​How to Make the Perfect Cup of Italian Coffee

“A hissing, rattling, and gurgling on my stovetop penetrates the still air in my kitchen. The reassuring sound — which physicists have dubbed the Strombolian phase of brewing — is gently comforting but also gets my bones moving each morning. Even more comforting and bone-activating are the steamy caffeinated vapors of roasted beans, which I deeply inhale while getting ready to start my day. But the real business of waking up begins when I pour the hot, brown elixir into a cup, usually with a splash of cream to mellow it out. Only then does the day really begin. ...”

departures

2010 September: Espresso, 2013 April: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World, 2013 May: Coffeehouse, 2015 June: Barista, 2015 August: Coffee Connections at Peddler in SoHo, 2015 November: The Case for Bad Coffee, 2016 January: 101 Places to Find Great Coffee in New York (2014), 2017 June: How Cold Brew Changed the Coffee Business, 2017 September: Our 7 Favorite Literary Coffee Shops, 2017 October: Clever Literary Coffee Poster, 2017 October: Coffee as Existential Statement: A Crisis in Every Cup on Valencia Street, 2018 February: The Trencherman: A Tale of Two Coffee Shops, 2020 April: Unfair trade, April 2020: A (Very) Brief History of NYC Espresso, 2020 May: The Islamic History of Coffee, 2021 January: The Life Cycle of a Cup of Coffee: The Journey from Coffee Bean, to Coffee Cup, 2021 June: Philosophers Drinking Coffee: The Excessive Habits of Kant, Voltaire & Kierkegaard, 2021 July:  The invisible addiction: is it time to give up caffeine?, August 2021: The Birth of Espresso: How the Coffee Shots The Fuel Our Modern Life Were Invented, 2021 October: Brew: A Brief History of Coffee, 2021 November: Coffee and Climate Have a Complicated Relationship, 2022 January: The Bialetti Moka Express: The History of Italy’s Iconic Coffee Maker, and How to Use It the Right Way, 2022 April: All Espresso Drinks Explained: Cappuccino, Latte, Macchiato & Beyond

​Why grain can’t get out of Ukraine

“Approximately 20 million tons of grain sit in storage in Ukraine, with few ways out of the country. It is a slow-moving crisis that is choking Ukraine off from the global economy, and cutting the rest of the world off from Ukraine’s critical supply of grains. Ukraine provides about 10 percent of the global share of wheat exports, and almost half of the world’s sunflower oil. Alongside Russia, Ukraine makes this region one of the world’s ‘breadbaskets.’ But Moscow’s war in Ukraine and Western sanctions against Russia have squeezed agricultural exports from the entire Black Sea region. These products can be replaced on the global market, but at a cost. Food is harder to afford for poor countries, and for poor people in rich countries. It could deepen a worldwide hunger crisis....”

VOX

Guardian: Culture matters around the world. What a shame it has been toxically weaponised in the UK

NY Times: Surviving Russia’s ‘Filtration Camps’ (Video)

NY Times: Opinion | Are We Sure America Is Not at War in Ukraine?

Has the Tide Really Turned in Ukraine?

A Ukrainian serviceman attends a wheat field on a front line near the city of Soledar in the Donetsk region on June 10.

​Travel New York in the footsteps of 'The Warriors'

“From Coney Island to the Bronx, The Warriors is a film that takes the viewer in and around the depths of New York City. Although most New York City-based films centre Manhattan in their stories, The Warriors are a gang with Coney Island on their minds, and the story sets out with the crew being framed for murder in the north end of the Bronx. Those unfamiliar with the layout of New York might need a bit of a recap, but really, the system is actually simpler and more organised than you might expect. ...”

FAR OUT

2015 September: Cast of 'The Warriors' to Reunite in Coney Island One Last Time, 2020 October: The Real Deal - The Warriors (1979)

​The Nuclear Observatory of Mr Nanof - Piero Milesi (1986)

“... Milanese composer Piero Milesi was one of the most prominent Italian artists in the field of electronic minimalism. After having studied cello, he graduated with a degree in experimental and electronic music composition from the Milan conservatory. He then joined the Gruppo Folk Internazionale entourage and got a degree in architecture with a thesis on the relationship between space and sound. ... Working in a melodic vein, The Nuclear Observatory Of Mr. Nanof veers from ethereal solo keyboard electronics to scores for lyricon and small chamber ensemble. Lovely, yet also rich musically. ...”

Cuneiform Records (Audio)

W - Piero_Milesi

Discogs (Video)

YouTube: The Nuclear Observatory Of Mr. Nanof   17 videos

What Hundreds of Photos of Weapons Reveal About Russia’s Brutal War Strategy

“Reflecting a shockingly barbaric and old-fashioned wartime strategy, Russian forces have pummeled Ukrainian cities and towns with a barrage of rockets and other munitions, most of which can be considered relatively crude relics of the Cold War, and many of which have been banned widely under international treaties, according to a New York Times analysis. The attacks have made repeated and widespread use of weapons that kill, maim and destroy indiscriminately — a potential violation of international humanitarian law. These strikes have left civilians — including children — dead and injured, and they have left critical infrastructure, like schools and homes, a shambles. ...”

NY Times

Munitions and submunitions photographed in 72 locations in Ukraine since the war began in February.

BM-21 multibarrel rocket system. A Soviet launch system in use since the 1960s, in which 40 launch tubes are mounted on a truck chassis. Illustration of a multibarrel rocket system.

 

The Blank Generation - Ivan Kral & Amos Poe (1976)

“... An invaluable document of a long-lost era, The Blank Generation sets the style for the Punk Documentary—raw, sloppily spliced, unsynched footage of bands, with sound recorded by cassette. The effect is total disorientation and CBGBs performances by Talking Heads (’Psycho Killer’), Blondie (’He left Me’), Ramones (’Shock Treatment’, ‘1-2-3-4, Let's Go’) Tuff Darts and many of the other New York bands fill up this frantic, crowd-pleasing film. CBGB, the small Bowery Avenue club that spawned and nurtured American punk and New Wave music in the mid-70s, closed earlier this fall after a three-decade run.....”

UbuWeb (Video)

NY Times: His Film Is a Punk Classic, but the Credits Now Roll Without Him

W - The Blank Generation

Patti Smith

 

​Pont-Aven School

“Pont-Aven School (French: École de Pont-Aven, Breton: Skol Pont Aven) encompasses works of art influenced by the Breton town of Pont-Aven and its surroundings. Originally the term applied to works created in the artists' colony at Pont-Aven, which started to emerge in the 1850s and lasted until the beginning of the 20th century. Many of the artists were inspired by the works of Paul Gauguin, who spent extended periods in the area in the late 1880s and early 1890s. Their work is frequently characterised by the bold use of pure colour and their Symbolist choice of subject matter.  ...”

Wikipedia

Everything You Must Know About Pont-Aven School

YouTube: The school of Pont-Avent

Le Matin Diélette (Morning, Diélette) - Henry Moret (1912)

Ukraine’s Death Workers: ‘If You Take It All Close to Heart, You Go Mad’

“LVIV, Ukraine — For many Ukrainians facing Russia’s invasion, there is hope the daily battles can be won: A soldier may beat back his enemies. A rescuer might miraculously pull a survivor from rubble. A doctor could save a life. But in one line of work, also deeply affected by this war, grief seems like the only sure end: the handling of the dead. From gravediggers to embalmers, funeral directors to coroners, these workers carry deep psychic wounds of war — and have few others who can relate to them. ...”

NY Times

Aljazeera - Analysis: What does Ukraine joining the EU really mean? (Video)

NY Times - Death in Ukraine: A Special Report

BBC - Lavrov: Russia is not squeaky clean and not ashamed (Video)

The Nation: In Ukraine’s Cultural Capital, Giselle Goes to War

Prima ballerina: Daryna Kirik, the principal dancer in a performance at the Lviv Opera in May. Her mother and grandmother survived the Russian occupation of Bucha.

Simone de Beauvoir Defends Existentialism & Her Feminist Masterpiece, The Second Sex, in Rare 1959 TV Interview

“Given how many academic philosophy departments have banished Existentialism into some primitive wilderness, it seems striking to hear people talk about it as a current phenomenon with a serious, living pedigree and a hip youth vanguard distilling its ideas into pop culture. ... And a Canadian journalist, sitting down to interview Existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, began by asking her to comment on the ‘group of noisy, rowdy jazz-loving young people, in the immediate post-war period.’ This first wave of 50s Parisian hipsters embraced Sartre, Camus, and Beauvoir right along with Coltrane and Charlie Parker. ...”

Open Culture (Video)

2010 June: Simone de Beauvoir, 2021 November: The Second Sex - Simone de Beauvoir (1949)

The Best Kendrick Lamar Songs: 33 Rap Essentials

“The best Kendrick Lamar songs have something for everybody. There are straight-ahead pop songs that stimulate the imagination, deeply rooted metaphors that take multiple close readings to untangle, and political songs diving into the history of Black oppression. ... The Compton-born MC is more than an album artist; everything he touches turns to gold. Without further ado, here’s our best crack: The best 33 Kendrick Lamar songs (for now). ...”

udiscover (Video)

2015 December: To Pimp a Butterfly (2015), 2016 March: When the Lights Shut Off: Kendrick Lamar and the Decline of the Black Blues Narrative by Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah (2013), 2016 March: Who gets to say how black people see themselves? - Marlon James, 2016 March: untitled unmastered (EP - 2016), 2016 July: BET Awards 2016: Watch Beyoncé Perform “Freedom” with Kendrick Lamar., 2017 April: Damn. (2017)

​Ukraine deserves its place in the EU. It’s right for the country – and right for Europe

“What a difference a war makes. Four months ago, the leaders of France, Germany and Italy would not have dreamed of supporting Ukraine’s candidacy for EU membership. But this Thursday, there they were in a sunny Kyiv, all emphatically endorsing it. If next week’s EU summit agrees, following the positive opinion just given by the European Commission, this really could be, as President Volodymyr Zelenskiy put it after meeting his visitors from luckier parts of Europe, ‘one of the key European decisions of the first third of the 21st century’. ... There are two good reasons for accepting Ukraine as a candidate for membership of the EU: because Ukraine has earned it, and because this is in the long-term strategic interest of all Europeans. The second is even more important than the first. ...”

Guardian

NY Times: Russians Breached This City, Not With Troops, but Propaganda

NY Times: The New Geography of the Russian Elite

BBC: Russia's Putin condemns 'mad and thoughtless' Western sanctions

Guardian: Boris Johnson vows to give Ukraine 'strategic endurance' in surprise visit to Kyiv (Video)

​Open City Mixtape: Short Films by A.V. Rockwell

“Rising director A.V. Rockwell captures life on the streets of New York City in this collection of ten short films—a mix of documentaries and narratives—depicting a cross section of some of the eight million lives whose stories are often overlooked. Shot in luscious monochrome and set to evocatively eclectic soundscapes, they are by turns gritty and transcendent snapshots of the dreamers, schemers, hustlers, and youths who give the cultural capital its singular rhythm.“

Criterion (Video)

Filmmaker A.V. Rockwell Premieres New Short Film ‘Open City’ (Video)

Open City Mixtape (Video)

Often left alone due to his struggling mother’s work schedule, Jahlil, a precocious young boy from the Bronx, spends most of his time roaming New York City’s transit system.

Mythologies - Roland Barthes (1957)

"Mythologies is a 1957 book by Roland Barthes. It is a collection of essays taken from Les Lettres nouvelles, examining the tendency of contemporary social value systems to create modern myths. Barthes also looks at the semiology of the process of myth creation, updating Ferdinand de Saussure's system of sign analysis by adding a second level where signs are elevated to the level of myth. Mythologies is split into two: Mythologies and Myth Today, the first section consisting of a collection of essays on selected modern myths and the second further and general analysis of the concept. ...”

Wikipedia

[PDF] Mythologies, amazon

YouTube: An Introduction to Roland Barthes's Mythologies - A Macat Literature Analysis

2010 March: Roland Barthes, 2014 March: Semiotext(e), 2014 November: What Is Schizo-Culture? A Classic Conversation with William S. Burroughs, 2016 December: Can We Criticize Foucault?, 2017 June: The CIA Reads French Theory: On the Intellectual Labor of Dismantling the Cultural Left, 2017 November: A Lover's Discourse: Fragments (1977)

​How to Counter Russia’s Artillery Advantage in Ukraine

“Public accounts make it clear that Russia intends to win the war for the control of eastern Ukraine the old-school way: superior, massed artillery fire using hundreds of thousands of unguided projectiles.Ukrainian armed forces have limited numbers of heavier weapons, around 100 of the American 155 millimeter howitzers, and radars that can track enemy artillery rounds in flight in order to locate enemy guns. This counter-battery fire can be made more effective through the use of precision-guided artillery rounds and, over time, should reduce the effectiveness of the enemy artillery. But so far, it has not. ...”

The Bulwark

NY Times: In Ukraine, a Minority Group Feels Ambivalence About the War

GRID - The Ukraine War in data: A double dose of bad news for the Ukrainian resistance.

NY Times: Ukraine’s Highly Mobile Tech Work Force Hits the Road

A security guard walks by the rubble of a police station that was destroyed by bombardment, in Lysychansk, Ukraine, Monday June 13, 2022.

Paintings in Proust: A Visual Companion to Hardcover – Eric Karpeles

Paintings in Proust (Vol. 1, Swann's Way) “November 14th, 2013, marked 100 years since Marcel Proust published Du côté de chez Swann (Swann's Way), the first volume of A la recherche du temps perdu, his masterwork written from 1909 to 1922, largely at night in the silence of a cork-lined room. ... We are indebted also to the excellent Paintings in Proust by Eric Karpeles, for helping us greatly in identifying the various mentions of artworks - a highly recommended book. ...”

Public Domain Review

Marcel Proust’s Dream of Art

NY Times: Pictures Worth Thousands of Words

amazon

2008 June: Marcel Proust, 2011 October: How Proust Can Change Your Life, 2012 April: Marcel Proust - À la recherche du temps perdu, 2013 February: Marcel Proust and Swann's Way: 100th Anniversary, 2013 May: A Century of Proust, 2013 October: On Reading Proust, 2015 September: In Search of Lost Time: Swann's Way: A Graphic Novel, 2016 January: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (1919), 2016 February: Chasing Lost Time: The Life of C.K. Scott Moncrieff: Soldier, Spy and Translator, 2016 May: The Guermantes Way (1920-21), 2016 August: Marcel Proust’s Search for Lost Time — Patrick Alexander, 2016 October: My Strange Friend Marcel Proust, 2017 March: Sodom and Gomorrah (1921-1922), 2017 August: Letters To His Neighbor by Marcel Proust; translated by Lydia Davis, October: Proust's À la recherche – a novel big enough for the world, 2017 October: Proust Fans Eagerly Await Trove of Letters Going Online, 2017 December: The Prisoner / The Fugitive (1923-1925), 2018 May: Time Regained (1927), 2018 September: Céleste Albaret, 2018 November: In the Footsteps of Marcel Proust, 2019 February: On the Anxiety and Vanity of Marcel Proust, Debut Novelist, 2020 October: 182 Days of Marcel Proust

Detail from Sandro Boticelli's Trial of Moses showing Jethro's daughter Zipporah - Source.

​Tragedy and triumph: the remarkable tale of Croatia’s first football steps

“Igor Stimac, a 54-year-old Croatian man usually full of laughter and love, begins to cry as his memories grip him in a world darkened again by a devastating war. The fleeting tears of the former footballer fall for Ukraine and its people. They have suffered in a way that reminds Stimac of everything his own country endured during the terrible Balkans conflict that surrounded its independence from Yugoslavia almost 30 years ago. It was a time when football gained a rare real-life significance as, out of bloodshed and carnage, Croatia’s defiant, gifted and fiercely intelligent players lifted their young nation by lighting up Euro 96 and then leading France in the semi-finals of the 1998 World Cup in Paris. …”

Guardian

Croatian and Serbian Hooligans: Football Foes Share Love of Hate (June 2020)

World Cup 1998

In Occupied Cities, Time Doesn’t Exist: Conversations with Bucha Writers - Ilya Kaminsky

“’Russian soldiers stayed in our building,’ my friend, the poet Lesyk Panaisuk, wrote to me when the Ukrainian city of Bucha was liberated from Russian occupation on March 31. Some months before, as soon as the war ensued, Lesyk had left Bucha in a hurry, fleeing the Russian soldiers. Although the city is now liberated, it is still dangerous to walk around Bucha. Lesyk’s neighbors find mines in the halls of their building, inside their slippers and washing machines. Some neighbors return only to install doors and windows. ‘In our neighborhood, doors to almost every apartment were broken by Russian soldiers,’ Lesyk emails.’A Ukrainian word / is ambushed: through the broken window of / a letter д other countries watch how a letter і / loses its head,’ writes Lesyk in one of his poems. He continues: ‘how / the roof of a letter м / falls through.’ While I read Lesyk’s emails, miles from Ukraine, my own uncle is missing. As bombs explode in Odesa, I email friends, relatives. No one can find him. ...”

The Paris Review

NY Times: Opinion | Five Blunt Truths About the War in Ukraine

GRID - Ukraine war in photos: One photojournalist’s view from the front lines

NY Times: North of Kyiv, the Russians Retreated. But the War Never Left.

Civilians in Novoselivka.  Russian troops moved through northern Ukraine during the first days of the war.

Lacombe, Lucien – Louis Malle (1974)

Review by Pauline Kael: “Introducing himself to a delicate, fine-boned parisienne, the farm-boy hero of Louis Malle’s new movie does not give his name as Lucien Lacombe; he gives the bureaucratic designation—Lacombe, Lucien. He presents himself name inverted because he is trying to be formal and proper, as he’s been trained to be at school and at work, sweeping floors at his local, small-town hospital, in southwest France. When he meets the girl, France Horn—and falls in love with her—his new job is hunting down and torturing people for the Gestapo. He likes it a whole lot better than the hospital. The title Lacombe, Lucien refers to the case of a boy of seventeen who doesn’t achieve a fully human identity, a boy who has an empty space where feelings beyond the purely instinctive are expected to be. ...”

New Yorker, September 30, 1974

senses of cinema – The Evil That Boys Do: Louis Malle’s Lacombe, Lucien

tv tropes

Wikipedia

Criterion

YouTube: Criterion Trailer 329: Lacombe, Lucien

OHM: The Early Gurus of Electronic Music 1948-1980

“… Music has been affected no less drastically. As Brian Eno points out in his forward to the recently reissued and expanded OHM: The Early Gurus of Electronic Music 3xCD box set (now with the addition of a DVD, and re-dubbed OHM+), most of what we listen to is electronic in some fashion, contrary to the entire history of music prior to the 1920s. Whether over the radio, stereo, or amplified speaker, electronic music has all but made ‘natural’ sound obsolete. ...”

Pitchfork

allmusic (Audio)

W – OHM: The Early Gurus of Electronic Music 1948-1980

Discogs (Video)

YouTube: OHM – THE EARLY GURUS OF ELECTRONIC MUSIC (COMPLETE)

Ukraine Says Troops Holding out in Sievierodonetsk After Last Bridge Destroyed

“KYIV—Ukraine said on Tuesday its forces were still holding out inside Sievierodonetsk and trying to evacuate civilians, after Russia destroyed the last bridge to the devastated eastern city in a potential turning point in one of the war’s bloodiest battles. Russia said it would give Ukrainian fighters holed up in a chemical plant inside the city a chance to surrender on Wednesday morning. Fighters should ‘stop their senseless resistance and lay down their arms’ from 8 a.m. Moscow time, Interfax news agency quoted ​Mikhail Mizintsev, head of Russia’s National Defence Management Centre, as saying. Civilians would be let out through a ‘humanitarian corridor,’ he said. ...”

Reuters

Guardian: Sievierodonetsk evacuation continues despite loss of main bridges

Aljazeera: Russia urges Ukrainian fighters in Severodonetsk to lay down arms (Video)

NY Times: The loss of a final bridge to Sievierodonetsk may hurt Ukraine’s ability to hold its ground.

BBC - Lysychansk: Russia erasing history in Ukraine's 'dead city'

A satellite image shows a close up view of a damaged bridge, in Rubizhne, Ukraine, on June 11, 2022. 

​Matepe & Karimba.

“Matepe Music. ... I use this label as a kind of general idea. I've borrowed the words from that article, from his book, from your vid and I go with it, wondering what exactly it is that I reference. At first I mean those mbira instruments with the flattened bell-shaped, cavernous resonators, the right hand octaves that hocket with in-house overtones, saturated with deep and low and growling fundamentals. I mean the conversation between the rattle player's patterns and the improvising mbira, the clipped exclamations of hup! hup! hup! that cut into soaring singing lines and virtuosic yodeling, the gentle clamor of muted fingerpads on the jenje drum, the cupped hand claps, the ecstatic whistles and the dancer's foot stomps. ...”

Yelloweaver (Audio/Video), Yelloweaver: Karimba part 2 (Video)

Layout of a Karimba (left) and Matepe (right) that are tuned together. Karimba made by Jacob Mafuleni and matepe made by Chaka Chawasarira.

 

Heidegger’s Notebooks Renew Focus on Anti-Semitism

“It has long been one of the most contentious questions in 20th-century intellectual history: Just how much, and what kind, of a Nazi was the German philosopher Martin Heidegger? To his strongest detractors, Heidegger was a committed National Socialist whose hugely influential ideas about the nature of being and the dehumanizing effects of modern technology and much of the modern philosophical tradition itself were fatally compromised by his membership in Hitler’s party from 1933 to 1945. To his staunchest defenders, however, he was a Nazi of convenience — a sometime personal anti-Semite, perhaps, but a philosopher whose towering intellectual achievements are undiminished by temporary political dalliances or everyday bias. ...”

NY Times

Heidegger Was Loyal to Nazism and It Is Dangerous to Pretend Otherwise

The politics of forgiveness - Heidegge / Jewish poet Paul Celan

Place as Palimpsest: Martin Heidegger and the Haunting of Todtnauberg

​Who Will Remember the Horrors of Ukraine?

“For many, Babyn Yar symbolizes the horror that largely preceded the gas chambers, the local Holocaust in which victims were shot at close range. Before the Nazis retreated, they had the corpses exhumed from the ravine and burned, an attempt to destroy the evidence of their crimes. The remains of their victims were dispersed throughout the land, mingling with the air, earth and groundwater. The full story of what happened to them went untold for decades, submerged and banned by Soviet authorities. For the past six years, a group of historians, activists and designers has been working to correct the narrative and commemorate all that occurred. They hoped to build a series of museums on the site, to definitively bring to light what happened at Babyn Yar, to make the memory of its successive horrors inextricable from the land itself. ...”

NY Times

NY Times: The Corpse of a Russian Soldier, and the Cold but Human Urge to Look

Aljazeera: Russia threatens to strip anti-war protester of citizenship (Video)

GRID: Victory over Russia could take years. How long will the world #standwithukraine?

Visual evidence and reconstructions like these aid the investigation by Forensic Architecture and Center for Spatial Technologies into the destruction of a theater in the city of Mariupol.

“Moniker: Identity Lost and Found” Documents and Celebrates Hobo Railroad Art and Underground Moniker Writing

“In June 2018, Ohio’s Massillon Museum hosted ‘Moniker: Identity Lost & Found,’ an exhibition featuring a distinctly remarkable documentation of mark-making and monikers, a grassroots movement which began in rail yards in the late nineteenth century. An exhibition catalog published at the time sold out almost immediately. This month heralds the release of a second edition in softcover format of Moniker: Identity Lost & Found in conjunction and cooperation with the Black Butte Center For Railroad Culture and its current exhibit, End Of The Line. ...”

Street Art NYC

Hacker ethic

“The hacker ethic is a philosophy and set of moral values that is common within hacker culture. Practitioners of the hacker ethic believe that sharing information and data with others is an ethical imperative. The hacker ethic is related to the concept of freedom of information, as well as the political theories of anti-authoritarianism, socialism, liberalism, anarchism, and libertarianism. While some tenets of the hacker ethic were described in other texts like Computer Lib/Dream Machines (1974) by Ted Nelson, the term hacker ethic is generally attributed to journalist Steven Levy, who appears to have been the first to document both the philosophy and the founders of the philosophy in his 1984 book titled Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. ...”

Wikipedia

The Hacker Ethic: Understanding Programmer Culture

2021 August: Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution - Steven Levy (1984)

Today 80% of smartphones, and 80% of websites run on free software (aka. Linux, the most famous open source operating system).

Russia hands out passports in occupied Ukraine cities

“The Russian occupation authorities in southern Ukraine say they have started handing out Russian passports to locals in two cities - Kherson and Melitopol. Ukraine condemns the creation of Russian citizens on its territory as ‘Russification’. President Vladimir Putin is fast-tracking the procedure. Russia's Tass news agency says the first 23 Kherson residents got Russian passports at a ceremony on Saturday. Tass says thousands have applied for them, but its claim cannot be verified. The Russian-appointed military governor in Kherson, Volodymyr Saldo, said ‘all our Khersonite comrades want to receive the passport and [Russian] citizenship as soon as possible’. ...”

BBC

NY Times: McDonald’s Is Back, Moscow Style, as Russian Economy Stumbles On

POLITICO: Ukraine’s leader says his troops keep defying predictions

As fighting rages, Ukraine’s leader says troops defy Russia

Café de Flore

“The Café de Flore is one of the oldest coffeehouses in Paris, celebrated for its famous clientele, which in the past included high-profile writers and philosophers. It is located at the corner of Boulevard Saint-Germain and Rue Saint-Benoît, in Saint-Germain-des-Prés in the 6th arrondissement. ... Georges Bataille, Robert Desnos, Léon-Paul Fargue, Raymond Queneau were all regulars, and so was Pablo Picasso. ... In his essay ‘A Tale of Two Cafes’ and his book Paris to the Moon, American writer Adam Gopnik mused over the possible explanations of why the Flore had become, by the late 1990s, much more fashionable and popular than Les Deux Magots, despite the fact that the latter café was associated with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and other famous thinkers of the 1940s and 1950s. ...”

Wikipedia

YouTube: CAFÉ DE FLORE | THE OLDEST COFFEEHOUSES IN PARIS

July 1952

The stone and iron turtles decorating New York City

“Colonial New Yorkers hunted them in estuaries and salt marshes, putting turtle soup on every restaurant menu. Contemporary city residents know them as the scaly native reptiles who occasionally pop their heads up while feasting in city waterways. Considering the role they’ve played in Gotham’s history and their presence in the modern city, it’s no wonder that images of turtles can be found on building facades, fence posts, and the sculptures in Manhattan parks.You would expect a neighborhood called Turtle Bay to have its fair share of ornamental turtles. You would expect a neighborhood called Turtle Bay to have its fair share of ornamental turtles. ...”

Ephemeral New York

Ukraine war in photos: Women at war

“In this curation from Ukraine, women at war. Or at least — a dozen women at war. Even in that small number, you can get a sense of the range of contributions women have been making to the Ukrainian resistance — women serving in the military and civilian defense forces, women checking for land mines and weaving camouflage for soldiers, women caring for the wounded and covering the war as journalists. Here you will also see women in government ranks: Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereschuk, Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova and — speaking this week to the European Council — the country’s first lady Olena Zelenska. Among other things, Zelenska told her audience that there are 37,000 women serving in the Ukrainian Armed Forces and that more than 1,000 of them have become commanders since the war began. ...”

GRID

WSJ: Documents Reveal Hundreds of Russian Troops Broke Ranks Over Ukraine Orders

Aljazeera: ‘War fatigue’ may cause West to lose interest in Ukraine support (Video)

NY Times: Biden Races to Expand Coalition Against Russia but Meets Resistance

Ukraine's Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova

​Up in the Old Hotel - Joseph Mitchell (1992)

"The publication of his book Up in the Old Hotel in 1992 ended Joseph Mitchell’s 28-year silence. Strictly speaking, though, Mitchell didn’t break his silence as much as he reopened a long-closed door and then shut it again. Up in the Old Hotel contains no new writing; it is a collection of four of Mitchell’s five previously published books—McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon (1943); Old Mr. Flood (1948); The Bottom of the Harbor (1960); and Joe Gould’s Secret (1965). All of the pieces originally appeared in The New Yorker, where Mitchell has worked for more than 50 years. ..."

The Grammar of Hard Facts: Joseph Mitchell’s Up In the Old Hotel

Caught by the river

Guardian - Joseph Mitchell: mysterious chronicler of the margins of New York

amazon

[PDF] Up in the old hotel

2014 August: Joseph Mitchell, 2015 May: Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorker by Thomas Kunkel, 2020 January: "The Mohawks in High Steel" (1949)

Cooking with Cyrano de Bergerac By Valerie Stivers

“In the opening scene of the play Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand, first performed in 1897, ‘orange girls’ at a Parisian theater in the 1640s make their way through an audience of soldiers, society ladies, noblemen, and riffraff, selling orangeade, raspberry cordial, syllabub, macarons, lemonade, iced buns, and cream puffs. The handsome soldier Christian de Neuvillette and his friends sample their wares, drink wine, and eat from a buffet. A poet and pastry cook named Ragueneau banter-barters an apple tartlet for a verse. ...”

The Paris Review

The Paris Review - Archives: Valerie Stivers