Rexfeng

With monthly changes and one-off specials, there have been 18 Cronut flavors in the year since it debuted.

Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim might not be the most obvious point of comparison for Dominique Ansel's Cronut, but think about it: They have similar shapes, and both are the result of uncompromising vision and technical innovation. The designers are each seen as leaders in their respective fields. And throngs of tourists queue up each day to experience them. Sure, the museum's been around a lot longer than the pastry, but today marks exactly 365 days since the Cronut was first unveiled, an eternity for a food fad. Haters and grouches may continue to protest the Cronut, but its enduring popularity is a testament to its status as a culinary hallmark.

Ansel says he has surprises planned at his Soho bakery to celebrate tomorrow, but the funny thing is, the James Beard–winning pastry chef tells Grub Street he can't remember the exact time he dreamt up this idea — there was no Eureka! moment. Ansel just says he was probably in his office when he thought of it. Instead it was more of a slow burn, starting around Valentine's Day, when he starts planning his yearly Mother's Day offerings. But as we noted last year when we first cast our eyes upon the the croissant-doughnut hybrid, the brilliance of the Cronut isn't necessarily the idea; it's the execution.

The kind of pastry that accommodates the airy, multi-layered qualities of a croissant simply falls apart when it's thrown into the hot bubbling oil that makes doughnuts so great, so it took Ansel some time to get it right. "The first batches were not the greatest," Ansel says. "We wanted light, delicate, not greasy, not too heavy." Ansel still won't reveal his secret (though the number of knockoffs suggests plenty of people have figured it out, or have at least identified some workarounds), but it took no fewer than ten different batches before Ansel got what he was looking for: a Cronut, though it wasn't called that at the time, that emerged from the hot grape-seed bath looking like the golden pastry paragon that it would soon become.

Once Ansel had the pastry down, he recruited some outside opinions. Just not too many of them. Only about ten people — friends and a few pastry chefs — taste-tested the earliest versions, while Ansel noted their reactions. Coincidentally, most of the testers lived in other states and countries, so word of the new invention didn't spread far beyond the inner circle.

In fact, the project was so under the radar that when Ansel wrote Cronut for the first time on a prep sheet, much of his staff had no idea what he was referring to. Eventually they were all filled in, and the name stuck. (Even though cronuts.com belongs to a Croatian poker website.)

The response to the release was immediate, and it hasn't let up since. An early sketch of the Cronut includes a reminder about a staff party, which ended up never happening, once the crowds descended. The lines may let up eventually, perhaps when Ansel expands (which he reiterates he has no plans to do immediately). For the time being, his routine is more or less set: "Winter, summer, waking up early, coming in to bake things with the team, opening the bakery at 8 a.m." Now it's gotten to the point where he's beginning to recognize Cronut regulars, people who have braved the line a dozen times or more. "There are people I see every week, every month," he says. "There are a lot of guys who come for the girlfriend."

Read more posts by Hugh Merwin

Filed Under: frenching, cronuts, dominique ansel, dominique ansel bakery, new york, soho

One of the greatest designers in the world, Massimo Vignelli, is very sick and "will be spending his last days at home". His son is requesting that if you were influenced at all by Vignelli's work, you should send him a letter:

According to Pentagram partner Michael Bierut, "Luca said that Massimo would be thrilled to get notes of good wishes from people whom he's touched or influenced -- whether personally or remotely -- over the years. Luca has visions of huge mail bags full of letters. I know that one of Massimo's biggest fantasies has been to attend his own funeral. This will be the next best thing. Pass the word."

Here's the address:

Massimo Vignelli
130 East 67 Street
New York, New York 10021
USA

Tags: design   Massimo Vignelli

Earlier today in Tokyo, limited edition bananas went on sale. They even had serial numbers. Yes, serial numbers. On bananas.

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Ina Fried, writing for Recode:

While Firefox OS remains targeted at first-time smartphone buyers overseas, China’s ZTE said Thursday it will start selling a model in the U.S. via eBay.

The ZTE Open C is listed for the “Buy It Now” price of $99.99.

What the hell, I bought one. (22nd one sold so far, according to the eBay page.)

According to the National Climate Assessment, climate change has already affected the US in significant ways. This map from the NY Times shows the change in temperatures from around the country, specifically the "1991-2012 average temperature compared with 1901-1960 average".

Among the report's findings? As I've noted before, weather is getting weirder and more bursty, not just hotter.

One of the report's most striking findings concerned the rising frequency of torrential rains. Scientists have expected this effect for decades because more water is evaporating from a warming ocean surface, and the warmer atmosphere is able to hold the excess vapor, which then falls as rain or snow. But even the leading experts have been surprised by the scope of the change.

The report found that the eastern half of the country is receiving more precipitation in general. And over the past half-century, the proportion of precipitation that is falling in very heavy rain events has jumped by 71 percent in the Northeast, by 37 percent in the Midwest and by 27 percent in the South, the report found.

Nonlinear systems, man.

Tags: global warming   science   weather

David Friedman:

Back in 2000, I was playing around with a Game Boy Camera, trying to use it to take color photos. (I finally got that to work.) When I first got the camera, I took a walk through midtown taking pictures. I just came across the images and thought I’d share them here for posterity (scaled up to 200% for visibility on our fancy modern displays).

I remember using a similar camera on my Handspring Visor around the same time.

This morning, a friend noted a discrepancy between two recent headlines at The Mac Observer:

• March 5: “Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer to Retire, Luca Maestri to Take Over”
• May 7: “PR Queen Katie Cotton Leaving Apple”

I tweeted the two headlines and corresponding URLs, with a single word of commentary: “Hmm”. I said no more partly because I was near the 140-character limit, and partly to see what the reaction would be. Some got it, but many repliers missed my point, mistakenly thinking it was related to an exodus of executives from the company.¹

My point was to draw attention to the disparate job descriptions: “Apple CFO” vs. “PR Queen”.

Julia Richert pointed to a similar discrepancy — two Philip Elmer-DeWitt headlines on his weblog at CNN/Fortune/Money:

• January 2012 (upon the hiring of John Browett to replace Ron Johnson): “A New Boss at the Apple Store”
• May 2014: “Angela Ahrendts’ Big First Week as Queen of Apple Retail”

Maybe you can find an article in which Peter Oppenheimer is described as Apple’s “finance king”, but I can’t. It’s true that Oppenheimer’s official title (“CFO”) aptly describes his position in a way that Cotton’s (“vice president of worldwide corporate communication”) does not. “Queen”, however, is the wrong way to shorthand it. Boss, chief, head, leader — honcho perhaps, if you want to be casual — any of these words can be used to convey authority. Queen, though, emphasizes something else: gender. It carries other connotations, none of them flattering: queens are arrogant, distant, prissy, entitled, superior; they become queens by birthright or marriage, not through merit.²

[UPDATE: Dan Benjamin points out that Elmer-DeWitt has used “king” in headlines, albeit not in the context of a substitute for a job title. Queen in the above cited examples is being used in lieu of gender-neutral words such as boss or chief.]

Unintentional sexism is sexism nonetheless. There’s almost never a good reason to use a different word to describe a woman’s job than the words you’d choose if the position were held by a man.

Matthew Garrahan and Tim Bradshaw:

Apple is closing in on its largest ever acquisition with the planned $3.2 billion purchase of Beats Electronics, the headphone maker and music streaming operator founded by music producer Jimmy Iovine and the hip-hop star Dr Dre.

The deal could be announced as early as next week, people familiar with the negotiations said, but they cautioned that some details had yet to be agreed and talks could still fall apart.

On the surface, this doesn’t make any sense to me. I can’t see Apple keeping the “Beats” brand around for headphones. If Apple wanted to sell expensive high-end headphones, they don’t need to spend $3 billion. The Beats streaming service is interesting, but can’t Apple do that on its own, as an expansion of the iTunes Music Store and iTunes Radio? And it’s not like Beats Music is even popular (at least yet) — Peter Kafka reports they only have 200,000 subscribers, most of them from a deal with AT&T.

Nothing from Beats looks like Apple. Not the brand, not the hardware. If this report is true, and Apple keeps the brand, how does that work? When is the last time Apple sold anything that wasn’t under its own brand? Filemaker is the only thing that comes to mind, and the origins of that arrangement are downright prehistoric. And if Apple doesn’t keep the Beats brand, what are they paying for?

I don’t get it.

Update: Numerous people are wondering if it’s all about streaming rights from the music labels — i.e. rights that Apple couldn’t get on its own (because the music labels have long resented iTunes’s dominance in digital music downloads), so they’re buying a company that negotiated those rights on their own. The problem with this theory is that those licenses (to my understanding) aren’t transferable in the event of an acquisition. Music label executives may be dumb, but they’re not that dumb.

Not long after FCC Commissioner Jennifer Rosenworcel asked agency chair Tom Wheeler to delay bringing his controversial net neutrality proposal to the table next week, another commissioner has also come out against the plan. "I have grave concerns about the Chairman's proposal on Internet regulation and do not believe that it should be considered at the Commission's May meeting," said Ajit Pai in a short statement. Instead, he urged the commission to spend its May meeting focusing on the upcoming spectrum auction. Previously, Rosenworcel expressed concerns about "rushing headlong" into a proposal without providing ample time for public response, but reports have suggested that Wheeler declined to take her advice.

Wheeler's compromise...

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Taking photos of people or products against a clean white background is perhaps one of the most common studio photography techniques in use — and an essential skill for any studio photographer using off-camera flashes and lighting. That hasn't stopped the US Patent and Trademark Office from granting Amazon one of the most bizarre and seemingly needless patents we've heard of in a long time: a studio lighting setup that allows photographers to "achieve a desired effect of a substantially seamless background." Yes, Amazon now holds a patent for taking photos with a "near perfect" white backdrop.

The details of the patent itself are slightly more focused, calling out specific lighting placement and even the placement of a 21-inch raised...

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Snapchat has settled with the FTC over complaints that its hugely popular app deceived users with the promise of "disappearing" messages. The company's early claims that messages sent through its app would permanently vanish after being viewed were misleading, the FTC said today. In its complaint, the commission calls out a variety of ways that snaps can be captured and saved indefinitely — including the old-fashioned screenshot method and third-party apps that tap into Snapchat's service.

The FTC's complaint also accuses Snapchat of duping its users over the amount of personal data the company collected. For example, at one point the Android app collected user-location data without proper permission. Worse yet, Snapchat did a poor job...

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Would it be possible to build the next YouTube or the next Netflix if big ISPs like Comcast and Verizon were allowed to charge companies for a "fast lane" that privileged their data? That has been a major concern for tech investors and entrepreneurs ever since the FCC lost its court battle with Verizon back in January. Today a group of leading venture capitalists published an open letter to the FCC calling on them to prevent what they say would be the end of net neutrality and a crippling blow to young startups.

"The internet will no longer be a level playing field."

"If established companies are able to pay for better access speeds or lower latency, the internet will no longer be a level playing field," they write. "Startups with...

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Since L.A. is a haven for food trucks, it only seems fitting that other businesses are jumping on the bandwagon. A mobile photography truck will be making its rounds on our L.A. streets come mid-June, taking headshots of actors—at a cheaper price. [ more › ]

Three rooms, a private bathroom, private bedroom, and a private living room. Sure, that sounds like a fine apartment. Except we're talking about United Arab Emirates' Etihad Airway's new first-class residence in the A380 Airbus . A one-way ticket costs $20,000 and one man is trying to crowdfund his way in.

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[Photographs: Robyn Lee]

What would you get if you took the dense, plush texture of Italian gelato, added the creamy body of American ice cream, and served it fresh from the machine like soft serve? You'd have one of the greatest desserts born on American soil: frozen custard.

Frozen custard is what happens when you take extra-rich ice cream and leave out all the air. It's so dense and soft it barely supports its own weight—it's served in ploops, not scoops—or it's whizzed up with chunky mix-ins or hot fudge and served as an extra-thick milkshake called a concrete. Ice cream is for people who like dairy. Custard is for dairy fanatics.

Perhaps that's why, despite its Coney Island heritage, custard really made its name in the Midwest and South. Today you'll find custard shops from Wisconsin to Missouri to Maryland and Virginia, as well as in chains like Kopp's, Culver's, and most recently Shake Shack.

Frozen custard at Scooter's in Chicago.

An ice cream this good shouldn't be confined to burger joints and custard shops—but can home cooks make it without any special equipment? As it turns out, yes, and here's a secret: the homemade stuff is just as good, if not better, than what you can buy.

Frozen Custard vs. Ice Cream

Blend up custard with sauces and chunky mix-ins and you have a super-thick milkshake called a concrete.

Legally speaking, American ice cream is a churned frozen dairy dessert that's at least 10% butterfat by weight. Custard follows the same rules, but it must also be at least 1.4% egg yolk solids by weight.*

* In case you're wondering, Harold McGee pins an egg yolk at 16% protein solids; the rest is water and fat.

In cookbooks, the terms "ice cream" and "frozen custard" are often used interchangeably because most home ice cream recipes these days call for egg yolks, and it only takes two to three yolks per pint to reach that 1.4% benchmark. So as far as the FDA is concerned, the ice cream you're making at home probably qualifies as frozen custard, assuming you're using eggs.

Custard at 5 Oz. Factory in New York City.

But the custard you'll find at Kopp's and Shake Shack isn't just extra-eggy ice cream. For one thing, frozen custard has to be eaten fresh—within two hours of being made, when it's at its softest and creamiest. But the biggest difference between ice cream and custard isn't a recipe or serving temperature—it's the machine you use to make it.

Many professional American ice cream machines are designed to beat air into an ice cream base as they chill it down. Churning paddles agitate the mix to keep ice crystals small, and air adds the hallmark lightness of American-style ice cream.

The continuous freezer at Kopp's. Counter workers scrape the stream of fresh custard into a chilled storage bucket below.

Frozen custard machines, called continuous freezers, work differently. You pour custard base into one side and the machine sends it down a pipe that freezes the custard to soft serve temperatures, then spits it out in one continuous stream. The machine works a little air into the custard, but way less than the fast-and-furious paddles of an ice cream maker. And the custard is ready fast—as soon as two minutes after the base gets poured in. At Shake Shack, the continuous freezer can run for hours, sucking in liquid base and turning it into fresh custard all day long. With high customer demand, the custard is eaten right away, and it never gets a chance to firm up into hard ice cream.

This video shows a continuous freezer in action, though it's used in this case to make hard ice cream, not fresh frozen custard. As for the '70s porn soundtrack...I have no clue.

Bringing Custard Home

Custard is different from ice cream in three ways: 1) an eggier recipe, 2) a soft serve consistency, and 3) a dense, rich texture with less air than ice cream. We can make eggy ice cream easily enough and the soft serve part isn't much of a problem. But what about that air?

Here's the thing: the ice cream maker in your kitchen works differently from the pro model in an ice cream shop. A pro machine beats air into ice cream like an electric mixer whipping cream—fast and furious. A home machine, which can take 30 minutes to churn a single batch of ice cream, is much slower, and works in much less air, more like stirring a bowl of cream with a wooden spoon. That's why the ice cream you make at home is often more dense than anything you can buy in the store, and that's the difference we can take advantage of as home cooks.

Soft Serve By Any Other Name

For my first try, I wondered if I could I make frozen custard just by churning a normal ice cream recipe and eating it fresh. After all, my go-to vanilla ice cream is pretty eggy, and it's plenty rich, almost 18% butterfat compared to the super-premium 16% mix you'll find at Kopp's.

I churned a batch and served it fresh next to some Shake Shack custard for comparison. Tasters loved, and even preferred, the homemade soft serve, but it wasn't the frozen custard I was after. The Shake Shack version was a little more dense and rich, with an ever-so-slight chewiness reminiscent of hot fudge. That's the elusive custard texture I was trying to achieve.

Another thing I hadn't thought of: frozen custard is served warmer than hard ice cream, and the warmer an ice cream, the more salt and sweetness you taste. All the salt and sugar in my recipe served to heighten the flavors of vanilla and egg, but they did so at the expense of the milk and cream. Custard is all about that honest, simple dairy flavor; my ice cream was actually too flavorful for the job.

Getting Rich(er)

How could I get a richer texture in my custard? More fat or eggs isn't the answer—my recipe is already loaded with both, and adding more would only make the ice cream too heavy. Nor could I add in less air—my ice cream maker works on one speed and doesn't allow me to control the air intake.

After eggs and cream, custard's third pillar is sugar, and as I know from making sorbet, different sugars make for different ice cream textures. My favorite widely available alterna-sugar is corn syrup, which I often use in sorbets to achieve an extra-glossy texture that feels more dense and rich on the tongue. A little corn syrup should bring out the slightly fudgy custard feel I was looking for.

Also, pound for pound, corn syrup is also less sweet than table sugar. Swapping out some sugar for corn syrup and reducing my recipe's salt content should give me the mellower, more dairy-forward flavor I was looking for.

This time it was dead-on. See how plush and glossy the custard looks when it's nudged with a spoon? That's the corn syrup at work—just a little bit, but enough to make the final product richer, creamier, and ever so slightly chewy, just like the custard you get at Shake Shack, Kopp's, and all the other top custard shops.

I'll put it this way: I worked on this recipe over a series of days, and when I told my lovely colleagues I was done and there'd be No More Fresh Custard, I got more than a few whimpering noises in reply.

Serving Frozen Custard

There's a downside to making custard at home in lieu of a real custard machine: it doesn't churn quite as cold, so it melts especially quickly. So unless you're planning to eat your custard right out of the churning bowl, I'd recommend transferring it to a container and letting it firm up in the freezer for an hour, ideally in small pint-sized containers. When you remove it, it'll be just firm enough to spoon out but still soft, fresh, and custardy.

As with store-bought custard, you need to eat this stuff fresh, within two hours of making it. So don't make more than you'll serve in one sitting, as anything leftover will harden into plain old ice cream. For two or three people, a pint is all you need; you can always double the recipe and churn in small batches.

And I know you're wondering: can I use this to make concretes? Indeed you can. But since your custard is warmer than what you'd get out of a professional machine, it's best to skip the blender or milkshake machine and add your mix-ins straight to the ice cream maker. For vanilla custard, I like chopped up M&M's. For chocolate custard, heath bars are just the thing, but if you prefer brownies, cookies, chocolate-covered pretzels, or gummy bears, go with what feels right.

What else does your just-as-good-as-the-competition custard need? How about an ersatz burger recipe to make it a full meal?

Recipes!

• Soft and Rich Chocolate Frozen Custard
• Soft and Rich Vanilla Frozen Custard

The Wii U appears to be a failure and Nintendo is in the red, but the company is planning to try a few new things to kick the console back in gear.  Nintendo president Satoru Iwata just announced that the company will launch its first smartphone service alongside Mario Kart 8, which arrives at the end of May. Tentatively dubbed "Mario Kart TV," it will let users watch both official and user-generated videos and follow rankings from the game via desktop, phone, and tablet using a cross-platform web interface.

The company also intends to finally capitalize on the NFC reader in the Wii U GamePad by launching the Nintendo Figurine Platform, or NFP. It promises to let you interact with toy figures a la Skylanders and Disney Infinity, except...

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Nintendo has said it will release new consoles targeted at emerging markets, marking a strategy shift for the Japanese gaming giant. The products will be built from the ground up to serve these markets, rather than repurposing existing hardware. "We want to make new things, with new thinking rather than a cheaper version of what we currently have," CEO and president Satoru Iwata told Bloomberg News. "The product and price balance must be made from scratch."

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The House Judiciary Committee has approved an amended version of the USA FREEDOM Act, a bill meant to end the mass collection of American phone records. In a unanimous vote of 32-0, the committee sent the bill to the House floor after hours of debate concerning surveillance and the limits of the NSA's power. If passed, it will explicitly prohibit intelligence agencies from using Section 215 of the Patriot Act to collect data en masse, instead requiring them to establish reasonable suspicion before getting a warrant and gathering data from specific queries. The USA FREEDOM Act, introduced in the House of Representatives by Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI) and cosponsored by 149 Congress members, was one of many bills brought over the past...

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Peter Bach, a cancer doctor, writes about losing his wife to cancer.

The streetlights in Buenos Aires are considerably dimmer than they are in New York, one of the many things I learned during my family's six-month stay in Argentina. The front windshield of the rental car, aged and covered in the city's grime, further obscured what little light came through. When we stopped at the first red light after leaving the hospital, I broke two of my most important marital promises. I started acting like my wife's doctor, and I lied to her.

I had just taken the PET scan, the diagnostic X-ray test, out of its manila envelope. Raising the films up even to the low light overhead was enough for me to see what was happening inside her body. But when we drove on, I said, "I can't tell; I can't get my orientation. We have to wait to hear from your oncologist back home." I'm a lung doctor, not an expert in these films, I feigned. But I had seen in an instant that the cancer had spread.

The last sentence here really got to me:

Our life together was gone, and carrying on without her was exactly that, without her. I was reminded of our friend Liz's insight after she lost her husband to melanoma. She told me she had plenty of people to do things with, but nobody to do nothing with.

Bach's discussion of treatment options reminded me of Siddhartha Mukherjee's The Emperor of All Maladies, which is one of my favorite books of recent years. I was also reminded of how doctors die.

Tags: books   cancer   crying at work   medicine   Peter Bach   Siddhartha Mukherjee   The Emperor of All Maladies

A sizable coalition of technology companies has today taken a stand in favor of net neutrality in the form of a letter to the Federal Communications Commission. The group, led by giants including Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, Twitter, and Yahoo, challenges a proposal the FCC is considering that threatens net neutrality.

While the letter does not explicitly mention a course of action — like calling on the FCC to regulate internet service providers as utilities — the coalition strongly espouses the benefits of an open internet. "The Commission's long-standing commitment and actions undertaken to protect the open internet are a central reason why the internet remains an engine of entrepreneurship and economic growth,"...

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What big country has big plans for its big buildings? It's Russia! According to data from skyscraper-indexing site Emporis, Russia is home to seven of the 10 tallest buildings currently under construction in Europe. It's like a Space Race for office space.

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Long-time Apple PR chief Katie Cotton is retiring. John Paczkowski broke the news:

She’s long been among the company’s most powerful executives and played a key role in shaping the mystique and exclusivity surrounding the Apple brand. Her departure from Apple is a milestone. “Katie has given her all to this company for over 18 years,” Apple spokesman Steve Dowling said in a statement. “She has wanted to spend time with her children for some time now. We are really going to miss her.” Reached for comment, Cotton told Code/red her decision to leave Apple was among the most difficult of her career. “This is hard for me,” she said. “Apple is a part of my heart and soul.”

---

Back in July 2010, I was witness to one of Apple’s few true PR crises in recent history: iPhone 4 “Antennagate”. Apple, famously, works hard to control the narrative surrounding its product releases, and generally does so successfully. But the Antennagate story was spinning out of control: from “the iPhone 4 can lose signal strength if held in certain ways” to “the iPhone 4 can’t make phone calls and might need to be recalled”. It was nonsense, but needed to be refuted. Nipping this thing in the bud was important enough that Steve Jobs flew back early from a vacation in Hawaii.

The event was held on a Friday, which itself is unusual. It was a “this thing can’t wait until Monday” situation — a fire that needed to be put out before it spread. Non-emergency press conferences are not held on Fridays.

An Apple PR rep had been in contact with me a few days prior, to ask if I’d be interested and available for a possible press event later in the week. At the time, I was suffering from a lingering summer cold, which made the prospect of a transcontinental flight even less appealing than usual. But I’m no malingerer, and so though I mentioned my cold, I said I’d almost certainly be in shape to travel by the end of the week. This seemed like something I wouldn’t want to miss (and I was right).

The final, “OK, it’s on, and you’re invited if you can make it” didn’t come until Thursday afternoon ET — a mere 18 hours before the event. I booked a flight on Priceline at 3p, and three hours later I was in the air, en route from Philly to SFO.¹

The press list for the event was unusually small — by far the least-attended Apple event I’ve ever witnessed. You can see in the video of the event that Apple’s on-campus Town Hall auditorium wasn’t nearly filled to capacity, and Town Hall is a relatively small venue. Every other Apple media event I’ve attended has been standing room only.

I was wearing a large SLR camera on a strap around my neck. As I filed in to find a seat, I was offered a choice: if I wanted to take photos during the event, I could sit toward the back; if I were willing to forgo taking photos, I could sit up front in the third row. I only had my camera with me on a lark — the advantages of publishing a website that runs photographs only rarely — so I took the seat in the third row. The first two rows, as usual, were occupied by senior Apple executives and employees.

As I took my seat, Katie Cotton, sitting in the second row, smiled and greeted me. “Hi John, glad you could make it. How’s the cold?”

I was feeling fine, the cold not much more than a memory at that point, and told her so. But I had to ask, laughing, “How did you even know I had a cold?”

Before she could answer, Greg Joswiak, sitting directly in front of me, turned around. “John, Katie knows everything.”

---

Most big corporations employ outside PR agencies. Not Apple. Apple’s internal public relations team is itself a world-class agency. That team was built entirely under Cotton’s leadership.

Cotton was never pictured on Apple’s executive leadership page, but my impression has long been that she was one of the very handful of most influential executives at the company. It is difficult to find a photograph of Steve Jobs or Tim Cook at a press event in which she is not at their side. Paczkowski put it well: Katie Cotton “played a key role in shaping the mystique and exclusivity surrounding the Apple brand.”

The times, they are a-changin’.

[The Nutella Bar at Eataly Chicago: Mark Much/Eater Chicago]
With Eataly Vino now completely gutted, and the store unable to sell wine until October following a settlement with the SLA over "interlocking interests," Mario Batali and Joe Bastianich needed something else to fill that void. Enter Nutella. Crowds flocked to the one in Chicago (according to GM Alex Saper, there's a 45 minute wait on weekends), and now the New York Eataly is getting a Nutella Bar of its very own.

The new counter, which opens Monday, will serve a menu of Nutella on toast, Nutella on croissants, Nutella on muffins, Nutella cookies, Nutella tarts, and more. The grand opening is at 5 p.m. on Monday, and they'll be giving away free bread with Nutella until 9 p.m. After that the Nutella Bar is open every day from 10 a.m. to 11 p.m. Check out the full menu below.

Nutella NY Menu

· All Coverage of Eataly [~ENY~]

Why headshot a single soldier, when you can headshot an entire evil Nazi vehicle? The lengthy new gameplay trailer for Sniper Elite 3 is filled with such terrible greatness.

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The New York Public Library has abandoned a controversial renovation plan that would have turned its research flagship on 42nd Street into a circulating library.

Apple public relations chief Katie Cotton is retiring after nearly two decades with the company. As VP of worldwide corporate communications, Cotton didn't have a particularly public face, but she's played a big role in shaping the tone of product launches and Apple's persona, from its struggles in the 90s through its huge hits through the 2000s. Cotton was also known as the gatekeeper to Steve Jobs during his time as CEO, and she's been serving the same role for Tim Cook since.

"Katie has given her all to this company for over 18 years,” an Apple spokesperson tells Recode, which first reported news of Cotton's retirement. "She has wanted to spend time with her children for some time now. We are really going to miss her." A person...

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NBC will be the only place to watch the Olympics for a very, very long time. The network has just locked down exclusive US rights to Olympic Games coverage through 2032. The new deal is extremely broad and covers just about any broadcast scenario you can think of, including free-to-air television, cable/satellite TV, internet, and mobile viewing. Today's announcement extends an existing deal with the International Olympics Committee that previously spanned through 2020. The new aspect of the pact, which covers 2021 to 2032, is valued at $7.65 billion.

The IOC says the multi-billion agreement is a huge boost to its future. Over 90 percent of revenue generated by the deal will support the International Sports Federations, Olympic...

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The creators of the PC game Towns have given up on development, choosing to leave the game unfinished for good—even though it's been on sale for the past 18 months and had sold over 200,000 copies as of last summer.

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Spotify has spent years battling the perception that it skimps on royalties; on average, the company pays out $0.007 each time an artist's song is streamed by its millions of users. In March, one Michigan-based band set out to defy the odds and bring in enough money to fund an upcoming tour. And they took a brilliant approach in getting there. Vulfpeck’s latest album Sleepify is a completely silent recording composed of tracks that are each a half-minute in length. (Users must listen to a song for at least 30 seconds before Spotify counts it as a proper "play.")

Upon its release last month, the band asked fans to stream Sleepify continuously at night as they slept, hoping the coordinated effort could morph Spotify's less-than-a-cent...

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Take a hike apples, get bent pretzels, because New York State's new official snack food is probably going to be creamy, bacteria-filled yogurt. Last night the New York State Senate debated a proposal submitted by a bunch of fourth graders to take yogurt to the next level, ultimately pushing it through in a 52 to 8 split. Yes, the New York State Legislature takes its advice from a bunch of ten-year-olds. [ more › ]