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Scientists spot a 'dark nebula' being torn apart by rowdy infant stars — offering clues about our own solar system's past
I Tried King Arthur’s Strawberry Cheesecake Cupcake Recipe, and It’s a Keeper
This is definitely not a quick and easy recipe, but the result is surely worth all of the work you put into it.
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Want to create a beautiful home? Don’t rush the design process.
It's Time for Shoulder Stretches
I’ve been having trouble sitting down to write this post, because as COVID-19 coverage swirls around me, I’m thinking: who has time for shoulder stretches? But then again, maybe this is when we most need a few shoulder stretches. Are you hunched over at your desk? I am.
This Weapon Is Not Your Life
Thanks to The Force Awakens, we know that after The Empire Strikes Back, the Skywalker family lightsaber made its way from the bowels of Cloud City into the collection of Maz Kanata. We still don’t know the details of that journey—for all its pre-release bluster, Marvel’s new Star Wars ongoing series has yet to reveal…
AmazonBasics 26-inch Folding Fire Pit hits 2018 low at $43 shipped
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Photos of Tokyo taken with a fractal lens look incredibly futuristic
Photographer Steve Roe brought his fractal lens to Japan & Korea and got some shots that look like they’re out of Blade Runner, Speed Racer, or anime.
The lenses are adjustable prism filters that picks up images from outside the camera’s normal field of view, allowing for in-camera layering effects. You can check out more photos shot with these lenses on Instagram (though few quite as successful as Roe’s).
Tags: Japan photography Steve RoeThe Citizens Equality Act of 2017
Larry Lessig is raising funds for running for President in the 2016 election. Lessig would run as a "referendum president", whose single task would be to pass a package of reforms called the Citizens Equality Act of 2017, and then resign to allow his Vice President to take over.
The Citizens Equality Act of 2017 consists of three parts: make it as easy as possible to vote, end the gerrymandering of political districts, and base campaign funding on all eligible voters, not just corporations or the wealthy.
Four years ago, Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks told Netroots Nation, "There is only one issue in this country," and he was referring to the corrupt funding of public elections.
That corruption is part of a more fundamental inequality that we've allowed the politicians to create: we don't have a Congress that represents us equally.
Every issue - from climate change to gun safety, from Wall Street reform to defense spending - is tied to this "one issue." Achieving citizens equality in America is our one mission.
Read why he wants to run and watch his pitch:
This is a long shot (and he likely knows it), but I wish him well...it's a worthy and important goal.
Tags: 2016 election Larry Lessig politics videoWhy Milk Bar Life Belongs on Our Shelves, If Not in Our Kitchens
We spend more time talking about cooking from cookbooks than we spend cooking from cookbooks, and it’s time to change that. Once a month, we’ll have Cookbook Club—a meal planned entirely from one cookbook, new or old, big or small—and we’ll ask our community members to do the same.
This month, we cook from Christina Tosi's new book, Milk Bar Life.
Tang Toast is made from white bread, margarine, and Tang drink mix.
I’m staring at the cover of Milk Bar Life, trying to figure out what to say about Christina Tosi’s newest cookbook, when I look up and see her face.
My friend is watching the fourth episode of Vice Munchies’ “Fuck That’s Delicious”—a web show starring the chef-turned-rapper Action Bronson—and, like any New York food personality worth his salt, Bronson is making a pilgrimage to the Milk Bar kitchen in Williamsburg. He’s brought his aunt’s famous baklava, and together, he and Tosi toss it into a blender, add a spoonful of Benton’s bacon fat and plenty of Cereal Milk™—here, the camera lingers—and spin it into a milkshake.
Tosi is everywhere: I see her on bus shelters when I pass the Corcoran Group’s Live Who You Are advertisements; I’ve watched her on “Mind of a Chef” and, soon, I’ll watch her on “MasterChef” and “MasterChef Junior,” too; I hear about her from my boyfriend’s kid sister in Baltimore, who wants to know if I’ve met her.
As the story goes, Tosi was initially hired by David Chang (founder of the Momofuku restaurant group and a poster child for culinary bad asses) to write his food safety plan. Dessert wunderkind that she is, Tosi ended up building the restaurants’ dessert service from scratch and earned a place as the pastry chef and an owner of Milk Bar (and the winner of the 2012 James Beard Award for Rising Star Chef of the Year and a finalist in the 2014 title of Outstanding Pastry Chef). The bakery, which first opened in 2008 in the East Village, now has six locations in New York, one in Toronto, and soon, another in D.C. They also ship worldwide.
It’s not that surprising then, that despite the number of cookbooks we bow to one day then allow to accumulate dust the next, the editors at Food52 chose Milk Bar Life for our inaugural cookbook club. It’s the same reason it’s not surprising that I reach for the Cheerios instead of Toasted Whole Grain Oat Cereal and M&Ms instead of Milk Chocolate Gems. The choice is practically instinctual.
Inspired by Shopsin's—the source of the original recipe—we topped our Mac and Cheese Pancakes with hot sauce and maple syrup.
Milk Bar Life is as appealing as the sprinkle-topped sugar cookies that cover the end papers. When I first got the book, I flipped through its pages with childhood glee, reaching for the food in the saturated photos as I would for packages of Ritz crackers and Fruity Pebbles in the grocery store—and happily, I'd have an excuse to do so: These nostalgia-rich foods are the ingredients in Tosi’s recipes.
Any jitters I had in reading the ingredient lists were soothed by my faith that if anyone could take unusual combinations of often-shunned ingredients—white bread, margarine (“not butter,” Tosi specifies), and Tang drink mix in Tang Toast; a reduction of cranberry sauce and Heinz chili sauce for the coating on Cocktail Meatballs—it was Tosi, the brainchild of Crack Pie and B-Day Truffles, a modern-day alchemist. Here was my female, New-York-City-food-world role model telling me it was okay to eat junk food and it was smart and creative to cook with it. And where her first book—the 2011 Momofuku Milk Bar—frequently called for scary equipment (acetate cake collars) and freeze-dried ingredients, this one, Tosi writes in the introduction, takes a “more down-home, lowbrow approach.”
I was wrong, first off, that this book would leave freeze-dried ingredients behind: The Mac and Cheese pancakes, adopted from Shopsin’s, call for 2 tablespoons of freeze-dried corn powder (“find it at milkbarstore.com,” you’re told; you'll also need 1 cup of it to make the Cornbread Ice Cream). One 6-dollar bottle of yellow dust and some slightly cheesy, slightly chewy pancakes later, and it was hard to taste the pulverized dehydrated kernels at all.
Another recipe—the Grilled Ham and Cheese Corn Cookie—calls not for corn powder but rather for its offspring, Milk Bar Corn Cookies (these serve as the sandwich’s “bread”). In the headnote, Tosi urges us to “take a chance and make” this recipe that “seems like it may be weird”; it’s especially good at 11 P.M., she says, when “you really don’t have time for a two-course meal.”
And that’s where Tosi’s self-proclaimed “lowbrow approach” to food reveals itself to be just that—an approach. This is a glimpse into how they do things at Milk Bar—and that brand is so powerful, its allure so magnetic, and Tosi so personable and so cool, that we’ll buy the book to find out—but it’s probably not going to be of direct service in our kitchens.
The Pickled-Juice Poached Fish had a milder flavor and a more powerful odor than we expected.
Some of the recipes we made, like the aforementioned pancakes and the Ritz Cracker Ice Box Cake, tasted like food we would’ve had to be drunk, high, or otherwise intoxicated to enjoy; yet these recipes stood at odds with others—Kimcheez-its and Burnt-Honey-Butter Kale with Sesame Seeds, for example—which, had we been drunk, high, or otherwise intoxicated, we would not have been able to pull off. The kale chips never dried out at the instructed 200° F—after 40 minutes, we had to increase the temperature to 300° F—and the Kimcheez-its, which had to bake for much longer than expected—came out tough and leathery.
Some of our community participants met success. Before making Tosi’s chocolate chip cookies, drbabs “wondered to [herself] if the world really need[ed] another recipe for chocolate chip cookies.” Her conclusion after tasting them? “It turns out that we do.” QueenSashy made the Lime, Yogurt, and Olive Oil Cake, which produced a cake that was “picture perfect” with a “sweet blast of lime.”
Yet before getting around to reviewing the actual recipes, both testers mused on Tosi: “Christina is my kind of girl,” says one. “She wears cute dresses. She studied mathematics. She pulls turkey meat with her fingers. She makes blue cheese covered pretzels. She is not afraid to say that she likes supermarket food.” The other starts with the statement: “Christina Tosi is my soul sister.” And I want Christina Tosi to be my soul sister, too.
But if this book came from another person—one who had not already written a wildly successful cookbook, one who was not affiliated with one of the most praised restaurant groups in New York City, one who had not built a brand on accessibility and quirkiness—we probably wouldn’t extol a successful recipe for cookies or a loaf cake; these reliable recipes would be our baseline, and then we’d demand something better. The elements that set this book apart from other anticipated titles—that it shuns conventional "high-quality” ingredients, that it ostensibly asks little in terms of technique—is actually not so different than books on convenience food-centered, semi-homemade-style cooking.
Kimcheez-its with Blue Cheese Dip and Salt-and-Pepper Cookies.
And that’s because what is different about this book is the story behind it. Food52 user sexyLAMBCHOPx puts it well when she writes that the people who will most enjoy this book are “diehard followers of Momofuku Milk Bar, a collector of women breaking out in the highly competitive world of cooking, bakers, and pastry chefs looking to cook outside of the box.” The book might not hold up in the kitchen, and it might not hold up without the strength of Tosi, Milk Bar, and Momofuku behind it, but that doesn't mean we don't learn from it.
In an interview with Hillary Dixler, Tosi expresses her hope that this book “can be a cookbook, it can be a picture book, it can be a storybook.” Where it fails as a cookbook, it succeeds as a storybook; in a few years from now, when Christina Tosi is even more famous than she is today, we'll look back at the book and tell tales of the creative, smart, and resourceful minds behind Milk Bar, and in fifty years from now, we'll study the book and treasure it as a cultural artifact. It will be a textbook in a food culture course in which a professor lectures about the toast trend, the anti-toast trend, and the upper-class reappropriation of junk food culture in the second decade of the millennium. There will be slides from Hot Girls Eating Pizza enjoyed over a tasting of Tang Toast.
What book should we cook from for our next Cookbook Club (and would you like to join)? Share with us in the comments!
Behold The Big Beautiful Face Of Vision In The New Avengers 2 Trailer
Marvel has released a brand new look at Avengers: The Age of Ultron, and the payoff at the end is huge. Behold the face of Vision, awakening! It looks good, really good.
New spectacular photo of a very special star
The Universe is a truly incredible place. This spectacular new photo by the Hubble space telescope—showing a young star known as V1331 Cyg, 1,800 light years away from Earth—is proof #251,603,995,874. It's a special star.
'Star Nomad Elite' Review - Size isn't Everything
Anh Huy Phan has brought one of my favorite genres to iOS. Star Nomad Elite[$3.99] is a trimmed down, stream lined 2d space adventure game. The game notes have a shout out to Elite, Wing Commander, Privateer, Escape Velocity and Freelancer. I was a bit surprised that my favorite 2d space sim, Star Sonata wasn't also mentioned. In any case, I had a lot of expectations going into Star Nomad. It's a fun game from a very small indie outfit that could really take you by surprise.
Star Nomad Elite is a sandbox game, which means at least to a certain extent, you make your own objectives and goals. Want to be an ace fighter pilot? Want to be a shipping tycoon? Want to skirt the law, smuggle contraband and make big money? These are the types of goals you can work towards. The game offers you a variety of ways to make money that you can use to upgrade ships and ship equipment. You can buy cheap supplies and sell them in remote locations for a big profit. You can take on delivery, escort and hunting quests. You can buy ships that specialize in combat or shipping and outfit them with defensive and offensive capabilities. If this sounds familiar, its because there are many games just like Star Nomad Elite, except they aren't on the app store.
So what separates Star Nomad from the pack? There are some positive things and some negative things that make Star Nomad a unique experience. The touch interface is so good it is hard to believe this is a port from a PC game. Much like Battleheart[$2.99], the interface is exactly as complicated as it absolutely needs to be and not one bit more. If you are a UI minimalist, this game will have some serious appeal to you. Probably the biggest negative I can think of is that there is a lack of features when you begin to compare it to bigger PC titles. That, in and of itself, is a good thing. What Star Nomad does, it does well. With Star Nomad 2 being worked on currently, I have a feeling that sooner or later we will see most of these features. I want multiplayer the most, but this one is not on the list of planned features for the foreseeable future. Multiplayer is, in many ways, at the heart of a good sandbox. I have hope though, because the developer has been hard at work submitting updates and upgrades and giving us the skinny in our forums thread, even generously offering refunds if you don't have a device compatible with the game.
The long and short of the gameplay is that it functions very well. Combat is harrowing and rewards you for being able to evade enemy fire. Trade routes are very profitable if you pay attention to the needs and wants of each port. Zones that are dangerous are truly scary, but they have amazing payoffs if you can manage to survive. The game is very well balanced and death has just enough sting to make you cautious. You lose your ship, but you get back the cost of your ship plus any credits you had, but that total is reduced by about 15-25%. Sometimes you have to do some work to get your ship back, but it usually isnt much more than one or two quests worth. In game NPC's will occasionally chit chat about random things on the radio. They are a decent replacement for real humans and keep the cosmos from feeling devoid of life. They will also occasionally have a hot tip about trade routes that are particularly lucrative.
I've criticized other games in the past for requiring out of app reading. Even though Star Nomad Elite has a very minimal interface, it is a game that you can absolutely succeed in without going to the dev's blog where most of the game's info is laid out. With that said, I suggest going there just for some tips and strategies, not required but recommended. The game skates the line of not offering enough info, but stays just on this side of the boundary, at least for me. Having played this type of game before I felt very much at home behind the helm of multiple ships and module configurations. The game's simplicity works for it in this regard.
As the follow up to Star Nomad Elite is not an additional chapter but a full sequel in Star Nomad 2, I feel fairly comfortable commenting further on the lack of features previously mentioned. There are less than 10 ships you can upgrade to, and only a grid of about 20 sectors you can travel to. Each module on your ships has a maximum of 5 or 6 upgrades you can purchase. For a game that exists alongside of something like Star Sonata, that is a very very small scope. If you can fit comfortably inside a sandbox with an itty bitty living space, you're going to be happy picking up Star Nomad Elite.
How to Clear Cookies / Cache for a Single Website on iPhone or iPad
Clearing the cache on your iPhone or iPad is really easy, but that will log you out of every single website that you were previously logged into, and wipe any other cookie-based preferences. So what if you want to just wipe cookies or cache for a single site?