The Bellewether

It’s rare to find a truly secret space left in New York City but we recently had the opportunity to discover one, right in the middle of midtown Manhattan. Our friends at The Vanderbilt Republic, who run the inspiring programming at the Gowanus Loft, like the camera obscura installation in years past, are converting a raw space in midtown that was once an electrical repair company. The cavernous 800 m2 space is made possible by a combination of history and zoning – it actually spans 3 buildings, grandfathered in when skyscrapers were built on top. The once outdoor courtyards were closed in to fulfill a functional purpose in perpetuity, a state of impermanent operability – until now. The multi-room discovery is to be known as The Bellewether, a flexible performance and production space

Clean energy jerbs

Fastest-growing jobs: solar panel installer, wind turbine techs

2021-04-14: The way to do this is not with silly nonsense like union jobs

What we need to produce are very cheap renewable technologies, ones so cheap that the poorer countries of the world will adopt them as well. If we insist on packing a lot of labor costs (“good jobs”) into our energy technologies, we will not come close to achieving that end.

I was disappointed and unnerved by recent comments from Brian Deese, President Joe Biden’s top economic adviser, who in the context of climate change remarked that “…investing in infrastructure can be one of the most effective ways to do that in a way that creates lots of jobs.” The correct Econ 101 answer, of course, is that a low-jobs energy infrastructure liberates labor to produce other goods and services for us, leading to higher overall output. Such policies remind me of the “make-work” fallacy, namely the view that the deliberate creation of domestic jobs (for instance through tariffs) will lead to a better economy. We will wind up with more good jobs in total if we seek to lower green energy prices, not raise them.

Peak Pasta

To test out new shapes, chefs only need a few ingredients: flour, eggs, water, and an internet connection. “I think the advent of YouTube is when everything changed. You can just look up different shapes. Before then, you had to actually head to Italy to see the shapes, find the book, or work with someone who had actually worked there.”

Xiao chi

Stretching from 40th to 65th Streets on 8th Avenue in Sunset Park, Brooklyn’s Chinatown is one of the best neighborhoods in New York to experience 2 unique styles of Chinese cuisine–Fujianese xiao chi and Cantonese dim sum. Because of these demographics, Brooklyn’s Chinatown has become a culinary destination for Southern Chinese cuisine, especially Fujianese xiao chi 小吃 (Little Snacks). Essentially, this covers anything that falls outside the Chinese definition of a full meal, in which rice is accompanied by several dishes of meat and vegetables. Comparable to Spanish tapas, xiao chi are small servings of dishes, most often noodles, dumplings and pastries meant to be eaten as snacks or a light lunch. This culinary category exists in every region of China. Cantonese dim sum, with its small servings of different dishes, is a type of xiao chi, although it’s considered more formal and often served in large restaurants with seafood-focused banquet dinners. Here are 5 restaurants in Sunset Park to sample this cuisine. Since the prices are affordable and the serving sizes are similar to tapas, try as many dishes and places as possible for the true xiao chi experience.

  • Lin Mini Café
  • Uncle Wang
  • San Qiang
  • Hong Kong Dim Sum
  • Park Asia

Fortnite Concert

People have gathered in virtual worlds for decades. People have attended virtual concerts for years. Yet the Fortnite event represented something different by many orders of magnitude. By one (unsubstantiated) estimate, 10M concurrent users attended the show in the game’s “Showtime” mode. In other words, this was something much more than a concert. It was a peek, albeit a short one, at what an AR- and VR-suffused future looks like: connected congregations of embodied avatars, in mass-scale events that still manage to feel personal.

Perovskite Solar

There are estimates that perovskite solar panels could cost just 10 to 20 cents per watt, compared to 75 cents per watt for traditional silicon-based panels — anywhere from 3X to 8X cost savings. Perovskite’s conversion efficiency has increased at an astounding rate over the last 4 years — from 4% to nearly 20%. And this is just the beginning — the theoretical limit of perovskite’s conversion efficiency is 66%, compared to silicon’s theoretical limit of 32%.