Not long ago, you could see this playing out on the menus of hip restaurants across the country. At AL’s Place in San Francisco, squash tahini was served with burrata, sumac-galangal dressing, pickles, and dukkah; in LA, there was preserved Meyer lemon and lacto-fermented hot sauce in Sqirl’s sorrel pesto rice bowl, and a ‘Turkish-ish’ breakfast of vegetables, a sumac- and Aleppo pepper-dusted egg, and three-day-fermented labneh at Kismet. Over in Nashville, Cafe Roze put a turmeric egg in its hard-boiled BLT and miso ranch in its barley salad. Up in New York, Dimes served a veggie burger with harissa tofu and a dish called huevos Kathmandu that paired green chutney and spiced chickpeas with fried eggs.

— Alison Roman, Bon Apptit, and the Global Pantry Problem, Navneet Alang in Eater

It became a running joke among U.S. officials that Bart Gellman should watch his back. In May 2014, I appeared on a panel alongside Robert Mueller, the former FBI director, to talk about Snowden. Mueller cross-examined me: Were the NSA documents not lawfully classified? Were they not stolen? Did I not publish them anyway? I held out my arms toward him, wrists together, as if for handcuffs. The audience laughed. Mueller did not. … Then came the day I found my name in the Snowden archive. Sixteen documents, including the one that talked about me, named firstfruits as a counterintelligence database that tracked unauthorized disclosures in the news media. According to top-secret briefing materials prepared by Joseph J. Brand, a senior NSA official who was also among the leading advocates of a crackdown on leaks, firstfruits got its name from the phrase the fruits of our labor. ‘Adversaries know more about SIGINT sources & methods today than ever before,’ Brand wrote. Some damaging disclosures came from the U.S. government’s own official communications, he noted; other secrets were acquired by foreign spies. But ‘most often,’ Brand wrote, ’these disclosures occur through the media.’ He listed four ‘flagrant media leakers’: the Post, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Washington Times. The firstfruits project aimed to ‘drastically reduce significant losses of collection capability’ at journalists’ hands.

— Espionage or Journalism? After the Snowden NSA Leaks - The Atlantic, Barton Gellman in The Atlantic

We’re working with London’s boroughs to identify places where temporary changes are needed to support social distancing or that would benefit from cycling and walking improvements.

To help our customers walk and cycle wherever possible, we’re concentrating on three key areas:

Some of the temporary changes we’re making could become permanent.

— Streetspace for London, Transport for London

‘Jared [Kushner] had been arguing that testing too many people, or ordering too many ventilators, would spook the markets and so we just shouldn’t do it,’ says a Trump confidant who speaks to the president frequently. ‘That advice worked far more powerfully on him than what the scientists were saying. He thinks they always exaggerate.’

— Inside Trump’s coronavirus meltdown, Edward Luce in The Financial Times

And I found more recently when I dug into the Cohen story that for all Mr. Farrow’s attraction to screenplay-ready narratives, he missed one that was made for this moment. The real story of John Fry, the I.R.S. employee who leaked Mr. Cohen’s records, went like this: Amid the swirl of the scandal involving Stormy Daniels, Mr. Avenatti, her lawyer, took to Twitter one day in May 2018, and demanded that the Treasury Department release Mr. Cohen’s records.

Mr. Fry, a longtime I.R.S. employee based in San Francisco, was one of the legions of followers of Mr. Avenatti’s Twitter account, and had frequently liked his posts. Hours after Mr. Avenatti’s tweet that day, Mr. Fry started searching for the documents on the government database, downloaded them, then immediately contacted Mr. Avenatti and later sent him Mr. Cohen’s confidential records, according to court documents. ‘John: I cannot begin to tell you how much I appreciate this. Thank you,’’ Mr. Avenatti wrote to Mr. Fry, according to the documents, then pressed him for more.

Mr. Fry ended up pleading guilty to a federal charge of unauthorized disclosure of confidential reports this January. In Mr. Fry’s defense, his lawyer said he had been watching ‘hours and hours’ of television, and described him as ‘a victim of cable news.’

— Is Ronan Farrow Too Good to Be True?, Ben Smith in The New York Times

Nowadays when everyone is on lockdown and there are days with nothing but spaces of time to pass, nights too, and you can make a hot tea or a coffee and sit down but when you look there’s nothing to read. You can’t access those unique voices writing about the things they care about, that are happening to them.

— If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs, TTTThis

Sale goes on to list four ways in which cities should think about slowing traffic down:

— Cities Are Meant to Stop Traffic, Jason Kottke quoting Kirkpatrick Sale’s 1980 book Human Scale

In one of the biggest car-free initiatives of any city in the world, the capital’s mayor announced on Friday that main streets between between London Bridge and Shoreditch, Euston and Waterloo, and Old Street and Holborn, will be limited to buses, pedestrians and cyclists.

— Large areas of London to be made car-free as lockdown eased, Matthew Taylor in The Guardian

I was prompted to write this article by the experience of a friend of mine who was somewhat embarrassed by having his full, legal name called out in front of a room full of people who only knew him by another name. The was the result of a software system suffering from precisely the ailment I described: someone used the ’name’ field for the name displayed to kitchen workers who were preparing an order. There was no need for his legal name to be used there, but either the integration was made before the ‘preferred name’ field was added, or the developer of the integration simply didn’t think to use it.

— Names, Legal Names, and Fractally Deferred Responsibility, Nora Codes

So, in adapting on the fly through March and April, the Spinach Bus partners took an ancient flower - evidence of cultivation goes back more than 1,000 years, and seed banks in the Netherlands, the heart of the global industry, have specimens grown continuously since the late 1500s - and ignored much of what had been done before in selling it.

— Mother’s Day Bouquets: How Five Friends Saved a Tulip Farm From Covid-19, Kirk Johnson in The New York Times