This essay, about growing up as a teenage girl in Brookyln, by Nancy Rommelmann, is the first best read of the new year.

If I’d set a fire or slit my wrists, the process might have been clearer for the adults involved. A female teacher might have pleaded my potential; I can easily imagine her standing by at dawn on a Sunday, offering support as my parents trundled me into a car bound for a sanitarium in New Jersey. But there was no female teacher, only an administration alarmed at having a garden-variety bad girl on the roster; someone who did not show up for school for no good reason; whose anecdotal reports from fifth grade on included some version of, “If she’d only apply herself...”

Good for Parker and Stone and their musical getting to profitability, which is a nice story, but the reason I'm calling this out is the writing in Variety. I've read articles in Variety before and never noticed it. Is it always this bad? Also, South Park fans, you're not part of the 'legit world' apparently...

Musical's sales are powered not only by the international popularity of Parker and Stone's 'South Park' the Comedy Central skein that's amassed a huge fanbase over 15 seasons, but also by the enthusiastic response of the legit world. Tuner won critical raves when it opened and then in June took home nine Tonys, including the new musical laurel, the one theater kudo generally believed to have a real impact on box office.

Complaining about a periodical's writing style? Who am I?

Short and sweet and sad.

The dog gave him a glance and we moved on by, but when I stopped after a decent distance and looked back he’d bent forward in his misery and I could hear sobs. A thin, tall man, perhaps in his late forties, his pale face now glistening with tears. Black jeans, gray shirt, some sort of jacket.

In a blurb about the new Momofuku Milk Bar Cookbook, this description of the difference between David Chang and his dessert chef Christina Tosi:

In the Momofuku kitchens, where chefs are hospitalized for anxiety-related skin diseases, Tosi is calm. Tosi doesn’t yell. There is no need. She is Samantha from “Bewitched”—she is all serenity, because she knows that things will work out fine in the end. If someone screws up in a Dave Chang kitchen, Chang will scream and rage and tell the person he has no integrity and might as well be working at KFC; then he will have to lie down for a day to recover. One imagines that if anyone ever screwed up in a Christina Tosi kitchen, she would wiggle her nose and, with a magic ping, that person would simply disappear.


Also, Chang bought her 240 Take 5 candy bars for her birthday and challenged her to eat them in a month.

Charles Cushman took color photographs of New York City in the early 1940s, the Daily Mail posted a lot of them. They're so great. Click through to love them.





Via @FelixSalmon / Stellar

Here's a list of the 129 service rules for La Bernardin in New York City from a chapter in Eric Ripert's 2008 book, 'On the Line'. The list was published on 4 or 5 different pages by the Star Tribune, and I figured they'd be better all on one page.

1. Not acknowledging guests with eye contact and a smile within 30 seconds. First impressions count!
2. Not thanking the guests as they leave. Last impression!
3. Not remembering the guests' likes and dislikes!
4. Not opening the front door for guests.
5. Silverware set askew on the tables.
6. Tabletop that isn't picture perfect.
7. Forks with bent tines.
8. Unevenly folded napkins.
9. Chipped glassware.
10. Tables not completely set when guests are being seated.
11. Dead or wilted flowers on the tables.
12. Tables that are not leveled.
13. Salt and pepper shakers that are half empty.
14. Salt or sugar crusted inside the shakers.
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The New Yorker recently profiled The Spotted Pig chef April Bloomfield and among other things discussed what it takes to work for her:

If David Chang’s band of renegades are the Red Sox of the New York restaurant world, Bloomfield’s cooks are the Yankees, square and conscientious. When I asked her what kind of people she likes to hire, she replied, “Nobody weird. Nobody with dreadlocks.” She paused a minute, and added, “Well, no white guys with dreadlocks.” Her cooks wear black pants and black shoes. “People with chile peppers on their chef pants shouldn’t be allowed in the kitchen.”

I also thought this was interesting, about why a restaurant would want a farm. Status symbol.

They both want a farm, where they can grow vegetables and raise livestock for use in their restaurants. A farm is attractive for two reasons. The first is that Bloomfield can’t always procure the calibre of ingredients she wants, since many of the city’s top suppliers are beholden to more established chefs. “They get all funny,” Bloomfield said. “I’m not Daniel Boulud.” The second is that a farm, in the hyper-competitive New York restaurant world, is a sign of clout and longevity, the breadbasket of an empire. Bloomfield and Friedman have been looking at land in New Paltz and Wassaic.

This fantastic collection of subway photos from 1970's and 80's New York City are great to look at.

“I wanted to transform the subway from its dark, degrading, and impersonal reality into images that open up our experience again to the color, sensuality, and vitality of the individual souls that ride it each day.” In “Subway”, passengers of the city’s subterranean world are portrayed in detail, revealing the interplay of its inner landscape and outer vistas, set against a gritty, graffiti-strewn background and displayed in tones that Davidson describes as “an iridescence like that I had seen in photographs of deep-sea fish”.

This was all over Tumblr the other day. It's via them.

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Last episode. This has been a long ride, the last several years of which were awful. One thing I'm hoping to get better at is cutting the chord on terrible TV shows earlier. 24 hasn't been remarkable since the first season. It hasn't been good since the 3rd or 4th season. It hasn't been watchable the last 2 years. And yet I watched. I watched week in and week out. I'm a worse person because of it. I hope you can all forgive me. All that said, I'm very excited to be live blogging the FINAL 2 hours of 24.

This 24 Tag will take you to ALL of the '24' related content on Unlikelywords.

We'll get going below the fold at 9PM EST.
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It looks as though we're actually going to get to the end of the series finally. (For those new visitors, I've been live blogging 24 for a couple years. This is sort of like one of those, 'I watch it so you don't have to.')

This 24 Tag will take you to ALL of the '24' related content on Unlikelywords.

We'll get going below the fold at 9PM EST.
Read the rest of this entry »