A Toast Story
The surprising, emotionally affecting origin story behind artisanal toast:
The smallness of her cafés is another device to stoke interaction, on the theory that it’s simply hard to avoid talking to people standing nine inches away from you. And cinnamon toast is a kind of all-purpose mollifier: something Carrelli offers her customers whenever Trouble is abrasive, or loud, or crowded, or refuses to give them what they want. “No one can be mad at toast,” she said.
Carrelli’s explanations made a delightfully weird, fleeting kind of sense as I heard them. But then she told me something that made Trouble snap into focus. More than a café, the shop is a carpentered-together, ingenious mechanism—a specialized tool—designed to keep Carrelli tethered to herself.
The Closing of the Marijuana Frontier
California is not just deciding whether pot should be legal. It’s determining the shape of a major new American industry.
The Agnostic Cartographer
How Google’s open-ended maps are embroiling the company in some of the world’s touchiest geopolitical disputes.
