Tiger Woods, Spices, Philosophy, Hacking, Fried Chicken, Mafia
The Greatest Week In Golf
Michael Weinreb | The Ringer | 6th April 2017
Getting Tiger Woods into perspective, twenty years after his first victory at the Masters, one of the greatest performances in sporting history. “What Tiger did that week is no less of a superhuman athletic feat now than it was back then, and it carries the same staggering social importance as it did back then. But the way in which those sounds have carried over the years wound up being far more complicated, far more puzzling, and far more of a mystery than most could have imagined at the time” (5,100 words)
Growing Up In The Spice Trade
Caitlin PenzeyMoog | AV Club | 6th April 2017
What you learn when your mother’s family runs a spice shop. Freshly ground pepper will never make you sneeze. Seasonings and spices are not the same thing — seasonings are composed of spices. Spices never go bad, but the flavours fade. “Don’t put your salt in a grinder. All you’re doing is making your salt smaller than it was before. Unlike pepper, which is actually processed in the grinder, salt does not need to be ground and is not fresher after coming out of a grinder. Use a shaker” (2,400 words)
Imaginary Spaces
Steven Nadler | Times Literary Supplement | 5th April 2017
Discussion of A.C. Grayling’s book The Age Of Genius, which argues that 17C philosophy marked a break between medieval and modern views of the world, with Descartes as first modernist, trusting in his own reason rather than religious doctrine. The break was real enough; but it owed more to Spinoza and to Leibniz than to Descartes. And only with Newton at the end of the century do we approach a truly modern view of the world — in which natural science guards mysteries of its own (3,200 words)
How To Hijack A Bank
Andy Greenberg | Wired | 4th April 2017
Annals of cybercrime. Hackers change the internet domain name records of a Brazilian bank, thereby seizing control of its entire online network including websites, ATMs, and card terminals. They redirect traffic to fake sites where customer credentials are stolen. The bank has hundreds of branches, five million customers and $27 billion in assets. The hijack, which lasts for five or six hours, is so complete that the bank cannot even send out emails in its own name warning of the attack (1,300 words)
Keaton’s Barbecue
Joe Posnanski | 4th April 2017
A song of praise to the fried chicken served at B.W. Keaton’s Barbecue in North Carolina. “You have the option of ordering the chicken hot or mild, though when I ask the woman behind the counter about the mild, she offers a look of such deep disapproval that I feel like I have publicly shamed my entire family. That sauce is pretty hot on first taste, but then, magical as it is, your body acclimates. It penetrates the chicken, the bone, your lungs and your heart in more ways than one” (1,600 words)
Crimetown USA
David Grann | New Republic | 10th July 2000
“When Lenny Strollo ordered the hit that summer night in 1996, there was no reason to believe it would go down any differently. As the top Mafia don in Ohio’s Mahoning Valley, his reach extended over nearly an entire corner of the state, a stretch of land that was home to more than 200,000 people and that had become, by all accounts, the most crooked county in America — a place, in the modern era, where the Mafia still held sway over every element of society” (7,800 words)
Video of the day: Orchestrina
What to expect:
“A small experiment using atypical mechanical setups that create music loops” (1’13”)
Thought for the day
Only a mediocre person is always at their best
W. Somerset Maugham