V.w.verweij

But only slightly. [ more › ]

by John Herrman

"Liberal legislators are holding up Gov. Cuomo’s nomination of an 83-year-old conservative to CUNY’s Board of Trustees because he once called Lady Gaga a "slut.'" —The Post enters the performative period of its decline.

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The post Dispute Framed appeared first on The Awl.

by Dan Nosowitz

When someone says salad, your first thought is probably a bunch of leaves, like lettuce or spinach or kale, plus some other stuff, and a dressing. Here’s the thing about the word “salad”: it means nothing. It doesn’t mean something cold; it doesn’t mean something raw; it doesn’t mean something with lots of different ingredients; it doesn’t mean something vegetable-based; and it CERTAINLY doesn’t mean a pile of leaves.

Leaves, even the stronger-tasting ones, are filler. No one has ever once thought, “Dang, this salad is good, but it’d be more good with more lettuce in it.” This idea of a leafy salad is perpetuated by make-your-own-salad joints that ask you to pick which kind of leaves you want. Do you want the spinach? How about the baby spring mix? Have you ever said “no leaves, thanks?” THIS WILL FLUMMOX MOST SALAD-MAKERS.

But there are a lot of reasons to ban leaves from salads! They go bad quickly, forcing you to consistently throw out half of each bag of salad greens you buy; they wilt even once they’re in the salad; they cannot be kept as leftovers, ever, since they rapidly turn into slimy organic compost. Also, making your salad consist of anywhere from thirty to sixty per cent leaves really limits your creativity. So let us forgo leaves. Let us not require our salads to rely on our least-favorite ingredient. Let us shape our own salad destiny.

Here are some good leaf-free summer salads.

1. Some version of a som tam salad.
Som tam is a Thai salad consisting of green, unripe papaya as its base. Other essential ingredients include peanuts and a lime/fish sauce dressing. Here is a good recipe. But it, like all salad recipes, is flexible. If you can’t find green papaya (I usually cannot!), you can substitute pretty much anything that’s crunchy and mild. Cucumber, zucchini, summer squash, sugar snap peas, and green beans all work very well when raw or very lightly cooked. You can substitute brown sugar for palm sugar, sambal oelek for fresh chili, and omit the dried shrimp if you can’t find any. The dressing—savory from the fish sauce, tart from the lime juice, sweet from the sugar, and spicy from the chili—is PERFECT. It can be hard to go back to vinaigrettes after you’ve made it. Note: this can also be done as a stir-fry (AKA “hot salad”): stir-fry some garlic, ginger, scallions, and chili in the bottom of a wok, add peanuts, then add in whatever (non-cucumber/mango) vegetable you’re using. Top with the same dressing.

2. Israeli salad
Israeli salad can and should only be made in the summertime, when you can get good tomatoes. Do not make this with bad tomatoes! If you do you’ll eat it and be like “IDK that was fine, I guess.” At its core, it is very simple: chopped tomato, cucumber, red onion, and parsley, with lemon juice and olive oil. But you can add lots of things to it: chickpeas for protein or feta cheese for salt and creaminess or bits of toasted pita chips for more crunch are both very good. This recipe recommends adding sumac. I’ve never done that, but sumac is good as heck; maybe I’ll try it and maybe you should too.

3. Non-leaf Caesar salad
Caesar salad is, like, really delicious, if it’s done right. That anchovy-mustardy-lemony dressing is pretty amazing. So don’t ruin it by dumping it on some dumb Romaine lettuce that can never really appreciate its charms. Caesars are great with pretty much any raw vegetable, but right now is asparagus season, so let’s do that! Here’s a good recipe.

4. Potato salad
I like the supermarket jugs of near-mashed mayo-y picnic salads as much as anyone, and I appreciate that potato salad has no leaves, but I think—as with coleslaw—that a vinegar-based dressing makes for a better, more refreshing, less-likely-to-make-you-feel-like-you’re-gonna-ralph salad than mayonnaise. Mark Bittman has a good recipe for a potato salad with a mustard vinaigrette, which I have tried and which is excellent. This salad is also good with pickled red onion/shallot.

5. Celeriac remoulade
This is a Jurassic-era French recipe, the kind of thing Julia Child would make and that I feel like you’d have a hard time finding in Paris today. I first had it in Montreal, where they still serve a lot of these old-ass uncool French dishes, and MAN IT IS DELICIOUS. Celeriac, or celery root, is the, um, root of the celery plant. It looks like a dumb idiot gnarled cancerous root system, but if you cut away all that nonsense and peel it, it turns out to be this fragrant delicious root vegetable that’s reminiscent of, but not quite like, celery. Celeriac remoulade calls for raw, grated celeriac, plus a very sour mayonnaise (the sourness coming from mustard and lemon juice). It’s kind of like French coleslaw! Here’s a good recipe.

6. Fruit salad
I LOVE FRUIT SALAD. Never ever buy a fruit salad. Always make your own fruit salad. If you make your own fruit salad, you will never again eat cantaloupe or honeydew with the flavor and texture of a raw Idaho potato. You are garbage, prepackaged fruit salad melon! Get in the garbage! Anyway, the key to fruit salad is to not be lazy. Don’t put a segment of orange or grapefruit in there with the pith or skin still on it. Supreme your citrus. Do not put whole strawberries in there; trim and slice them. Fruit salad should have a dressing, and it should have fresh herbs, like chopped-up basil and/or mint. Always. It’s also good to squeeze a little bit of lime juice and maybe some honey over the top to add some extra kick. As for ingredients, I don’t care, add literally whatever you want, but try to have a variety of flavors and textures. If you have something sweet and soft, like a banana, try to add something crunchy and tart, like a Granny Smith apple. Also, avocado is a fruit. Add it to fruit salad! Especially if you have grapefruit in there too.

7. Chana chaat
Chana chaat is an Indian chickpea salad, although I don’t think they refer to it as a salad? it seems like a salad to me. Anyway, chana chaat is basically chickpeas with a dressing, often with tamarind. This recipe is pretty good, although obviously you can use canned chickpeas and cumin powder (instead of toasting and grinding whole cumin seeds). Sure, it’d be better if you made your own chaat masala spice blend with whole spices and sure it’d be better if you used asafoetida (a spice which smells like actual poop), but, like, you don’t need to. Mostly this salad is about the chickpeas and the tamarind dressing, which is spicy and sour and sweet all at once. (Tamarind paste can be found in Indian and Mexican markets or Whole Foods, obvs.) I’d recommend adding a few things to this recipe (not leaves!), like sliced radish or cucumber or carrot or cauliflower for some crunch, and maybe some boiled potatoes because potatoes are good.

Armed with these recipes you can go forth and ENJOY your salad, rather than just eating it because it’s salad and you’re supposed to eat it to look thin and beautiful even though it looks and tastes like something you raked up. Eat good salads! Leave Leaves Behind!

Dan Nosowitz is a freelance writer/editor who lives in Brooklyn. He has serious opinions about the MTV Real World/Road Rules Challenge.

Photos by Dwight Sipler, Young Sok Yun, Lynn Gardner, Jacqueline, tracy benjamin, Daniel, madlyinlovewithlife, and Garrett Ziegler, respectively, via Flickr Creative Commons

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The post How to Make a Good Salad Without Dumb Leaves appeared first on The Awl.

by Matthew J.X. Malady

People drop things on the Internet and run all the time. So we have to ask. In this edition, PolicyMic writer Jared Keller tells us more about adults who like to spend time playing "Magic: The Gathering."

Two grown ass men playing Magic in Herald Sq pic.twitter.com/2klxhwB0eM

— Jared Keller (@jaredbkeller) May 16, 2014

Jared! So what happened here?

I just started a new job a few blocks off Herald Square, and while strolling to catch the 1 downtown, I spotted two gentleman engaged in a highly intense game of "Magic: The Gathering" in a near-empty Subway. It was a sort of depressing scene, the kind of thing you’d maybe find if you Googled “geeks”: two guys of stocky, even portly build, with beards that looked like something a blind bird built, wrapped up in a fictional world, oblivious to the thousands of opportunities for social interaction swirling around them. It sort of reminds me of the time a friend spotted Jonah Lehrer buying bulk packages of frozen chicken at a Whole Foods a few days after his plagiarism scandal broke: a single snapshot of a sad, lonely life.

I kid: Plenty or normal, well-adjusted people play Magic (although maybe not in the middle of Herald Square on a warm Friday evening). I even know some of them.

Am I completely out of it for not knowing that adult-aged human beings are still playing "Magic: The Gathering" in New York City and elsewhere on planet Earth?

Maybe! I’m kidding, sort of, in my description above. I have close friends who are highly functional, wonderful people with excellent social skills who are also intensely good at Magic. They just don’t normally play in public because then they’d end up in tweets by jerks like me. But damn they’re good at it.

I’ll admit that I have a Magic deck, left over from my years working at a summer camp. I worked with 9-12 year olds and used to get stuck with a lot of, um, “indoor kids.” (This is likely because I lack hand-eye coordination, and ball-throwing and sport-catching are tricky.) Magic was a great way to get them focusing on something that wasn’t my face, so I could engage them in conversation and check up on them and make sure they were having a good time. (There’s some scientific research that shows people are more forthcoming in conversation when they’re not looking at each other, which is why baseball games and movies are great for first dates or parent-child bonding.) And, to be honest, I relished those games. Magic saved me as a young kid, gave me something to do that was social and engaging that I was good at, and gave me a safe place to hone my social skills so I could survive through middle school. I stopped playing in high school (girls and drinking got in the way), but it was a significant part of my life. I was (well, I work in media, so I guess I still am) a big fat geek, and Magic will remain part of who I am.

But it ain’t just for geeks! Or, at least, for overt, neck-beardy, fedora-wearing geeks. My close friend Kyle was an all-star soccer player in college, built like a brick shithouse and a total dreamboat with the ladies, but give him a Magic deck and he would dismantle people left and right. Everyone’s entitled to their guilty pleasures, and Magic is one of them for many people. Then again, those people may have been geeks like me back in the day. Some of them grow up and stay geeks, and some of them grow up and become super normal but have retained their geeky impulses, a leftover keepsake from their childhoods (ask me about the Justice Society of America sometime). But geeks are super cool now, right?

Then again, busting out your Magic cards depends on circumstances. I’m happy to play, maybe once, for old times sake, with a few friends so we can sate our nerd impulses and bro out on bourbon and mana. But it’s just not appropriate sometimes, like the time we picked my buddy up for Kyle’s bachelor party in Maine and he brought a giant, custom-made wooden cube with something like 1,500 Magic cards for building custom decks. We were going to spend all weekend drinking and disturbing the peace, so I don’t think that a 4/4 trample was an appropriate party accessory (although we also dropped $250 on plastic superhero masks, so maybe that’s debatable).

Lesson learned (if any)?

Let people do what they like. If they want to play Magic, let them play Magic, unless it’s distracting them from more age-appropriate things like paying a mortgage, getting a job, or having children. It’s just like a video game on cardstock anyway. But if you’re going to do what you love, maybe don’t do it in public because some jerk like me may tweet your photo without knowing a damn thing about you. It reminds me of that guy who was an open object for Internet ridicule but was actually a perfectly decent person with an interesting backstory. Everyone has a story, and most people are just trying to be happy and live their lives in the best way they know how without doing harm to anyone.

Just one more thing.

People are judge-y creeps, and I regret sassing these two men. They looked like they were having a fun time. And you know what: Who really gives a shit what some jerk passerby like me thinks? Cast like nobody’s watching.

Matthew J.X. Malady is a writer and editor in New York.

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The post The Dangers of Playing 'Magic: The Gathering' in Public appeared first on The Awl.

Let the Trumpification of D.C. begin with the Old Post Office building. [ more › ]

Enjoy it, or something. [ more › ]

Photo by PoPville flickr user nevermindtheend

Photo by PoPville flickr user Joe in DC

When becoming a member of the PoPville flickr pool please make sure your settings allow me to download your photos. Join the PoPville flickr pool here and follow PoPville on twitter here on facebook here and you can now sign up for daily email summaries here.

See headline. [ more › ]

If you have any animal/pet photos you’d like to share please send an email to princeofpetworth(at)gmail(dot)com with ‘Animal Fix’ in the title and say the name of your pet and your neighborhood. Your photos will go into the queue (usually 3-4 weeks wait) and will be posted in the order I receive them. If you’ve already entered your pet and would like to do so again – that’s no problem – just space the entries out a bit. Please try to send horizontal photos 640×480 (medium size on your iphone) if possible.

“It’s a Westie party in Bloomingdale! Pablo is not amused.”

“This is Bailey – we live in Columbia Heights. He loves to see us off to work and greet us in the window when we come home!”

“This Yoda from Columbia Heights with his favorite toy, Leo the Lion”

Poverty, grocery stores, asthma-related ER visits. [ more › ]

Just when you think it can't get any crazier in US politics, it does.

Photo by PoPville flickr user Joe in DC

When becoming a member of the PoPville flickr pool please make sure your settings allow me to download your photos. Join the PoPville flickr pool here and follow PoPville on twitter here on facebook here and you can now sign up for daily email summaries here.

Photo by PoPville flickr user A. Drauglis

If you have any animal/pet photos you’d like to share please send an email to princeofpetworth(at)gmail(dot)com with ‘Animal Fix’ in the title and say the name of your pet and your neighborhood. Your photos will go into the queue (usually 3-4 weeks wait) and will be posted in the order I receive them. If you’ve already entered your pet and would like to do so again – that’s no problem – just space the entries out a bit. Please try to send horizontal photos 640×480 (medium size on your iphone) if possible.

“Ginger, from Mount Pleasant, spent some quality time with FDR & his pup.”

“This is Joe Gibbs of Woodley Park, also known as Gibblet. Between plotting to take over the Senate and causing general mayhem, she enjoys eating cardboard and the buttons off TV remotes.”

“Sully
H St”

Photo by PoPville flickr user JamesCalder

Congrats to PoPville pick dno with:

“Photographic proof that CrossFit is a religion.”

Congrats to PoP pick Matt with:

“May the power of Christ propel you!”

Honorable mention to albany with:

“BRO you seeing this pump?”

Winners and honorable mention, please email me at princeofpetworth(at)gmail for your shirts, tote bags or onesies.

Way back 100ish years ago, women would wait for their train in a separate waiting room at Union Station. Below is a photo of that ladies’ waiting room … which looks extremely sparse. This photo is from the 1910s.

Source: Library of Congress

312 Florida Ave NW. #dc #aniekan #bloomingdaledc #shaolinpencil @aniekanreloaded #mural #nw #streetart #FloridaAve #shaw #Bloomingdope @bloomingdope (at Best One Liquor)

Harrar Coffee and Roastery is located at 2904 Georgia Ave, NW.

From an email:

“We have this Ethiopian Coffee Ceremony going every Saturday mornings at 11:30am, when we roast a specialty coffee and offer consumers free samples. During the ceremony, our barista also wear traditional Ethiopian clothing and we talk about the tradition.”

The underside of this spider is surprisingly beautiful.

Summer Reruns, By Crom!

By Crom! on Weald! Or did you want to see books? PDFs? Or prints and mugs and such?

By Crom! will be tabling with Weald Comics at VanCAF this coming weekend! See you there?

1,231 people have now been executed in the USA. Time has released an animated map showing the total number of executions made in each American state since 1776. Every Execution in U.S. History in a Single Map allows you to view the history of executions in the US. As you play the animation you can watch as the number of executions spreads westward in the early years of the USA, as the country

“Dear PoPville,

I’m on an old email group from a past residence and there was a request from someone in the neighborhood that stated:

Neighbors,

Members of the community are protesting the renewal of Darnell’s liquor license based on a significant number of complaints.

If you would like to join this protest group, or would like more information, please contact XXXXXXXX by email at XXXXXXXXX@gmail.com beforeSunday evening.

The protest needs to be filed with the District Monday morning, so if you would like your complaints to be heard make sure to get them to me beforeSunday evening.

Kinda weird to me…Darnell’s seems to be very low key, not mentioning that Blind Dog also is there. Thinking you might want to see how community feels.”

Anyone have a problem with Darnell’s?

It's her best chance to breed. [ more › ]

NASA is now broadcasting live real-time film of Earth as seen from the International Space Station. The High Definition Earth Viewing (HDEV) experiment has placed four HD cameras on the exterior of the space station and is useing them to stream live video of Earth. Because this view of Earth is live at times you might not see anything on the cameras, this is usually because the ISS is flying

Here are the photos that sum up the event. [ more › ]

If you have any animal/pet photos you’d like to share please send an email to princeofpetworth(at)gmail(dot)com with ‘Animal Fix’ in the title and say the name of your pet and your neighborhood. Your photos will go into the queue (usually 3-4 weeks wait) and will be posted in the order I receive them. If you’ve already entered your pet and would like to do so again – that’s no problem – just space the entries out a bit. Please try to send horizontal photos 640×480 (medium size on your iphone) if possible.

“Miss Kitty was recently shaved, and the groomer got a little bit out of control. Kitty is a 12 year old Himalayan, and I now liken her to a Praying Mantis Kitty!”

“This is Kona of SE DC enjoying the warmer weather”

“Nobody puts Buddy (of Petworth) in a corner!”

D.C. has food trucks, vintage flea markets, fancy coffee shops and pop-up everythings. Maybe we've finally reached peak hipster. [ more › ]

Click bigger.