Rexfeng

Let's talk cultural mesofacts. You likely recall 50 Cent as a rapper In Da Club but much has happened since then. 50 diversified like crazy: started a record label, parlayed a possible Vitaminwater endorsement into an investment worth $100 million, and, relevant to the matter at hand, wrote several books, including a pair of self-improvement books: Formula 50: A 6-Week Workout and Nutrition Plan That Will Transform Your Life and The 50th Law. Zach Baron recently recruited 50 Cent to be his life coach for a GQ piece and it ends up going way better than he expected.

50 Cent thinks for a minute. Actually, he says, my girlfriend -- the one I just mentioned, the one I'd just moved in with? 50 Cent would like her to make a vision board, too. Then we're going to compare. "Take things out of your folder and things out of her folder to create a folder that has everything," he says. "Now the vision board is no longer your personal vision board for yourself: It's a joint board." That joint board will represent what we have in common. It will be a monument to our love.

But there will be some leftover unmatched photos, too, in each of our folders. And that's what the joint board is really for -- what it's designed to reveal. "The things that end up on your vision board that aren't in hers are the things that she has to accept," 50 Cent says. "And the things that she has that you don't are the things that you have to make a compromise with." In a healthy relationship, he explains, your differences are really what need talking about. This is how you go about making that conversation happen.

This article just keeps getting better the more you read it. (via @ystrickler)

Tags: 50 Cent   books   business   music   Zach Baron

From a book by Hartmut Esslinger, a collection of photographs of prototypes his company Frog Design worked on for Apple Computer.

The portables and phones are especially interesting.

Tags: Apple   books   design   Frog Design   Hartmut Esslinger

Elon Musk's SpaceX has revealed its first manned spacecraft at a live launch event in California. The Dragon V2 is capable of carrying seven astronauts for several days to and from the International Space Station, docking automatically with the station, and landing gently "almost anywhere on Earth" using its propulsion system.

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"Gangnam Style" has become the first YouTube video to break 2 billion views. The music video hit the record late Friday night, 525 days since it accumulated 1 billion all-time views in December 2012. That second billion took three times longer than the first, which was achieved just 159 days from the video's release on July 15th, 2012. The second place video on YouTube is still the music video that "Gangnam Style" dethroned: Justin Bieber's "Baby," which has just half the number of views as "Gangnam Style." Whether or not you're intoxicated by surging beat and Psy's ludicrous antics, it's an incredible achievement. Google's joined in on the celebration with a cute little easter egg just for the occasion — click on the dancing Psy at the...

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Clever mix of traditional cell animation and iPhone photography, by Marty Cooper.

(Via Andy Baio.)

Remarkably thoughtful piece by Maciej Ceglowski on privacy, memory, and more. Must read.

The classic. [Photographs: Laura Togut]

We've peeked behind the scenes at many a celebrated foodstuff over the years, but none have quite the gravitas of what may be New York's most iconic dish: the pastrami sandwich at 125-year-old Katz's Deli.

Katz's is nothing less than a keeper of the Jewish culinary flame, thanks in no small part to their homemade pastrami, which transforms tough, stringy beef belly into one of the most delicious sandwiches on earth. Ever wonder just how they do it? So have we, which is why we set out to find out.

Meet Jake Dell, the third generation owner of Katz's, who's about to walk us through the process in eight [not so] easy steps.

Step One: The Beef

Note the shirt.

Like other cured meat, pastrami began as a way for poor folk (in this case Jewish immigrants) to preserve and improve the flavor and texture of cheap cuts of meat. While plenty of pastrami is made with any cut of beef brisket, aficionados will tell you that the real deal comes specifically from the navel end. Navel is particularly fatty and stands up well to the long cooking to come; save the rest of the brisket for corned beef.

Step Two: The Cure

Curing the meat with salt keeps spoilage at bay, but these days its main advantage is the flavor and texture effect it has on the meat. Salted meat is denser and slices cleaner than unsalted meat, and the pink curing salt Katz's uses brings a familiar cured twang to the beef. The salt, which is enriched with sodium nitrite, also keeps the meat rosy pink as it cooks; with plain salt your pastrami would turn grey.

Katz's cures their corned beef (which doesn't get smoked) for a full four weeks, but the pastrami cures for less time—two to four weeks depending on the batch.

Step Three: The Rub

Katz's applies a spice rub to the pastrami just before it's smoked. The full blend is a company secret, but onions, garlic, cloves, pepper, chili, mustard seed, and coriander all make their way in. This rub helps form the black crusty bark on the meat once it's smoked.

Step Four: The Smoke

Of all the delis in New York that make their own pastrami from scratch, almost none smoke their own meat. The reason? Space: the smoker for Katz's pastrami is the size of a studio apartment. So once they apply the spice rub, the Katz's team sends their pastrami to a subcontractor facility that handles thousands of pounds of meat at once.

Smoke brings smoky flavor (no surprise there) but also starts to cook the meat. It takes two to three days of low-temperature smoking to finish the job—are you getting the idea yet that this is a labor of love?

With such a long smoking time, the wood used for fuel has a subtle impact on the pastrami's flavor. Katz's has a secret blend of wood chips that falls strictly into they-could-tell-you-but-then-they'd-have-to-kill-you territory.

Step Five: The Boil

The boiling vats.

Now that the meat's been cured, rubbed, and smoked, it's time return home....to jump into a vat of boiling water. This step is just about cooking the meat until it's done. While you can use a thermometer to track your progress (and Katz's does), a real pastrami whisperer from Katz's can tell you when the meat is done by touch alone. What do they look for? Meat that's cooked but still soft and jiggly.

Lady with a baby.

A Katz's employee careens through the deli with a battered old shopping cart filled with freshly boiled brisket. "Lady with a baby coming through!," someone shouts.

That shopping cart has been in service for years, patched up with twine as needed, and it's as good a symbol for Katz's as any: getting the job done the right away, and the same way, for years. As for the "baby" part, Dell says it nicely: "the pastrami is our baby and we treat it that way."

Step Six: The Steam

The "baby" is unloaded from the cart into large steamers behind the deli counter. At this point the meat is fully cooked and seasoned—steaming simply adds tenderness, loosening up the meat so it slices cleanly and melts in your mouth. After 15 to 30 minutes the meat is (finally) ready to slice.

Step Seven: The Slice

You'd think the hard part was over, but slicing and and assembling a pastrami sandwich is an art in itself. Dell tells us that "every busboy here aspires to be a cutter." Skilled cutters know how to remove the pastrami's inedible membrane of silver skin and slice the meat thinly against the grain—all with as few knifestrokes as possible (for clean slices) and at a blink-and-you'll-miss-it speed.

Step Eight: The Sandwich

Assembling the sandwich.

And then there's the assembly. A well-made pastrami sandwich has a balance of fat and lean, is piled high but not too bulgy, and is layered so the meat bites away cleanly. Rocket science? No, but it's one more way that care and know-how makes a difference in this sandwich to end all sandwiches.

Make Your Own

Can't make it out to Katz's for a taste? Try our very own recipe right this way »

Get to it.

History happened this past Memorial Day at the Big Texan Steak Ranch in Amarillo, Texas, when a Nebraskan woman finished two 72-ounce steaks and sides of a baked potato, shrimp, salad, and bread roll in 14 minutes, 57 seconds. (The actual challenge is simply to eat a single dinner in less than an hour, but this feat was about glory — and a world record.) Molly Schuyler polished off the first steak in under five minutes, she said she "wasn't really going for time," with the second dinner. Schuyler put it this way to the Amarillo Globe-News: "There was no point. I had to do it in under an hour, so I was fine." She then presumably lit a match on her boot heel and fired up a smoke. Now, you might be asking yourself, Is there video of the 5-foot-7, 125-pound self-described "bottomless pit" devouring such a feast? And you will be happy to know that we live in the year 2014, so of course there is.

Fair warning: There is little romance involved in the eating of 144 ounces of beef quickly — so only watch the video if you're prepared to see something you'll never un-see.

[Amarillo Globe-News]

Read more posts by Riddley Gemperlein-Schirm

Filed Under: accomplishments, big beef, competitive eating, steak, texas

The heat is (back) on.

Irwindale, California, Mayor Mark Breceda has been successful in his efforts to convince the local city council to drop its ongoing public-nuisance complaints against David Tran's immense 650,000-square-foot fermented-jalapeño factory. Since last fall, neighbors have been adamant that odors emanating from Huy Fong Foods, which is located within an industrial area of the city, have drifted on the wind and right down into their tranquil suburban backyards, where the hot-sauce vapors have allegedly caused cluster headaches and ruined several birthday parties. Sriracha sauce baron David Tran has pledged, the Pasadena Star-News reports, to deal more efficiently with complaints and swiftly quell any offensive odors once chili-grinding season begins in August. Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, the announcement was made less than a week after Grub reported that the McIlhenny Company's Tabasco brand, which is distributed in 166 countries, has debuted its own version of Sriracha sauce. [AP, PSN, Related]

Read more posts by Hugh Merwin

Filed Under: burn sauce, david tran, huy fong foods, irwindale, sriracha, srirachapocalypse, tabasco

From left: Lior Lev Sercarz of New York's La Boîte à Epices and Tom Erd of Wisconsin's the Spice House. [Photographs: Lauren Rothman and courtesy of the Spice House]

The world is smaller than it used to be. That's thanks, in part, to spices and the globalizing influences of colonialism that were fueled by our hunger for tastes from far away.

So it's a small irony that when we want to expand our culinary world view, we turn back to spices.

Think about what's in your pantry right now. Your black peppercorns might hail from India, your cinnamon from Indonesia; your coriander might have been harvested in Bulgaria, while the cumin you often pair with it was grown in Turkey. Allspice, that favorite ingredient in so many Scandinavian dishes? It's anything but Nordic—it's usually grown in Jamaica.

It's fascinating—and a little mind-boggling—to think about the intricacies of the spice trade, a millennia-old business traversing the globe. To help us wrap our brains around it, we turned to two of our favorite spice gurus: Lior Lev Sercarz, the master spice blender behind Manhattan boutique La Boîte à Epices, and Tom Erd, the co-owner, along with his wife Patty, of the Spice House, the premier mail-order Midwest spice shop that's been in operation for over 50 years. They shared some secrets of the trade with us.

Whole Spices Beat Out Ground—Every Time

A shelf at the Spice House. [Photograph courtesy of the Spice House]

"Nobody seems to understand shelf life," Erd says. Whole and ground spices are effectively separate products, each with their own shelf life. When left whole, spices' cell walls remain intact, but as soon as the spice is ground, those walls rupture and the spice's volatile essential oils—responsible for the very flavor and aroma of the spice—begin to dissipate at a rapid rate. "Now the clock starts ticking," Erd goes on.

His advice? When possible, buy whole spices and grind them just before cooking, as a coffee connoisseur does with beans. Stored whole, spices will keep for at least a year at full potency, if not several. A spare coffee grinder, like this affordable model, makes quick work of most whole spices.

When that's not an option, buy smaller quantities of ground spices and use them within a few months, or a year or two at most. Good spice shops will allow you to buy spices in small quantities.

Freshness is a Matter of Trust

When a spice merchant places an order, she does it blind: not knowing how fresh the spice is or what condition it'll arrive in.

"This business was started by pirates and there are still pirates in it," Erd likes to say. "Shippers will try to pass off crops that are one or two years old. I pay for this year's crop and I want this year's crop: you really gotta know your guy."

Spice trading, Sercarz agreed, is a profession where relationships are everything.

"It's still a bit old school," he says. "There's a lot of hand shaking. You need to know the right suppliers and you need to build on those relationships, on that trust."

The Best Kind of Storage is No Storage at All

Spice blends at La Boîte à Epices. [Photograph: Max Falkowitz]

Spice merchants deal with a volume of product that's hard to fathom—a bag of spices can weigh over 100 pounds—and the product inside is a ticking timebomb of freshness. So how do spice sellers store their product to maintain its quality? Well, preferably they don't do much storage at all.

"The goal is not to keep them here," Sercarz says. "The shorter time they can spend here, the better." That means ordering as little product as possible at a time, particularly when it comes to pre-ground.

"We buy smaller quantities of those items," Erd notes. "Just enough so that they'll be off our shelves in three weeks to a month."

So How Do They Get Those Spices, Anyway?

Both Erd and Sercarz rely on a network of spice brokers and middlemen scattered all over the world, but most are concentrated in Asia where the majority of the world's spices are grown. These brokers use their own relationships to purchase spices directly from farms.

"It's very hard to buy directly from spice farmers," Sercarz explains. "Many of these people live in extremely remote places, and it's near impossible to get in touch with them." "Through the centuries, it's been a word-of-mouth thing, and it still is," Erd says.

But that's starting to change, if slowly. Sercarz now purchases directly from a few farms in Israel, France, and Cambodia, and here at home Erd buys some herbs from California farms.

The Market Dictates Their Inventory

Inside one of the Spice House's retail stores. [Photograph courtesy of the Spice House]

With hundreds of herbs and spices out there, how do spice merchants decide what to stock? For the most part they listen to their customers. And who do costumers listen to? The media.

"I don't set the pace," Erd explains. "That's TV chefs and food writers. If they're using Sichuan peppercorns, I better be selling Sichuan peppercorns. You have to follow the food trends."

20 years ago—in the era of Paul Prudhomme—Cajun seasoning flew off the Spice House's shelves so home cooks everywhere could get their taste of blackened fish. Today Erd struggles to keep Middle Eastern flavors in stock, thanks in large part to the continued popularity of 2012's wildly successful cookbook Jerusalem by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi.

It's a different story at Sercarz's business, where the chef-turned-spice-merchant lavishes his attention on minutely-tuned imaginative spice blends with names like Penang, Orchidea and Tangier. Sercarz mainly designs custom blends for high-end restaurants like Le Bernardin, and some of those blends then join his retail line. But he's noticed an increased demand for Middle Eastern spices as well.

Restaurant Collaborations are Key

While retail sales establish a spice merchant's brand and build visibility, contracts with restaurants are their bread and butter. A third of the Spice House's business comes from its sales to restaurants—in-store sales and internet sales make up the other thirds—and La Boîte supplies more than 80 restaurants, bakeries, and bars from here to Paris and beyond.

Both Sercarz and Erd sell proprietary spice blends to restaurants, either recipes they develop or ones that chefs provide based on their own tastes. "Every year it's a bigger part of our business," Erd says.

Desirability—and Profitability—Varies by Season

Inside Manhattan's La Boîte à Epices. [Photograph: Lauren Rothman]

You might think that a spice shop's big money-makers are the high-priced specialty seasonings like saffron (price: up to and over $10,000 a pound) and vanilla ($2 or more per bean). But Erd's most important items are reliable seasonal staples: baking spices like cinnamon in the winter and grilling spices like cumin and chili powder in the summer.

Big Spice vs. Little Spice

Small specialty spice merchants have a hard time competing against giants like McCormick. With high-volume orders, large companies can set the pace of the market and have far greater purchasing power. While Erd and Sercarz rely on broker connections, large companies' needs are so vast that they can approach a whole farm and buy out their entire stock during the late season: when prices are lower.

"At our level, we just can't do that," Erd says.

But small shops offer a different kind of value for consumers: freshness.

"We grind only about 100 pounds of spices at a time," Erd says, "and then we sell them within two days and grind again. Big companies grind only once every month or two, so by the time you get your hands on one of those bottles the spice inside may have been ground eight months ago. With our stuff? When you get it, it was probably ground only a week prior."

And, of course, as at any small business, owners Erd and Sercarz wear many different hats.

"I handle everything," Sercarz says. "I do finance, I do the books, I'm responsible for creativity, for purchases, the list goes on. I highly doubt McCormick's CEO does the purchasing."

More on Spices

Indian Spices 101: How to Work With Dry Spices »

Today is the fifteenth anniversary of my move from Croatia to the United States. I guess it’s time to stop using the above excuse when I mispronounce “haphazard”, forget a state capital, or get confused about how to use a drive-thru lane¹.

It was maybe two years after the move that I started thinking full-time in English, a language I’d previously only used in the classroom. Oddly, English felt more comfortable in my brain than Croatian ever had. Long sentences were easier to build, idioms were deeper in meaning, and new phrases came more naturally and more frequently. I didn’t feel myself tripping over the grammar or worrying about the vocabulary as much. There always seemed to be a different way to say something if I got stuck on a word.

This is partly due to the prevalence of American culture in, well, much of the rest of the world. I grew up with American cartoons, TV shows, and movies (all beautifully subtitled instead of horribly dubbed). I listened to American music—duh. I used computers set to English.²

And it’s also partly because I was born in one country—along with its own culture, language, and values—called Yugoslavia, a hybrid glued together from disparate peoples after World War I; then it morphed, through a civil war, into another—Bosnia, the previously largely-Muslim, Ottoman-influenced Yugoslavian republic; and then the family moved mere blocks away to a third, Croatia—a predominantly Catholic, Italian-and-Prussian-influenced, “Western-style” country.

All these moves came with tweaks to the way I spoke—Croatian, Bosnian, and Serbian, the three big languages of Yugoslavia, are very similar, but the minute differences were seen as absolutely crucial delineators once the warring started between the Yugoslavian republics. It’s as if Texas and California went to war, and saying “y'all” in San Diego went from folksy-cute to a potentially mortal giveaway. Look, it’s one of THEM! 

And what I spoke of mattered as well. You wouldn’t want to profess your love of a (completely apolitical) Serbian band from the 1970s during the war in Croatia in the 1990s. Better to stick to Looney Tunes, My So-Called Life, and Radiohead.

Of all those post-Yugoslavian places I lived in, Croatia is the country with which I mostly associate my childhood. This despite the fact that I lived there a shorter time than in Bosnia, or in the US now. It’s because the place where you went to high school casts such a long shadow over the rest of your life, I think. Croatia was where I made all the friends I remember, all the friends who shaped my tastes and opinions and prejudices. Meanwhile, memories of kids from my early childhood were smudged by the war that transitioned me into teendom.

And my high school memories are fading now as well. I’ve met so many lovely people since 1999; they’re displacing the old friends. Only so much room in the li'l brainbox. I try to keep in mind that this happens, to some extent, to every high-school graduate. People move away, start jobs, start families. Friends become Facebook updates.

Most adults have a home to go back to for the holidays, etc. My immediate family all moved to Florida when I did, so trips back home are now to the “new” home.³ And as for my life in Bosnia, I literally can’t go back to that house. It is now occupied by another family, relocated there by the “other guys’” army when they invaded our hometown. We escaped to the Croatian town across the river and stayed there for years, practically able to look back on the family house we had fled in the middle of the night, unable to visit it. And when the war finally wrapped up and it became safe and legal to cross the border and walk the old streets again, it was still emotionally unsafe. So I never went back. 

But I’ve been in the United States for fifteen years now, and it feels more like home than any other place. The US of A has been inviting and welcoming to me. I’d worried about fitting in—I have always worried this my whole life, and I always will—and was pleasantly surprised to find the people here patient and eager to help a newcomer. This is largely luck, likely; had I been of slightly darker skin, or slightly more visible religious beliefs, or of less middle-class-mainstream needs, things may have turned out differently. That sucks. But this is home now, and the cracks and holes in my home are mine to fix.

In four years, I will have technically been American more than I’ll have been anything else. It has already felt that way for a long while.

* * *

¹ For the first ten or so years here, I’d avoided the drive-thru lane because I—don’t laugh—didn’t know how it worked. I felt silly driving up and asking, ok, what happens now? At some point in my mid-20s, a switch flipped and I’m now generally more eager than anything to ask precisely that: hey, I’ve never done this before, how does it work?

² It still freaks me out today to see an operating system in Croatian. I have no idea what half the words mean, because they were all hastily invented in the late 90s to catch up to decades of American terminology.

³ I live in Portland, OR now, and I prefer it to Florida by a margin as wide as Florida’s highways, though I can’t really complain about spending the holidays there. Or can I…!

ESPN:

Shelly Sterling announced late Thursday night that she has signed an agreement to sell the Los Angeles Clippers to former Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer for $2 billion.

A source close to the situation told ESPN’s Ramona Shelburne that Sterling and Ballmer signed the final papers of the sale shortly before midnight at the offices of her Los Angeles-based attorneys. Sterling announced she was acting under her authority as the sole trustee of the Sterling family trust, which owns the Clippers.

Ballmer’s $2 billion bid beat a $1.6 billion bid from a group with some familiar names:

Geffen’s group also included Oracle CEO Larry Ellison; Oprah Winfrey; Guggenheim executives Todd Boehly and Mark Walter; Steve Jobs’ widow, Laurene Jobs; Steve Wynn’s ex-wife, Elaine Wynn; and Beats by Dre co-founder Jimmy Iovine.

Ballmer should make for a great sports owner. He’s got plenty of money and a passion for winning.

Another one worth a re-link. Kontra, back in 2008, “Why Apple Doesn’t Do ‘Concept Products’”:

Apple would gain nothing from telegraphing its intentions and capabilities by releasing public conceptual products. The company is being more than prudent by not displaying their unconstrained fantasies to competitors, media, investors or customers.

As counterintuitive as it may seem, this inexorably leads us to Kontra’s law:

A commercial company’s ability to innovate is inversely proportional to its proclivity to publicly release conceptual products.

An officially licensed adapter will allow Super Smash Bros. Melee veterans to play the upcoming Wii U version of Super Smash Bros. with GameCube controllers, Nintendo announced today. The peripheral allows players to connect up to four GameCube...

Uber will eventually replace the people who drive its cars with cars that drive themselves, CEO Travis Kalanick said today at the Code Conference. A day after Google unveiled the prototype for its own driverless vehicle, Kalanick was visibly excited at the prospect of developing a fleet of driverless vehicles, which he said would make car ownership rare. "The reason Uber could be expensive is because you're not just paying for the car — you're paying for the other dude in the car," Kalanick said. "When there's no other dude in the car, the cost of taking an Uber anywhere becomes cheaper than owning a vehicle. So the magic there is, you basically bring the cost below the cost of ownership for everybody, and then car ownership goes away."

...

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Apple's purchase of Beats is finally confirmed, and we know for sure that Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre will be joining the company as well. Unfortunately, their new titles at Apple aren't helping us figure out exactly what they'll be working on — according to The Wall Street Journal, Iovine and Dr. Dre's titles will simply be "Jimmy and Dre." (It's probably safe to assume they'll continue working on Beats projects, as it sounds like the brand and its products will live on with an identity separate from Apple.) We're not certain, but this is probably the first time anyone at Apple has had a one-word title that echoes his name. Just imagine the business cards!

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Microsoft's Skype will eventually be able to translate voice calls between people. In an on-stage demo at the Code conference today, Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella showed off Skype Translator, an upcoming version of the service that is capable of translating voice conversation in "near real-time" using technology developed by the company's Skype and Translator teams. With it, you can talk in your native language to another user who speaks a different language, and Microsoft will translate it to the other person.

"Ever since we started to speak, we wanted to cross the language boundary," Nadella said before showing off a development version of the software, which will be out in beta later this year and possibly as a commercial product...

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Google co-founder Sergey Brin said today that it was "probably a mistake" for him to have worked on Google+ because he's "not a very social person." Speaking at Recode's Code Conference, Brin — who also called himself "kind of a weirdo" — acknowledged that he used Google+ to post pictures of his kids to his family, but suggested that any previous professional focus on the social network was misguided. "It was probably a mistake," he said, "for me to be working on anything tangentially related to social to begin with."

Brin, who co-founded Google with Larry Page in 1998, said his attention is now on his company's semi-secret skunkworks group, Google X. Google X is working on a range of projects, including a contact lens that measures...

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Humpty Dumpty was set up.

The quest for high-protein and low-cholesterol breakfast has led to something of an ever-escalating albumin arms race, causing every major fast-food player from Subway to Dunkin' Donuts to Jack in the Box to 7-Eleven to add egg-white sandwiches to menu boards. The final straw seems to have been McDonald's, which last year put together some "freshly grilled egg whites" and "extra lean Canadian bacon" and christened the results "Egg White Delight," a sandwich that has now apparently scrambled raw ingredient supply systems so thoroughly that we're all facing an unprecedented shortage of egg whites.

Health-food obsessives were the first to go yolk-free, with their propensity for egg-white everything from omelettes to sandwiches, and avoidance of the supposedly (although disproved) cholesterol- and fat-heavy yolks. All that aside, everything just changed when McDonald's suddenly got with the program. "Analysts say the fragile egg supply chain has been under pressure as fast-food restaurants race to add low-cholesterol egg sandwiches to menu boards," the Financial Times reports.

Now there suddenly isn't enough product to go around. The cost of liquid egg whites soared 80 percent this past year, and meanwhile, the price of dried egg whites has been at its highest since 1979 as stocks hit all-time lows. Because the fast-food giants can leverage their corporate dimensions with broad purchasing power and fixed prices, the shortage is hitting small businesses the hardest: As Food Business News reports, the industrywide price shifts tend to hurt independent bakeries, which no longer can afford to keep egg whites in stock. Expect this to be a very bad season for meringues and chiffon pies.

The Egg-White Craze: It's No Yolk [Guardian]

Read more posts by Riddley Gemperlein-Schirm

Filed Under: whites people, egg-whites, eggs, fast-food, food news

The M60 bus, which remains one of the few mass transit options for commuters heading to and from LaGuardia airport, has finally been upgraded to an express bus line. It's now the M60 SBS [Select Bus Service], with its own special red fast lane that nobody else is allowed to use (but whatever, who's going to stop them?). [ more › ]

What do you do with your Lamborghini if you think it isn't getting enough attention? For some of the Yakuza in Tokyo's underground, you customize it with vinyl wraps, flashing lights, and strings of colored LEDs. Japan-based director and cinematographer Luke Huxham created a mini-documentary last year offering a wonderful peek inside this subculture, which has blossomed from illegal, loud bōsōzoku motorcycle gangs full of young daredevils. Huxham managed to gain access to a man named Morohoshi-san, who invited him to shoot the short film about the gang and its customized rides.

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Respawn is re-adding Capture the Flag to Titanfall on PC, even though "less than 1% of the player base was even trying to play CTF," a blog post reads. Respawn removed Capture the Flag and Pilot Hunter from playlists last week, meaning those modes...

Farhad Manjoo:

Just wait, the company’s critics have always shot back. Wait till Amazon controls the whole market — then see how well it treats authors, publishers and customers.

Now Amazon is walking right into its detractors’ predictions. There are a couple obvious reasons this is a bad strategy. It’s bad public relations — if it doesn’t already, Amazon may soon control a monopolistic stake of the e-book market and its tactics are sure to invite not only scorn from the book industry but also increased regulatory oversight.

But the more basic problem here is that Amazon is violating its own code. To win a corporate battle, Amazon is ruining its customer experience. Mr. Bezos has long pointed to customer satisfaction as his North Star; making sure customers are treated well is the guiding principle for how he runs Amazon.

Tim Bradshaw, reporting for The Financial Times:

Apple is readying a new software platform that would turn the iPhone into a remote control for lights, security systems and other household appliances, as part of a move into the “internet of things”.

Apple plans to take on rivals Google and Samsung and make a “big play” in the world of smart home technology at its Worldwide Developer Conference on June 2 in San Francisco, according to people familiar with the matter.

This will reinforce the view, held by some in Silicon Valley, that Jetsons-style home automation is the next frontier in technology as growth in smartphone sales begins to slow in developed markets.

I’m pretty excited for next week.

A US military research facility long at the center of conspiracy theories will be dismantled and shut down this summer, if all goes according to plan. HAARP, an acronym for High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, has been implicated in everything from mind control to extreme weather like hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, and tornados since the project's origins in the early ’90s. In 2010, for instance, former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told the UN that the facility was responsible for devastating floods in Pakistan. But scientists have always waved off such claims as completely ludicrous.

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Over three weeks ago, rumors from multiple sources rocked the tech world and made it seem that Apple would almost certainly purchase headphone maker Beats Electronics for some $3.2 billion. But since then, there's been nary a peep from Apple. Of course, the deal was only in "advanced stages" according to those early reports, and it seems something may be causing negotiations to drag on longer than expected. Billboard has spoken with multiple sources close to the discussions who've provided some details on what may be causing the delay.

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There was a time, not long ago, when Piscine Molitor was the place to be. Tucked away in the leafy outskirts of Paris, the pool opened with Art Deco splendor in 1929, and soon became a magnet for all things chic. Sunbathers would lounge among celebrities and starlets, stretched out in white deck chairs and very often topless. One of its first lifeguards was an Olympic gold medalist-turned-actor who would go on to star in the film Tarzan.

During winters, the pool was converted into an ice...

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Idaho couple Julie and Scott Brusaw of Solar Roadways have raised more than $1 million on Indiegogo to pursue the extremely ambitious goal of replacing the nation’s roads with solar panels. The design will now move from prototype to manufacturing, a dangerous phase for any technology project — and while the dream is exciting, the logistics of actually pulling it off are less so.

The Brusaws are not scammers or wackos. Scott has an electrical engineering background and the project has gotten two rounds of funding from the Federal Highway Administration. They’ve built a prototype parking lot made of solar panels, microprocessors, and LEDs encased in a textured glass that they say can withstand the weight of a 250,000-lb. truck.

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