The Rye Revolution

...or can’t make it, Ginsberg has penned what I believe to be the definitive book on rye baking, The Rye Baker: Classic Breads from Europe and America. In the book Ginsberg covers every imaginable rye recipe from around the world, from loaves to crackers to scones. Since it’s hard to find good rye loaf even in a big city, learning to bake your own rye really pays off. The unique chemistry of rye, especially when leavened with a sourdough starter, al...

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The Architecture of Bernard Maybeck

...sco. Poet and ornithologist Charles Keeler lived in a Maybeck home. In his book, The Simple Home (which you can read online for free) Keeler says, The home must suggest the life it is to encompass. The mere architecture and furnishings of the house do not make the man any more than do his clothes, but they certainly have an effect in modifying him. A large nature may rise above his environment and live in a dream world of his own fashioning, but m...

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Save the Foot! Save Lost Words!

...notes a response by author Robert MacFarlane’s and children’s book illustrator Jackie Morris that resulted in an elegant “wild dictionary” called The Lost Words: A Spell Book (public library). And, thanks to Brain Pickings, I now know how to link to books via your local public library....

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Escaping the AI Vampire Castle

...AI generated children’s stories. This is just part of a flood of scammy AI books on Amazon. The AI children’s books advertised on my Kindle combine titles that have an English-as-a-second-language vibe, vaguely Manga style cover illustrations and author names such as “Leanor Varelade” that either yield no search results or are close to the names of real people (Leonor Varela is a Chilean actress). In short these books are what you would get if you...

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Sorting the Digital Photos of a Digital Pandemic

...t fondling. Unlike the Matrix there’s no neat way out of the mirror house postmodernity of the eXistenZ universe. Ariadne has left no thread to escape the maze. The best you can do is to map the territory. Towards that end, instead of a photo sorting app, I’ll leave you with two book recommendations: K-punk : the collected and unpublished writings of Mark Fisher which contains the essay on eXistenZ that inspired this post (I’d recommend reading hi...

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