History Of Food: “How The New York City Bagel Was Born” (NYU Video)

Bagels have roots in 17th-century Poland, but it’s American wheat—along with Jewish immigration to New York, labor organizing, and an epic battle between bakers—that made them what they are today. Jacob Remes, a clinical associate professor at NYU’s Gallatin School who has studied this history, says nobody has had a real New York bagel since 1967.

Health: Diagnosing “Essential Tremor” Movement Disorder

From a NextAvenue.org online article (01/07/20):

Essential Tremor InfographicEssential tremor is a common movement disorder — more common than tremors that come with Parkinson’s disease — and the most common neurologic condition affecting people 65 and older. It is estimated that 10 million Americans live with essential tremor, according to the International Essential Tremor Foundation.

About half of people with essential tremor inherited the condition. But the severity and affected body parts can differ from generation to generation, and researchers still haven’t pinned down the gene or genes responsible.

Tremors typically happen when people try to use their hands for a task. Activities such as shaving can be difficult’ people often need to use safety razors or electric razors to avoid cutting or nicking themselves. Also, difficulty holding a utensil makes eating a challenge for many people with essential tremor.

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Performing Arts: “The Letters Of Cole Porter” (New Yorker Review)

From a New Yorker online article review:

The Letters Of Cole Porter Yale University Press November 2019Beneath his smooth, genial, almost inhumanly productive and evasive surface, there were turbulent waters. His very name, for all its air of Ivy League ease, represents a burdened legacy. The Porters were his difficult, scapegrace father’s family; the Coles were his mother’s rich and ambitious Indiana family. He was a Porter by birth but, if his mother had anything to do with it, would be a Cole for life.

Certainly, Porter’s ghost could not ask for better care than he has been given in “The Letters of Cole Porter” (Yale), edited by Cliff Eisen, a professor of music history at King’s College London, and Dominic McHugh, a musicologist at the University of Sheffield (and the editor of Alan Jay Lerner’s letters). Laid out with a meticulous scholarly apparatus, as though this were the correspondence of Grover Cleveland, every turn in the songwriter’s story is deep-dived for exact chronology, and every name casually dropped by Porter gets a worried, explicatory footnote.

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Politics: January 14 Democratic Party Debate In Iowa Highlights (Video)

DES MOINES, Iowa — The Democratic presidential candidates had one last chance to contrast themselves on national TV before the Iowa caucuses. And in between slams of President Donald Trump, they delivered.

Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders traded criticisms of their long records on trade, foreign policy and health care. Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar reprised their December clash about experience in the Oval Office. And Elizabeth Warren turned a question about her allegation that Sanders said a woman couldn’t beat Trump — a comment Sanders has repeatedly denied making — into a call to recognize female political power in the Democratic Party.

Read the full story here: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/01…

Travel & Dining: Touring London In A 2020 Morgan Plus Six Roadster (Video)

In GQ’s on-going quest to road test the contenders for the 2020 Car Awards, chef Paul Ainsworth takes a trip down memory lane in a brand new old-school British roadster.

Morgan PlusSix First Edition Moonstone Roadster 2020
Morgan PlusSix First Edition Moonstone Roadster 2020

The winners of the Car Awards, in association with Michelin, will be revealed on 3 February, 2020. Full coverage will appear in the March issue of GQ, on sale 6 February. For more information visit: GQ.co.uk

Travel: “Okavango – River Of Dreams” Directed By Beverly And Dereck Joubert (Video Profile)

Beverly Joubert and Dereck Joubert
Beverly Joubert and Dereck Joubert

Beverly Joubert and Dereck Joubert on OKAVANGO: RIVER OF DREAMS (DIRECTOR’S CUT), a documentary premiering at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.

Okavango: River of Dreams, follows a cast of wildlife whose destiny is forever linked to this unique desert oasis and its extraordinary journey as it winds its way to the Kalahari Desert, the only river in the world to disappear inland.

Presented by Dropbox.

“David Attenborough – A Life On Our Planet” Recounts 93-Year Old’s Life In Nature (Trailer)

Sir David Attenborough has warned that “human beings have overrun the world” in a trailer for his new film.

The feature-length documentary, titled David Attenborough: A Life On Our Planet, looks back on the defining moments of his life and the environmental devastation that has taken place during that time. As well as highlighting some of the issues that climate change poses, he also explores some of the potential solutions.

In the trailer, the veteran broadcaster, 93, said: “I’ve had the most extraordinary life. It is only now that I appreciate how extraordinary.”

For the full story click here: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020…

New Literary Books: “Parisian Lives – Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir And Me” (Bair)

Deirdre Bair Parisian Lives Samuel Beckett Simone de Beauvoir and Me A Memoir BookDe Beauvoir and Beckett despised each other – and lived essentially on the same street. While quite literally dodging one subject or the other, and sometimes hiding out in the backrooms of the great cafés of Paris, Bair learned that what works in terms of process for one biography rarely applies to the next. Her seven-year relationship with the domineering and difficult de Beauvoir required a radical change in approach, yielding another groundbreaking literary profile.

Drawing on Bair’s extensive notes from the period, including never-before-told anecdotes and details that were considered impossible to publish at the time, Parisian Lives is full of personality and warmth and gives us an entirely new window on the all-too-human side of these legendary thinkers.

In 1971 Deirdre Bair was a journalist and recently minted PhD who managed to secure access to Nobel Prize-winning author Samuel Beckett. He agreed that she could write his biography despite never having written – or even read – a biography herself. The next seven years of intimate conversations, intercontinental research, and peculiar cat-and-mouse games resulted in Samuel Beckett: A Biography, which went on to win the National Book Award and propel Deirdre to her next subject: Simone de Beauvoir. The catch?

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Politics & Foreign Affairs: Joe Biden And Iranian Protests (Podcast)

The race for the Democratic nomination looks much like it did a year ago—but previous contests prove that once voting starts, momentum can reshuffle the pack. 

The Economist Intelligence PodcastIran has been roiling with protests following the accidental downing of an airliner; what should Iranians and the wider world expect now? And we examine how Bogotá’s once-adored public-transport system went so wrong.

Top 2019 Architecture: “Branch House” By Tolo Architecture (Montecito)

branch-house-by-tolo-architecture-1-e1579038253756.jpg

The interior palette is simple, even stark: concrete floors, gypsum board walls and ceilings, and exposed laminated-veneer lumber joists in the corridors and other areas. Colorfully glazed Heath clay tile punctuates specific areas: blue for the kitchen, and blue, pink, and yellow for the bathrooms. The exterior is even simpler, with the roof and siding of the boldly geometric volumes sheathed in copper shingles that act as a rainscreen while protecting the wood-framed structure from fire like a protective armor.

Branch House by Tolo Architecture
http://toloarchitecture.com/

Designed by Los Angeles–based TOLO Architecture, the Branch House brings a village of abstract domestic forms to a typical suburban enclave in Montecito, Calif. The 4,400-square-foot single-family residence sits on a 1-acre site on a cul de sac. A series of eight rectangular volumes, each with a skylight, enclose a living room and dining room, a kitchen, a two-car garage, an office, two bedrooms, a master bath, and a powder room, respectively, and are deployed in a nonorthogonal layout across the site. The positioning of each balances the desire for occupant privacy as well as views of the surrounding landscape. Meandering glass-lined hallways connect the volumes and act as galleries for the client’s art collection.

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