Teju Cole has written a beautiful essay on photographing black skin for New York Times Magazine.
What comes to mind when we think of photography and the civil rights movement? Direct, viscerally affecting images with familiar subjects: huge rallies, impassioned speakers, people carrying placards (“I Am a Man”), dogs and fire hoses turned on innocent protesters. These photos, as well as the portraits of national leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, are explicit about the subject at hand. They tell us what is happening and make a case for why things must change. Our present moment, a time of vigorous demand for equal treatment, evokes those years of sadness and hope in black American life and renews the relevance of those photos. But there are other, less expected images from the civil rights years that are also worth thinking about: images that are forceful but less illustrative.
This guy has become obsessed with the goddess, Ina Garten aka the Barefoot Contessa. Welcome to the world, Gary.
A teenager has invented a $500 dialysis machine that could make the lives of dialysis patients much easier!
I like articles about restaurants so here is an article about a fancy restaurant doing something fancyish. I also like the word fancy.
The dining room will have been dismantled by now, the tableware and furniture packed up. The final cuttlefish soba noodles and iced rose-petal broth have left the kitchen; the last wild duck has been barbecued and carved; no more sweet potatoes will appear at the pass, simmering in molten sugar. After two years of planning for a five-week run of 32 lunches and 32 dinners, with 3,584 guests fed approximately 57,350 courses, the labour of love that was Noma’s time in Tokyo came to an end yesterday.
Regularly rated as the world’s best restaurant, Noma receives 100,000 enquiries a month for tables back in Copenhagen; 60,000 names ended up on the waiting list for reservations in Tokyo. The Japanese capital is a place of gastronomic pilgrimage, one that even the Michelin guide, that proud bastion of French culinary imperialism, accepts outshines Paris, as the most starred city on the planet.
Notable Mugs: Michael K. Williams by Wendy C. Ortiz. I don’t have a middle name so I do not have a middle initial.
If the end is near, it might be okay in some neighborhoods. I would live in a shipping container home if it was cute.
Mac McClelland wrote a well-reported piece about how police responded to the Charlie Hebdo attacks.
The most interesting thing, to an outsider, about the morning J.R. was having on January 7, 2015, was how fervently he spent it wishing his dog would die. He’d gotten up at 7:30 for his usual 9 a.m. shift, and the ancient, squat thing glowered up at him in the elevator ride down to their morning walk, its miserable mug pulled into a permanent frown. All J.R. wanted, as they descended the floors, was for the dog to keel over. Or at least to make it the length of one claustrophobic elevator ride without noxiously farting. It would be about another four hours yet before J.R.’s city and country and profession would be the very center of the whole world’s attention — though that wouldn’t change anything between these two mutually hateful parties.
On her website, Janet Mock has written a much-needed and sobering piece about visibility, erasure, and the danger far too many trans women face.
