Confessions of a Private Chef: Foie Gras for Pets, Ecstasy for Pud

"Jack Burke, who cooked for the one per cent, reveals a world where nothing is off the menu."

The Ambitious Engineering Behind the Golden Gate Bridge

As many as a million people crossed the Golden Gate Bridge on foot to celebrate the 50th anniversary of its construction in 1987. More than a few of them would have remembered San Francisco as it was before it had its most iconic structure — and indeed, some would even remember

Open Culture • 2h

Good at pivoting

Seth Seiders, (Al Capone’s accountant) wrote a book about the “pivot man.” This is a key function in industrial organizations, bureaucracies and any organization with more than thirty people. It’s someone (often not a ‘man’) with a boss and with employees. In our modern world,

Seth's Blog • 3h

Dozens of M.C. Escher Prints Have Been Digitized & Put Online by the Boston Public Library

In addition to the iconic scene in Jim Henson’s Labyrinth, or appearances in animated TV shows and video games, M.C. Escher’s work has adorned the covers of albums like Mott the Hoople’s 1969 debut and the speculative fiction of Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges. A big hit

Open Culture • 3h

Skiing Down Mount Everest with No Oxygen: It’s a Wild Ride

From Red Bull’s YouTube Channel: “Ski mountaineer Andrzej Bargiel becomes the first person to climb Mount Everest and ski back to Everest Base Camp without supplementary oxygen. After nearly 16 hours climbing in the high altitude “death zone” (above 8,000m where oxygen levels

Open Culture • 7h

Made in L.A.’s Anti-Curation Doesn’t Work

The curators’ self described “no-methodology methodology” results in a scattered exhibition that feels bland and curatorially unimaginative.

Hyperallergic: Sensitive to Art and Its Discontents • 15h

Coco Fusco Turns Back the Ethnographic Gaze

In her first US retrospective, she becomes museum specimen, interrogator, colonial queen, and more to expose the systems that produce them.