Sea urchins are the new It Food. According to Wired Science, this tantalizing tidbit comes from no less buzzworthy a source than a trendspotter at Converse. Meanwhile, two of the chefs picked to provision the New Yorker Stories From the Near Future conference were effusive in their praise for the prickly little echinoids.

“The sweetness … the saltiness!” gushed the otherwise-reserved Daniel Humm, executive chef at Eleven Madison Park.

“It has a certain creaminess,” said Momofuku’s David Chang. “A strong flavor you can combine with anything.”

They convinced me to override my natural disinclination — and Chang’s sea urchin cappuccino was everything they promised it would be. But that made me wonder whether sea urchins might, like nearly every other ocean creature we’ve developed a taste for, run out.

A quick Googling returned a few interesting results. Their populations have benefited from a human-produced drop in predators, but sea urchins aren’t endless.

And if we overfish — overurchin? — them, that would be scary. The other day a friend told me that the oceans are reverting to prehistoric form, with primitive creatures like jellyfish and urchins thriving in warming, polluted and overtaxed waters. If human appetites are too voracious for even these survivors, we’ll be reduced to eating sea slime.

Next week I’ll ask some sea urchin experts about their prospects. More to come….[via link

As a tribute to Mother’s Day, Time has assembled a highly unscientific study of the ten best and worst mothers from the worlds of pop culture. From Mrs. Robinson (one person’s bad mother is another’s post-feminist role model) to Marge Simpson (her heart is as big as her hair), they’ve covered the notables. Happy Mother’s Day!

A sad Kermit the Frog sings Elliot Smith’s Needle in the Hay (complete with The Royal Tenenbaums parody), NIN’s Hurt, and Radiohead’s Creep. Touchingly charming.[via link]

Like good wines or French cheeses, artists often improve with age; cue Pablo Picasso and Oscar Neimeyer, Claude Monet and Ettore Sottsass as instant examples. So too does American furniture designer Wendell Castle.

Now in his 70s, Wendell has produced some classics over the decades, from bulbous plastic pieces in the Sixties that nod to the Memphis movement, through to his trademark crafty wooden pieces with idiosyncratic twists. Although they were created 40 years ago, many pieces are looking fresher than ever and are fetching rocket prices at auction, while his large body of work in wood has firmly redefined Wendell as artist designer rather than craftsman.

New works launched last year include the splendid Nirvana chair and Night on Earth chaise, both of which form part of an exhibition of his work which opened 1 May at New York’s Barry Friedman Gallery

SLIDE SHOW

“I look at life as retouching.

Makeup, clothes are just a transformation

of what you want to look like.”

Pascal Dangin

For a charity auction a few years back, the photographer Patrick Demarchelier donated a private portrait session. The lot sold, for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, to the wife of a very rich man. It was her wish to pose on the couple’s yacht. “I call her, I say, ‘I come to your yacht at sunset, I take your picture,’ ” Demarchelier recalled not long ago. He took a dinghy to the larger boat, where he was greeted by the woman, who, to his surprise, was not wearing any clothes.

“I want a picture that will excite my husband,” she said.

Capturing such an image, by Demarchelier’s reckoning, proved to be difficult. “I cannot take good picture,” he said. “Short legs, so much done to her face it was flat.” Demarchelier finished the sitting and wondered what to do. Eventually, he picked up the phone: “I call Pascal. ‘Make her legs long!’ ”

Pascal Dangin is the premier retoucher of fashion photographs. Art directors and admen call him when they want someone who looks less than great to look great, someone who looks great to look amazing, or someone who looks amazing already—whether by dint of DNA or M·A·C—to look, as is the mode, superhuman. (Christy Turlington, for the record, needs the least help.)

In the March issue of Vogue Dangin tweaked a hundred and forty-four images: a hundred and seven advertisements (Estée Lauder, Gucci, Dior, etc.), thirty-six fashion pictures, and the cover, featuring Drew Barrymore. To keep track of his clients, he assigns three-letter rubrics, like airport codes. Click on the current-jobs menu on his computer: AFR (Air France), AMX (American Express), BAL (Balenciaga), DSN (Disney), LUV (Louis Vuitton), TFY (Tiffany & Co.), VIC (Victoria’s Secret). ARTICLE…

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News of Note from the last week; worthy of the best in cocktail conversation. (Chattails is taken from the Urban Dictionary: When two or more friends decide to have cocktails and conversation).

The economic slowdown has swelled the ranks of people without health insurance. But now it is also threatening millions of people who have insurance but find that the coverage is too limited. [NYTimes]

Starting in June 2009, the US government will require a passport or “similar federally approved document” for entering the US by land. Both US and Canadian citizens living near the borders are unhappy. [Salon]

Fifty percent of the Australia’s houses sit less than 8 miles from a beach. Eighty percent of Australians live within 80 miles of the sea. [Architectural Record]

The capacity of Niagara Falls is controlled artificially; the flow is doubled during normal tourist visiting hours. [Newsweek]

As a reward for returning the Stradivarius left in the backseat of Mohamed Khalil’s taxi, violinist Philippe Quint gave the cabbie a reward of $100, a private 30-minute performance in the taxi waiting area at Newark, and tickets for him and his family to Quint’s next performance at Carnegie Hall. Khalil also received a medal from the city of Newark. The Stradivarius is valued at $4 million. [BBC]

Toilet bowls are cleaner than the average computer keyboard. Studies differ on how much cleaner…1/5? 1/67? 1/400? [Gelf Magazine]

When actively used, women’s ballet shoes can last anywhere from 2 weeks to 2 days. [Arizona Daily Star]

For $6,000, you can buy a Worldchanging Carbon Clean Slate gift for your graduating high schooler, which will offset all the climate emissions that your kid has accumulated from birth. For $25,000, you can offset their entire life. [Worldchanging]

By 2015, Moscow will have the 10 tallest office buildings in Europe. The rent for Moscow office space is currently higher than in midtown Manhattan. [Newsweek]

Vincent Callebaut’s Anti-Smog: An Innovation Centre in Sustainable Development is an ecological marvel, a self-sufficient entity that reacts to its environment and applies avant-garde renewable energies to purify the air of nasty Parisian smog. Labeled a “didactic prototype of ecological experimentations”, the center (or “centre”) is a linear and emblematic site suspended above Paris’ canal de l’Ourcq that was envisioned as a place to educate French citizens on the importance of urban ecology and renewable energy.

Boasting 250 square meters of solar PV that produce more energy than the building uses, the “Solar Drop” structure is also coated with titanium dioxide, which reacts with the suns’ ultraviolet rays to create a photo-catalytic effect that actually breaks down smog in the air. It also harvests rainwater from the roof for use inside. Connected to the Solar Drop by bridge, the “Wind Tower” is a helical structure captures and utilizes the breeze coming off the canal. MORE…

Breathtaking photos of the plume from Chile’s reactivated Chaitén volcano accompanied by a brilliant light-infested thunderstorm. Awe inspiring.[via link]

Andrew O’Hehir of Salon heralds “A Star is Born at 51″ as he gushes high praise on a new leading lady in the madcap farce, “A Previous Engagement.“ For those of you who loved “Truly, Madly, Deeply” and who didn’t? [EA 03.21.08] the star who has caught his eye and affection is none other than Juliet Stevenson.

“Stevenson is so incandescent — so funny, so vulnerable, so awkwardly sexy — in her role here as Julia Reynolds, a married woman from Seattle who’s returned to Malta to fulfill a 25-year-old promise to meet her former lover, that she lifts writer-director Joan Carr-Wiggin’s ordinary middle-aged rom-com above all its abundant clichés.

[...] (Stevenson’s long and varied career goes back to playing Antigone for British TV in the early ’80s; more recently, she’s appeared in “Bend It Like Beckham,” “Nicholas Nickleby” and “Being Julia.”) Every scene Stevenson is in she commands, even more so because she plays Julia as a woman adrift in a sea of yearning and uncertainty, a bottomless fount of stammered double-takes, deer-in-headlights epiphanies and enraged zingers.

As silly as the plot is — and as grating as that boomer-lounge-music soundtrack gets — “A Previous Engagement” got under my skin. Perhaps you’ve noticed that there aren’t many parts like this lying around for actresses over 50, and Stevenson by-God gets her fangs into this one, imbuing Julia with a ferocious blend of anxiety, sexual longing and wiry, tensile strength. If any significant population of adult women get to see this movie, she’s going to have a second career as a cult leader in front of her.

And topping the honors for superness in a Summer Blockbuster, New York Magazine nominates the impeccably suited, no-frills Virginia “Pepper” Potts, played by Gwyneth Paltrow in Iron Man.

While Potts is, ostensibly, Tony Stark’s coffee-fetching, ego-soothing EA, she far exceeds her assistant role, running unfazed from impending destruction in impossibly high heels, saving Stark from cardiac arrest by delicately installing his new heart (hello, metaphor!), and, in her most heroic moment, deftly juggling the world of high technology with the world of Scotch-guzzling creeps. [...] I really don’t think you could tie your shoes without me,” Potts whispers to Stark in one pivotal scene. Icky Oedipal associations aside, it’s true that without Potts, Stark and Iron Man would have destructed several times over, both literally and emotionally. What makes Potts super is her balance: She negotiates feminine desire with feminine brain and feminine technical proficiency, all in the absence of sass and perk, those grating affects that are all too often substitutes for, well, being a man. Not only does she deliver his afternoon coffee with gentle poise (in outfits equally practical and fatal), she connects the crime-solving dots before Stark does and sets plans in motion for the smackdown of Obediah’s evil superego Iron Monger. While Dargis sees ditz and empty glitz, we’d like to think Potts will be just one of many elegantly smoking supporting females who will be tying Hollywood’s proverbial shoelaces this summer. {Readers who are so inclined might want to check out the ensuing comments from female viewers on New York’s site, some who don’t agree that Pepper Potts is anymore aggressively empowered than Nancy Drew}.

It is not an empty clearness, a bottomless sight.
It is a visibility of thought,
In which hundreds of eyes, in one mind, see at once.

from ‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven’ by Wallace Stevens

Photography by Ray Metzker. “Composites” series. “Composites” have been assembled from discovered vintage prints made in the mid-60’s. Metzker, at age 70, had a fresh opportunity to finally complete a body of work begun over 30 years ago. [via link]

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Has anyone noticed the disquieting rise of street art?”It’s the anti-establishment movement that has taken the art market by storm, keenly collected by hedge-funders and Hollywood’ s A-list. Now, even Tate Modern is giving Street Art its stamp of approval.”

You just can’t catch a break as a politician these days. Right when you think you look all “hip” and “endearingly self-deprecating” by allowing yourself to be skewered by certain late-night comedians (bonus points if you’re actually on the show while this gentle, aide-approved gentle ribbing is happening), those same wise-asses up and turn on you—as Amy Poehler did this weekend in her latest Hillary Clinton spoof on “Saturday Night Live.” [via truthdig]

VIEW

Out of 101 Cookbooks, Heidi weighs in with a perfectly luscious and nutritionally wholesome contribution with this stunning berry-studded breakfast quinoa. The recipe is taken from Dr. John La Puma’s recent release - Chef MD’s Big Book of Culinary Medicine.

Heidi goes on to say: I’ve written about just a handful of books this year (more to come, I promise!), but I wanted to highlight this one for a few reasons. It’s a fantastic healthy-cooking (and eating) primer written by a someone who is both a doctor and chef. The book is text heavy and photo-free, but for those of you who want to dive into some of the ways food can work for you, this is a good overview. A chapter in his book opens with the following passage:

“…I have begun to think of a home kitchen in much the same way I think of a health spa - a place where people can come to be restored, feel better, experience pleasure, and become healthier. And this is how I’d like you to start thinking about your kitchen. Your kitchen is at the heart of your health.”

“In your home, you probably keep your medicine chest in the bathroom. I’m offering a second medicine chest, one that helps prevent diseases and symptoms and that you keep right in your kitchen cupboards, fridge, freezer, and pantry.”

There’s a lot going on here (in a good way). One chapter outlines the fifty foods that should be part of your pantry - those of you already cooking from a natural foods pantry have a big head start. To make the cut each contender had to demonstrate “that if eaten regularly it could prevent, and in some cases, actually treat - specific conditions and symptoms.” The good news is, many of the fifty foods are flat-out delicious in their own right, and for those of you who are regular readers here, you’ll find a cast of familiar characters - oats, quinoa, lentils, beans, greens, and agave nectar, avocado, and berries. Another chapter tells you which foods to eat (or avoid) based on forty common conditions.

The quinoa berry bowl is typical of what you’ll find in the recipe section. Broadly speaking, the recipes are concise and approachable, with every ingredient working for you on both the flavor and nutrition fronts. You’ll find recipes that are both vegetarian and non-vegetarian, and many that are easily adaptable either way. A few other recipes that caught my attention; Butternut Barley Risotto, Cinnamon Orange Dreamsicles, and Walnut Scented Dessert Pancakes. Now I know many of you will only buy cookbooks that have cover-to-cover photography, but I hope the shot at the top with give you a little glimpse of what you might be missing.

My diet is far from perfect, but I’ve learned over the years that if you surround yourself with delicious, healthy, real ingredients you’ll discover and create amazing ways to use them. This book is full of ideas, helpful information, and ingredient-based inspiration. At the very least flip through it the next time you pop into a bookstore, and in the meantime enjoy the quinoa berry breakfast bowl you see up above. [via link]

Warm and Nutty Cinnamon Quinoa Recipe

I used a red quinoa here, but you can use whatever kind you like, white/buff colored seems to be the most common. Also, a few notes and tips from the book: low-fat soy milk may replace the low fat milk, blueberries may replace the blackberries, dark honey may replace the agave nectar, and walnuts may replace the pecans.

1 cup organic 1% low fat milk
1 cup water
1 cup organic quinoa, (hs note: rinse quinoa)
2 cups fresh blackberries, organic preferred
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/3 cup chopped pecans, toasted*
4 teaspoons organic agave nectar, such as Madhava brand

Combine milk, water and quinoa in a medium saucepan. Bring to a boil over high heat. Reduce heat to medium-low; cover and simmer 15 minutes or until most of the liquid is absorbed. Turn off heat; let stand covered 5 minutes. Stir in blackberries and cinnamon; transfer to four bowls and top with pecans. Drizzle 1 teaspoon agave nectar over each serving. Serves 4.

*While the quinoa cooks, roast the pecans in a 350F degree toaster oven for 5 to 6 minutes or in a dry skillet over medium heat for about 3 minutes.

…is what Maureen Dowd out of the New York Times is calling the proposed matchup of an Obama/Clinton presidential team. She proposes several scenarios Obama might want to consider in naming Clinton to the ticket. For example, following Dick Cheney’s reign of terror, she suggests taking the “vice” out of the office, thus shrinking the vice presidency back to its “bucket of warm spit.” Another idea might be to permit Hillary to hold up “the train of the young prince who usurped her dream, derailing the post-nup she had with Bill to trade places.” All in all, the wonderfully wicked Dowd at her vilifying best!

Out of Wired Science a fascinating find on underwater microphones being used in a revolutionary new and creative way. Researchers at the Cornell Bioacoustics Research Laboratory and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute have teamed up to use hydrophones to protect endangered whales off the coast of Massachusetts.

Using ten microphones attached by a stretchy data cable to buoys at the surface and special software that picks out the acoustic signature of right whales, the scientists are able to detect the slow-moving marine mammals. When a hydrophone hears a whale, it makes a cell or satellite call to researchers who contact ship captains to tell them to watch out. The map on the next page is a near real-time detection map provided to you, at listenforwhales.org

It’s important work as less than 400 right whales survive and run-ins with ships are a leading cause of their death.

The project’s website features a ton of interesting information, including whale sounds with their spectrographic signatures alongside, so you can see the frequency diagram of what you’re hearing.

They also provide an interesting lesson on the development of underwater listening technology, including a page on pop-ups (seen left), which function as ocean acoustic archives. Researchers drop one into the waters they’re interested in and go back home. The device records several months worth of oceanic chatter to its hard drive. Then the researchers come back and beam a particular sound into the water that, when picked up by the pop-up’s hydrophone, causes the device to detach from its anchor and float to the surface.

For those wanting to know more, the AP’s Jay Lindsay got out onto the water with the researchers and filed a great story from Cape Cod. [via link]

Wonderful read out of Design Observer by the esteemed Steven Heller on those former classics of doom, dread, and earth shattering calamities that set us on edge, prophesied our end, and are now the new, and very real face of the world we live in:

Remember the scene in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall in Dr. Flicker’s examining room where Alvy Singer’s angst-ridden mother tells the doctor her son is depressed? As the doctor furiously puffs on a cigarette, Alvy says the universe is expanding and since “the universe is everything, and if it’s expanding, someday it will break apart and that would be the end of everything!”

“What is that your business? What has the universe got to do with it?,” screams Alvy’s mother. “You’re here in Brooklyn! Brooklyn is not expanding!” To which Dr. Flicker adds, “It won’t be expanding for billions of years yet, Alvy. And we’ve gotta try to enjoy ourselves while we’re here. Uh?”

Existential gloom and doom scenarios have not just plagued the sackcloth and ash crowd. Many of the most rational among us have been consumed by the specter of endgame.

“Hard wooden chairs don’t do it anymore,” says Bruce MacMillan, who credits Starbucks with “the rise of the casual meeting room,” reports Elaine Glusac in the New York Times (4/30/08). Others point to books such as Dan Pink’s “A Whole New Mind” and Richard Florida’s “Rise of the Creative Class,” but whatever the drivers it’s clear that the old “coffee urn” approach to meetings is giving way to things like “wheat-grass shots on breaks.” Executive coach Leslie Marquard is making a business out of the trend toward these so-called “right-brain meetings,” where “better brainstorming” is encouraged via “comfortable, colorful furnishings and accessories ranging from Slinkys to … Guitar Hero.”

Leslie set up Catalyst Ranch, one such “alternative meeting space in a former sausage factory, near the loop in Chicago.” The only problem is that clients have to come to her, and when she has to facilitate meetings at “endothermic hotel rooms with no windows and natural air.” Fortunately, this appears to be changing. For example, the W Hotels in New York provide Etch A Sketches and other toys in meeting rooms, while the W Seattle offers a ’sensory setup’ for meeting rooms, furnishing aromatherapy candles, stress balls and puzzles, mood music and black notepads with white lead pencils.” Wow.

The Hotel Sax in Chicago meanwhile “has opened irregularly shaped meeting rooms with few right angels, including an oval foyer with a video wall and a room with a curved wall, low armchairs and an electric fireplace. One L-shaped space features a recessed bank of white leather seat pods opposite a water wall.” As for the payoff, Diana Peterson says a “right-brain meeting” worked its magic for her at a recent sales meeting at the Curtis Hotel in Denver, saying the “fun energy” resulted in “an increase in sales of 40 to 50 percent after the conference, versus flatter results from similar events in traditional settings.” [via link]

Cartoonist John Porcellino, famed for his King Cat comic series, is working on an upcoming portrait of Henry David Thoreau. Over on the drawn and quarterly website, Tom Devlin offers a wonderful preview where you can get a glimpse of the magnificence to come.

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Mesmerizing time-lapse photos by Alexey Titarenko profiling the nebulous forms of people in a “City of Shadows” (St. Petersburg just after the collapse of the Soviet Union).[via link]

A great little film on the history of the CBS eye, created on its 50th anniversary in 2001. [via link]

VIDEO

A profile in courage out of the New Yorker:

“Ten months ago, Grant Achatz, a chef, was given a diagnosis of tongue cancer. He was informed that if he did not start treatment immediately he would die. “You have Stage IV cancer,” he remembers being told by a doctor at the University of Chicago Medical Center. “There is no Stage V.

Doctors removed lymph nodes from his neck; a pink scar now extends from an inch below Achatz’s left earlobe to an inch above the collarbone. He was also given twelve weeks of chemotherapy treatment, which made his hair fall out, and six weeks of radiation, which nearly swelled his throat shut, and caused the skin inside his mouth and on his face to peel. “They burned me so bad I had to wear a burn mask,” he recalls. The therapy also destroyed his sense of taste. Although it is slowly returning—the process can take a year or more—he is in the precarious position of having to create and serve food that he cannot really taste.”

Bill Henson’s photos of people at the opera, including a short interview with the photographer.

What I was interested in terms of Paris Opera series was that whole strange business of finding oneself with a whole lot of other people gathered in a darkened space, such as the opera, awaiting some special event. There is something quite magical about it. I’ve always found that people sitting in the dark just waiting for something is the most haunting sort of experience. It seemed to me it was a common experience, a universal thing that everyone feels, really, at some point or another.

More of Henson’s opera photos here[via link].