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
All Espresso Drinks Explained: Cappuccino, Latte, Macchiato & Beyond
Fela's stories: Confusion Break Bone
Casualty of war in Ukraine: The global food supply
A colorful mural on a tenement wall honors the immigrants who built Yorkville
Finding Utopias Where We Can: On Hopeful Living as Resistance
‘This Is True Barbarity’: Life and Death Under Russian Occupation
“TROSTYANETS, Ukraine — The last three Russian soldiers in this Ukrainian town are in the morgue, their uniforms bloodied and torn. The first one’s face is frozen in pain. The second has his wooden pipe in his lap. The third is stuffed in his sleeping bag.These dead are not all that was left behind in Trostyanets, a strategically located town in the country’s northeast, where Russian forces fled several days ago in the face of an orchestrated Ukrainian assault. A monthlong Russian occupation reduced much of the town to rubble, a decimated landscape of mangled tank hulks, snapped trees and rattled but resilient survivors. ...”
Luigi Russolo’s Cacophonous Futures
“Luigi Russolo (1885–1947) was well into a successful painting career when he turned to music in his 1913 manifesto The Art of Noises (L’arte dei rumori). Announcing an intention to ‘enlarge and enrich the field of sound’, the Futurist polymath waxed poetic about the modern city’s sonic landscape — ‘the throbbing of valves, the bustle of pistons’, and ‘the shrieks of mechanical saws’. For Russolo, the noisy nature of everyday, industrializing Europe offered new ways of perceiving the acoustic world and a means of shaking concert music loose from its stagnant orchestral roots. ...”
The 2022 World Cup draw analysed: ‘The Group of Dark Arts’, favourites France and that song
How Kyiv Has Withstood Russia’s Attacks
Harold Rosenberg
'Prince And The Revolution: Live' Set For Multi-Format Reissue
2020 September: Prince's Sign O' The Times: An oral history
What is behind Putin’s demand for Russian gas be paid in roubles?
“President Vladimir Putin has signed a decree requiring buyers of Russian gas from countries deemed hostile to pay in roubles from Friday using a special account at a Russian bank, or see their contracts halted.His move was rejected by European governments, with Germany – Europe’s industrial powerhouse – calling it ‘political blackmail’. ... Putin’s order is in retaliation to unprecedented Western sanctions imposed on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, which Moscow says are akin to an economic war. ... The rouble plunged to historic lows after Putin sent his troops into Ukraine on February 24 as the United States and its allies moved to remove Russia from global payment systems, cut off its central bank from capital markets and froze hundreds of billions of dollars of its reserves. ...”
Canaletto's Venice Revisited
“Canaletto’s Venice Revisited is now open at the National Maritime Museum.This major exhibition displays the complete set of 24 Venetian views painted by Canaletto in the 1730s. The works, from the world famous collection at Woburn Abbey, form the largest single commission the Italian artist ever received.Canaletto’s Venice Revisited reassesses Canaletto at the height of his career, looking beyond the broad views he is famous for to also closely examine the features that bring his Venice to life. ...”
A Nation of Spy-Catchers: Fear of Saboteurs Has Ukrainians on Edge
“LVIV, Ukraine — Two weeks after Valeriy, an actor and amateur photographer, settled in western Ukraine after fleeing his home in Kyiv, he was stopped and questioned by the local police. Someone had reported him as he strolled around the city photographing its squares, churches and other landmarks — many now buttressed with sandbags. The police officers took him to their car and scrolled through the recent photos on his mobile phone, leafed through his sketchbook, and checked what channels he subscribed to on the social messaging app Telegram. ... With Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine now into its second month, suspicion has settled like a fog over the country, joining anger and unity as the dominant emotions. ...”
YouTube: Putin's New Ukraine Strategy: Is Russia Retreating? - TLDR News EU, Are Putin's Claims About Ukrainian Nazis Real? - TLDR News EU
A Bookstore Revival Channels Nostalgia for Big Box Chains
“... Turnout for the same release today would be lower, because of Amazon.com Inc., because of dying malls, because of J.K. Rowling’s support for gender essentialism — and because there are simply fewer bookstores. Between 1991 and 2011, the U.S. lost 1,000 chain bookstores. A story in The Bulwark checking in on Borders locations 10 years after its 2011 bankruptcy revealed that some had become Books-A-Million, but many more of their ‘medium-box’ locations now sold food, furniture or clothes.Even so, that HuffPost story, now five years old, may have played taps for the chain bookstore too soon. ...”
The Real Scandal at the Oscars Was When Celebrities Crossed a Picket Line
“While the world reacted to movie star Will Smith’s altercation with comedian Chris Rock at the 94th Academy Awards ceremony Sunday night, a different Oscars controversy was brewing — one centering on the struggles of hospitality workers at a hotel that caters to Hollywood elites. Following the awards show in Los Angeles, rapper Jay‑Z hosted a party at the Chateau Marmont hotel, where workers with UNITE HERE Local 11 have been leading a boycott since February 2021 amid allegations of rampant sexual misconduct, racial discrimination and union busting. The billionaire hip hop mogul refused to respond to the union’s requests that he honor the boycott by moving his party to a different venue. ...”
The Battle for the Mural — and the Future of Belarus
“As his family slept, the man spent his nights planning. There were about 40 security cameras among the three buildings in central Minsk, maybe even more. He had long ago calculated their blind spots. He knew there was only one place in the shared courtyard they didn’t see. It took him a day to map out the best approach. The group had decided that they would act in the evening, when there would be enough people on the street so that their actions would not arouse suspicion but not so many that someone would be likely to report them to the police. He wasn’t afraid for himself as much as for the rest of them. If they got caught, it would be his fault. They positioned their spotters to watch for the Belarusian security services, the siloviki. They agreed on a plan to create an emergency diversion if they arrived. ...”
Sonologyst – Interdimensional (2022)
What the horrors of Syria and Chechnya can tell us about Russia’s tactics in Ukraine
Hania Rani ~ Music for Film and Theatre (2021)
2021 April: Live from Studio S2 (2021), 2022 January: Hania Rani
Chelsea and the Stamford Bridge dilemma facing any new owners
When Nokia Pulled Out of Russia, a Vast Surveillance System Remained
“Nokia said this month that it would stop its sales in Russia and denounced the invasion of Ukraine. But the Finnish company didn’t mention what it was leaving behind: equipment and software connecting the government’s most powerful tool for digital surveillance to the nation’s largest telecommunications network. The tool was used to track supporters of the Russian opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny. Investigators said it had intercepted the phone calls of a Kremlin foe who was later assassinated. Called the System for Operative Investigative Activities, or SORM, it is also most likely being employed at this moment as President Vladimir V. Putin culls and silences antiwar voices inside Russia.For more than five years, Nokia provided equipment and services to link SORM to Russia’s largest telecom service provider, MTS, according to company documents obtained by The New York Times. ...”
Guardian - Sean Penn: I’ll smelt my Oscars if Academy doesn’t let Zelenskiy speak, Sean Penn Vows to Destroy His Oscars if Zelensky Doesn’t Speak at Academy Awards (Video)
J.R.R. Tolkien Tolkien Estate
Explore Rarely-Seen Art by J. R. R. Tolkien in a New Web Site Created by the Tolkien Estate: “J. R. R. Tolkien managed to write the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which ought to be accomplishment enough for one mortal. But he also wrote the The Hobbit, the gateway for generations of children into his major work, as well as a host of other works of fiction, poetry, and scholarship, many of them not published until after his death in 1973. And those are only his writings: a lifelong artist, Tolkien also produced a great many drawings and paintings, book-cover designs, and pictures meant to delight his own children as well as the children of others. ...”
2010 January: The Lord of the Rings, 2018 January: An Atlas of Literary Maps Created by Great Authors: J.R.R Tolkien’s Middle Earth, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island & More, 2019 January: The Largest J.R.R. Tolkien Exhibit in Generations Is Coming to the U.S.: Original Drawings, Manuscripts, Maps & More, 2020 January: Hear Christopher Tolkien (RIP) Read the Work of His Father J.R.R. Tolkien, Which He Tirelessly Worked to Preserve, 2020 August: The Complete Guide to Middle-earth - Robert Foster (1971), 2021 September: When the Nobel Prize Committee Rejected The Lord of the Rings..., 2021 October: When J.R.R. Tolkien Worked for the Oxford English Dictionary...
A painter captures the humanity amid the dirt and darkness of a New York alley
Lessons Learned from a Tyrant’s Unspeakable War on Ukraine
“Open Source is the world’s longest-running podcast. Christopher Lydon circles the big ideas in culture, the arts and politics with the smartest people in the world. ... Big lessons out of the war in Ukraine about ‘how the world really works’ are showing up on the ground, not in theory class. They’re what you can learn just by watching. Example: it’s almost a rule now that invasions don’t work—not Putin’s in next-door Ukraine any more than Americans landing on faraway Afghanistan or Iraq. Second, that economic sanctions can work like poison when they take Russia’s central bank out of play and tie up trillions in Russian assets overseas. Third, specially for Americans, it appears that a great power can strengthen its hand by declaring it does not have a vital strategic interest in the fight and will not be sending its troops into battle. ...”