Authorities in Suffolk County arrested 21-year-old Brittany Ozarowski for grand larceny Wednesday, alleging she methodically raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for unnecessary "cancer treatments" and used the proceeds to buy heroin. More »

RECEPTIONIST: Thank you for calling [redacted] how may I assist you?
SUTTON: Good afternoon, would you be so kind as to let me know what the price might be for the wine pairing on the extended tasting menu offered on Fridays and Saturdays?
RECEPTIONIST: Is this Ryan Sutton?
SUTTON: That's pretty good voice recognition.
RECEPTIONIST: Nah, it's just that you're the only person who would ask a question like that.

The end of sex * The end of power * The end of money * The end of war *

“One could dismiss this proliferation of ‘The End’ as a plea for attention by publishers, magazine editors, authors, bloggers, TED talkers and the rest of the ideas industry — a marketing device signaling little more than the end of imagination,” writes Washington Post Outlook editor Carlos Lozada. (He’s also keeper of the Things We Do Not Say list.)

But it is more than that. “The end of” is also the perfect headline for our age. It fits a moment that fetishizes disruption over stability. It grabs an audience enamored of what is next, not what is here. It suits a public debate in which extreme positions are requisite starting points.

* The end of everything (washingtonpost.com)

More »

1,181 citations were issued for public urination last year in Williamsburg leading all of Manhattan and Brooklyn. Compare that to the 166 in Fort Greene, or the 100 on the Upper East Side and you might want to think twice before letting it fly in the Burg this weekend. Up in Queens however, Elmhurst and Jackson Heights combine for a whopping 3,854 citations. If you love public urination and this Williamsburg news bummed you out, don’t worry you can find your safe zone with this interactive map Gothamist put together that shows citation numbers by precinct:

- @joshmorrissey

Lost in a music archive in the capital of Niger was the first I heard of the legendary Mammane Sanni Abdoulaye. The space was overflowing with dusty CDs, cassettes, and Nagra reels, and hunkering down from the insufferable heat outside, I prepared to spend a long week in research. Mammane’s cassette was the first I pulled from the shelf, and I almost passed over in lieu of something more obscure. But I was captured by the photograph — a black and white picture of a young man with a goatee and a knit cap, posing in front of faux backdrop, hands on what appeared to be an organ. The music proved equally intriguing. The instrumental compositions were simple but dreamy, repetitive but hypnotic. It was esoteric and bizarre, unlike anything I had ever head – the imaginary audio track to an arcade game of desert caravans trek through an pastoral landscape of 8-bit acacias and pixelized sand.

Finding Mammane was surprisingly easy. Immediately after asking about him to the archive director, I had him on the phone. The next day, Mammane arrived. Much older than in the photo, with greying hair and in a pressed shirt and slacks, he had a laugh when I showed him the cassette, and he said it was best if we spent the day talking – he was retired, and didn’t have much to do anyways. Moments later were running through the streets to catch a bus, followed by a taxi, that soon carried us outside of Niamey into the surrounding Sahel of scrubs and brown plains, where Mammane lives today. Inside the tiny house, interrupted intermittently by the persistent crow of a rooster, Mammane told me his story as we listened to his cassettes and paged through books of old photographs.

Mammane is well known throughout Niger, but his synth music was never hugely popular. He came from a privileged place in Niger society – his maternal grandfather was a chief in Ghana, his paternal grandfather a Colonel in the first World War, and Mammane’s father was a librarian for the American Cultural Center. As a young man, Mammane became a functionary for UNESCO, during which he traveled to Japan and Europe. During one of the UNESCO meetings, a delegate from Rwanda had brought along his Italian “Orlo” organ. Mammane was captivated by the sound and convinced him to sell it. “It was possibly the first Organ in Niger,” he explained. He began to compose songs on the organ. Many of these songs were interpretations of Niger folkloric classics. “I wanted to make the Wodaabe songs on the keyboard, make the Tuareg tendé with the rhythm,” he said. Some were his own compositions. Salamatu, one his most popular songs, was created for his girlfriend. He stopped as he came across her photo, how he once lay with his head in her lap, and tears came to his eyes. When she asked him why he was crying, he answered “Because I’ve never been so happy as I am in this moment.” He sits quietly, before I asked what happened to Salamatu, and he smiles before shaking his head and turning the page.

His first and only album was recorded in 1978. Mammane stepped into the studio of the National Radio with his organ, where it was transposed and overdubbed in two takes. In coordination with the Minister of Culture, the album was released in a limited series of cassettes showcasing modern Niger music. The cassette project unfortunately did not progress as planned, and merely a handful were released. Perhaps 100 were made – Mammane is unsure – fabricated in Nigeria. The copy that he owns and the one at the archive are the only ones he knows are left. Nevertheless, for over 30 years, Mammane continued to play. For a short while he even had a television show called “Mammane Sani et son Orgue Électronique” on Niger’s television. He digs out a short clip, a black and white video transfer playing in front of the same backdrop that graces the cover of the cassette. Mammane is hardly esoteric or forgotten in Niger. His music today is known by everyone – it forms much of the repertoire of televised intermissions, radio segue-ways, and background music. And Mammane has continued to update his organs and pianos when they fall apart, benefiting from generous contributions from high society, gifts of presidents and ministers.

I left Mammane’s house in the evening, ducking out of his house to catch transport back into town before the night came. And it was nearly a year later when we started to talk about releasing it on record. Mammane was nonchalant about it, only insisting that the proceeds could be used to upgrade his computer and get a new copy of audio software. But one of his musician friends I recently spoke to in New York was more adamant in his idea of the vinyl release. “He’s been waiting over 30 years,” he said. “It’s about time.”

Grab the vinyl here at the new Sahelsounds shop or Mississippi Records – and of course, the music is available on Bandcamp. Proceeds of the sales will go to Mammane’s new computer and a copy of Reason, so stay tuned for future recordings.

The post Mammane and his Electronic Organ appeared first on sahelsounds.

The Twitterati (and presumably a bevy of bankers) went astir today after a small DC watchdog began systematically leaking millions of financial secrets about offshore companies. Here's why you should care. More »

It's closing time.

First Franny's, now Beer Table: Justin and Tricia Philips send word that they will move their five-year-old Park Slope microbrew haven and restaurant to a brand-new, much larger location to be announced in the coming weeks. Details are scarce for now, but Philips mentions that Beer Table 2.0 will have a full kitchen and more seats. The final day of business for the original is April 27; Beer Table Pantry in Grand Central Terminal will stay open while the crew gets settled. Philips says an as-yet-unnamed restaurateur will take over its old digs and "surely do great things" there. [Earlier]

Read more posts by Hugh Merwin

Filed Under: moving, beer, beer table, justin philips, park slope

The Dakine pizza is an awesome pizza featuring; thinly sliced pineapple, jalapeño, tomato, mozz, ricotta, and prosciutto cotto. EAT IT!!

Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax says it wasn't going for controversy when it decided to use a photo of three smiling men on a billboard meant to promote a campaign honoring remarkable women. More »

Mohamed Karzo – C’est La Vie

Guitar music in Niger is curiously distant from its Malian cousins. Looking at a map of the Sahara and following the roads, it makes sense – though the two countries share a border, the respective capitals (Kidal, Agadez) are often reached via a circuitous route, North via Algeria, or South into the Zirma speaking Niamey. One distinction could be that Nigerien guitar is faster, or that it has as many as four chord changes, or that it sometimes uses an alternate tuning (G-B-D-G-B-E). Another is that each country is informed by a different godfather. While Malian ishumar guitar traces its roots back to Ibrahim from Tinariwen, Nigerien guitar pays homage to Abdallah Ag Oumbadougou.

While I neglect to make it as far North as Agadez, the capital of guitar in Niger, in Niamey I meet with Mohamed Karzo, nephew of Abdallah Ag Oumbadougou. Mohamed is a young guitarist with a group in Agadez. And though one gets the impression there are hundreds of such groups, guitarists are quick to point out when they have their own compositions – a rarity in the folkloric music where even new songs tread sonically very close to older ones, a quality perhaps of a finite number of solos over chord changes. Too dark for photos and without acoustic instruments, his electric guitar is plugged into a pair of speakers fixed in another room. We simply turn up the volume, and Karzo sings one of his songs, followed by, of course, by one of his uncles.

Mohamed Karzo – Tenere (Abdallah Ag Oumbadougou Cover)

The post Niger Guitars Pt. 1 appeared first on sahelsounds.

Netflix just announced that all fifteen new episodes of Arrested Development will premiere on Sunday, May 26, at 12:01 a.m. PST, and you can barely contain yourself, right? But have you noticed that your anticipation is tinged with a little bit of anxiety? Have you figured out yet whether you'll be marathoning all fifteen episodes at once, or do you have a plan to carefully parcel them out (and can you stick to it)? Now that Netflix has upended the usual TV-viewing paradigm, here are the five ways you can consume the new season of Arrested Development, each with its own pros and cons.

You stay up until midnight (or even later in other time zones!) and mainline all of the new episodes until the next morning.
How to Prepare: Be sure to rest up the day before, since you wouldn't want to nod off that night and miss Kristen Wiig's cameo, would you? (At least you won't have to call in sick on Monday, since May 27 is Memorial Day.) And just remember: If you absolutely, positively need to take bathroom breaks or a quick catnap in order to continue … you are a lousy quitter and you should just burn yourself alive.
Drawbacks: You've waited years and years for these new episodes of Arrested Development, and now you're going to watch them bleary-eyed at 4:47 in the morning? This is perhaps not the best way to consume what could be the most important television you watch in your entire life.

You wait until the next morning to begin watching.
How to Prepare: Withdraw from social networking the night before, as the peer pressure to watch these episodes immediately may be too great to withstand. Destroy your television set so that you'll have to wait until Best Buy opens the next morning to get a new one. Leave ominous voice mails about "the final countdown" until your friends and family have no choice but to place you under a 5150 overnight psychiatric hold until the next day ... when you can watch the new episodes well rested and feelin' good!
Drawbacks: It's the Christmas morning conundrum: How do you sleep soundly through the whole night when you know you've got exciting presents to unwrap the next morning? Obviously, the solution is pills.

You throw a party and watch all of the new episodes with friends.
How to Prepare: Since many of the people you know will be consuming episodes at their own pace and thwarting your attempts to discuss the new season in-depth, it's probably better to invite friends over to watch alongside you. Just make sure that your guests have already seen every episode in advance ... do you really want to pause the show to explain what that blue handprint is a callback to?
Drawbacks: What if your friends laugh too much and you miss some of the jokes? What if they laugh too little and you start to wonder whether your friends even get it, really? What if you're about to move on to episode six and then Ashley is like, "Oh, we're really going to watch all of the episodes?" and then she laughs and someone else chuckles just to be polite, and it's like, Ashley, that was EXPLAINED TO YOU on the EVITE, but thanks for POISONING THE MOOD and making everyone question EVERYTHING? Go home. You were only invited because you're dating Ben.

You watch a new episode every week, just like old times.
How to Prepare: You'll need nerves of steel to parcel out Arrested in discrete weekly segments, but there is an upside: You'll get a whole week to turn over each episode in your head, remembering all of the good lines and wondering what comes next. Isn't that a better way to watch than just bingeing your way through the new season in one continuous blur?
Drawbacks: Everyone has that friend who compulsively tweets out his favorite punch lines from New Girl or Parks and Rec, ensuring that once you finally get to those shows on your DVR, you'll see every other zinger coming. Unless you murder or defriend him, get ready for that dude to spoil all of Arrested's best moments weeks in advance.

You just watch whenever you feel like it, over a span of weeks ... even months.
How to Prepare: Are you a monster? How could you? Are you on the right site?
Drawbacks: You're a monster.

Read more posts by Kyle Buchanan

Filed Under: arrested development ,how-tos ,tv ,netflix

Exciting news from Eater today about The Drink owners who have confirmed plans to open a new seafood restaurant in Greenpoint.

A brand new seafood restaurant is slated to open soon in Greenpoint called The Bounty. Nika Carlson, who also operates The Drink in Williamsburg, tells Eater:

We’ll be serving seafood from the North Atlantic region, made with a hint of Southern charm. Our menu will include things like crab cakes, whole grilled fish, a raw bar (oysters, clams, etc), a burger, and eventually, when blue crabs are in season in the Chesapeake,Maryland-style steamed crabs.The head chef is Eric Mann, who previously worked at Craft and Prune, and Roberta’s vet Kevin Ang is also on board as a baker/chef and co-owner. The other partners in this project are Adam Collison, also of The Drink, and Lance Hess, who previously worked for Morgans Hotel Group. The Bounty is slated to open by the end of the month at 131 Greenpoint Ave, just 50 feet away from the G-Train station.

We can hardly wait.

The Dirty Projectors have assembled an eye-catching list of producers for the remix 12″ of “The Socialites.” AlunaGeorge, Faulty DL and Joe Goddard (of Hot Chip) have all contributed their take on the Swing Lo Magellantrack. Goddard’s remix doesn’t disappoint, taking its time stretching out before a loose and satisfying breakdown.

The whole project will be available on May 13 via Domino.

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Read more articles like "Hot Chip’s Joe Goddard remixes Dirty Projectors “The Socialites”" on PMA - Pretty Much Amazing.

Tags: Dirty Projectors, Hot Chip, Joe Goddard

Check out a slideshow of images from opening day at Jumpin’ Jack’s Drive-In in Scotia.

It's no secret that right now, Today is in a tailspin. Once viewed as a cup of Earl Grey in TV form, the show hast lately earned a reputation as a scalding cauldron of poison. The New York Times reports that ratings have dropped about 20 percent since the show took Ann Curry out behind a shed and shot her last June. Unholy god Matt Lauer has become so unpopular—almost overnight—that NBC is reportedly considering replacing him with Anderson Cooper before his rumored $25 million contract expires in 2014. (According to Deadline, Lauer got wind of NBC's plans and phoned Cooper personally to tell him he disapproved of the network's decision, because he is a divabitch.) More »

For a brief period on Sunday, several popular K-pop videos were blocked from international viewers. And, as Billboard reports, devoted fans reacted (as you’d expect) like a bunch of junkies arriving home to discover their stash stolen. In short, they freaked right the fuck out.

The affected videos were from artists represented by the Read More

Our favorite craft beer bar in the city is having a birthday tonite. There will, of course, be lots of great beer to sample. See below:

Brouwerij Lane
78 Greenpoint Ave
(between Franklin St & West St)

He's, like, so awesome and amazing and nice in a misunderstood kind of way.

He will literally ROFL at your jokes.

"Haaaa ha ha! O-M-G, Skyler! Stop! That's so funny! I can't breathe!"

He doesn't want to startle you, so he will actually knock before entering your room.

Yeah, Mr. White! Yeah! Manners!

He will initiate Destiny's Child sing-a-longs with you.

It definitely makes impromptu trips into the deserts of New Mexico A LOT more fun.

He will sprinkle compliments throughout your day.

"Jesse, you rock at sitting in the passenger seat!" *High five*

---

View Entire List ›

According to the South China Morning Post, a two-day city-wide search to find a 21-year-old woman who fell down a drainage hole was abandoned yesterday in Changsha. [ more › ]

By Steven Cook
Gazette Reporter

A Schenectady County Court Judge turned down a request for youthful offender status for a city teen who admitted to torching the former Luigi's restaurant, saying the community needed to know about his actions.

Game Of Thrones makes its triumphant return to HBO on Sunday night, and I am so amped. So, it would seem, is spectral folk singer-songwriter Marissa Nadler, who likes the show’s awesome wordless theme music so much that she recorded her own haunted a capella version of it. Nadler’s take, produced by Hallelujah The Hills member Ryan Walsh, sounds basically nothing like the original, but if you close your eyes, you can still see that CGI map of Westeros unfurling in your head. Hear Nadler’s version below.

Read More...

I’ve yet to meet anybody who used Google’s RSS Reader more, or pushed it harder than I have over the  last eight years. I consult its aggregations on my desktop the first thing in the morning, even before retrieving my four daily newspapers from the curb. Later, like a donkey following a carrot on a stick, I nibble  on my iPhone feed as I walk to the subway. At work, I keep Reader open to follow blogs and news and , to the neglect of my children, it has  been my steady bedtime companion for some time.

So when Google announced last week that it was sending Reader to the software slaughterhouse on July 1, I took to Twitter to object. Knowing that Google was unlikely to give the service a reprieve, the next thing I did was export my Reader settings and shop the alternatives.

One thing I didn’t do was to write a column accusing Google of betraying my trust, as Om Malik, James Fallows, Ezra Klein, Alex Hern of the New Statesman, The Week, and others did. Nor did I vow not to use Google’s new product, an Evernote substitute called Google Keep, ‘lest the company yank the rug out from under me again. I never trusted Google in the first place. I never thought it would support its products forever. As Slate’s Google graveyard attests, the company has routinely created and abruptly killed off software services, often tossing out the minimum viable product and watching to see if it caught on before putting any further effort into developing it.

The old software maxim —  if you’re not paying for it, you’re the product — is true of almost every Google service. Google sells your Gmail activity — as well as your searches of the Web, images, maps, and use of its other services — to advertisers. We, the Google Reader product, weren’t producing much, if anything, in revenue for Google, so the company fired us.

The death sentence Google has dealt Google Reader doesn’t mark the end of RSS aggregation, of course. As long as you’ve exported your Reader settings and imported them to another RSS reader, you’ll still be able to consume your usual feeds. What is lost in the Reader kerfuffle is the easy synchronization of feeds across devices, which is dominated by Google, and which is what made Google Reader so splendid: Your iPhone RSS reader always knew what your desktop RSS reader had added or subtracted from your feed or what you’d already read. But all is not lost. As long as Feedly makes good on its promise to clone the Google Reader API  (and we switch our RSS readers), we should be able to maintain the synchronization miracle. I’m crossing my fingers.

Having survived being sacked by Google, I still don’t think most users have learned the requisite lessons. Try thinking of Reader as a remarkable gift from Google to consumers, as one economist did a few years ago; he wildly guesstimated it was worth $1 billion to users, with their only investment being the time  spent curating their feeds over the years. For Reader users to carp about Google betraying them is like the alcoholic filing a complaint against a bar when it shuts off the free beer. A service run in the cloud, such as Google Reader, requires engineering resources, so who can begrudge Google’s decision to place them elsewhere?

Another lesson learned is that no software is forever, whether it comes advertiser-supported, free, or with a price tag. Anyone who has seen one of their beloved pieces of software decline and vanish from the marketplace — I’m talking about you, XyWrite — knows the heartache of losing a valuable tool. But even beloved operating systems die off and are replaced by better operating systems. (That doesn’t appear to be true at Reuters, where we’re still running Windows XP, an 11-1/2-year-old OS that Microsoft will stop supporting next year.) Google hasn’t put much effort into improving Reader over the years, probably because it never figured out a way to sell a sufficient number of ads against it to justify the development. Instapaper creator Marco Arment, for one, is happy to see Reader die because 1) Google allowed the product to atrophy and 2) Google’s determination to set the price of RSS services at zero to users deterred other companies from entering the market to innovate and create better RSS products.

The death of Google Reader should remind  all of us how vulnerable “free” software services can be to market pressures, a point Kevin Drum also makes in his blog today. Free software served from the cloud can vanish overnight, or its features can be altered (“upgraded” is the term  Drum aptly and sarcastically invokes) without much warning. The same isn’t ordinarily true of software that you install on your own computer, or services that you purchase.

The biggest lesson of the Google Reader rumpus: You get what you paid for.

******

What’s your favorite post-Reader RSS reader? Send your review of it in the form of a love letter to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com. I wish my Twitter feed could still support RSS. Sign up for email notifications of new Shafer columns (and other occasional announcements). Subscribe to this RSS feed for new Shafer columns. Hurrah for RSS!

PHOTO: Coffee cups with Google logos are seen at the new Google office in Toronto, November 13, 2012.    REUTERS/Mark Blinch

I bet this guy makes the worst espresso

When my daughter was born almost two years ago, I started working part-time, and more flexibly. It was easy enough to give up my online editing job in favor of the kinds of projects that could be completed on my own schedule, and I’d wanted to make the jump from editor to writer for a while. Plus, the thought of juggling a full workweek and a new baby—all while my husband routinely worked 60-plus hours a week—just made me want to take a really long nap.

Bread gets knocked down. But it gets up again.

"I'm trying to cut back or avoid gluten in my diet," is something we hear far too often these days, and it's usually met with an eye-roll. While some people (one in 133) do in fact suffer from celiac disease, many are just convinced that gluten's what's making them fat. Or tired. Or cranky. Or all of the above. Since 2009, the NPD Group has surveyed people to see if they're anti-gluten. The market research firm's new survey charted the highest level of gluten-phobic folks the company's ever seen: 29 percent said they're aiming to cut gluten out of their diets. What makes this problematic is that it's costing Americans billions of dollars; gluten-free products are hella expensive — a 242 percent increase! It's neither easy nor cheap to achieve the texture of a muffin without wheat (and usually not satisfying, either). Last year, the gluten-free market was $4.2 billion, and researchers say that by 2017, it could increase to $6.6 billion. Cutting gluten can certainly make some people feel better, but if there's a placebo effect in action, the cost is far greater than the perceived benefit. [Time]

Read more posts by Sierra Tishgart

Filed Under: health, diet, gluten, gluten-free, nutrition

Sounds like a good policy to us:

Though Williamsburg beer halls welcome kids — and parents in need of a drink after a hard day of calming tantrums and navigating city streets with strollers — they’re setting strict curfews on the way-underage set. The no-kids-after-8 p.m. policies are designed to help keep evening drinking sane for adults who don’t want to feel they’re imbibing in a preschool.

“Radegast and Spritzenhaus have curfews for the babies,” said neighborhood mom Courtney Brett. “It’s great for all of us, because what baby is going to stay up past 8 p.m.?” [...]

Yael Eisele, who often takes her 5-year-old son and 2-year-old daughter to Spritzenhaus on afternoons because “it’s pretty empty, there are big benches and there are always kids there,” said she’d faced resistance from some single bar-goers who claimed her kids were out of place.

“Someone at Spritzenhaus once said to me, ‘I don’t drink my beer in the playground,’” recalled Eisele.

“People go out and relax, and I get it, not everybody wants to have kids around, especially if [the kids] are going crazy.”