Back to Top

Culture

Dave's Picks | Remembering 'Mommom', and her (idiot proof) matzo ball soup recipe

Dave's Picks | Remembering 'Mommom', and her (idiot proof) matzo ball soup recipe

Head inside for a moving tribute to beloved G-Ma Carol Cohn, known as Mommom to all who loved her, and learn to make and master her stellar matzo ball recipe for yourself. (Thank you Mommom, and to Melanie Gardiner for sharing this masterpiece!)

Dave's Picks ICYMI | NPR • Housing Projects And Empty Lots. Chanell Stone Reframes Nature Photography

Dave's Picks ICYMI | NPR • Housing Projects And Empty Lots. Chanell Stone Reframes Nature Photography

California-based photographer Chanell Stone

is challenging the genre of nature photography, made popular in the 1900s by (typically white) men like Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. The idea back then being that nature was remote, wild, and untouched — environments she notes in this NPR piece have too often been off limits or inaccessible to low income Black people.

Dave's Picks | NYTMag | ‘I Voted’ Stickers for Everyone Who Needs One

Dave's Picks | NYTMag | ‘I Voted’ Stickers for Everyone Who Needs One

A New York Magazine collab with 48 artists.

Hey kids look: Stickers! Super cool VOTING Edition!! And please, I know you know but DON’T SIT THIS ELECTION OUT. We need all hands ON DECK.

From NY Mag:

Perhaps you’re voting by mail this year. Millions of Americans are doing so, more than ever before, and many of them for the first time. What these voters need is I VOTED stickers. And so New York, in partnership with I am a voter., asked 48 artists to design them. The cover of the October 26 issue of the magazine will be converted to a sticker sheet, featuring contributions from Shepard Fairey, KAWS, Barbara Kruger, David Hammons, Laurie Simmons, Amy Sherald, Baron Von Fancy, Marilyn Minter, Lorna Simpson, Tawny Chatmon, Rico Gatson, Zipeng Zhu, Adam Pendleton, Adam J. Kurtz, Zaria Forman, and many more. There will be four different covers, each with 12 stickers — enough that each reader can wear a different one daily, from publication through to Election Day.

Dave's Picks | NYT | New Loses Iconic Graphic Designer Milton Glaser

Dave's Picks | NYT | New Loses Iconic Graphic Designer Milton Glaser

Remembering Milton Glaser, Master Designer of ‘I ♥ NY’ Logo

He was also a founder of New York magazine, created a memorable Bob Dylan poster and produced designs for everything from supermarkets to restaurants to “Mad Men.”

Dave's Picks | NYT | Take One Last Look at the (Many) Plastic Bags of New York

Dave's Picks | NYT | Take One Last Look at the (Many) Plastic Bags of New York

Alright kids, today — MARCH 1 — marks the first day of the new ban on plastic bags in NYC and all of NYS. Let’s a have a look back in this fun, rather beautiful at times, Ode to a Plastic Bag photo essay and commentary. Ohhhh BAGS. We hardly knew ya.

Dave's Picks | NYT | ‘High Maintenance’ and the New TV Fantasy of New York

Dave's Picks | NYT | ‘High Maintenance’ and the New TV Fantasy of New York

Well now. In which we discuss the merits of television (“It’s not TV, Dave. It’s HBO”.) portraying our fair city . . . Do they get it right or nah?

By Willy Staley | Jan. 30, 2020

It was probably during the fourth episode of the second season of HBO’s “High Maintenance” when I finally noticed what it was up to. The show follows a weed dealer known only as The Guy while he bikes around Brooklyn, leading the viewer into his customers’ homes and lives, where the cameras remain long after he’s gone, letting us peer into their problems, quirks, traumas and anxieties. Like many representations of New York on TV, it’s loosely predicated on the notion that people who live here are inherently more interesting than people who live in, say, Milwaukee. This particular episode centers on a man named Baruch who has just left one of Brooklyn’s ultra-­Orthodox sects. His hair is still twisted into payos, and he’s crashing with a friend in a squalid railroad apartment, looking for whatever work he can find by plugging search terms like “kosher jobs” into Craigslist. He tells his friend that he’s going on a date with a shiksa, one who has been asking him penetrating questions. “Wait a minute,” the friend responds. “Is she a writer?”

NYT | The Heir to a Tofu Dynasty Finally Learns to Make Tofu

NYT | The Heir to a Tofu Dynasty Finally Learns to Make Tofu

Two years ago, Paul Eng decided to confront a reality he had been facing most of his life: He was the heir to a tofu tradition who had no idea how to make tofu.

Mr. Eng’s grandfather learned the trade in the 1930s from fellow immigrants shortly after he arrived in Chinatown. He went on to open up a small tofu shop on Mott Street, called Fong Inn Too, and developed recipes that would become well loved in Chinatown for more than eighty years. When Mr. Eng’s parents closed the shop in 2017, the recipes, never written down, disappeared with it.