Unsolicited Thornburgh

Tumblr Staff: Announcing the #music tag on Tumblr.

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 14:30:50 -0500

Tumblr Staff: Announcing the #music tag on Tumblr.:

After hearing much demand from the bloggers and fans on Tumblr, we have finally launched a #music tag page.

Track the new tag to stay up on the best new music, videos, artwork and photos on Tumblr, hand-picked by members of the community. The tag editors come from different…

Awesome

roadsandkingdoms: When McDonald’s and KFC first opened up in...

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 14:17:47 -0500

roadsandkingdoms:

When McDonald’s and KFC first opened up in Pakistan in the 1990s, there were manic scenes. Snaking queues, traffic jams for miles and kids running amok in play areas. Burger joints had existed before, but the fried chicken and ‘would you like fries with that’ phenomena swept through the country, paving the way for spinoffs in every neighbourhood and small town.

But long before the golden arches began gleaming through Pakistan, there was always the poor man’s burger: the bun kebab.

The bun kebab builds on the familiar burger formula: it’s a patty in a bun. But its flavors stretch far beyond the western world, combining Pakistanis’ love for spices and fried food, all in one go.

More from Saba Imtiaz’s Karachi dispatch: bun kebabs on Roads & Kingdoms

A Week in Timbuktu

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 16:39:02 -0500

A Week In Timbuktu (via Roads & Kingdoms)

It would be fair to say that the Hotel Colombe wasn’t ready to receive guests. Since closing down at the end of March last year when the latest incarnation of the global Jihad swept south out of the Sahara desert and into Timbuktu it had been quietly falling apart. The hotel’s faultlessly polite…

markcoatney: simonbooks: J.D. Salinger’s biography to publish...

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 18:53:14 -0500

markcoatney:

simonbooks:

J.D. Salinger’s biography to publish in the fall from S&S.

<———- THRILLED.

FYI, we are testing the Tumblr “Respect” button as we speak…

Taxi Wallah

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 11:37:39 -0500

Taxi Wallah (via Roads & Kingdoms)

The Indian-built Padmini spent decades as the tricked-out battleaxe of Mumbai’s taxi fleet. The cars are being replaced by newer models, from Tatas and Hyndais, but not before photographer Glasweegee got a chance to go inside the cabins of a dying breed.

roadsandkingdoms: Gordes is often anointed in guide books and...

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 11:37:00 -0500

roadsandkingdoms:

Gordes is often anointed in guide books and tourist office pamphlets with bland monikers like the “jewel of Provence”. Indeed, the hilltop village is the very image of Provence, the first town to pop up on a Google search, right up there next to the violet lanes of lavender. It’s true that its beauty, especially in the morning when the sun climbs over the towering chateau, or in the early evening, when the staircase of stone buildings is bathed in amber and the valley behind the town looks like it was created in the mind of Matisse, can break you. You will find yourself saying stupid things like “let’s give up our crude urban existence and find an old stone home that we can covert into a little B&B.” They have a name for this in these parts: Peter Mayle Syndrome. Side effects include marmalade making, furniture building and a sudden desire to crush your own olives.

Pilgrims in Provence: A search for the soul of southern France

losangelespast: The intrepid reporters of the Los Angeles...

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 06:45:15 -0500

losangelespast:

The intrepid reporters of the Los Angeles Herald-Express radio-flash car, combing the city for breaking news, 1949.

The best of the media minds are reproducing.

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 15:53:36 -0400

The best of the media minds are reproducing.

Roads & Kingdoms: Bingeing, Love and Welshness

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 16:35:48 -0400

Roads & Kingdoms: Bingeing, Love and Welshness:

roadsandkingdoms:

[Editor’s note: Following Dougie Wallace’s half-insane photoessay on the bingedrinkers of Blackpool yesterday, here’s a more literary take on the phenomenon in Wales, from writer Nemonie Craven. Updated and republished from her late, lamented How to Live Blog]

I was struck the other…

Nemonie Craven gets in a limo with old friends, drinks heavily, and has an epiphany in the bathroom. Nicely done.

madillac: suicideblonde: THEIR KID IS AWESOME! They have a...

Sat, 05 May 2012 10:41:49 -0400

madillac:

suicideblonde:

THEIR KID IS AWESOME!

They have a child?

uglyrenaissancebabies: British Library, Harley 4425, f....

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 13:58:41 -0400

uglyrenaissancebabies:

British Library, Harley 4425, f. 140.

Fuck you, baby.

roadsandkingdoms: [Photo by Glenna Gordon] Follow this...

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 12:50:34 -0400

roadsandkingdoms:

[Photo by Glenna Gordon]

Follow this photographer. Her photoessay from Monvrovia on Roads & Kingdoms today is sad/beautiful, and she Tumbls well, too: great stuff from West Africa and beyond at scarlettlion.tumblr.com

Today’s Tumblr recommendation from Roads & Kingdoms. I second it.

roadsandkingdoms: Foodporn for Peace: Chicken Liver Salad, Jack...

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 12:53:44 -0400

roadsandkingdoms:

Foodporn for Peace: Chicken Liver Salad, Jack Fry’s, Louisville, KY

On the weekend, I went to Louisville for the Christian wedding of one US Army intelligence officer to another US Army intelligence officer. The night before the ceremony, I had gone nearly straight from the airport to an American bistro called Jack Fry’s in the Highlands, and at Jack Fry’s I went straight for an Old Fashioned and for this dish, sauteed chicken livers with poached egg, brioche croutons in a vinaigrette of red wine, bacon and shallot.

Liver is not usually my first call. The last time I faced a plate of chicken liver, it was a year ago in the Pankisi Gorge in eastern Georgia at a Chechen roadside restaurant. Pankisi is pacified now, but not that long ago it was one of the rougher places on earth, a hideout for the Muslim insurgents fighting the Russians on the other side of the mountains in Chechnya, a den of gangsters and heroin cookers and arms dealers.

And yet then as now, in a roadside restaurant serving Chechen food, you get a food that I had always known as the particular domain of the Jews: chicken liver. My father makes a ridiculously good and simple chopped liver in his home in San Francisco, just onion, hard-boiled egg, chicken liver, pepper. Making that dish is perhaps the most Jewish thing he does, and eating it is certainly the most Jewish thing I do.

And no, my father’s version doesn’t include a bacon vinaigrette, nor does the sauteed onion, pepper and liver combination of the Muslims in Pankisi. But forget the accessories: it’s worth celebrating the fact that we all share this food—California half-Jews, Muslim insurgents, bourbon-loving Kentucky Christians—like we share Abraham. We are People of the Book. We eat chicken liver.

Yes, liver. Helluva dish, too.

cmonstah: The most aesthetically pleasing cupcakes in the...

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 18:42:36 -0400

cmonstah:

The most aesthetically pleasing cupcakes in the world. (Taken with instagram)

They look terrified

roadsandkingdoms: Sweet, sour, bitter, boozy: Peru’s national...

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 18:40:32 -0400

roadsandkingdoms:

Sweet, sour, bitter, boozy: Peru’s national cocktail ranks high on the list of world’s greatest adult beverages

Master the mix with R&K’s Pisco Sour video from the bar at Central Restaurante, Lima, Peru

roadsandkingdoms: Privyet, says the crawfish. This one is...

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 13:39:33 -0500

roadsandkingdoms:

Privyet, says the crawfish. This one is Russian—you can tell by the red of his carapace. He waves at you from the end of the kind of meal not easily forgotten, Moscow chef Ivan Shishkin’s Fat Party, held last year around the long table at Tapa de Comida not far from Trubnaya Station.

Shishkin—journalist, photographer, chef and raconteur—managed to make delicious a multiple course feast featuring dishes that were all or mostly fat. And here at the end, was this lean and lithe river creature, like a palate-cleanser, an after-dinner mint.

—

You may have heard about the news from Moscow this week. I have never met President Putin, but I have sat my hours in the Kremlin with his spokesman Dmitry Peskov, who is a delightfully diligent smoker (I don’t want to imagine what would happen if I tried to light up in Jay Carney’s office). Peskov is also a master of the art, to quote Luke Harding’s excellent post Why So Sad, Vlad, of ”You know I’m lying, and I know I’m lying, but—hey!—that’s the game”. So Peskov said that Putin was crying during his victory speech because of the bitter cold and wind.

What Peskov will not say is that those tears were a sign of pressure, a slight fissure in the iron. Simply put: it is no longer fun being Alpha Dog (as US Embassy cables called Putin). He may have won strongly and avoided an election run-off with one of the scabrous curs who were allowed to run against him, but he will have to be a different leader now. He no longer has political capital to blow on powergrabs and graft. So while the real opposition—the blogger Navalnys and old guard Limonovs—who got detained in the streets for protesting after the elections, may be in a dark mood, I think they have won already. Putin 3.0 will be different, because of them and the people that joined them. If he isn’t, then these people will rise and keep rising until Project Putin is over, for good.

—

Which brings me back to our friendly dinner mint from the river here. Shishkin’s other restaurant, a small speakeasy of a restaurant called Delikatessen located in some back Hof off the Ring, has become something of Stammtisch for me to call home in Moscow. It serves umami burgers and cherry-infused Bourbon to a mix of artists and photographers and tech entrepreneurs and retail workers and whomever else thinks it’s okay to put on a scarf instead of a mink when they go out to eat in Moscow. It is, in other words, just my kind of place. But it’s also, I think, a bit of a canary in the coal mine of Russian life. Not that that particular restaurant needs to survive—indeed, after being a complete sensation when it opened, it has now settled into a more regular crowd, not always crowded, but still always good. But that kind of place needs to survive, the kind of business that opens up because of a feeling that someone had that was unrelated to the structures of power and rivers of money or the national agenda set by Putin and his Kremlin. Maybe I’m not explaining it well, but Delikatessen is independent and that is a terribly important thing for Russian business, culture, life. There is so much of it now in Moscow, even the billions that the Kremlin is sending into high-tech haven’t overwhelmed the true entrepreneurial energy. Putin cannot control, or shakedown, or expropriate this feeling. He does not own the Fat Party. He never has. And if this crawfish had a middle finger, I know he would be raising it toward the Kremlin.

Chewing, spitting, editing FTW roadsandkingdoms: The second in...

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 16:12:39 -0500

Chewing, spitting, editing FTW

roadsandkingdoms:

The second in our Burma Basics series: Matt takes on the ubiquitous chew of Burma, betel nut, on the streets of Rangoon. WARNING: footage of a Californian in sunglasses getting slightly high may not be suitable for all audiences.

Roads & Kingdoms: A North Korean Folly, in the Heart of Senegal

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 15:39:08 -0500

Roads & Kingdoms: A North Korean Folly, in the Heart of Senegal:

Our first original piece for R&K, from a good one: The Independent (UK) Africa Correspondent Daniel Howden

roadsandkingdoms:

Daniel Howden (@howden_africa) in Dakar for Roads & Kingdoms

Getting inside the mind of an emerging African dictator is as simple as taking an elevator. Beyond a studded leather door there’s a lift takes you into the hollow head of a bronze colossus towering over the seafront of Dakar….

Roads & Kingdoms: Agdam is Not a Tourist Attraction

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 08:44:44 -0500

Roads & Kingdoms: Agdam is Not a Tourist Attraction:

My Q&A with a teenage adventurer.

roadsandkingdoms:

As I wrote last month, I ran into someone quite unexpected when I went to report on the Kachin civil war in northern Burma: an 18-year-old American backpacker named Zach Goldman. Sensing an opportunity, I quickly deputized him as a dirt-cheap Roads & Kingdoms intern and was not disappointed.

Love in a bowl. My latest for Roads and...

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 12:31:37 -0500

Love in a bowl. My latest for Roads and Kingdoms

roadsandkingdoms:

Foreplay: Food Porn Just Before the Lunch Hour

Duck Blood Soup, Jiangsu Province

Today is Valentine’s Day, so let’s think about love for a moment.

We are selfish beings. To love is to consume, to take the best of someone—their bodies, their youth, the best years of their life—all for yourself.

We are generous beings. To be in a relationship is to consent to sacrifice. In Germany, this is sometimes expressed by volunteering to be eaten by another man who posted an online ad seeking someone to eat. Rare, perhaps, but poignant.

In Jiangsu Province, the duck was generous. A creature born to sacrifice, neither too clever nor too quick to avoid the blade. The people of Nanjing have famously relied on the kindness of these ducks for a thousand years. And so in that city, this duck found its last and truest form disassembled in this melamine bowl.

Duck blood and vermicelli soup: Mung bean noodles in a lightly salted broth. Duck blood, curdled, cut into blocks. Then added with intestines and liver. Everything that works so well together in a duck’s life—the blood brings oxygen, the liver cleans the blood, the intestines wring nutrients to feed them both—works in harmony in soup. The blood adds earth, the liver adds smoke, the intestines bring the texture of snapping branches underfoot to them both. In the forest of herbs there’s a glade, a salted pond, and the duck swims contentedly in it, inside out.

And so Nanjingers are generous lovers themselves. They don’t insult the body of their partner. They would never tear a duck apart with machines and toss everything that is not breastmeat into some industrial vat to be used in glues and cosmetics and animal feeds. Instead, they use everything save feathers. And, as a good traveler, I tried to be as my hosts. I was tender to the soup. The soup was tender back.

Happy Valentines Day from Roads and Kingdoms. —NT