Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
rating: 3 of 5 stars
I think of Malcolm Gladwell books as a sophisticated guilty pleasure.
He Who Must Name Patterns is the darling of airport bookstores (which I think amuses him; there is a part on airplane crashes in Outliers that is difficult to read on a flight, similar to beginning [...]

Great afternoons so often begin with local beer, wherever you are.
Sweetwater Brewery in Atlanta lets fans help affix labels to its beer one night a week, so you sometimes find it easier to read the particular brew name (in this case, Georgia Brown) when you’re tilting the neck back on November afternoons…

The Sweetwater “don’t [...]

Soon after checking in on Sunday, I convinced my colleague Paula to go from the Hudson Hotel to Hudson Street for brunch at the Fatty Crab, where the menu builds on pork belly.

I would return for the “belly & egg”—pork belly and a fried egg on a brioche triangle (and for another cocktail that [...]

In Mexico: One Plate at a Time, Rick Bayless tells us that hard squashes are prized for their seeds, which are used to thicken soups and sauces as well as provide protein. I’m thinking of my sister Kat, who is a vegetarian, with this recipe; I like to make dishes especially for her during this [...]

Do you ever find it difficult to describe the work you do to your family?
In anticipation of the upcoming Tryptophantastic week, I offer this video (from Zachary Seward of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard) to explain my job, which on this particular October night included a Boston gathering to talk about the Knight [...]

Last night, Andrew, Jessica, Annie, and I made ravioli, stretching pasta sheets until you could see through them with sautéed mushrooms, asparagus, garlic, and parmesan:

Sprinkled with Hawaiian red salt and feathered with chives, the cooked ravioli rested in a butter sauce.
I realized when taking the picture below that the chives had fallen in [...]

The biscuits were baking, the jam cooling, and the bacon sputtering yesterday morning, for brunch (not Grease, though the bacon rendered plenty) was the word—brunch was the time, was the place, was the motion; brunch was the way we were feeling.
A small group of the leading lights in digital innovation filled the magic cottage with [...]

The ultimate comfort food? Aligot. Traditionally almost equal parts potato puree and Tomme cheese (joined in elasticity), I like to take mashed potatoes in this direction, adding garlic and Tomme/Raclette to Yukon Golds, stirring with figure eight motions.
This Thanksgiving side deserves a place in your dinner rotation all year. I’ll be making this for [...]

Voilà, the project I have been working on these few months at the Knight Foundation:
KnightPulse.org, a place to discuss the future of information—to talk about new ways to give, share, find, and receive information we need. We’re posting video conversations to start off, and we’ll build tools the community wants next.

All mistakes are [...]

On Friday night, I was transfixed listening to Dave Brubeck coaxing jazz with his unique time signatures from a piano on stage right—at 88, he riffs playfully, hunched over at first, then gracefully moving from one end of the keys to the other—

And I woke up this morning thinking about what I might be at [...]