“

I’ve been frustrated by my inability to find a good baguette. I’d tried the local bakery nearby, which was reputed to have one of the best baguettes in New York. It was too big, too dense, too bland, and (ultimately) too expensive.

What I remember about the baguettes in Paris is that they were cheap and I never had a desire to put anything on them. They are a meal onto themselves. And I also suspect they were laced with narcotics.

…

But yesterday I took my walk and on the loop back stopped at Whole Foods to buy some oatmeal. They were selling baguettes for two bucks. I figured I’d take the gamble. It’s fashionable to talk shit about Whole Foods. But the baguette I got there almost—almost—as good as my daily special from Eric Kayser. I brought it home, sat up with my wife and my kid and we all got high.

When I was leaving Paris, I wrote about how the things I valued seemed to be valued over there. High on that list are things you stuff into your body. And when I thought about what I stuffed into my body, while in Paris, I didn’t feel like a foodie. I didn’t feel special. I felt like I was learning French.

”

– http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/09/how-to-become-a-foodie/279555/

“

In the lucrative world of music copyright, it may be something of a watershed moment: on Friday, after six years of legal wrangling and decades after he wrote the lyrics to the hit song “YMCA,” Victor Willis will gain control of his share of the copyright to that song and others he wrote when he was the lead singer of the 1970s disco group the Village People.

Mr. Willis, who dressed as a policeman during the group’s heyday, was able to recapture those songs, thanks to a little-known provision of copyright legislation that went into effect in 1978. That law granted musicians and songwriters what are known as “termination rights,” allowing them to recover control of their creations after 35 years, even if they had originally signed away their rights.

It is possible, maybe even likely, that other artists who also wrote or recorded songs in 1978 have, after invoking their termination rights, quietly signed new deals with record labels and song publishing companies. But Mr. Willis appears to be the first artist associated with a hit song from that era to announce publicly that he has used his termination rights to regain control of his work.

”

– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/11/arts/music/a-copyright-victory-35-years-later.html?ref=todayspaper

“

In four years, Chang had gone from a noodle cook to an international name brand whose dazzling ascent made him the role model for countless other impatient young chefs who hoped, like him, to open their own places without long years of apprenticeship in someone else’s kitchen. His fame allowed him to begin steadily growing his empire outside the East Village—opening Má Pêche in midtown Manhattan in 2010, Seio-bo in Sydney one year later, and the Toronto trio the year after that. (For some reason, this pretension-hating chef is drawn to restaurant names that couldn’t be more hoity-toity—they come complete with diacritical marks.) At the same time, he and pastry chef Tosi began expanding Momofuku’s chain of hugely successful stand-alone Milk Bar dessert shops, which have inspired a cult around her insanely rich Crack Pie and Proustian soft-serve ice cream that tastes like cereal milk.

“His genius isn’t so much in the cooking as in understanding the Zeitgeist in the way that nobody else did,” explains Ruth Reichl, who, as then-editor of Gourmet, was one of Chang’s early champions. “At that point, most restaurateurs were thinking it was the reader of The New York Times they had to woo. But they aren’t the people who are spending money today. It’s the 20- to 30-year-olds who spend all their disposable income on food and are extremely knowledgeable about it. As his work got more sophisticated, he trusted his audience to follow him. He’s one of them.”

”

– http://www.vogue.com/magazine/article/david-chang-the-anxiety-of-influence/#1

kanye west – bound 2 (on jimmy fallon)

“Scientists in Indonesia have discovered a new species of walking shark that lives on the ocean floor and uses its fins to shuffle around, wiggling from side to side as it moves. Named hemiscyllium halmahera, the shark was described in Aqua, International Journal of Ichthyology.”

– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/10/science/a-shark-prowling-the-ocean-floor.html?ref=todayspaper

“

After controlling for many health and behavioral factors, researchers found that some fruits — strawberries, oranges, peaches, plums and apricots — had no significant effect on the risk for Type 2 diabetes. But eating grapes, apples and grapefruit all significantly reduced the risk. The big winner: blueberries. Eating one to three servings a month decreased the risk by about 11 percent, and having five servings a week reduced it by 26 percent.

Substituting fruit juice for whole fruits significantly increased the risk for disease.

”

– http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/04/some-fruits-are-better-than-others/?ref=todayspaper

reflektor – arcade fire

“We want food to be delicious, diverse, healthy, affordable, sufficient for everyone, environmentally sustainable, good for animal welfare, from farms that make the countryside more attractive and use as few chemicals as possible. Many of these values are in conflict with one another for much of the time. For example, ugly fields covered with polytunnels can produce tasteless but plentiful, cheap, environmentally friendly and nutritious vegetables. The tastiest, most cow-friendly outdoor reared beef is too expensive to feed the majority, and can produce more greenhouse gasses and use more land than that from intensively reared cattle. There are some crops for which yields are so much better if grown non-organically that it makes no rational sense to avoid using pesticides and herbicides that are well within safe levels. IVM is just the most recent, vivid example of how our desire for the natural, traditional and aesthetically appealing food can clash with the value we place on animal welfare, environmental sustainability and the humane imperative to feed the whole world well.

Almost all the coverage of IVM has glossed over this pluralism, presenting commentators as either for or against, period. Perhaps that’s because balancing competing goods on a case-by-case basis is difficult, and we’d much prefer the simplicity of arranging them in a hierarchy, so that we always know what trumps what. It’s just too hard to accept that sometimes two things we highly prize, such as animal welfare and conservation, can pull in different directions. We easily fall prey to the philosophical myth that the good is unitary and whole, rather than plural and fragmented.”

– http://www.aeonmagazine.com/nature-and-cosmos/in-vitro-meat-demands-a-whole-new-food-ethics/

“

On Tuesday, the company plans to announce a new program, Kindle MatchBook, that lets its customers buy the electronic versions of books they have already purchased in print form for either $2.99, $1.99, $0.99 or free. That’s far less than the $11 or more that Amazon typically charges for standalone purchases of the latest Kindle titles.

One benefit of MatchBook is that Amazon will let its customers buy Kindle editions of books that they purchased in print as far back as 1995, the year Amazon opened for business. The discounted Kindle edition prices apply to book purchases made in the future on Amazon too.

”

– http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/03/amazon-couples-print-digital-books-with-new-program/?ref=todayspaper

“

Verizon and a host of other companies that spent billions of dollars to build their Internet pipelines believe they should be able to manage them as they wish. They should be able, for example, to charge fees to content providers who are willing to pay to have their data transported to customers through an express lane. That, the companies say, would allow the pipeline owner to reap the benefits of its investment.

The F.C.C., however, believes that Internet service providers must keep their pipelines free and open, giving the creators of any type of legal content — movies, shopping sites, medical services, or even pornography — an equal ability to reach consumers. If certain players are able to buy greater access to Internet users, regulators believe, the playing field will tilt in the direction of the richest companies, possibly preventing the next Google or Facebook from getting off the ground.

The court is set to hear oral arguments starting Monday morning in Verizon v. F.C.C., which is billed as a heavyweight championship of the technology world, setting the old era against the new.

”