Rexfeng

So, you think you know Manhattan and New York City, do you? Well, multimedia artist Peter Wegner is about to show you a completely unexpected side of your city. His series, Buildings Made Of Sky, turns you upside down to show you the hidden "skyscrapers" all around you.

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From Sweets

Neuhaus chocolates. [Photograph: Robyn Lee]

Ask yourself this: if you don't have kids or don't receive trick or treaters, does that prevent you from eating Halloween candy? No? Good. Then regardless of your relationship status you should feel fine eating chocolate on Valentine's Day. What you call the most clichéd trick in the book I call the foremost ritual of Chocolate Appreciation Day.

With that out of the way, here's an assortment of Valentine's-friendly chocolates, favorites of the Serious Eats team and our Sugar Rush bureau chief.

Classic Chocolate Boxes

[Photograph: Robyn Lee]

Belgian import Neuhaus doesn't make especially novel chocolate, but if you're looking for that classic red box look or intricately designed sweets, they'll do you right. Their specialty is nougatine, a sheet of toffee-like candy (a blend of nuts and sugar) that's cut into squares, folded into little purses, filled with a flavored cream, and coated in chocolate.

Truffles from Payard. [Photograph: Niko Triantafillou]

A step up in sophistication brings you to Payard and Jacques Torres, both of which make all kinds of truffles and caramels worth your attention. Also consider Japanese import ROYCE' Chocolate, which specializes in ganache-like squares so soft they just melt in your mouth.

[Photograph: Robyn Lee]

But our absolute favorite chocolate truffles come from Kee's, a tiny shop in Soho with original truffles like black sesame and makrud lime. Kee's chocolates are always impressively flavored and fresh.

Bars for Purists

These are the impulse buys at The Meadow. [Photograph: Max Falkowitz]

Chocolate purists may prefer chocolate bars to candies. For the best selection in New York, visit The Meadow's world-class shelf of bean-to-bar chocolate and ask the friendly salespeople to help narrow down your choice. For some good made-in-New-York chocolate? Try one of Cacao Prieto's single origin bars.

Chocolate Novelties

The Dory bar with apricot and black pepper from Liddabit. [Photograph: Niko Triantafillou]

Or you could just say, "Screw normal chocolate, I'm getting you candy bars" instead. And with varieties like apricot with black pepper, passionfruit with rice crispies, and something called "Chocolate Doom," Liddabit Sweets is your place to go. Or get some of the first class chocolate-covered bacon or pretzels from LES shop Roni-Sue's.

Gourmandises from Maison du Chocolat. [Photograph: Robyn Lee]

Of course chocolate novelties can also mean some fancy-pants sweets, and that's where La Maison du Chocolat excels. Their intricately designed chocolate sweets are akin to what you'd find in a fine dining restaurant's pastry department, but they're all available to go, wow factor and all.

Anything We Missed?

These are just a few V-Day-friendly suggestions, so tell us, where do you buy chocolate gift-giving (or treat-yo-selfing)?

About the author: Max Falkowitz is the New York editor and ice cream maker in residence at Serious Eats. You can follow him on Twitter at @maxfalkowitz.

Because that makes perfect sense.

For the first time in its 64-year existence, the fast-food chain is making inroads throughout California, particularly in areas that are already home to several wonderful doughnut vendors. In order to build its forthcoming store at 5590 Seventh Street in Long Beach, Dunkin' Donuts announced it'd first need to dismantle the giant doughnut that's been suspended above the Daily Grind drive-through for more than 50 years before tearing down the building on the parking lot beneath it. So, basically, the company that's currently pushing a garish, heart-shaped brownie-batter specimen wanted no part of the enormous pink doughnut that's been around for as long as anyone can remember. Locals, you may imagine, weren't having it.

"Doughnuts make people happy," vintage store owner Kathleen Schaaf told the Press-Telegram. "Why would they want to get rid of the beautiful doughnut in the sky?"

The reason why, developers and the franchisee explained, is that "the company is now more focused on coffee and breakfast than doughnuts," so keeping the old pink one hovering above the new store would just confuse everyone.

Concerned citizens passed a petition, however, and now it's been decided that the very large doughnut (which was once a carb-y beacon for a mini-chain called Mrs. Chapman’s Angel Food Donuts) will be taken down and turned over to the city of Long Beach.

“We understand now that there’s a lot of emotion around the doughnut," says the managing partner of the incoming franchisee. "The last thing we want to do is be viewed as the guys that killed the doughnut.”

Seems like everyone is on the same page.

Long Beach ‘Retro Row’ merchants rally to save giant iconic doughnut [Press-Telegram]
Dunkin' Donuts hands fans of giant doughnut sign a sweet victory [L.A. Times]
Earlier: Dunkin' Donuts Expanding to California Even Though California Already Has Better Doughnuts

Read more posts by Hugh Merwin

Filed Under: good signs, donuts, doughnuts, long beach, the chain gang, the daily blend

(Yuri Kadobnov/AFP/Getty Images)

Sochi has been fraught with problems in the days leading up to the Olympics, but no one issue has been quite so telling of Russia's hosting struggles as a malfunction at its opening ceremony that led to an incomplete set of Olympic rings going up on display. While the ceremony was supposed to feature all five rings growing from small snowflakes into the Olympic logo's five intersecting circles, the top-right ring failed to expand alongside the others, leaving four circles beside what looked almost like an asterisk.

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LinkedIn just announced that it'll be shutting down Intro, a service meant to integrate LinkedIn contact details right into the iOS Mail app, after less than four months. LinkedIn simply said it was discontinuing the service in an effort to "focus on the most relevant offerings for our members." While the company didn't come right out and say it, though, it's safe to assume Intro never found a significant following — probably due to security concerns rising from the fact that LinkedIn had to scan every email that came into your inbox.

In the days immediately following LinkedIn Intro's launch, security researchers reacted quickly and negatively. Security firm Bishop Fox called the service "a dream for attackers" and Richard...

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Ryan Sutton gives two and a half stars to Contra on the Lower East Side. On the chicken: "Poultry — the final savory course — might appear as a clean breast, anointed with obscenely crispy skin and communion-like mushrooms rounds. If those flavors are too delicate, a swath of blood pudding lies on plate's left edge. It tastes like iron and oregano and it makes the entire dish look like an abstract rendition of continental drift." [Bloomberg]

This collection of before-and-after photos of NYC's streets shows how much the Bloomberg administration and former Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan transformed the city's streets.

Constructing our cities around cars is one of the biggest mistakes of the 20th century and we're still paying for it. As Kaj Pindal cleverly depicted in his 1966 Oscar-nominated short film What On Earth!, it often seems like cars and not people are the Earth's dominant life form.

(via @anildash)

Tags: cars   cities   Janette Sadik-Khan   Kaj Pindal   Michael Bloomberg   NYC   video

These are all the cameras and lenses that the Getty Images photographers have brought to the Sochi Winter Games. Exactly $425,659.59, according to Robert Cianflone in Petapixel—"that's the value of a house and more than a Lamborghini Aventador!"

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Have you seen some of the contraptions needed to make those sphere-shaped ice cubes that are all the rage? They look like they belong in a factory stamping out auto parts from sheet metal. This silicone Frozen Peas mould looks infinitely easier—and so much more adorable.

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President Obama on Thursday urged China to do more to allow the freedom of worship, called on North Korea to release a Christian missionary and insisted that Iran free a Christian pastor.

Inspired by Pablo Picasso's light paintings, an artist has created light pen drawings that map the geographical mentions in hip hop lyrics. Last year, Tahir Hemphill set out to create a database containing every lyric in rap history for his Kickstarter-funded Hip Hop Word Count project, and he's now using that data to find patterns in the language rappers use.

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A shooting broke out near from Madison Square Park earlier this morning, and two people were injured. [ more › ]

An age of inexpensive wearable devices that track our every move, and having plenty of places to post that information publicly has resulted in a perfect mix of data that shows where people are exercising. Nathan Yau over at Flowing Data has done just that, taking public running logs from RunKeeper and stacking them up over maps of the cities. The result is a collection of maps for 22 cities (most of which are in the US) that shows what routes get the most foot traffic.

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The US Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has banned all liquids, gels, aerosols, and powders from direct flights between the United States and Russia. Delta Airlines posted a notice on its site notifying its customers of the rule change, which is effective immediately. The news comes on the heels of a report from the Department of Homeland Security that warned airlines to be on the lookout for explosives in toothpaste containers. Despite the warning, officials said that "we are not aware of a specific threat to the homeland at this time."

TSA rules already prohibit carry-on liquids, gels, and aerosols to no larger than 3.4 ounces per container (about 100mL), and all such products must be placed in a clear 1 quart (roughly...

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Titanfall on Xbox 360 has been delayed to March 25 in North America and March 28 in Europe, EA announced. Titanfall launches on Xbox One and PC on March 11 in North America, and before now, that date has been associated with the Xbox 360 release as...

Activision has announced a new three-year development cycle for upcoming Call of Duty games, starting with this year's release. This move, which will still see individual Call of Duty games coming out annually, cements Sledgehammer Games as one of...

Great news for globetrotters who like to impress their friends with their travels: Now, instead of having to sacrifice a big chunk of wall space for a giant map covered in thumbtacks, they can downgrade to this clever and compact cork-covered globe.

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On his site Truth in Olive Oil, Tom Mueller tells us how to buy great olive oil and, more usefully, which brands to buy at the supermarket.

Unlike many wines, which improve with age, extra virgin olive oil is perishable: like all natural fruit juices, its flavor and aroma begin to deteriorate within a few months of milling, a decline that accelerate when the oil is bottled, and really speeds up when the bottle is opened. To get the freshest oil, and cut out middle-men who often muddy olive oil transparency and quality, buy as close to the mill as possible. If you're lucky enough to live near a mill -- common around the Mediterranean, and more and more so in other areas of the world with a Mediterranean-like climate, like Australia, S. Africa, California, Texas, Georgia -- visit it during the harvest to see how olives are picked, crushed, stirred, and spun into olive oil.

Mueller is also author of Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil, which was published a few years after his olive oil exposé in the New Yorker.

In 1997 and 1998, olive oil was the most adulterated agricultural product in the European Union, prompting the E.U.'s anti-fraud office to establish an olive-oil task force. ("Profits were comparable to cocaine trafficking, with none of the risks," one investigator told me.) The E.U. also began phasing out subsidies for olive-oil producers and bottlers, in an effort to reduce crime, and after a few years it disbanded the task force. Yet fraud remains a major international problem: olive oil is far more valuable than most other vegetable oils, but it is costly and time-consuming to produce-and surprisingly easy to doctor. Adulteration is especially common in Italy, the world's leading importer, consumer, and exporter of olive oil. (For the past ten years, Spain has produced more oil than Italy, but much of it is shipped to Italy for packaging and is sold, legally, as Italian oil.) "The vast majority of frauds uncovered in the food-and-beverage sector involve this product," Colonel Leopoldo Maria De Filippi, the commander for the northern half of Italy of the N.A.S. Carabinieri, an anti-adulteration group run under the auspices of the Ministry of Health, told me.

Tags: food   Tom Mueller

Vice President Joe Biden is very unhappy about America's declining infrastructure. During a speech in Philadelphia today, he threw New York's LaGuardia Airport under the bus to drive that point home. But first, the vice president talked about advancements overseas. "If I blindfolded someone and took him at 2 o'clock in the morning into the airport in Hong Kong and said, 'Where do you think you are?’ He’d say, ‘This must be America. It’s a modern airport,'" Biden said. International airports have indeed seen some stunning innovations recently.

"If I took you and blindfolded you and took you to LaGuardia Airport in New York, you'd think, ‘I must be in some third-world country,’" Biden said. When his statement drew laughter...

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Ooh la-la.

Now that things are looking a lot less bleak for David Tran's Irwindale, California company, the founder of Earth's most popular brand of Sriracha sauce is getting all appreciative of his customers and has just announced that free factory tours are now available. In his new, much-needed bid for hot-sauce transparency, Tran says he wants everyone to see how the sauce is made and "how delicious it smells," from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., Mondays through Fridays. Reservations are a must; call 626-286-8328 to make an appointment, and don't forget your hairnet. [Sriracha Cookbook via Foodbeast, Earlier]

Read more posts by Hugh Merwin

Filed Under: hot right now, david tran, huy fong foods, sriracha, srirachapocalypse

Aureus Wade's Precomposed Touch Gestures are a set of touch-device gestures available as QuickTime animations for use in product demos or presentations. They'll work in your video editor, and Photoshop.

Use Your Interface (UYI) is a showcase of interface and interaction transition design curated by Josh Davey.

Google's $35 Chromecast dongle made it cheap and easy to show off YouTube videos on your TV. Now, the company sees another narrow window of opportunity for Chrome: teleconferencing. "Audioconferencing takes pain to a completely new level," says Caesar Sengupta, VP of product development for Chrome. Today, the company plans to fix that with a $999 kit that uses a souped-up Intel Core i7 Google Chromebox and $250-a-year Google cloud services to make setup as painless as possible. "It takes minutes to go from a full packaged box to a meeting room that's ready to go," says the exec.

The Chromebox for Meetings package comes with a collection of off-the-shelf components, including a Logitech HD webcam, a Jabra speakerphone, and a Boxee-like...

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[Krieger]
'Inoteca's wine director has put out a call on Reddit for all "NYC Winos" to help drink those 1,300 odd bottles of wine it's got left before the restaurant shutters for good on Saturday. As the restaurant noted on Tuesday, all of the wines have already been discounted some, and there's an extra 10 percent off for anyone in the service industry. The Reddit plea adds that there will be more discounts as week goes on, and that "we're popping some outrageous stuff to pour by the glass that will get repossessed if we don't get to them first."

'Inoteca is streaming live updates of all the deals, discounts, and opened magnums on Twitter, so keep an eye out for the good stuff. As time ticks down, the discounts could reach as high as 80 percent off.
· All Coverage of 'Inoteca [~ENY~]

This morning, the Wall Street Journal made a shocking announcement related to the Port Authority. No, it wasn't another Bridgegate scoop—it was the revelation that the agency would be cutting all weekend PATH service between the World Trade Center station in lower Manhattan and the Exchange Place station in Jersey City. [ more › ]

Twitter's latest transparency report is out, and the company seems furious about what it can't reveal. While Google, Facebook, and others have reached a deal with the US government to break out national security requests in broad numbers, but Twitter wasn't one of the companies involved, and it says such numbers aren't useful for its purposes. "Allowing Twitter, or any other similarly situated company, to only disclose national security requests within an overly broad range seriously undermines the objective of transparency," writes policy manager Jeremy Kessel, though he says the compromise is a step in the right direction.

The company echoed a common refrain: by placing overly strict limits on talking about national security, the...

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Millions of Americans have to take medication daily, but a lot of them forget to do so — a 2009 study conducted by the New England Healthcare Institute found that medical nonadherence costs the US as much as $290 billion per year. Massachusetts-based company PillPack wants to change that by redesigning the typical pharmacy experience. Currently serving 31 states, the company recently raised $4 million in funding to expand its services which ship two weeks worth of medications to patients in individual day packs that can be torn off and taken anywhere.

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As journalists have started to flood into Sochi to cover the Olympic games, they've found that their accommodations are a bit rough around the edges. Reports range from broken heating units and dirty tap water to missing trash cans, but Sochi guests may have something more important to worry about than a hastily thrown-together hotel room: their own privacy. Dmitry Kozak, a Russian deputy prime minister in charge of preparations for the Olympics, mistakenly revealed during a press conference that at least some hotel guests are under video surveillance in their own bathrooms. "We have surveillance video from the hotels that shows people turn on the shower, direct the nozzle at the wall and then leave the room for the whole day," the...

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From the American Intercity Bus Riders Association [pdf], via Flowing Data.