Dzaleznik

Nestled in the midst of Matt Zoller Seitz's video essay on Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is this bombshell: the movie contains a Star Wars reference no one seems to have noticed. Seitz synced the scenes for us:

There have to be others, right? Many of Anderson's films end with all of the characters gathered together like at the medals ceremony in Episode IV...someone even synced up the end of the movie with the closing credits music from Zissou and it works really well:

And of course, there's Conan O'Brien's take on what a Star Wars movie directed by Anderson might look like.

Tags: Matt Zoller Seitz   movies   Star Wars   The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou   video   Wes Anderson

PolicyMic: "The new Texas law requires all voters to provide a photo ID that reflects their current name. If they cannot, voters must provide any of a series of other acceptable forms of identification all of which must match exactly and match the name on their birth certificate."

"Supporters of these new laws insist that requiring voters to have an ID that matches their birth certificate is a reasonable requirement. As Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott has repeatedly said, 'Almost every single person either has a valid photo ID ... or it is very easy to get one.' What they don't say, however, is that the people who don't are largely married women who have taken their husband's name."

"In fact, only 66% of women have an ID that reflects their current name. If any voter is using name different than what appears on their birth certificate, the voter is required to show proof of name change by providing an original or certified copy of their marriage license, divorce decree, or court ordered name change. Photocopies aren't accepted."

STERLING, Va.—Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, who rose to national fame as a legal crusader against Obamacare and the EPA, swung through his old home base today with four fellow attorneys general giving testimony. Those who had worked closely with Cuccinelli recalled the wise counsel he'd given. West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, who last year became his state's first Republican AG since the Hoover administration, credited Cuccinelli for helping elect him.*

"When you need to attribute the sins of the shutdown, don’t look over here," said Morrisey.* "Look somewhere else."

Cuccinelli's campaign is fretting about this. The candidate was losing before the shutdown, but he's shed a few more points in polls taken since it started. Before the rally, one voter I talked to could recite quotes from a Washington Post piece he'd just read, about voters blaming the GOP for the shutdown. After the rally, reporters used half the alotted Q&A time to pin down Cuccinelli about this.

"Are you concerned about the blowback to Republicans?" asked a reporter from NBC News.

"I always worry about things like that," said Cuccinelli, "but in my race, when it comes to running for governor … my opponent was saying he wouldn't sign a budget unless he got his Obamacare Medicaid expansion."

After a question about Kathleen Sebelius—why was Cuccinelli saying he wasn't getting involved in national politics, then making that demand?—another reporter went back to the shutdown.

"Last week, Larry Sabato called you the first casualty of the shutdown," she said.

"All I can do is be concerned and go forward," said Cuccinelli. "My role isn't to address any of that directly. I wasn't involved in that. It happened across the river from us. The real question, again, was whether 'someone running for governor in Virginia is willing to do the same' "—someone like McAuliffe.

So another reporter jumped in. "Polls show that anybody with 'GOP' after their name is affected by the shutdown."

"Three of you now have asked if I'm worried," said Cuccinelli. "I worry about everything. We have definite examples from me in 2006, where I passed a plan to get out of the problem, and 2013, where Terry McAuliffe said, 'Let me be crystal clear,' he will not sign a budget without the Medicaid expansion."

When Cuccinelli was finished with his third version of the answer, Anna Nix, Cuccinelli's spokesman, gave the reporters a free tip.

"Can we have one more NEW question?"

*Morrisey, a New Yorker by birth, moved to West Virginia in 2006 when he was working as a lawyer in Washington. Nothing wrong with that, but it made for a weird contrast when another speaker blasted Democratic nominee for governor Terry McAuliffe for not being a real Virginian. McAuliffe moved to this state in the '80s to become a D.C. political hack.

*Correction, Oct. 21, 2013: This post originally misspelled West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey's last name.

By John Tierney

There are lots of familiar American “college towns” – places where a single university dominates the social and economic life of the city. Think Boulder, Ann Arbor, Madison, Berkeley, Princeton, Charlottesville.

None of those college towns has quite the feel of Burlington, Vermont. 

Part of the difference is that, somewhat unusually for a small town, there’s not just one dominant institution here. The immediate Burlington area has several colleges (the University of Vermont, St. Michael’s College, and Champlain College), each of them significant in the character of the city, and each offering glimpses into the disparate challenges facing American colleges and universities. I’ll save Champlain for a future post and focus here on UVM and St. Mike’s.

Why not just UV? Or UVT? UVM is an abbreviation of the university’s Latin name, Universitas Veridis Montis, University of the Green Mountains. And if you’ve ever seen the Green Mountains – or watched the sun set over Lake Champlain with the Adirondack Mountains beyond – you know why Vermonters want to keep that homage to their verdant hills.

Founded in 1791 as a private institution, UVM became the state land grant university in 1865. To graduating high-school students and their families, searching the collegiate landscape for the right landing spot, UVM (roughly 13,000 students total) has been known as one of the “public Ivies,” public universities that are said to provide an Ivy League collegiate experience at a public-school price.  Other public Ivies include: the University of Michigan, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Virginia, the College of William and Mary, and the University of Texas at Austin.

[Photo at top: Old Mill, UVM's oldest building, from the 1800s. Below, Waterman building at UVM. All photos by John Tierney.]

As Jim Fallows has noted earlier, Burlington is unusual in supporting a profitable print newspaper, a non-harassing airport, and a software-company culture you might expect to find in Palo Alto or Seattle rather than Vermont. UVM’s presence among the public Ivies raises a similar question. How can a state with a population of some 600,000, and with no natural-resources revenue base, support an institution that competes with schools in much bigger, richer states?

Much of the answer seems to lie in differential pricing. Back in 1955 the state legislature revised the university’s charter and passed a measure requiring that the university always charge out-of-state students at least 250 percent of the in-state fee. In other words, from a relatively early time, Vermont has been following a practice that other state universities latched onto only much later – putting the lion’s share of the financing for the university on the shoulders of out-of-state students. Only about 6.5 percent of the University’s roughly $617-million budget in 2013 comes from state appropriations. But the $35,000 tuition (and estimated $50,000 total annual expenses) for out-of-state students seems not to be a deterrent: approximately 65 percent of the university’s students come from other states or countries.

UVM also attracts students from around the country who want to compete at the top level in various sports. Not surprisingly, given its locale, the university is especially appealing to world-class skiers: UVM has won the national championship in skiing six times since 1980, most recently in 2012. [Below, UVM's Morrill Hall, home to the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences.]

To many who know the university, it’s not the competitive athletes who come to mind when they think of UVM, but another segment of the student population, one that gives rise to lots of jokes about the university – granola-crunching, tree huggers. There’s an intensely outdoorsy, locavore culture that pervades this small city and finds expression at the university.

For example, UVM is one of only a small handful of American colleges and universities to sign onto the Real Food Challenge, a nationwide effort to shift university food budgets away from industrial farms and junk food and toward what food activists call “real food” – “local/community-based, fair, ecologically sound and humane food sources.” The pledge commits UVM to make sure its food budget is at least 20 percent real food by 2020. An ambitious goal that will be harder to reach than one might think – and that fewer than twenty colleges and universities (a real “Who’s Who” of ecologically-minded institutions) have signed onto.

---

Only a couple miles from UVM, over in nearby Colchester, is St. Michael’s College, which doesn’t have the national profile of UVM, but is very successful in its own niche: it’s a fine Catholic liberal-arts college with about 2000 undergraduates. Founded by Edmundite priests in 1904, St. Michael’s has a welcoming, ecumenical tone that harmonizes to the humanist tenor of the Burlington metropolitan area. If you walk around this campus and talk to its students and faculty, as I did, you get the sense that this attractive, congenial community is serious about trying to offer its students what it calls a “transformational experience.” [Below, campus green at St. Michael's College.]

What surprised me as I explored St Mike’s was how prosperous the place seemed. The grounds were immaculately groomed, the buildings well maintained. To all outward appearances, I might as well have been walking around Middlebury or Wesleyan or any of a dozen other thriving New England liberal-arts colleges. 

I tried to square what I was seeing with what I knew: St. Michael’s is one of the many hundreds – actually, thousands – of American colleges that struggle for long-term survival. St. Mike’s is always sweating it. The college’s finances are tuition-driven (it has a tiny endowment), so it has to worry about the perfect-storm confluence of (1) rising tuition, (2) rising concerns among the public about whether a college education will “pay off,” and (3) a declining number of college-age students in New England, the region from which the college principally draws. [Below, McCarthy Arts Center at SMC.]

But students keep coming. Why? The college says they’re attracted by several things: the strong social-justice ethos at SMC and a multi-faceted program of volunteerism, which gets participation from more than 70 percent (!) of the college’s students; its longstanding and wildly successful NOLS-like wilderness training and leadership program; and a Fire and Rescue Squad, which, with its own vehicles and building (photo below), has become the rescue squad of choice for the neighboring community of Colchester and much of Chittenden County.

Moreover, the college’s Catholic heritage, while taken seriously, does not overwhelm the place. A spirit of religiosity is less dominant than the ethos of the Edmundite order, which emphasizes caring, outreach, and service to the poor. It’s a mission that seems to animate the students at St. Mike’s, propelling them out into the needy communities of the Burlington area.

All told, thousands of students from the Burlington area colleges are heavily involved in volunteer activities and community service, working with immigrant refugees, struggling elementary schools, community gardens, Boys and Girls clubs, homeless shelters, soup kitchens, and the like.

---

There’s an intriguing chicken-or-egg kind of question that emerges when you look closely at Burlington and its colleges: is the distinctive character of this small city a consequence of the college’s presence and contributions, or is there something intrinsic and native to the city and its residents (an earthy, Bohemian temperament?) that imparts to the colleges their special flavor? People smarter than I might be able to answer that. I can’t. But even I can see that there is a remarkable symbiosis that enriches the city and its colleges and infuses both with a strong sense of community (about which Jim will be writing more soon). The dominant values of the townsfolk give the colleges a special vibe that gets magnified on campus and then shot back out through the larger community in various ways.

Katie Baker notes that a prominent member of the pickup artist community has written a book about why Denmark is a bad place for pickup gurus to find women. Turns out that the Nordic country's "excellent social welfare services" also function as an effective douchebag repellant.

Fans of the travel writer will be disappointed that "pussy literally goes into hibernation" in this "mostly pacifist nanny state," where the social programs rank among the best in the world. Roosh's initial admiration for those resources is almost charming, if you're able to momentarily forget that this is a man who considers devirginizing teenagers a sport.

"A Danish person has no idea what it feels like to not have medical care or free access to university education," an awed Roosh reports. "They have no fear of becoming homeless or permanently jobless. The government's soothing hand will catch everyone as they fall. To an American like myself, brainwashed to believe that you need to earn things like basic health care or education by working your ass off, it was quite a shock."

Shock turns into disbelief and then rage when Roosh is rejected by heaps of "the most unfeminine and androgynous robotic women" he's ever met. "Not a feminine drop of blood courses through their veins," Roosh rants. He concludes that the typical fetching Nordic lady doesn't need a man "because the government will take care of her and her cats, whether she is successful at dating or not."

He's not wrong. Several of Denmark's social services are intended to reduce gender inequality by supporting women, a sort of state feminism that he can't accept.

Tags: Denmark   Katie Baker

Normally when you see Kate Upton in an ad you expect to see a kind of basic "sex sells" marketing. But in this case the people behind Hot Pockets seem to be going for something else. What starts as an Upton ad quickly becomes a Snoop Dogg* enterprise with a heavy focus on his baking skills. The moral? Eat these snacks when you're high.

I'll admit that I've never tried Hot Pockets in a psychically altered state. They may be more palatable that way. The ad is kind of fantastic, one way or the other.

Correction, Oct. 10, 2013: This post previously misspelled Snoop Dogg's last name.

There's a story about NASA's incredibly expensive space pen and Russia's simpler solution that gets trotted out every time some large organization introduces some complex, bloated, over-engineered product or process. The story goes like this:

During the space race back in the 1960's, NASA was faced with a major problem. The astronaut needed a pen that would write in the vacuum of space. NASA went to work. At a cost of $1.5 million they developed the "Astronaut Pen". Some of you may remember. It enjoyed minor success on the commercial market.

The Russians were faced with the same dilemma.

They used a pencil.

Fantastic story, right? Except that's not what happened. NASA originally used pencils in space but pencils tend to give off things that float in zero-g (broken leads, graphite dust, shavings) and are flammable. So they looked for another solution. Independent of NASA, the Fisher Pen Company began development of a pen that could be used under extreme conditions:

Paul C. Fisher and his company, the Fisher Pen Company, reportedly invested $1 million to create what is now commonly known as the space pen. None of this investment money came from NASA's coffers -- the agency only became involved after the pen was dreamed into existence. In 1965 Fisher patented a pen that could write upside-down, in frigid or roasting conditions (down to minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit or up to 400 degrees F), and even underwater or in other liquids. If too hot, though, the ink turned green instead of its normal blue.

After testing, NASA ordered 400 Fisher pens for use on space missions at a cost of under $1000. Russia switched to using the pens a year later. Fisher still sells the original Space Pen and you can get it on Amazon for about $32.

Tags: NASA

Photographer Edward Burtynsky's latest project is called Water.

While trying to accommodate the growing needs of an expanding, and very thirsty civilization, we are reshaping the Earth in colossal ways. In this new and powerful role over the planet, we are also capable of engineering our own demise. We have to learn to think more long-term about the consequences of what we are doing, while we are doing it. My hope is that these pictures will stimulate a process of thinking about something essential to our survival; something we often take for granted -- until it's gone.

Water is on display this month in NYC at Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery and Howard Greenberg Gallery and in London at Flowers Gallery. There is also a book and an upcoming feature-length film:

(via pdn)

Tags: Edward Burtynsky   photography

"I think, personally, it would bring stability to the world markets."

-- Rep. Ted Yoho (R-FL), quoted by the Washington Post, on breaching the debt ceiling.

Apple picking season is here, which for me means that I'll end up with way, way, way more apples than I need because who can resist filling up those bags when you're dragging that wagon around the pick-you-own orchards and you're finally tall enough to reach all the good apples that are above kid-picking level?

Here's how to host yourself an all-apple meal.

Salad: Arugula, Apple, and Pomegranate Salad with Cider-Honey Vinaigrette

[Photograph: Jennifer Olvera]

Let's start things off simple with a three ingredient salad: crisp apples, peppery arugula leaves, crunchy almonds, and sweet-tart pomegranate seeds. Four ingredients. Crisp apples, arugula leaves, crunchy almonds, sweet-tart pomegranate seeds, and goat cheese. Five. Just five ingredients. Crisp apples, arugula leaves, almonds, pomegranate seeds, goat cheese, and a honey-cider dressing...dammit. You get the picture. It's a great salad with a mix of flavors, super easy prep, and only six ingredients. You're only seven ingredients away from a perfect fall salad that only takes eight ingredients to make. Let's just say not very many ingredients and call it a day.

Get the recipe for Arugula, Apple, and Pomegranate Salad with Cider-Honey Vinaigrette »

Main Course: Apple-Cranberry-Stuffed Pork Loin

[Photograph: Josh Bousel]

Apples and pork go hand in hand like cold beers and hot showers. They were made for each other, the sweet apple bringing out the natural sweetness of the pork. In this recipe, apples and cranberries get rolled inside a pork loin before being grilled for a bit of extra smokiness. Don't want to fire up the grill in October? Don't worry, it'll work just fine in the oven as well.

Get the recipe forApple-Cranberry-Stuffed Pork Loin »

Side Dish: Braised Red Cabbage and Apples

[Photograph: Carrie Vasios]

If apples are the Robin to pork's Batman, then cabbage is their Batmobile. Exciting yet dependable with a few tricks up its sleeves, and the perfect vehicle for delivering your pork and apples to wherever they may be in need (namely, your mouth). Braise the cabbage down with a bit of acid and some sweet-tart apples and you've got yourself a little sauerkraut substitute that comes together in a flash.

Get the recipe for Braised Red Cabbage and Apples »

Dessert: Apple Cider Doughnut Cake

[Photograph: Maria Del Mar Sacasa]

Apple cider doughnuts—those miniature, cinnamon and sugar-coated specimens that every orchard in New England starts selling come apple harvest season—are cake doughnuts, so it was only a small leap of logic to convert them into doughnut cakes. With actual pieces of apple along with apple cider in the batter, our baked version is actually more apple-y than the deep fried original. The only downside is that you don't get to watch the automated robotic doughnut frying machine make ours. You'll just have to find other ways to entertain yourself before dessert instead.

Get the recipe for Apple Cider Doughnut Cake »

About the author: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt is the Chief Creative Officer of Serious Eats where he likes to explore the science of home cooking in his weekly column The Food Lab. You can follow him at @thefoodlab on Twitter, or at The Food Lab on Facebook.

Recipes!

• Apple Cider Doughnut Cake
• Arugula, Apple, and Pomegranate Salad with Cider-Honey Vinaigrette
• Braised Red Cabbage with Apples and Raisins
• Grilling: Pork Loin with Apple-Cranberry Filling

True story. You know who you are…

A horrified friend shares what he found on Google when he searched for a definition of the word "literally."

People: The second definition, still up on the search results page, is not correct. There is a perfectly cromulent word that means "not literally true but feels important"—"figuratively." Of all the crimes one can lay on the doorstep of Vice President Joe Biden, the bowdlerization of "literally" is literally the most egregious. (Which is to say he has not, in fact, committed any worse crimes. I mean, maybe the passage of the bankruptcy reform bill.)

A new Public Policy Polling survey finds that Louisiana Republicans aren't sure whether President Obama or George W. Bush was responsible for the federal government's "poor" response when levees broke after Hurricane Katrina.

Key finding: 29% of Republican primary voters in Louisiana blamed Obama, who took office in 2009, and 28% blamed Bush, whose term lasted through 2008.

Hurricane Katrina hit on Aug. 29, 2005.

Oh hey look, the police commissioner of the largest department in America is profiling. Again:The New York Police Department has secretly labeled entire mosques as terrorist organizations, a designation that allows police to use informants to record sermons and spy on imams, often without specific evidence of criminal wrongdoing. Designating an entire mosque as a terrorism enterprise means that anyone who attends prayer services there is a potential subject of an investigation and fair game for surveillance. Since the 9/11 attacks, the NYPD has opened at least a dozen "terrorism enterprise investigations" into mosques, according to interviews and confidential police documents. The TEI, as it is known, is a police tool intended to help investigate terrorist cells and the like. Many TEIs stretch for years, allowing surveillance to continue even though the NYPD has never criminally charged a mosque or Islamic organization with operating as a terrorism enterprise. The documents show in detail how, in its hunt for terrorists, the NYPD investigated countless innocent New York Muslims and put information about them in secret police files. As a tactic, opening an enterprise investigation on a mosque is so potentially invasive that while the NYPD conducted at least a dozen, the FBI never did one, according to interviews with federal law enforcement officials... The NYPD did not limit its operations to collecting information on those who attended the mosques or led prayers. The department sought also to put people on the boards of New York's Islamic institutions to fill intelligence gaps. One confidential NYPD document shows police wanted to put informants in leadership positions at mosques and other organizations, including the Arab American Association of New York in Brooklyn, a secular social-service organization. That Barack Obama, a politician who pushed Illinois racial profiling bill, ever flirted with a Kelly nomination, is evidence of what happens when take you Serious People, seriously. From my label-mate Conor Friedersdorf:Usually, when I write phrases like, "This is how a secret police force with files on innocent Americans starts," I'm issuing a warning about the future. But the NYPD literally started a secret police unit that began indiscriminately keeping files on innocent Americans. This isn't a warning about a slippery slope. It is an observation about ongoing abuse of civil liberties in America's biggest city. Precisely. This is just who we are, now. Make sure to check out New York magazine's piece on Kelly's outfit. Al-Qaeda greatest victory has been in exposing our meek defense of values we claim to cherish. Shame on Ray Kelly. This is disgraceful.

Coinbox Hero and Cookie Clicker both break the idea of the video game down into the bare essentials: perform an action to get points, use points to power up, repeat. They're games that show you how games work. (See also Cow Clicker.)

In Cookie Clicker, you click to make cookies until you have enough cookies to hire a cursor to click for you and eventually you get enough points to buy cookie mines, time machines, and antimatter condensers capable of generating millions of cookies a second. There doesn't seem to be a goal per se...presumably you can keep upgrading until you're generating trillions of cookies a minute. It's like Bitcoin except with cookies.

In Coinbox Hero, you start similarly, jumping into a Super Mario-esque coinbox to get coins to buy workers to collect more coins for you. Unlike Cookie Clicker, there's a clear objective: earn 1,000,000 points to buy a device that will destroy the coinbox.

I found both of these games very satisfying to play, which suggests that a significant amount of my enjoyment of games derives not from the gameplay but from the amassing wealth and power, which, man, I guess I have something to talk to my therapist about this week. (via waxy)

Tags: video games

VIEW SLIDESHOW: First Look: Tony Maws' Kirkland Tap & Trotter in Somervilla, MA

[Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]

Were you surprised when you heard that Tony Maws, chef/owner of Craigie on Main in Cambridge was planning a second restaurant? I sure was. I mean, he never left the pass. You could walk into Craigie on Main any night of the year and there he'd be, calling out orders and finishing plates. Heck, an entire book on his restaurant came out last year, its overriding thesis being that Tony Maws is the kind of chef who could only ever be tied down to a single location.

But this is the good kind of surprise. With a James Beard award under his belt and more recognition than any chef could hope for, there's not much left that Maws needs to prove. The Kirkland Tap & Trotter, whose doors opened last week on the Somerville/Cambridge border, serves up the kind of food that he'd serve to his family on a lazy sunday afternoon. Grilled meats, fresh vegetables, simple sauces, bold flavors.

Family and friends have always been deeply important to Maws. The original Craigie Street Bistrot was opened on a shoestring budget, with the help of flea markets and friends who were generous with their manual labor. I remember the early days, when Tony's mother Marjorie would serve glasses of sparkling wine at the book- and photograph-strewn front table as we waited for our table. His wife is a constant, smiling fixture at Craigie on Main. You'll catch his toddler-aged son coloring in pictures on the pass on slow nights.

Maws, eating some lamb ribs by the front window.

But for all that, it's tough to say that Craigie on Main is a real, everyday, neighborhood spot when meals push into the hundreds of dollars and scoring a seat takes weeks if not months of planning. The days of "the little neighborhood bistro that could," as Maws used to call it, are long gone. The Kirkland Tap & Trotter aims to bring those ideals back to his repertoire. "No swooshes or dots of sauce on the plates here," says Maws. "We're just doing simple food, but perfectly executed. I want to see families dining here on a Monday night."

Tony is adamant that the Kirkland Tap & Trotter is not just a reincarnation of Craigie. "This isn't Craigie on Main Two," he says. And indeed, if you look at the menu and the plates of food, it'd be hard to tell that they even came from the same chef. "It's funny. At Craigie on Main, we don't allow tongs in the kitchen. Here, you wouldn't be able to cook without them," he says as he flips a swordfish chop searing on the grill.

There are some similar threads running through both restaurants. The focus on local produce and off-cuts of meat. The eclectic beer and wine lists. The extensive-but-not-overbearing use of modern cooking techniques—most meats at both restaurants are cooked through in a CVap steam oven before being finished with more traditional means—the plancha or a skillet at Craigie on Main; an oak and coal-fired grill at Kirkland Tap & Trotter.

The burger

And, of course, the burger. "Craigie's burger is still Craigie's burger," Tony tells me. That particular burger has done him well, named best burger in the city countless times and even gracing the cover of Bon Appetit. "We wanted to do something a little different for Kirkland. We ditched the powdered miso and custom beef blend." Craigie on Main's burger has suet, bone marrow, and dehydrated miso mixed into its three-cut blend of beef. Kirkland's is made with "straight up coarse ground chuck, with a little extra fat mixed in." It makes for a simpler, more familiar bite. "We plan to mix it up with the toppings and pickles," he adds.

The space is large—over 110 seats— and dominated on the left side by a long bar that leads into the open kitchen. Take a look back there and the first thing—maybe the only thing—you'll notice is the massive grill. Two elevated grates are suspended above a pit filled with charcoal and oak embers, the cook lifting them up and down with a pulley system in order to adjust the heat reaching the meat, fish, and vegetables arranged on top. Nearly every meat-based dish on the menu spends some time on that grill, and the aroma of smoke and fire is unavoidable.

The grill

The inspiration here is casual gastropub and grill. There's a grilled half chicken on the menu and a double-cut pork chop. Each night there are a half dozen or so "swordfish chops," cut from the collar of the fish—a nod to David Burke's lauded dish from Fresh, his old TriBeCa spot. There's whole grilled salmon head—you might have seen something similar at New York's Chez Sardine. Maws's comes with three sauces—two Mexican-inspired salsas, and a Vietnamese nước chấm.

Chalkboard specials run every night, and are more than just a couple of additions—they're the main part of the menu. Those used to ordering the "Chef's Whim" at Craigie on Main will be comfortable here. The grilled meats rotate each night, depending on what was available to the kitchen that day.

The swordfish "chop"

The dining room is a mix of high tops surrounding the bars and windows, with small tables and larger communal seating occupying the center of the room. You may well end up bumping elbows (if not sharing meals) with your neighbors here. Walls are bare, and surfaces are wood. It's a crowd-friendly space, and can get noisy—more fun than romantic.

And how was the food? Well, this is a first look and it's too early to say with certainty what it will look like a few months in, but for now, take a peep through the slideshow for a closer look at some of the dishes and the space.

About the author: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt is the Chief Creative Officer of Serious Eats where he likes to explore the science of home cooking in his weekly column The Food Lab. You can follow him at @thefoodlab on Twitter, or at The Food Lab on Facebook.

From Serious Eats: New York

Tacos al pastor. [Photographs: Max Falkowitz]

There are many places to get tacos in the East Village, but few that have a tricked-out mezcal bar that pours from uncommon bottles by the ounce. If you're interested in such a pairing, there's now Sembrado on 13th Street, where Hecho en Dumbo's Danny Mena does a menu of tacos and other snacks. During normal hours, the small tacos are priced closer to Empellon than Tacos Morelos, and the cocktails rest at the now-standard price of $13, but a daily happy hour from 5 to 7 p.m. offers an enticing deal.

Then you can get tequila or mezcal margaritas for eight bucks and tacos al pastor—the house specialty—for a very reasonable $2.50 each; two make a nice snack. The tortillas, made at the restaurant, are great—soft to the point of creamy with strong, fresh currents of corn—and they hold up well to flavorful shavings of pork, which, despite its deeply spiced chili rub, boasts the naturally sweet flavor of pig. You may notice that each taco comes wrapped with just one tortilla. Don't complain before trying—it's a smart move for this size of taco that makes for a more balanced bite.

El Caifan.

The happy hour mezcal margarita special is a good drink; lime tames the spirit's billowing smoke and all the dilution draws out mezcal's own subtle sweetness. But I'm even more partial to the El Caifan ($13), a negroni-like sipper of mezcal Peloton infused with smoky lapsang souchong stirred with Campari and Carpano Antica. It has layers of smoke, resounding bitterness, and delicate notes of citrus and agave, the kind of drink worth savoring as a night cap, but hey, the night's still young.

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

From Serious Eats: New York

VIEW SLIDESHOW: Larb Ubol Brings Serious Isan Thai to 9th Avenue

[Photographs: Max Falkowitz]

By my estimation, Ninth Avenue is home to a couple dozen Thai restaurants between 55th and 30th Streets. And with an exception or two, they're all pretty crummy. But with the arrival of Larb Ubol that might be changing.

Larb Ubol specializes in Isan cuisine, food from the northeast of Thailand along the Laotian border, which is characterized by the incendiary heat of dried chilies and includes a pantheon of spicy chopped meat salads best downed with beer. You won't find any coconut milk curry here, and the pad Thai is an obligatory one. No: you come for fiery som tum and deeply spiced larb, stir fries of pork and whole crispy fish.

If this sounds familiar to some other New York restaurants, it should: the kitchen is run by the talented chef Ratchanee Sumpatboon, most recently of Zabb Elee, and if you've been wondering, like I have, whether Zabb might be slipping in the past few months, Larb Ubol might be the reason why. But that's okay, as even though this new spot is still young, it's already getting a lot right, enough to count it as a leader among the city's growing Isan restaurants.

Pad ped moo krob.

A look inside Larb Ubol reveals an adorably tacky space. A useless empty bar dominates the restaurant's entry (Larb Ubol is presently BYOB); chairs benches are upholstered in mismatched baggy plaid; two of the three dining areas are separated by a vertical white picket fence adorned with fabric sunflowers. If you're lucky, you'll dine to soft rock covers of the Rolling Stones.

But don't judge the place until you've tried a plate of Pad Ped Moo Krob ($11), slices of fried fatty pork jumbled with a fresh red curry sauce and spherical Thai eggplant two ways: quartered for crunch and sliced thin for tenderness. The gentle sweetness tempered by chilies, green peppercorns, and ginger hits in layers, a tongue-searing dish that rewards contemplation.

The top of the menu leans heavily towards salads: those with ground meat, others with larger hunks of grilled meat, and shredded green papaya, many in half a dozen variations. Most fetching of the som tum (papaya) may be the Poo Plara ($10), the fresh-tasting fruit cut with the one-two punch of salt-preserved crab and pickled fish. Funky, briny, and, if you ask insist, hellishly hot, it's as far removed from the sugary papaya salads elsewhere on Ninth that you could hope to find.

Larb pla dook.

The namesake larb at Larb Ubol may not take the city's top honors—it could use the searing heat of Kin Shop's duck, the moody spices you find at Pok Pok, or the interplay between citrus and fat that Chao Thai negotiates so gracefully—but I'd hardly call it disappointing. Both Pla Dook (shredded catfish, $11) and Moo Krob (fried fatty pork, $10) are run through with chilies, lime, and coriander, sprinkled with toasted rice powder, and great with beer. (You'll find a liquor store next door.) The steak-like hunks of beef in the Nuer Nam Tok ($10) have a milder heat, but still a satisfying one.

These are mid-sized portions, either generous appetizers or slight mains, best ordered in groups to sample them all. When you do so, don't be shy about the sticky rice ($3). Larb Ubol's could be more tender, but a small bundle, plucked by hand and dragged through sour, spicy larb remains, is the best way to get the most out of your order. The small plates here encourage sharing rather than hinder it.

But there's still work to be done in the kitchen. Marinated and grilled pork jowl ($11) is more crunchy and cartilaginous than succulent, and Kai Yang ($9), a classic northern Thai dish of mild grilled chicken with a pungent, sour dipping sauce, comes out tough and bland. I admire that Sumpatboon is making her own Sai Krog Isan ($7), but the sausage needs more sourness and fermentation; as of now it comes across as just hammy. And though I quite like the Kai Jiaw ($8), a tender fried omelet dotted by ground pork, pickled garlic, or daikon, its deflated, wrinkled countenance shows how crackly its crust could have been. If you order it (and I think you should), pony up another two bucks to get a mix of ground pork and pickled garlic as your filling—they do well with each other.

Duck pad ped.

Elsewhere on the menu you'll find larger mains like eight-piece duck and a whole fried red snapper. That Duck Pad Ped ($11) is one of the best value ducks I've seen in some time—the brown sauce is several shades less sweet than the cloying New York Thai standard, the notes of basil forceful, the skin still crisp beneath its shellack of glaze. You've paid more money for tougher duck; get this one instead.

And then there's that snapper, Pla Rard Prik ($20), steamed beneath its greaseless crust and just as loaded with aromatic basil. You could try to be polite and cut it into serving portions, but you're best off picking it apart by hand, feeling for bones as you go, the way fried fish should be eaten. In a lesser Thai restaurant these sweet sauces would overwhelm; here they're tight and complex, careful complements to fish and duck.

Pla rard prik.

There is also dessert, but the selections are meager: ice cream, which can be served fried if you long for the mall dessert of your youth, or a coarsely shaved ice loaded with bubblegum-flavored syrup and little else. Skip them and continue to lament the absence of good dessert in this part of New York.

Unlike Zabb Elee, Larb Ubol isn't strictly an Isan restaurant. Stir fried noodle dishes including, yes, pad Thai, are popular lunch specials, perhaps an acknowledgement of the conservative palates a west 30s restaurant must serve. We'll come back for lunch some time, but do yourself a favor and venture out to dishes that sound unfamiliar. Sumpatboon is one of the city's best ambassadors to Thai food, and even if her new restaurant is still working through some kinks, she has something to teach us all.

More photos in the slideshow »

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

Choire Sicha ponders.

But if New York City is better than ever -- and we think it is -- then why does it suck so bad?

The money, yes. And the cupcakes, and the ATMs, and all these apartments that somehow are in clock towers, which are all also just money. Among the young set, it's newcomers' parents paying up at our phantom tollbooth. There is now a class of New Yorkers with the luxury of not just money but also plenty of time. Once you got a crappy coffee at the deli or you didn't get coffee. Now the city is a wonderland of delicious pour-over. Every day is choose-your-own-adventure when you're not dying over the rent. Now there's a substantial population who thinks New York's a lark, or college 2.0, or an indie-lectual Rumspringa, a lazy not so Grand Tour before packing it in to get married in Dallas. Not to pick on the millennials: The olds aren't suffering either. Now a vast number of them pretend to live in the city while gardening at their second homes, in the sweet spread from Germantown to Ghent to Kinderhook. The result: New York has fewer who'd bleed for her. Once the city was for people who craved it with the stridency of a young Madonna. The result was entertainment, friction, mayhem, disaster, creation, magic.

(via @tcarmody)

Tags: Choire Sicha   NYC

Meet Jumpy the dog. This dog can jump higher than you, skateboard better than you, dive better than you, walk on its front paws better than you, surf better than you, catch a Frisbee better than you, do a backflip better than you, and ride a scooter better than you. Jumpy is better than you.

Ok, this dog is a better skateboarder, but Jumpy is still better than him. Jumpy is better than everyone. (thx, dad)

Tags: video

Barney Frank: "House of Cards, the Netflix series, has no stronger relation to political reality than the ratings given by Standard and Poor's to packages of subprime mortgages had to economic truth."

"Having watched several episodes, I agree that it is well acted. My problem is that it might mislead people into thinking that this is the way our political system actually works. It is not."

Public Policy Polling is out with more pretty-much-meaningless 2016 speculation for the media to munch on (only 29 months until the Iowa Caucuses!), so let's dig in. The meatier results: Georgians still oppose gay marriage, but as always there's an age gradient. Hillary leads Sarah Palin, Rand Paul, and Paul Ryan, is deadlocked with Jeb Bush, and slightly trails Chris Christie in favorability. But all that is upstaged by questions asking Georgians how they feel about historical southern icons—you know, William Tecumseh Sherman, Martin Luther King, Jr. ... Honey Boo Boo.

From PPP:

We asked Georgians their opinions about a number of current and historical figures in the state. Martin Luther King Jr. has a 73/15 favorability rating- it's 83/6 with Democrats but just 59/28 with Republicans. Paula Deen remains quite popular in her home state at a 54/21 spread- she's very popular with Republicans at 73/11 but seen positively by a plurality of Democrats at 40/33 as well.

Or, more succinctly:

The full report is up here (PDF) but here are some morsels from the crosstabs. Along with the Deen-King comparison, respondents were asked about the "White Student Union" started by a Georgia State University student. Surprisingly, black and white respondents feel a little differently comparing Deen to the leader of the Civil Rights movement:

Ideology:

Voted for Obama vs. Romney:

What does all this tell us? Sure, there are still a lot of bigots in the south (and everywhere) but there are also people who have a sense of irony and silliness. Posing Paula Deen as a foil for Rev. King is pretty #skewed in its own right, because using human punchlines like Deen and Honey Boo Boo in a poll like this begs smart alecks to express their "favor" for giggles. Do you want to continue seeing stories like this until 2016? Press 1 for yes, 2 for no.

Taco Bell's line of Doritos Locos tacos have been a huge hit, driving big increases in sales with the basic concept of replacing a hard taco shell with a Doritos-flavored shell. But Taco Bell CEO Greg Creed wants the world to know that what it's seen from the partnership is just the beginning.*

"People who love Taco Bell eat a lot of Doritos, and people who eat a lot of Doritos eat at Taco Bell," he tells Mary Avant of QSR magazine. And that seems correct. The article does not specifically note this is a factor driving the demographic overlap, but in my experience, both Doritos and Taco Bell are greatly enjoyed by people who are high on marijuana. In particular, as legal restrictions on pot are loosened, the odds are good that it's going to become very cheap, and people will smoke more of it. A key public health question is whether increased pot consumption will crowd-out alcohol consumption (substitution) or crowd it in (complementarity), but it's clear that the impact on consumption of Doritos and Taco Bell will be positive.

So naturally, Taco Bell is investing resources on additional innovation in this space:

In addition to a yet-to-be-launched spicy Flamas flavor, Creed says, the platform has an extended runway for adding shell flavors and switching up ingredients inside the shell. “At the moment, what we’ve done is introduce these different flavored shells, but the ingredients inside have been the same—ground beef, sour cream, lettuce, tomatoes,” he says. “We’re going to go back now and say, ‘What would make sense within the Taco Bell menu and all of our ingredients to put inside a Nacho Cheese Doritos [taco]? What would make sense within a Cool Ranch Doritos [taco]?”

The other interesting point raised in the article is that in many ways Taco Bell's competition with Chipotle is overstated. Those are both national chains with a "Mexican" concept, but the customer base is quite different. According to Avant, the real threat to Taco Bell comes "from regional competitors like Taco Bueno in the Midwest and Taco Cabana on the West Coast." If you ignore the questionable geography of that claim—both chains have the preponderance of their locations in Texas and the westernmost Taco Cabana is in Albuquerque, N.M.—that seems potentially correct. Taco Bueno, in particular, offers a very similar kind of vibe but with somewhat less "this food makes me feel ill" factor. Taco Cabana, by contrast, really stands head and shoulders above the competition in terms of its innovative tortilla machine. I'm not sure why they've been so timid in terms of expanding out of their core region, but I think they're poised to take America by storm.

Correction, Aug. 5, 2013: This post originally misspelled Taco Bell CEO Greg Creed's first name.

Doug knows a movie producer who recently got Glass and said, 'This is as close as I'll ever get to being a rock star.' When the velvet-rope hostess at the of-the-moment Wythe Hotel bar in Williamsburg stops to take a photo of me with her iPhone, I know exactly what the producer meant. This is the most I will ever be loved by strangers.

Author Gary Shteyngart spends some time wearing Google Glass and shares the experience (as only he can) in The New Yorker: Confessions of a Google Glass Explorer:

I hear that in San Francisco the term 'Glassholes' is already current, but in New York I am a conquering hero.

Tags: Gary Shteyngart   Google Glass

A new Quinnipiac poll finds Anthony Weiner drops to fourth place among likely Democratic primary voters in the race for New York City mayor with likely Voters saying Weiner should drop out of the race by a 53% to 40% margin.

Christine Quinn leads the pack with 27%, followed by Bill de Blasio at 21%, Bill Thompson at 20%, Weiner 16% and John Liu at 6%.

Said pollster Maurice Carroll: "With six weeks to go, anything can happen, but it looks like former Congressman Anthony Weiner may have sexted himself right out of the race for New York City mayor."

Jeffrey Toobin says the Supreme Court may soon strike down campaign finance limits.

"The reason the contribution levels might be in jeopardy rests on the rationale the Justices now demand for all campaign-finance limits. According to Justice Anthony M. Kennedy's opinion in Citizens United, the government's interest in preventing the actuality and appearance of corruption is 'limited to quid pro quo corruption.' Congress can regulate campaign contributions only to stop contributors from demanding, and receiving, quid pro quos. The Court forbids other justifications for contribution limits--like levelling the playing field. Quid pro quos are, of course, very difficult to prove. So unless the government can prove that the limits on aggregate contributions prevent quid-pro-quo corruption (and how, really, can the government do that?), these rules might fall, too."

"Such an outcome is especially likely because the current Court has such an exalted idea of the importance of campaign contributions as a form of individual expression. In other words, money equals speech. The speech of wealthy people is a source of particular, almost poignant concern."

The Whitehorse City Council put out a compelling ad to get you to watch meetings on cable access television.

Back in October, I wrote a post about the race to win the Igor I. Sikorsky Human Powered Helicopter Competition. To win the $250,000 Sikorsky prize, a human-powered helicopter must fly for 60 seconds, reach a momentary altitude of 3 meters, and stay within a 10 meter square. Last month, after 33 years of collective human effort, someone finally won the prize:

Wow, that helicopter is amazing! Popular Mechanics has more on the winning flight.

Reichert knew that the challenge was to keep supplying enough power through his legs to keep the craft from descending too quickly. On two previous flights in which he'd flirted with the three-meter mark, Reichert had descended too abruptly and fallen afoul of a phenomenon called vortex ring state, in which a helicopter essentially gets sucked down by its own downwash. Both times Atlas had been wrecked. This time, Reichert spent the balance of the flight easing the craft down gently to the ground. "You're so focused on having the body do a very precise thing," he told Pop Mech. "If you lay off the power even a little bit, or make any sharp control movement, you can crash."

(via hn)

Tags: flying   video