There’s a long-simmering secret behind the gilded doors of many fine dining restaurants. Inside the silent kitchens, with their exquisitely organized benchtops and lineups of tweezered plates, an increasingly vocal chorus is peeling back the truth, revealing top-heavy hierarchies and crippling financial pressures. Movies like “The Menu” and “Burnt” shone a blistering light on soul-destroying stress and the impossible quest for perfection. And earlier this year, fine dining poster child Rene Redzepi, the man behind Copenhagen’s Noma, a restaurant that was named the world’s best multiple times, announced he would permanently close next year and reopen as a food laboratory and pop-up space. “We have to completely rethink the industry,” Redzepi told The New York Times in January, blaming the...
In today’s Around the World in 50 Experiments adventure, we’re heading to India, home to one of the oldest civilisations on Earth and a current population of over 1.4 billion people! India is a magical land of spices, colour, mountains, beaches, swamps, rain, curry and crafts. India has 22 official languages and is the birthplace of chess, snakes and ladders and yoga! Where is India? India is a country in South Asia bordered by the Bay of Bengal on one side and the Arabian Sea on the other. India has a varied terrain and climate, including deserts, jungles and fertile areas perfect for farming. As part of our virtual trip to India, we’re going to learn about the monsoon, India’s...
In May 2019, I was invited to give a lecture at my old high school in Scarsdale, New York. Before the talk, I met with the principal and his top administrators. I heard that the school, like most high schools in America, was struggling with a large and recent increase in mental illness among its students. The primary diagnoses were depression and anxiety disorders, with increasing rates of self-harm; girls were particularly vulnerable. I was told that the mental-health problems were baked in when students arrived for ninth grade: Coming out of middle school, many students were already anxious and depressed. Many were also already addicted to their phone.Ten months later, I was invited to give a talk at Scarsdale...
June 6, 2023––“Baseball had a great run, a nice century. Boxing used to be huge too. Times change, tastes veer, attention spans shrink. Cultural gems become cultural relics. It’s no one’s fault; we move on to new things.” When staff writer Mark Leibovich started reporting his new cover story for The Atlantic, such was his thinking toward the sport; Leibovich thought he would be writing its obituary. Instead, he discovered that some of the same Moneyball whiz kids who had made baseball games endless and unwatchable had been brought back in to save the sport––and, against all expectations, have implemented the transformations necessary to save it. In his first cover story for The Atlantic, Leibovich continues his sharp reporting on...
There’s nothing that tastes better on a hot summer night than a bowl of homemade ice cream, and I’ve never used an ice cream maker that can make a better scoop than the Breville Smart Scoop ice cream maker. This ice cream maker has a built-in compressor so you don’t have to put the bucket in the freezer overnight. It works fast, makes all types of ice cream, as well as frozen yogurt and gelato, and has a hardness dial so you can make soft serve or a hard scoop. I tested out this ice cream maker for two weeks and I can’t stop experimenting with different kinds of ice cream. Here’s how the Breville Smart Scoop works and what...
