Jon Schubin

The wedge of Lower East Side real estate bounded by Allen Street on the west and Seward Park on the east, East Broadway on the south and Canal to the north, is an amalgam of cut-rate bus companies, Chinese dumpling factories, and 99-cents-plus stores, its oldest structures still inscribed with Hebrew lettering but long colonized by an ever-expanding Chinatown. Fifteen years ago, Good World Bar and Grill was a solitary, off-the-beaten-path pioneer of downtown cool at the foot of Orchard Street, serving up Nordic cuisine before it was New. Gentrification ensued, as it often does, in the form of third-wave coffee bars and Italian wine bars, multiculti bistros and upscale vegetarian restaurants. Lately, though, the pace has accelerated, with a flurry of new leases signed and the conversion of a neighborhood landmark, the Beaux-Arts Jarmulowsky Bank building, into a boutique hotel. Here, a few of the latest arrivals to the area and its environs, and some on the way.

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1. Rosette
171 E. Broadway, nr. Rutgers St.; 212-933-1176
At the latest in a line of vegetable-centric restaurants at this address, a parsnip “steak” shares chef Nick Curtin’s menu with shrimp and grits and a burger.

2. 12 Corners
155 E. Broadway, nr. Rutgers St.; 646-717-2849
Nice little coffee bar and neighborhood social center with sponsored-sports-team trophies on the shelves and an owner-barista who used to work for Kobrick Coffee Co.

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3. Skál
37 Canal St., at Ludlow St.; 212-777-7518
Where once there was Afro-French (Les Enfants Terribles), now there is New Nordic.*

4. Fung Tu
22 Orchard St., nr. Canal St.; 212-219-8785
Beautiful, delicious, reimagined Chinese-American food from Per Se vet Jonathan Wu: duck-stuffed dates, pork-belly-and-olive-filled egg rolls, Chinese beef jerky with dill and peanuts—and that’s just for starters.

5. Ludlow Inn
1 Ludlow St., at Canal St.; no phone yet; September
In the basement space below Three Points, Angel’s Share veteran Shigefumi Kabashima will operate a similarly low-key cocktail bar.

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6. Café Grumpy
13 Essex St., nr. Hester St.; 212-260-3454
Greenpoint-roasted coffee, offbeat house-baked pastries.

7. Three Points
1 Ludlow St., at Canal St.; no phone yet; September
Developer Ross Morgan renovated the building and plans, with partner Paul Italia and Numero 28’s Luigi Porceddu, to open a Neapolitan pizza bar on the ground floor. The pies will be individual-sized and baked, along with most everything else, in the brick oven.

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8. The Leadbelly
14 Orchard St., nr. Canal St.; 646-596-9142
From the Fat Radish folks across the street, an oyster-cum-cocktail parlor crossed with a highly stylized live-music rec room, and the only place we know where it’s possible to tuck into a Scotch egg while being serenaded by a dude on five-string banjo and foot tambourine.

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9. Forgtmenot
138 Division St., nr. Ludlow St.; 646-707-3195
A ramshackle surf shack with the soul of a Greek diner, this tiny joint has become marginally less tiny after a recent expansion. Greek fries are the crowd favorite.

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10. Pies-N-Thighs
43 Canal St., nr. Ludlow St.; no phone yet; September
The southern-style kitchen has homed in on a block bereft of fried chicken and banana-cream pie. The new space is half the size of the Brooklyn HQ, but anyone who remembers the original P-n-T that operated in the back beer closet of Williamsburg’s Rock Star Bar knows this is no cause for alarm.

11. Forthcoming Hotel Project
9 Orchard St., at Canal St.; no phone yet; 2015
Opened in 1912 as the Jarmulowsky Bank, this 12-story landmark is undergoing a renovation by local architect Ron Castellano that will restore its dome spire and preserve as much original detail as possible. No official confirmation, but Ace Hotel and Taavo Somer are rumored to be involved.

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12. Cochinita Dos
49 Canal St., nr. Orchard St.; 212-226-8226
L.A. expat Adam Frank, a self-described gringo preaching the taco gospel, has brought his Clinton Hill taquería concept across the river in hopes of converting
a few East Chinatownies. As in Brooklyn, the Yucatán specialty cochinita pibil (citrus-marinated, slow-roasted pork) is the thing.

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13. Dimes
143 Division St., at Canal St.; 212-240-9410
L.A.-vibed, adobe-walled haven for rice-bowl-munching stylists and the skate punks who love them.

This article appears in the June 2, 2014 issue of New York Magazine.

*This post has been updated to reflect the fact that Ben Spiegel's role at Skál has changed.

Read more posts by Robin Raisfeld and Rob Patronite

Filed Under: openings, 12 corners, cafe grumpy, chinatown, cochinita dos, dimes, forgtmenot, fung tu, ludlow inn, pies n thighs, rosette, skal, the leadbelly, three points

Forbes has a great piece on the escalating war between Uber and Lyft, two of the leading companies disrupting the taxi market. It's a two-front war. On the recruitment front, the companies are offering more and more generous bonuses to drivers. At the same time, they're in a price war trying to attract customers in major cities.

"To reel in users, companies make rides cheaper and cheaper, which angers drivers," Forbes's Ellen Huet writes. "When Uber and Lyft battle, drivers lose in the long run." Drivers worry that the big bonuses will be temporary, while the lower fares will be permanent.

In its focus on drivers, though, the article fails to mention an important point: lower fares are great news for consumers. Regardless of who ultimately wins the car-sharing wars — Uber, Lyft, or yet another Silicon Valley startup — the competition is making urban transportation more convenient and affordable for millions of people. That's good for urban travelers. And because it makes an environmentally-friendly urban lifestyle more affordable, it's good for the environment too.

The old system wasn't so great for drivers either

At the same time, it's important to remember that the old system wasn't so great for drivers either. Before Uber and Lyft came on the scene, many cities had regulations that kept fares high by limiting the number of taxis on the street. But those higher fares didn't necessarily go into the pockets of drivers. Often they'd go to the owners of taxicab companies, or the owners of scarce (and therefore very valuable) taxicab licenses. In Los Angeles, for examples, some traditional taxicab drivers lease a vehicle for $500 per week, reducing their annual income by around $25,000.

So it's not clear whether the increasingly competitive taxi market will be good or bad for drivers in the long run. But growing competition in the taxi market is a big win for consumers.

Built from thousands of pre-carved pieces of stone which were imported directly from India, the BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir Atlanta is the largest Hindu temple in the U.S. and indeed the largest temple of its kind outside of India.  

Between 2005-2007 the massive Atlanta mandir (place of worship) is actually part of a network of Hindu temples across the world that were carved in India and simply shipped off to be put together on site like a giant Lego set. The Atlanta BAPS alone was built out of over 34,000 individual pieces of marble, limestone, and sandstone. Before being sent to the states, artisans etched surreally intricate designs, reliefs, and statues into the rock, so it was ready to go by the time it made it to American shores. Even more surprisingly, the temple was put together using a workforce of volunteers who donated over a million cumulative man hours.

Once completed the mandir now contains six tall pinnacles, 86 decorative ceilings, 116 archways, and 340 columns. The tallest of the pinnacles reaches an impressive 75 feet into the air, making it stand out majestically on its 30 acres. 

In addition to all of its other size-related superlatives, the BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir Atlanta, which is actually located in a city near Atlanta known as Lilburn, is the tallest structure in the city. The temple is open to the public for both worship and architectural appreciation.       

A mysterious artist who goes by the name Gold Poo has been decorating dog shit in Bushwick for about a year now. (Um okay.) Now there’s a copycat dog poo artist out there, biting his style. As Dog Poo states on his instagram account, “Welcome To The Shit Show.”

Dogster has more:

According to the Huffington Post, Brooklyn has not one, but two poop artists, and a little bit of a turf war has developed between them. It started when the NYC blog Gothamist printed some pictures of a number of dog poops covered with glitter that had been spotted along Dekalb Avenue in Bushwick.

Longtime dog poop artist Gold Poo saw the pictures and called foul, claiming that the anonymous glitter-bomber was trying to ride on his coattails. “I was surprised at first,” he told HuffPo. “Seeing how I have been doing this for just under a year straight and have gotten little to no attention.” Apparently, all the cool kids are gilding poop these days. Or something.

But the lack of publicity hasn’t bothered Gold Poo, or as he calls himself, the “captain of this goldpoo train.” In fact, the recent press has prompted him to jump on poop art’s new attention for his own outreach purposes, even though Dixon’s Instagram is definitely not his work: Gold Poo uses spray paint, not glitter, and wasn’t working in the DeKalb Avenue area on the date Dixon snapped his photo.

Here’s a gallery of Gold Poo’s far superior decorated poops and art:

The X-Men take on the Grief-Industrial Complex. SNIKT!

The Smithsonian National Zoo's family of Asian small-clawed otters—the smallest, cutest otter species in the world—spent some time over the weekend with one of their favorite toys: a keyboard to bang on. With their small claws, natch.

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In our description of the debut single from 1987 - Stockholm-based Victor Holmberg and one half of production duo Montauk – our own Genevieve Oliver said listening to it “almost feels like the sublime experience of listening to Sigur Ros.” Well put. It’s been almost a year since that fateful debut, and now Holmberg has released another tantalizing single with “Michelle,” an absolutely stunning grower that intensifies ever so gradually. The production on this is simply stellar. Also, it’s nice to listen to music in other languages sometimes – Holmberg sings in his native Swedish. Below the song, he also offers a stanza of the poem “Idyll” and a few words about the song. Bonus marks if you can read Swedish, but if you can’t, there’s an English translation.

Karin Boye, “Idyll”
Nu sluter sig vardagens rymd kring oss två, lik en len
lätt dimma.
Är du rädd att bli fånge, är du rädd att drunkna i det gråa?
Var inte rädd: i vardagens innersta,
i allt livs hjärta, brinner med stilla nynnande lågor en djup, hemlig helg.

Now the space of the everyday closes around us two, like a soft, gentle mist.
Are you afraid of becoming a prisoner, are you afraid of drowning in the greyness?
Do not be afraid: in the everyday’s innermost depth,
in the heart of all life,
there burns with quietly humming flames a deep, secret festival.

1987
“Mitt skrivbord är prydligt ordnat. Mapparna är tydligt namngivna. Jag har valt en ny bakgrundsbild. Drake nedsjunken vid ett bord framför en kandelaber och en uggla, båda av guld. Jag vill att den här låten ska skimra som kandelabrar av guld och samtidigt skära djupa sår. Jag gömmer mig bakom svartvita fotografier, men är livrädd att drunkna i det gråa. Hoppas ni gillar den.”

“My desk is neatly organized. Folders are clearly named. I have selected a new wallpaper. Drake slumped at a table in front of a chandelier and an owl, both of gold. I want this song to shimmer like a gold chandelier and simultaneously cut deep wounds. I hide behind black and white photographs, but I’m terrified of drowning in the gray. Hope you like it.”

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Read more articles like "Listen: 1987, “Michelle”" on PMA - Pretty Much Amazing.

Tags: 1987

It’s officially rooftop bar season in NYC. Well, ok, so the ‘season’ is more of an idea conjured up by bar and resto owners than an actual thing but the Observer is not quibbling. There are many more rooftop bars than you might imagine, so no matter where you are, particularly around midtown, there is always somewhere high with a breeze, to relax. Beat out the crowds on the first “Summer Friday” of the season this week, Friday 23rd May, and choose from the fabulous selection here.

Gansevoort Park Rooftop
Address: 420 Park Avenue South at 29th Street
Your favorite summer Friday happy hour just became your go-to weekend brunch escape. Now serving brunch on Saturdays and Sundays, patrons can escape the sidewalk crowds and head up to the roof for an extensive menu with drink specials complete with a Park Avenue view. While the indoor/outdoor swimming pool is for guests only, the Sundeck space is open to the public. Enjoy a complimentary popcorn serving while sipping on a signature Ginger Park cocktail and soaking in the rays.

Pod 39 Rooftop
Address: 145 East 39th Street
Perched 17 floors high, the top of the Pod 39 Hotel reveals a seasonal rooftop oasis. With panoramic views of the city from the river to the East, the Freedom Tower to the South, the Empire State Building to the West and the Chrysler Building to the North, this two-story open roof space is the ultimate gathering place for after-work or evening out. The buzzing bar scene features tequila-inspired cocktails by mixologist Sam Anderson from Ken Friedman and April Bloomfield’s Salvation Taco.

VU Rooftop Bar
Address: 17 West 32 Street
For the social media savvy young adults who want to Tweet their trip pics including some astonishing skylines, opt for an alternative to the pricey Top of the Rock Observation Center. The recently renovated La Quinta Manhattan, best known for its indoor/outdoor rooftop VU bar, offers stunning views of Manhattan. The $25 you would have spent on a Top of the Rock ticket can go toward enjoying a drink and earning “likes” on your newly posted, close-up shot of the Empire State building. This non-pretentious rooftop bar is open all year and offers a daily happy hour from 5-7pm on weekdays and all day on Sundays.

Plunge Rooftop Bar + Lounge
Address: 18 Ninth Avenue at 13th Street
A perennial favorite, the recently refreshed rooftop at Gansevoort Meatpacking NYC is the original in the neighborhood (celebrating 10 years this summer!) and offers 360-degree views of the Hudson River and Manhattan complete with indoor/outdoor terrace seating and a back garden cabana. This season, enjoy made-to-order skewers from the outdoor grill service while you sip on the signature Mango Lime Rickey cocktail and reminisce with friends over sweeping city views.

Refinery Rooftop
Address: 63 West 38th Street
Discover artisanal cocktails like the Uptown Girl or Perfect Pear and selective wines to 3,500 square feet of cinematic views of Manhattan and the Empire State Building. A retractable glass roof enhances city sunsets over the indoor-outdoor section, which is paved with vintage French terracotta floors. Inside, a fountain and fireplace give comfort and flair to a lounge with wooden ceilings constructed out of wood salvaged from the original building’s water tank. The best part? It’s located right under your nose in the Garment District!

 

 

 

Pod 51 Rooftop Deck
Address: 230 East 51st Street
Pod 51’s Rooftop Deck offers sun-bathers and star-gazers a more-relaxed alternative to the NYC buzzing rooftop scene. Adorned with oversized lounge benches, colorful Adirondack chairs and a 12-foot long picnic table, this is the perfect spot to gather for a DIY picnic. Visitors can bring up their own wine, homemade dishes or menu items from the ground floor’s new craft beer gastropub, Pop @ Pod.

Filed under: , Tagged: bars, Gansevoort, Plunge, pod 39, Pod 51, Refinery, rooftop, summer, Vu

On sale now, sort of.

These are tough times for America's most famous Sriracha. While Huy Fong founder David Tran — the guy who makes the green-capped, rooster-emblazoned bottle you see everywhere — continues his long municipal headache in Irwindale, California, his competitors are looking to strike with their own versions. The latest, and perhaps most threatening, is Tabasco. In fact, the hot-sauce giant has already launched its brand of Sriracha, but for some reason, the company appears to be keeping it a secret.

You might think that a major product launch like this would normally be accompanied by a big media rollout, but apart from some talk on an LSU message board thread and a brief shout-out on Vice, there's been almost no mention of Tabasco's Sriracha. In fact, it seems the only place you can even buy it is on the company's official "country store." (At $4.99 for a 15-ounce bottle, or 33 cents an ounce, it's about twice as expensive as Huy Fong Sriracha.)

So what's going on? Why keep things so hush-hush? We asked reps for Tabasco, who wrote back this boilerplate email:

Tabasco Sriracha Sauce is a limited edition product, currently only available through the Tabasco Country Store. As McIlhenny Company develops new products and innovations, occasionally they are shared with fans through the Country Store. 

Tabasco Sriracha Sauce is made with red peppers and has the slightly sweet and garlicky taste of a traditional sriracha sauce with the signature Tabasco Sauce balance of vinegar.

But rumors from Avery Island suggest the reality is that Tabasco simply isn't yet pleased with the product or the packaging, at least not enough for a national rollout. We've heard that might happen in early 2015, but Tabasco officials are, predictably, staying quiet about that.

It makes you wonder why the company would release this product at all. It could be to capitalize on Tran's current problems, or maybe the company really does just want to offer it to fans first. Either way, if and when Tabasco goes big with its Sriracha, the implications for the Thai hot-sauce industry could be huge: Tabasco, which is still a family-run business, is in 166 countries — where it routinely outsells the spicy competition, including local brands. It doesn't matter that connoisseurs may dismiss the brand's acrid, vinegary taste — the company's unparalleled distribution means that, once it's really released, Tabasco-branded Sriracha could quite easily become the world's most-consumed version of the sauce on the entire planet.

Read more posts by Hugh Merwin

Filed Under: burn sauce, avery island, david tran, huy fong foods, sriracha, tabasco

New Yorkers are of course, familiar with the Manhattan’s Koreatown, land of great karaoke joints and Korean BBQ. Of course, unlike the actual Korea, Koreatown isn’t divided into North Koreatown and South Koreatown. Until now that is, with Late Night Basement host Chris Rose splitting the neighborhood at East 33rd Street into North and South Koreatown. Taking things a step further and playing off the recent Vice series in which they visited North Korea, Rose sought people’s opinions on the differences between North Koreatown and South Koreatown, while asking if someone could smuggle him in to the North, before bringing a North Koreatown and South Koreatown resident together for a karaoke performance. Take five minutes and watch it, what the hell. You’re probably checked out for Memorial Day weekend anyway. … Read More

MAD Magazine is giving Romenesko readers an exclusive look (must credit Romenesko blah blah blah!!) at this Huffington Post parody, which doesn’t hit newsstands until June 17. You’ll see the Puffington Host spread in MAD #528, with a “Kim & Kanye In… MONSTER MARRIAGE!” cover.

Frostie the Snow Goat was born with a life-threatening infection that makes his back legs unusable, and even after a course of antibiotics, he can't walk on his own. So Frostie's caretakers at Australia's Edgar's Mission Farm Sanctuary set him up with a wheelcart to help him take his first steps.

Read more...

Despite slowly encroaching vegetation and a great deal of yearly rainfall, the so-called Desert of Maine remains a strange reverse-oasis among the verdant Maine pines.

The small, 40-acre plot of land now known as the Desert of Maine was actually began as a successful farming plot. As early as the late 1700's, the land was being farmed by the Tuttle family who used the acreage to grow potatoes. Unfortunately by the late 1800's the family had neglected to rotate the crops and combined with overgrazing by their flock of sheep, the land had been turned into a useless sandy silt. In truth the poor land use had simply exposed glacial silt that had been laying in wait under the top soil for thousands of years. The family abandoned the plot in 1919 and thanks to the land's desert-like appearance it was turned into a tourist oddity in 1925.

The Desert of Maine has been attracting curious visitors ever since, adorning the dunes with desert-worn debris and even a fiberglass camel. A gift shop and "sand museum" have also been erected where visitors can bottle and take home some sand from one of the most unlikely deserts in the world. 

The global hotelier is set to unveil its Bavarian "castle hotel," replete with a beer hall stocked with craft beer and German grub, later this year—not in Germany, but in China.

China Travel | 0 Comments

Available now at all full-service Umami Burger locations.

Acclaimed chef and occasional commencement speaker José Andrés is the latest guest chef to have a custom design go into production at Umami Burger. The José Andrés Burger, which went on sale yesterday, has a patty made of ground pork and cured ham, and is topped with piquillo pepper confit, caramelized onion, and big slice of Manchego. It costs $15, with $1 of each purchase donated to World Central Kitchen, Andrés's humanitarian organization focused on finding solutions for hunger and poverty. The chef announced earlier this year that he's headed into the fast-food business next, so maybe consider this a warm-up. [Related]

Read more posts by Riddley Gemperlein-Schirm

Filed Under: andresburger, jose andres, umami burger

Inside the shadowy Washington PR network with ties to dictators' cronies, war criminals, and suspicious Ukrainian arms transporters.

At this point, it seems as if the city might go overboard with the summer events just to make up for the extended and horrible winter we had this year. Then again, that’s just this city’s M.O.

So, take out your jam-packed summer calendars and pencil this in: Starting this weekend, Extra Fancy will replace its Sunday brunch with weekly, summertime fish frys.

According to Eater NY, from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. every week this summer, patrons are invited to pop-in for a classic fish fry, where they’ll be able to choose from beer battered pollock or cornmeal crusted catfish. Both dishes will come with french fries, two seasonally-driven sides, ketchup, tartare sauce and Frank’s hot sauce.

Here’s the price breakdown: One-piece meals are going for $14, while two-piece meals will set patrons back $19.

And that’s about it.

Count us in.

Follow Nikita Richardson on Twitter @nikitarbk

Just smashing.

Like any other self-respecting fast-casual chain, Smashburger is expanding in New York City, with a total of ten restaurants in Manhattan and four in Queens on the way. Smashburger announced plans for a Financial District outpost last fall, where it was also approved for a wine and beer license. [CO, Related]

Read more posts by Hugh Merwin

Filed Under: burger smash!, smashburger, the chain gang

Spruce Point Capital released a report today that details why iRobot, the company that makes the Roomba robotic vacuum, is a short target for them and other hedge funds.

Via sprucepointcap.com

A group of hedge funds are hoping to clean up by short-selling the company that makes the Roomba robotic vacuum.

A new report from Spruce Point Capital Management issued Tuesday questions the accounting and corporate governance practices at iRobot, the company that manufactures the Roomba, the Scooba and other robotic home cleaning products. The report also claims competition from cheaper, comparable robotic cleaners means iRobot will face mounting financial obstacles to maintaining its growth.

Roombas retail for between $400 to $600, while foreign competitors like Miele and ECOVACS, which are now selling directly to the U.S. market, are much less expensive. What's more, Roomba sales are largely correlated to the housing market, which has seen stagnated growth in recent years, said Spruce Point founding partner Ben Axler.

Spruce Point further alleges in its report that iRobot executives have benefitted from "outrageous compensation schemes" and that the company uses "aggressive accounting techniques to prevent the unraveling of its financials," in spite of the fact that "its balance sheet is showing signs that it may be stuffing the channel." Axler cites the fact that iRobot is pushing for more advertising as an indicator that sales growth has slowed.

iRobot stock is trading at around $31 per share after starting the quarter around $42 per share. Currently, its shares have a 25% short interest, meaning that a quarter of iRobot's investors are betting that its share price will fall instead of rise.

A spokesman for iRobot did not return requests for comment.

Austin Stewart is an assistant professor of design at Iowa State University with a simple idea: maybe we should help chickens play second life. Through virtual reality goggles. Before we kill and eat them.

The idea, called Second Livestock, has gone viral since getting picked up in the Ames Tribune (Iowa State's local paper) and then Fast Company, and it may seem silly, but as with most wacky-seeming ideas, there's a more sophisticated argument being made here than you might expect. I called up Stewart Friday to walk me through the case for developing virtual reality-enabled, massively multiplayer online games for chickens. Here's his case.

It enables chickens to live a free-range life

Key to the vision of Second Livestock is that it would enable what Stewart calls "Virtual Free Range™" living. In theory, you could run a farm of Second Livestock-playing chickens, who in fact live cheek by jowl with each other, but who perceive themselves as living together on an open field.

Stewart envisions Second Livestock as purely a social experience between chickens rather than as a game involving AI bots pretending to be chickens. "Maybe the farmer could disguise himself as a chicken to check on his flock, but there would be no non-player characters," he says. "They'd be real chickens, because the facilities are all networked together, and they'd be in the same virtual world, and they'd have microphones."

But it avoids the disadvantages of conventional free range farming

The most obvious cost of free range farming, from the farmer's perspective, is that it requires more land per chicken than raising them in cages very close to one another. Second Livestock would enable farmers to raise the chickens closer together while still providing the mental experience of living on an open field.

But there are also benefits to the chicken relative to free range farming, Stewart says. He got the initial germ of the idea for Second Livestock from a talk by Michael Mercil, chair of the department of art at Ohio State (where Stewart went to grad school), in which Mercil emphasized that free range living can be rather dangerous and stressful for chickens. "There's research suggesting that free range chickens show all the signs of having a stressful life," Stewart says. "They have more broken bones, they get broken legs, etc., whereas birds raised in little boxes don't have those indicators of stress. And who's to say which is better?"

Second Livestock allows farms to avoid that stress, both for the chickens' sake and because the risk of physical injury or death that comes with free range farming isn't present. The latter factor could make Second Livestock-raised chickens cheaper than free range ones. "You don't have the loss you do when you farm free range chickens," Stewart explains. "You'd be harvesting a significantly higher number of chickens."

What is the world of Second Livestock like?

When describing the actual map of Second Livestock (developed using the game engine Unity by Stewart and a former Ohio State student of his, Ryan Lee), Stewart gets fairly utopian. "There's water sources and little bugs that crawl around, that are mapped to where the food and water trays are [in the cage], so they can bend and actually drink water and eat food," he explains. "Those things are the ideal of chicken life, and there are no predators, obviously. So they're free to just worry about chicken business."

But would chickens actually, you know, like that? It's hard to say. While Stewart has created an exhibition wherein one can put on an Oculus Rift and see the world of Second Livestock, he has yet to test it on real chickens. That'd require approval from various ethics committees at his university, and Stewart is a designer, rather than an animal technologist. "I don't feel comfortable strapping a headset on a chicken and seeing what happens," he says. And he's open to the idea that, if tested, it might just not work. "Will animals actually accept a virtual world as readily as we do, or is there some level of intelligence or imagination that needs to happen where we can suspend disbelief more readily than a chicken can?" he asks. "I don't know."

The idea was more to start a discussion about the world we're comfortable letting the animals we eat live in — and that we're comfortable living in ourselves. "I feel like this is more of  a design project, to get people to have a conversation about animal husbandry," he says. "We live in boxes, just like the chickens we eat."

Harry Potter ended up enrolling in Hogwarts School. For those less magically gifted, China’s Hebei province has another option.

Bread sculpture : the edible art
Wiseman
1975

Submitter: [This was found in a] small academic library. As a for-profit, so we’re even more at risk of legal action or the like if someone finds content in our collection offensive. I’ve actually been combing through older items in our culinary collection specifically for racist content. There’s been quite a few mammy drawings in the regional cookbooks. Yikes. Those get to live in ‘special collections’ now.

We’re a small college offering only a few degrees, but we have a pretty strong culinary program, which is what makes having this in our collection particularly embarrassing. This isn’t something that supports the goals of our culinary program in the slightest, and although it can be viewed with a fun kitschy eye, it’s also a tad horrifying in it’s pure 70s-ness. It’s dated at best, and racist at worst. Especially with a largely minority population, I can’t justify keeping something this minimally-useful-if-at-all on the shelves that also makes a pun on the Hottentot Venus.

Plus, BREAD PUBES. Freakin’ bread pubes!

Holly: I had such a good laugh when I saw the pictures (below). My sides absolutely HURT from this one. How can a bread-baking book be not safe for work, you ask? Well, click through, my friends. At your own risk.

 

More NSFW (Oh, come on, you know you want more.):

Real Auto-Erotica

Cheap Date Handbook

The Bandit Bares It

The Bandit Bares Even More

A young girl plays in a replica of a lunar-module in Toronto, Canada, August 1975.Photograph by Robert Madden, National Geographic Creative

Oklahoma and Texas play an annual football game called the Red River Rivalry. When it comes to actually red rivers though, none compare to the one found in Boluo County near Huizhou, Guangdong province earlier this week. It’s like the jungle’s menstruating.

The Nanfang reports:

After the many storms that have deluged Guangdong Province with heavy rain, rivers have completely turned bright red or blue, reports Xinhua.

A printing factory is believed to be the cause of the discoloration, and has been ordered to close down.

As always in China, we’ve seen this before. (We even used the same Elizabeth Economy-inspired headline. Sorry about that.)

Picture This: Guangdong River Turns Bright Red (The Nanfang)

I thought bicycle helmets, bangs and gusts of wind were my only hair-related challenges, but this week I discovered something far worse: According to a carefully highlighted copy of “The Woman’s Dress for Success Book” (published 1978) that my colleague discovered on the street, my long curls mean my career is doomed.

In a chapter titled “Packaging Yourself,” the female reader is warned:

“Your hair must not be excessively curly or wavy. If the current fashion calls for curls and waves, forget it. Too many curls and waves will hurt you in business.”

“Gray hair adds authority to a man and takes it away from a woman.”

“All exotic things done to hair are absolutely wrong.”

Those rules were written by a man (gray-haired and authoritative) named John T. Molloy, who today offers sartorial suggestions on a blog. But I wondered whether his original advice is still abided by and, for the sake of my career, tried to find out.

Here are the do’s and dont’s offered in the book (I added the letters):

So, do today’s high-powered women abide by such guidelines? I took the pictures from Fortune’s list of 2013′s 50 most powerful women in business and looked at how they fared on the late-1970s typology.

My career outlook might be bleaker than I thought. Shonda Rhimes, executive producer of “Grey’s Anatomy,” was the only woman on the list to wear her hair curly. Only eight women broke the long-hair rule, and not one double sinned, with long curly hair.

More depressingly, academic research (with a slightly more rigorous methodology than the one I used here) suggests that women’s hair does matter. For example, some studies have found that women with long hair are associated with “decreased forcefulness” and seen as “high maintenance,” or that long hair on a woman can “signify reproductive potential” (think maternity-leave discrimination at a job interview). Long hair really could adversely affect my career.

All is not well.

"I used to go out for fro-yo like five times a week," said a co-worker at Grub Street HQ recently, with a sigh. "But I can't remember the last time I visited 16 Handles." It wasn't the first time I'd heard this kind of comment recently. A friend who runs a bar in midtown used to stop in for fro-yo a few times a week, but his appetite has cooled. "It's been a while, even though I have enough loyalty points to buy a Maybach." The toppings bars in the shops are still full of colorful gummy bears and rosy diced strawberries, but New York's fro-yo boom has hit dark times.

The slow decline of New York's recent frozen-yogurt dessert-scape can be seen more acutely in the East Village, long a haven for frogurt shops. Twist on Avenue A opened last fall, then promptly disappeared; the unrelated shop Twister on Second Avenue closed in March, lasting just over half a year. The festive-sounding Yogurt Crazy was first announced for Third Avenue in 2012 but instead, a notice from NYU — its landlord — appeared taped to the storefront last year demanding $37,134.87 in back rent. Over in Brooklyn, Forever Yogurt signed a lease near Barclays Center, but that ended in eviction papers and a claim of $12,000 in unpaid rent.

Independent shops aren't suffering alone. Big Frogurt is having similar trouble: Pinkberry Chelsea, at Eighth Avenue, closed recently. Pinkberry Gramercy and Pinkberry Columbus Avenue were filled with customers this time last year, but have since gone dark. The chain's once-mighty 177 Bleecker Street location, which had lines out the door, closed without any fanfare in 2012, three years after the Red Mango across the street had done the same.

Then there's the West Village. Chicago chain Forever Yogurt, which was supposed to debut in the hallowed old Bleecker Bob's, has quietly canceled its plans. Perhaps it was put off by the rent, which is rumored to have been between $15,000 and $20,000 a month, a tall order even for a chain that boldly proclaimed it was scouting the Lower East Side, Upper East Side, Upper West Side, and Brooklyn.

In other words, it's bleak out there. Here's what's going on:

New York hit a natural saturation point.
Businesspeople kept opening new shops even as interest waned, and that's because the logistics of opening a fro-yo shop over a traditional restaurant do seem tempting: Locations don't need to be outfitted with full kitchens, employees don't require much training, and food costs are both steadier and lower than at typical restaurants. (Yogurt and toppings cost operators about 25 percent of the price they can sell them for; a restaurant is lucky if its costs are at 30 percent.) In fact, the model is so popular that the USDA says frozen-yogurt mix is among the few dairy categories to actually increase in production compared to levels from the previous year. (But more operators buying yogurt mix doesn't necessarily mean more customers are buying yogurt.)

The shops sell the exact same product, which makes it impossible to stand out.
That yogurt mix is just one reason these shops all feel the same. Hardly anyone makes much of the fact that almost every business uses the same commercial mixes, produced by a company called YoCream, a division of Dannon. But if all these shops look the same, and they all buy the same core ingredient, it becomes increasingly difficult to stand out from the crowd. Shops try to tout the hiring of a "New York City-trained pastry chef," or attempt to make customers think that flavors like "Birthday Cupcake Batter" are somehow substantially different than a competitor's "Yellow Cake Batter" flavor, but it's not enough to get new customers in the door.

Yogurt shops require increasingly expensive real estate.
"I don't know how many more frozen yogurt places we can handle, but every time I think I'm done, you see another one," says Julian Hitchcock, a commercial real estate broker. The big problem is that the yogurt chains operate stores more like a retail business than a traditional restaurant, meaning it's important to them to have prime spaces on stretches with lots of foot traffic (instead of tucked into a former garage in Bushwick, for example). According to Hitchcock, that means they all take "incredibly good, and incredibly expensive spaces," which aren't cheap. "We used to joke about starting a side business that would just be me talking to the frozen yogurt chains as they would inevitably go out of business, because there's just too many." Hitchcock suggests that what's happening now is a natural course correction.

Discounts never look good.
Unsurprisingly, some shops are now offering big sales to compensate for the lack of demand from customers. But at the newest Red Mango location, an ongoing glut of deep discounts — East Village residents and NYU students get 10 percent off by presenting valid I.D.; cups are 20 percent off from noon until 5 p.m.; everything is 25 percent off from 5 to 7 p.m.; etc. — can also affect a sort of anti-charm.

Green juice replaced yogurt as the city's premier no-guilt expenditure.
Tellingly, fro-yo's most adaptive strategy seems to be to try to steal some mojo away from the sector that's done the most to displace its novelty, the green juice business. Red Mango has begun to experiment with kale and drinks with names like "Cool Pineapple Zen," and all new locations will get a juice bar. It doesn't help that juice bars have even begun targeting kids (who might otherwise prefer strawberry-topped fro-yo to a kale smoothie). Last month, the two locations of the fashion-model-friendly Melvin's Juice Box even introduced "Melvin's Junior" menu, consisting of 100 percent organic, made-to-order drinks. The "powerful antioxidants and Vitamin C" in the "Orange Pop," for example, "go under the radar with a citrus kick from oranges and pineapples." No wonder Melvin's will open its second location, in the East Village, next week.

Read more posts by Hugh Merwin

Filed Under: busts, 16 handles, bleecker bob's, forever yogurt, fro-yo, frozen yogurt, pinkberry, red mango