stove every few years). Both consumers and executives are easily frightened by the latest economic problem, be it rising gas prices or the debt-ceiling impasse.

Earlier this year, Charles M. Holley Jr., the chief financial officer of Wal-Mart, said that his company had noticed consumers were often buying smaller packages toward the end of the month, just before many households receive their next paychecks. “You see customers that are running out of money at the end of the month,” Mr. Holley said.

In past years, many of those customers could have relied on debt, often a home-equity line of credit or a credit card, to tide them over. Debt soared in the late 1980s, 1990s and the last decade, which allowed spending to grow faster than incomes and helped cushion every recession in that period.

Now, the economic version of the law of gravity is reasserting itself. We are feeling the deferred pain from 25 years of excess, as people try to rebuild their depleted savings. This pattern is a classic one. The definitive book about financial crises has become “This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly,” published in 2009 with exquisite timing, by Carmen M. Reinhart, now of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, and Kenneth S. Rogoff, of Harvard.

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