Ivy Esquero

On Monday, an autopsy revealed that the headless and handless murder victim discovered last week inside a metal barrel in northwest Pennsylvania was killed by a single arrow to the heart.

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Vietnam's most famous soup, pho (pronounced "F-AH," like steam escaping from a teapot) originated only a century ago in French-colonial Vietnam, appearing on the streets of Hanoi in 1913. Some say it was invented in the nearby town of Van Cu, but it was in the French colonial capital that the soup, assembled on the spot by strolling vendors wearing special hats called mu pho, began to flourish as the city's most popular street food. As R.W. Apple noted in Far Flung and Well Fed, "Pho was developed by cooks in Hanoi, not in the South, and not until after the French arrived late in the 19th century, importing their love of beef to a pork eating culture."

By legend it is said that the best examples of pho are made by boiling beef bones for five days. Though it started in the north, the soup has spread throughout Vietnam, and each province has its own style. For example, Saigon phos are supposedly darker, sweeter, and more spice-intensive, with heavier and wider rice noodles. A large proportion of Vietnamese immigrants to New York originally came from the Mekong Delta south of Saigon, and many of the versions we have here probably originated there.

But however you want to spin its history, pho is a damn fine soup and one of the best cold-weather fortifiers around. Here are 10 of the best examples I've found, in ranked order.

· All Posts by Sietsema [~ENY~]

With two weeks left until it’s release, the HONY book has been on both the Amazon and Barnes and Noble “Top 100” for about 30 days. Now I don’t have a PhD in book selling, but I’m pretty sure that isn’t normal. Anyway, I was sitting in my agent’s office the other day, and he says to me: “Man, this book looks so great. I just wish we could find a way to give everyone a peek inside. Maybe I can ask the publisher for some digital sample pages.” I told him not to worry, I had a better idea. Then I went home and built a book castle in my living room.

The one. The only. The HONLY.
300 pages. 400 photos. 75 unseen.
Complete with stories and captions.
If placed in a prominent location, it is guaranteed to keep Aunt Martha quiet and occupied at Thanksgiving, when she normally drinks five glasses of wine and starts talking shit.

Preorder now for 40% off:
AMAZON: http://amzn.to/10sbtW5
BARNES AND NOBLE: http://bit.ly/16SycBf
INDIEBOUND: http://bit.ly/191EZLF

ThinkProgress has a roundup of how foreign media is writing about the shutdown. France: "Jefferson, wake up, they’ve gone crazy!" Germany: "[Republicans] are not only taking their own party to the brink, but the whole country." Russia: "The 'Elephants' Are Robbing the U.S. Government."

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When you hear about people eating at a nice restaurant every night, you might return to your half-frozen Hot Pocket in resentment and disgust. But if that person is 103-year-old Harry Rosen, it kinda just warms your heart.

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Yep.

To us die-hard Modernists, schooled in solid colors and geometric prints, floral upholstery can be discomfiting. Yet the Pendel two-person sofa by British designer Russell Pinch has us intrigued—owing mostly to its high-backed, tailored curvaceousness and its availability in the beautifully illustrated, hand-printed Trollslända linen, designed in 1945 by Swedish textile artist Gocken Jobs. Created with small spaces in mind, the compact Pendel, which is also available in solid colors, is framed in solid beech, and sports slender oak legs along with the kind of organic shapeliness that, despite its botanical motif, would complement the familiar profiles of Modernist classics.

Images: Future Perfect

In a 12,000 word interview with Italian Jesuit journal La Civilta Cattolica, Pope Francis furthered his reputation as World's Coolest Pope by correctly noting that the Roman Catholic Church has become “obsessed” with preaching against abortion, gay marriage, and contraception.

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"The toughest part of the job is witnessing the personal tragedies of the people we’re trying to help."
“What’s the toughest scene you’ve ever witnessed?”
“We got to the scene of a car accident one time. A father had rolled his car over two embankments, with his wife and two kids in the car. The wife and one of the children had been crushed to death. I’ll never forget the father clawing at that car, trying to get them out.”

Paella de zanahoria, rutabaga y nabos (vegetable paella).

If you're not already aware, James Beard Award–winning chef Ken Oringer is a huge freaking deal in Boston: He runs Clio, Uni, Toro, Coppa, and La Verdad, as well as Earth in Maine. Oringer announced plans with chef-partner Jamie Bissonnette to expand his empire and bring Toro to New York well over a year ago, and now it's finally opening in Chelsea on Monday. The 100-seat Spanish restaurant, which is adjacent to Colicchio & Sons and Del Posto, is housed in the old Nabisco factory building, and it overlooks the water. Don't expect a typical tapas menu: There's rabbit paella, pig's-ear terrine with king crab and yuzu, and hard-to-find percebes (gooseneck barnacles) cooked on an open plancha. Take a look at the space and a few of the dishes, straight ahead.

Toro, 85 Tenth Ave. (entrance on 15th St.), 212-691-2360

Read more posts by Sierra Tishgart

Filed Under: openings, boston, chelsea, jamie bissonnette, ken orringer, new york, restaurant news, spanish food, tapas, toro

How Google Has Completely Botched Zagat:

BOOM. 

The saga of Julie Chen's face continues. After revealing last week on The Talk that she got plastic surgery to appear less Chinese, because she was advised to do so by her boss and agent, the Big Brother host has now clarified that the work she had done was only on her eyes.

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abcworldnews:

American families throw away up to $2,200 worth of food every year.

THIS. 

Food purveyor D'Artagnan is now raising chickens that eat bread and vegetable scraps from high-end restaurants like Per Se, The Modern, Jean Georges, and David Burke Townhouse. These "Green Circle" birds will eventually be served at the restaurants that provide the fancy chicken feed. David Burke explains: "It's kind of like a weird competition...It's like, 'My chicken eats better than yours.' At least that's how I'm looking at it. I'm going to spoil my chicken like a pet." [NYT]
[Photo Credit]

“After five years of significant achievement at Corton, we’ve parted ways with Paul Liebrandt. We thank our terrific staff for their hard work and commitment and the best customers any restaurant could hope for. It’s time to reassess. Our options are open and I’m certain exciting things lie in our future.”

-

That’s what Corton’s co-owner, Drew Nieporent, posted on the restaurant’s website today. It’s sad news for lovers of delicious and ambitious food.

Paul Liebrandt is now cooking at The Elm in Williamsburg, but still, Corton in Manhattan was one of the few places where New Yorkers could enjoy fussy, fancy tasting menus for a relatively affordable price ($125 or $155). The New York Times has the full story. I awarded four-stars to Corton in a review for Bloomberg News in May, our highest rating. 

Photos: SAOTA via Homes of the Rich

Not to be completely outdone by a Qatari counterpart, one super-wealthy resident of Dubai is planning to construct a 91,000-square-foot megamansion. Designed by South Africa-based Stefan Antoni Olmesdahl Truen Architects, the sprawling compound occupies an end lot on the emirate's famous Palm Island, with views to the city skyline, a private beach, towering walls of sliding glass, and indoor and outdoor swimming pools. The dramatic interiors, conceived by fellow South African firm Antoni Associates, include an open atrium with two-story waterfall.

· UAE Palm Jumeirah [SAOTA via Homes of the Rich]
· Proposed Hypermodern Qatari Palace Offers 'Ultimate Luxury' [Curbed National]

The average rent here in Brooklyn is over $3,000 a month. In New York City, where humans cannot afford to live, the average apartment sells for more than $1.4 million. You fools. You could have a Braveheart castle for that price!

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It's not just that being poor is difficult; according to a new study, poverty actually makes it harder for you to think.

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Photo via Design Boom

Next week this library in Birmingham, England, designed by Dutch firm Mecanoo Architecten—the same architects behind the kickass Maritime Museum in The Netherlands that won an Architizer A+ Award—will open to the public, officially being thrown into the ring (along with perhaps Baghdad's new library and the Peabody library in Maryland) to fight for the title as the world's prettiest place to check out a book. At some 377,000 square feet, the filigreed structure is also the largest library in Europe and cost a whopping €186M, or $246M to realize. The design itself—sorry, the "spacial narrative"—is meant to reflect various architectural eras of the city, including the 1960s concrete building that is Birmingham's repertory theater and the 1936 sandstone Baskerville House. And while the place boasts a smörgåsbord of fancy library delights, including a Shakespeare Memorial Room and community health center, the design's real grand gesture is its façade, essentially an mesh of circular '70s-ish motifs wrought and woven atop an edifice of blue, citrine, and slate—"a rich and layered tectonic palette," as Design Boom writes. More photos, below.

· Mecanoo Architects Unveil Filigreed Birmingham Library [Design Boom]
· All Libraries posts [Curbed National]

It's been just over 36 hours since Miley Cyrus stuck her tongue out at the pearl-clutching world of knee-jerk moral outrage, but someone already went and wrote a song that puts the entire manufactured fiasco in perfect perspective.

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We all bemoan the chain store onslaught for destroying the unique character of NYC, but a recent study reveals that while they may be bland, chain establishments can actually provide a better sense of community than their locally-owned counterparts. Anthropologists from the University of West Virginia studied three local Boston coffee shops and three Starbucks outlets in an attempt to determine which type of store offered a better social environment. The team used five criteria for their study, including how welcoming the store was, available amenities and the general atmosphere. Their somewhat surprising conclusion: in almost all areas, Starbucks beat out the independent coffee shops. [ more › ]

If you head over to the search field on Google, Amazon, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter or any of the world’s other big websites and start writing, a little box will appear below. As you type each letter, the site will make its best guesses as to the words you’re trying to find.

For instance, I just put the query “beach” into Google.com from San Francisco. Starting with “B” — Bank of America? “Be” — Best Buy? “Bea” — bearfacts? (a U.C. Berkeley site, apparently).

“Beac” — beacon? Beach Blanket Babylon? beach? Yup, that’s it.

Sometimes the search engine hits on what you want right away. Other times, despite typos, it magically understands what you meant to look for. Sometimes the results are existential and funny and reveal odd inclinations. (Try “Google is …” or “I hate …”)

This particular feature is known as “typeahead” or “autocomplete.” It’s based on analysis of the enormous dataset of everything everyone else in the world has searched for, narrowed down using personalization and location filters. Basically, Google thinks you’re likely to be looking for something that lots of people, especially people like you, have looked for before.

The more common a search is, the more it’s judged to be likely that you’re doing it, too. Except, of course, if it’s for porn. For that, you’ll have to click through to see the actual results. Google’s not going to presume it for you.

This little feature originated on Google nearly nine years ago, sprung from the mind of a junior software engineer. He wanted to call it “Google Complete,” but then-exec Marissa Mayer stepped in and suggested the more accessible “Google Suggest,” which stuck.

Google Suggest launched in December 2004. It’s a geeky thing, and the human race would survive just fine without it — but I’d argue that it’s one of the more influential online user interface changes of the past decade. So, over the past couple of weeks, I set out to find out a bit more about how it came to be.

Designer Dan Saffer has labeled those little features that make a big difference “microinteractions,” and just published a book on the topic this year.

Autocomplete, Saffer said in an interview this week, is part of the microinteraction canon, along with things like Twitter’s “pull to refresh,” which has become part of so many smartphone apps.

“What started as a signature moment for Google became the de facto standard,” Saffer explained.

Saffer described two signs that a microinteraction has gotten it right: 1) You wonder why things that don’t have it are broken; and 2) You only notice it when it messes up.

A Side Project Is Born

Google Suggest was built by Kevin Gibbs, a recent Stanford grad who joined Google just a couple of months before it went public. Having spent a few years at IBM, Gibbs was drawn by the lure of big projects and “20 percent time,” as well as a new program that would shuttle workers from San Francisco to Mountain View headquarters (today, ubiquitous Google Buses are the bane of anti-gentrification San Franciscans, but at the time there was just one trip a day from the Glen Park transit station).

When he started at Google, Gibbs’s role was to work on the systems infrastructure that helped run Google’s data centers, so there wasn’t much of his day job he could do from a laptop on the shuttle, with its crappy Edge Internet connection, Gibbs said in a recent interview.

So, with that extra offline time, rather than taking a nap, he thought it would be fun to work on something that combined some of the hot new geeky developer stuff of the time:

• Big Data. Because he worked at Google, Gibbs could play with billions of Web documents and use thousands of computers to process them. This was before Amazon Web Services came out, and before that term meant much of anything to anybody.
• JavaScript. This was around the time the notion of “Ajax” programming was coming to prominence, where developers could build webites that checked a server for new data and loaded it without refreshing the page. What it meant was that websites could start behaving like software applications. Gibbs wanted to try it out.
• High-speed Internet. By 2004, more than half of American Internet users had access to broadband at home or work. That made it possible to build something that was much more complex and still potentially accessible to a big audience.

Gibbs said he doesn’t spend a lot of time thinking about or taking credit for Google Suggest these days — he’s now at Quip, the new mobile productivity startup he co-founded with former Facebook CTO Bret Taylor.

“I don’t feel when I look at a search box that it’s something I did,” Gibbs said of Google Suggest. “It feels like this is just how the world’s supposed to work. I don’t feel any personal attachment to it unless I stop to think about it.”

The technological timing was right, Gibbs said. “I’m sure it would have happened if I hadn’t done it. I think it’s one of those history of invention things — where there was one guy who developed it in Germany and one guy in Russia, and it turns out they were doing it in the same year. I haven’t found my guy, but I think it was just an idea that was just so ripe to have happened.”

“That’s Cool, What If You Did It for Search?”

Back in 2004, the first thing Gibbs built on his shuttle trips was a URL predictor. So, as you started typing a URL into a browser, it would autocomplete the remaining options by analyzing Google’s immense corpus of Web content. Kind of like how, in Outlook, when you started typing an email, the names of the people in your address book would pop up — but on a much larger scale.

A co-worker — Gibbs now can’t recall who it was — looked over and said, “That’s cool, what if you did it for search?”

So Gibbs redid the system. It clicked right away. Search leaders at Google, including Jeff Dean and Rob Pike, got wind of the feature and started promoting Gibbs’s work internally. Mayer contributed the name “Google Suggest.”

But before the product could launch, Gibbs had to personally create the blacklist of words that wouldn’t appear on Google Suggest.

Since the feature would be actively showing results before someone had finished a query, there was a huge risk of Google putting forth something that offended people — even if it was the most likely result algorithmically.

That meant many hard and strange decisions, Gibbs recalled, about terms like “hooters,” which could mean owls or the restaurant or boobs; and “lesbian sex,” which on its own is descriptive, but when followed by words like “video” is perhaps not appropriate for all eyes. (In the second case, he didn’t remove the root search, but blocked some derivations.) For many letters of the alphabet, the most commonly searched word was “porn.”

Gibb’s blacklist was clunky and imperfect. He worried that he would be shaping people’s behavior, since “taking something out of results implies it doesn’t exist.” There was also the creepiness factor of Google appearing to reach into people’s private thoughts and history and anticipate what they were thinking — one of the first of so many such examples over the past decade.

But in December 2004, after a short period of internal testing, Google Suggest launched as a Google Labs feature.

Gibbs wrote the brief blog post introducing it to the world:

Today we launched Google Suggest, a new Labs project that provides you with search suggestions, in real time, while you type. We’ve found that Google Suggest not only makes it easier to type in your favorite searches (let’s face it — we’re all a little lazy), but also gives you a playground to explore what others are searching about, and learn about things you haven’t dreamt of. Go ahead, give it a spin.

The project stemmed from an idea I had a few months ago, and since then I’ve been working on it in my 20% time, which is a program where Google allows their employees to devote 20% of their working hours to any project they choose. What’s really amazed me about this project is how in a matter of months, working on my own, I was able to go from a lunch table conversation to launching a new service. In my opinion, this is one of the things that really makes Google a great place; that the company’s systems, resources and, most important, people are all aligned to make it as easy as possible to take an idea and turn it into something cool.

Plus, we have Segways.

Aside from the notion of Segways being cool, the funny thing is that, after the initial launch, Google Suggest didn’t fully launch for nearly four years.

The feature languished in opt-in mode in Google Labs until it was finally made default on Google.com as well as mobile, maps and browsers in 2008.

Gibbs admitted that was partly because he lost interest in the project, and wasn’t willing to neglect his day job to add new features to it. ”Once I launched it, I wasn’t really that interested in continuing to do it,” he recalled.

But, since 2008, Google has embraced Suggest wholeheartedly, to the point that it’s not even a feature anymore; it just happens with every search. Sites like Facebook soon followed suit. In 2010, Google expanded the feature to start automatically refreshing the entire search-results page, not just the search query, with Google Instant.

Podunk Towns Have Searches, Too

Reflecting back on that time now, Gibbs says he’s most proud of two aspects of Google Suggest. First is the democratic nature of the feature. Google Suggest wasn’t just about guessing that people who typed in “b” were looking for Britney Spears (as they invariably were at the time, as she was the top search term for years). It was about the long tail, too.

In fact, that was a bit of a hard sell, Gibbs recalled. ”It took hundreds of machines to store everything that it might return to you. And I think a lot of people thought it should just have the most common searches.

“But what I really liked was that I could put in just the name of just my very small hometown in Central California — Porterville — and even at that time, it would show all the most popular results just for that town. It made me realize that within your community, whatever you care about, wherever you happen to be on the Internet, that world is still a big, enriched world that could otherwise be left behind.”

Second, Gibbs said, Google Suggest “respected someone’s time.” If it was already obvious to Google what someone was searching for, why not just show it?

Of course, that’s not just altruistic. Creating a website that was more responsive meant that people used it more, and thus saw more and better Google ads.

But that wasn’t Gibbs’s concern. He was back to working on data centers, and then starting Google’s cloud infrastructure tools for developers, in order to compete with Amazon Web Services. Gibbs finally left Google in July 2012, to start Quip.

In recent weeks, introverts have been receiving a lot of attention on the internet, which they hate. Just kidding—they love attention! Talking about, reading about, and Facebook-sharing about introverts are an introvert’s favorite things to do.

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The NYPD's manipulation and suppression of crime statistics has been thoroughly substantiated, and yesterday an independent committee released a report that reveals serious flaws with the NYPD's system of cataloguing crime. The report [PDF], written by three former federal prosecutors, provides insight into how numbers and complaints are twisted to benefit cops and their superiors, which in turn affects the crime numbers touted by public officials at press conferences. "A close review of the NYPD's statistics and analysis demonstrate that the misclassifications of reports may have an appreciable effect on certain reported crime rates," the report states. [ more › ]

We're always amused/horrified by corporate food chains' flashy stunt products—behold the 1,000 calorie Cinnabon & Oreo "Chillatta"!!!—and lately we can't stop dreaming/having nightmares about Dunkin' Donuts' new Glazed Donut Breakfast Sandwich. The Dunkin' team has yet to airlift a box to Gothamist HQ, but yesterday our extern Emilie Ruscoe heeded the call of the bacon on our behalf. Unfortunately, her dispatch from the Land of Dunkin' is seasoned with bitter disappointment. [ more › ]

BIG NEWS: Fairway is now offering Graeter's ice cream, a Cincinnati institution, right here in NYC. The ice cream is known for its rich flavor and dense texture, which it definitely lived up to when we sampled each and every flavor they sent to Gothamist HQ (it's a living) last week. The pints (currently on sale at $4.99 a piece) come in Black Raspberry Chip (their signature flavor), Chocolate Chocolate Chip, Mint Chocolate Chip, Mocha Chocolate Chip and Vanilla Chocolate Chip. [ more › ]

It's kind of a low bar, but this is almost definitely the most beautiful Excel spreadsheet you will ever behold.

Yes, it's a spreadsheet, created by the 73-year old artist Tatsuo Horiuchi. You can see more of his work at Spoon & Tamago:

(You can download the original file here, if you need to prove to yourself it's Excel.)

[via Chris Blattman]

Today in microfashion…

From Sweets

VIEW SLIDESHOW: First Look: Odd Fellows Ice Cream, a wd~50 Vet's Scoop Shop in Williamsburg

[Photographs: Max Falkowitz]

Note: First Looks give previews of new dishes, drinks, and menus we're curious about. Since they are arranged photo shoots and interviews with restaurants, we do not make critical evaluations or recommendations.

When Holiday Kumar was pregnant two years ago, she got some strange cravings. Offbeat, savory ice cream flavors were one of them.

Holiday and her husband Mohan had talked before about starting an ice cream business, and in their frequent visits to wd~50 during Sam Mason's tenure as its pastry chef, they found their ice cream man. (Yes, Sam Mason of Empire Mayonnaise fame.)

Last Thursday, the trio opened Odd Fellows Ice Cream on the Williamsburg waterfront, footsteps away from Smorgasburg's Saturday market spot. The scoop shop will sell ice cream, housemade sodas, shakes, floats, and cotton candy. Its opening menu includes sweet cream and strawberry ice creams. It also has chorizo caramel.

"I'm just trying to use science to make the best ice cream possible," Mason tells me. That means some ice creams get sweetened with dextrose while others get sucrose or honey. Sorbets are stabilized with a wee bit of locust bean gum to tone down any errant ice crystals.

But his approach is, by and large, traditional—these are classic American-style custard ice creams made to taste rich, creamy, and fluffy—and Odd Fellows is ultimately designed to be a classic scoop shop. Mason is also one of very few New York ice cream makers who's pasteurizing his own dairy, which Odd Fellows buys from Battenkill Creamery.

Odd Fellows will rotate the bulk of its flavor offerings over the season. In addition to the flavors above, the starting lineup runs from vanilla and "sprinkles" to cornbread and maple-bacon pecan. The candy-striped scoop shop will have counter and table seating as well as pre-packaged pints available to take home. At time of opening, Odd Fellows is restricting its offerings to ice cream, sodas, and cotton candy—additional menu items will come soon.

Prices run $3.25 to $6.25 for one to three scoops, and larger sundaes cost $7.95. Milkshakes are $7.50, housemade sodas are $3.50, and egg creams (made with Fox's U-Bet!) will be $3.25. The shop is open from noon to 10 p.m., Sunday through Thursday, and until 11 p.m. Friday and Saturday. Hit up the slideshow for a closer look at some ice cream glamor shots.

Odd Fellows Ice Cream

175 Kent Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11249 (map)
347-599-0556 ; oddfellowsnyc.com

About the author: Max Falkowitz is the editor of Serious Eats: New York. You can follow him on Twitter at @maxfalkowitz.