New York Times - "Aiming for My Fastest Marathon, I Turned to Distance Running’s Mecca"
Showing posts with label Travel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Travel. Show all posts
Saturday, August 15, 2026
Sunday, June 14, 2026
2030 World Cup and the World's Largest Football Stadium in Casablanca Morocco
Sunday, February 15, 2026
Sunday, November 30, 2025
Monday, October 13, 2025
Saturday, September 13, 2025
Sunday, August 17, 2025
Sunday, April 20, 2025
Friday, March 14, 2025
Sunday, May 5, 2024
The Best Pizza in New York?
New Yorker - "Tables for Two: Scarr’s Pizza"
"The restaurant’s owner and founder, Scarr Pimentel, grew up in Hamilton Heights, in a sprawling Dominican family; as a teen, he landed a busboy job at the celeb-magnet Nolita restaurant Emilio’s Ballato, where he started learning the basics of turning flour, yeast, and water into dough. He moved on to pizzerias—Artichoke Basille’s, known for its gargantuan slices, and Lombardi’s, arguably the birthplace of New York pizza—and began to refine his own sense of pizza perfection. Scarr’s Pizza opened in 2016, in a narrow sliver of a space with brown wood-panelled walls, molded Formica booths, and kitschy late-seventies ambience. It was a deliberate aesthetic, both a play to nostalgia and a subversion of it. Pimentel, a Black Latino man making moves in the overwhelmingly white pizza world, wasn’t paying homage to the pizzerias of his youth; he was claiming them.
The original Scarr’s was a classic New York pizza shop, serving classic New York pizza, except for all the ways it wasn’t. The ingredients were organic. You could buy a can of Bud Light, but you could also get a bottle of natural wine. There was no pork in the kitchen—Pimentel doesn’t eat it—and a portion of the menu skewed plant-based and vegan. The pies were thoughtful and deliberate, not high-speed, high-volume gut bombs. Pimentel is an exacting sort of person, which is a good quality in the world of pizza: when he couldn’t figure out exactly the right blend of flour for the crust of his dreams, he started milling his own, a fresh batch daily, in the restaurant’s basement prep area. The slice shop’s Orchard Street location, and its whole vibey gestalt—aesthetic deliberateness, quasi-healthfulness, nerd-level gastronomic rigor, plus a tiny bar and dining room that felt a little bit like a secret—made it a default for the hip and artsy habitués of the lower end of the Lower East Side, an area that’s since become saddled with the name Dimes Square. Social-media buzz began to build. Bon Appétit declared it the best slice in the city. The lines were long, and getting longer.
In pizza, as in all things, trends come and go—everyone’s freaking out about sourdough crusts one minute and Detroit-style rectangular pies the next. When Pimentel opened Scarr’s, many of the city’s most lauded pizzerias were sit-down affairs that served whole pies: coal-fired, Italian American-style at old-school spots like Lombardi’s and John’s of Bleecker; minimalist, jewel-like Neapolitan pizzas from Una Pizza Napoletana; and cheffy, creative “New Brooklyn” pizzas at places like Lucali, Roberta’s, and Emily. Now, for some reason (credit the slumping economy, a collective wistfulness for a New York City that once was, or the success of Scarr’s itself), we are living in the golden age of the slice. It is the fundamental unit of New York pizza: a cheap, hot meal for a city short on time and money and space, consumed while standing, a food shovelled-in more than eaten. At places like Scarr’s (and similar new-wave slice shops, like L’Industrie and Mama’s Too), it is treated like a form of art."
Airbnb Icons
New York Times - "In Latest Stunt, Airbnb Lists the ‘Up’ House. It Floats."
"On Wednesday, Airbnb announced that it was expanding stunt promotions like these under a new permanent category called “Icons,” featuring unusual and ambitious partnerships with brands and celebrities
At a news conference in Los Angeles on Wednesday, Brian Chesky, Airbnb’s chief executive, introduced the inaugural slate of Icons listings.
It was headlined by a replica of the floating house from “Up,” the 2009 animated Pixar film, balloons and all. With the help of a giant crane, the house will be suspended high in the air over the New Mexico desert.
...
Only a few people have been able to stay in Airbnb’s previous fantastical listings, but the company said it expected roughly 4,000 customers to book stays in Icons listings in 2024.
Another 10 listings are slated to go up by the end of the year. Booking periods will vary. Dates for the “Up” house are open through mid-September.
With Icons, Airbnb is hoping to capitalize on the success that earlier listings have achieved as promotional tools, ready-made for Instagram selfies and eye-catching headlines, Mr. Chesky said. (Yes, we fell for it.)
He pointed to the success of Airbnb’s collaboration with Mattel last summer, which brought the Malibu DreamHouse to life ahead of the release of the blockbuster “Barbie” film. The buzz interested other brands."
Sunday, March 17, 2024
The Delicate Rise of Mezcal
Bloomberg - "The Last Days of Mezcal"
"Ironically, the explosion of interest in mezcal rests on its artisanal nature, its reputation as agave’s anti-tequila. Most tequila is a mass-produced commodity churned out in gleaming factories by the global liquor giants, but mezcal still comes from thousands of small family operations across Oaxaca and eight other Mexican states, using methods that have barely changed in centuries. The wild agave species, wood fires, open fermentation vats, steampunk stills and whims of the mezcalero all contribute to an astonishingly flavorful and diverse spirit that mixes floral, fruity and herbal notes against a beautiful backdrop of smoke. Collectors discovered mezcal in the 2000s, bartenders and influencers followed, and the land rush was on."
Saturday, February 10, 2024
Swedish Fika for Americans
Wall Street Journal - "Sweden Has a Caffeinated Secret to Happiness at Work"
"Pronounced “fee-kah,” the Swedish culture of breaking for coffee involves much more than a schlep to Starbucks. It’s meant to be a deliberate pause to provide space and time for people to connect. Many Swedish companies build a mandatory fika into the workday, while the Embassy of Sweden in Washington holds one for staff weekly. IKEA, promoting its Upphetta coffee maker on the corporate website, extols the virtues of fika: “When we disconnect for a short period, our productivity increases significantly.”
“Fika is where we talk life, we talk everything but work itself,” said Micael Dahlen, professor of well-being, welfare and happiness at the Stockholm School of Economics. The ritual helps drive trivsel, he says, a term that means a combination of workplace enjoyment and thriving. The concept is so fundamental to Swedish workplaces that many companies in Sweden have trivsel committees, he said."
Monday, January 29, 2024
Friday, January 19, 2024
The Dakar Rally
Reuters - "Driving in the desert: Surreal images from the Dakar Rally"
From Wikipedia:
The Dakar Rally or simply "The Dakar", formerly known as the "Paris–Dakar Rally", is an annual rally raid organised by the Amaury Sport Organisation. Most events since the inception in 1978 were staged from Paris, France, to Dakar, Senegal. Security threats in Mauritania led to the cancellation of the 2008 rally, and events from 2009 to 2019 were held in South America. Since 2020, the rally has been held in Saudi Arabia. The event is open to amateur and professional entries, professionals typically making up about eighty percent of the participants.
The rally is an off-road endurance event. The terrain that the competitors traverse is much tougher than that used in conventional rallying, and the vehicles used are typically true off-road vehicles and motorcycles, rather than modified on-road vehicles. Most of the competitive special sections are off-road, crossing dunes, mud, camel grass, rocks, and erg among others. The distances of each stage covered vary from short distances up to 800–900 kilometres (500–560 mi) per day. The rough terrain and lack of skill usually results in accidents and serious injuries.
From RedBull.com:
Imagine a race where cars, motorcycles, trucks and quads zoom across vast deserts, challenging both the vehicles and the drivers to their limits. That's the Dakar Rally, an incredible adventure that takes place every year in a different part of the world.
The 46th edition of the Dakar Rally will be hosted by Saudi Arabia from January 5–19, 2024. Starting from the city of AlUla and ending at Yanbu on the Red Sea coast, the near 7,900km route, of which 4,727km are timed specials, includes some of the most breathtaking and difficult terrains of Saudi Arabia including the Empty Quarter, Rub' al Khali and Wadi Rum.
The race is a combination of speed, endurance, strategy and teamwork, and it is considered one of the most grueling and exciting motorsports competitions in the world. Drivers and their navigators must work together to navigate tricky terrain, overcome obstacles and face unexpected challenges in order to make it to the finish line.
With more than 1,000 people lining up to race, the 2024 Dakar Rally promises to be another epic rally-raid adventure over the sand dunes with a host of established global stars and talented young racers out to impress.
From Wikipedia:
The Dakar Rally or simply "The Dakar", formerly known as the "Paris–Dakar Rally", is an annual rally raid organised by the Amaury Sport Organisation. Most events since the inception in 1978 were staged from Paris, France, to Dakar, Senegal. Security threats in Mauritania led to the cancellation of the 2008 rally, and events from 2009 to 2019 were held in South America. Since 2020, the rally has been held in Saudi Arabia. The event is open to amateur and professional entries, professionals typically making up about eighty percent of the participants.
The rally is an off-road endurance event. The terrain that the competitors traverse is much tougher than that used in conventional rallying, and the vehicles used are typically true off-road vehicles and motorcycles, rather than modified on-road vehicles. Most of the competitive special sections are off-road, crossing dunes, mud, camel grass, rocks, and erg among others. The distances of each stage covered vary from short distances up to 800–900 kilometres (500–560 mi) per day. The rough terrain and lack of skill usually results in accidents and serious injuries.
From RedBull.com:
Imagine a race where cars, motorcycles, trucks and quads zoom across vast deserts, challenging both the vehicles and the drivers to their limits. That's the Dakar Rally, an incredible adventure that takes place every year in a different part of the world.
The 46th edition of the Dakar Rally will be hosted by Saudi Arabia from January 5–19, 2024. Starting from the city of AlUla and ending at Yanbu on the Red Sea coast, the near 7,900km route, of which 4,727km are timed specials, includes some of the most breathtaking and difficult terrains of Saudi Arabia including the Empty Quarter, Rub' al Khali and Wadi Rum.
The race is a combination of speed, endurance, strategy and teamwork, and it is considered one of the most grueling and exciting motorsports competitions in the world. Drivers and their navigators must work together to navigate tricky terrain, overcome obstacles and face unexpected challenges in order to make it to the finish line.
With more than 1,000 people lining up to race, the 2024 Dakar Rally promises to be another epic rally-raid adventure over the sand dunes with a host of established global stars and talented young racers out to impress.
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