For centuries matzo was a handmade specialty, carefully rolled into a thin, cratered moon shape and pricked with a fork. Today, many Orthodox communities still make this version — called shmurah — which is supervised by a rabbi from start to finish. But industrialization in the mid–nineteenth century forever changed the matzo industry. Historians trace the first […]
Tag: quotes
Nagging questions and doubts remain. Have we somehow prostituted ourselves for the vicarious entertainment of television viewers? Has the private language, the intimate currency of our happy household, been debased by making it public? I had thought it would be ‘fun.’ I was wrong. But somehow it has felt like an education of sorts — […]
In 1987, a young Nikki Finke profiled the “Literary Brat Pack” (choice Brat Pack members included Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney, of Less Than Zero and Bright Lights, Big City fame, respectively) for The Los Angeles Times.
Horace Silver was one of jazz’s most influential composers and talented pianists. He’d played with countless greats, from Sonny Rollins to Miles Davis, and led a quintet that shaped jazz as we know it. You might not know Silver’s songs by name, but you’ve probably heard his melodies sampled in hip-hop. Silver died in June 2014 […]
In 2014, The Telegraph reported that Inge Hausen, a pensioner from the Nordic village of Tyrsil, contacted an explosions expert from the Norwegian army about a 25-year-old can of fermented herring, called surströmming. The swollen can had lifted Hausen’s roof by two centimeters, and he feared it would explode. Here’s an excerpt from the article: […]
L’Engle’s life–her family, her religion, her motherhood, her career, her writing decisions—have been subject to much speculation. Later in her celebrated, prolific career, she transitioned to writing about religion and family–more memoir, less fiction. But it’s her “children’s” books that remain the most popular.
This whitewashing of Jewishness out of pop culture is an old, old story, and it isn’t specific to camp movies; it’s true of plenty of other Hollywood representations of American teens, too. The Czech Jew who wrote the novel that was the basis for Gidget (1959) was inspired by his own surfing daughter, Kathy Kohner, who went on […]
“When we first came out, [punk] was kind of on some vulgar shit,” recalls Jenifer. “We started kicking PMA in our music, and the message was different than the regular punk rock. You know, a punk rocker can write a song about hate─I hate my mom or some shit, you know? We wasn’t on no […]
Every means of confession creates a kind of person who confesses. You become who you are by saying what you did. The details make a difference. That pronoun, “I,” feels one way when you say it as part of a formula, in the dusk of a confessional, to a priest you cannot see behind the […]
That night, the whole village watching, Stavros Stavros finally proved his manhood: on the dance floor. With the pomp of the traditional syrtos that suggested respite before battle, the resting of the soul, he rejected the pappas’s interference, his mother’s control, his father’s weakness. When he felt like showing off, he showed off. During one […]
Quietly, steadily, the Buffett family is funding the biggest shift in birth control in a generation. “For Warren, it’s economic. He thinks that unless women can control their fertility—and that it’s basically their right to control their fertility—that you are sort of wasting more than half of the brainpower in the United States,” DeSarno said […]
Olive-oil fraud was already common in antiquity. Galen tells of unscrupulous oil merchants who mixed high-quality olive oil with cheaper substances like lard, and Apicius provides a recipe for turning cheap Spanish oil into prized oil from Istria using minced herbs and roots. The Greeks and the Romans used olive oil as food, soap, lotion, […]
“The tourists don’t know anything,” said Nichole, 29, a former heroin user who lives in a shelter and goes to the McDonald’s regularly with her boyfriend. “I love when they walk in here and look around and everybody is nodding out on a table. Because they have no idea what’s going on. They’re like, ‘Why […]
“An artist gets it to a point where they’re already self sustainable and then labels swoop in and there’s going to come a point where these artists realize the reason why they’re swooping in and giving them all this money is because they can make ten times as much if they just keep doing what […]
Texas—despite being America’s Cheer Capital—is one of thirty or so states that don’t recognize cheerleading as an official sport (other non-recognizers include the NCAA and the National Federation of State High School Associations, both of whom also decline to classify cheerleading as a sport). The lack of official recognition created a regulation vacuum of sorts, with no […]
Impostor syndrome has been covered extensively in recent years. Its inverse, known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, is at least as pervasive: our innate tendency to confidently claim expertise in topics we know very little about, sometimes to embarrassing (if not tragic) results. Writing for Pacific Standard, David Dunning, who led the first studies of this […]
In January, when Breanna went missing, Eddie wouldn’t tell anyone whether he knew where she was. He shared the temptation to vanish. He’d recently written a letter to his mom in jail saying he and Breanna were going to run away. They just didn’t know where to go. The police had been to this motel […]
Liberland is one of Europe’s newest would-be countries. Czech politician Vit Jedlicka and two fellow libertarians founded it in mid-April, claiming about 2.7 square miles of no man’s land between Croatia and Serbia. The idea is to create a “European Singapore,” where taxes are voluntary, Jedlicka told Bloomberg Business recently. Writing for the BBC, Rose Eveleth took […]
I am used to pausing beside train trestles, tilting my head to watch passing planes, perpetually looking forward to: to the evening, to the weekend, to the next year in a new place. But for the first time I find myself unable to fix my gaze on the horizon; I find my relationship to time […]
In 1990, a group of activists and legislators fighting for the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) gathered on the steps of the Capitol to make a statement. Writing for Curbed about the act’s 1990 passage and its impacts over the last quarter century, Patrick Sisson details how the group dramatized the difficulties faced […]
Like Senna’s, Winehouse’s family co-operated with Kapadia, but unlike them, they are displeased with the film, and it’s not hard to see why. As well as a welcome portrait of the frequently caricatured Winehouse as an (exceptional) artist and as a person, Amy is an indictment of those around her, especially her ex-husband, Blake Fielder-Civil, […]
Cecilia Sajland, marketing manager for Kalles, said, “We wanted to show other nationalities’ incomprehension when it comes to very Swedish tastes like Kalles,” adding, “We wanted Swedes to feel unique and proud of the brand and the taste.” The recipe for Kalles was sold by a peddler to Abba Seafood, a defunct Swedish company, in […]
Only one of the rape victims in Krakauer’s book, “Cecilia Washburn,” is identified with a pseudonym. “And I didn’t interview her,” Krakauer said. (Krakauer says he discussed the possibility of an interview with Washburn’s attorney multiple times, but she replied each time that her client likely would not consent to an interview.) The rest of […]
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