On Sunday, the New York Times published an op-ed series on cities and inequality pegged to the coronavirus crisis. But a piece on how to redesign urban space post-COVID-19 never once mentions race, revealing a troubling blind spot in the way urban designers talk about this crisis: The idea that safe, generous and accessible common space is fundamental to public life is an essential American ideaas old as the Boston Commonbut if our current catastrophe can help recapture this birthright, it will have served a small purpose. Colonial Massachusetts? Whose birthright are we talking about here, exactly?

— Coronavirus and cities: What urban designers don’t get about COVID-19, Alissa Walker in Curbed

The outraged reaction to the film showed it had hit home. It won best director at Cannes in 1995, but the police believing it to be a polemic against them turned their backs on the team when providing a ceremonial guard at the festival. In the context of the Noisy-le-Grand riots and that summer’s strikes against prime minister Alain Jupp’s austerity measures, its anti-authoritarian swagger was a red rag. Kassovitz was accused of playing up a bad boy image, smoking dope during one TV appearance. He in turn complained about a media unable to connect with the deeper issues. He recalls making journalists from a celebrity magazine cry when he rounded on them for publishing a special booklet on how to speak in banlieue slang. The media made us stars and didn’t take care of the subject of the film, he says now. They asked me questions where I said: Don’t ask me that, go to the projects and talk to the guys there.’ But they didn’t want to talk to them.

— How La Haine lit a fire under French society, Phil Hoad in The Guardian

I didn’t even realize I’d lost my desire to shop until one day, about six weeks into isolation, I absentmindedly clicked on a Madewell email offering an additional sale on a sale. I don’t even have anywhere to wear the jumpsuits I already own, let alone one that would require heels. Every work trip, every speaking gig, every quick vacation had already been canceled, even as my calendar still had reminders of the life I had planned in advance, on a different timeline, for myself. But in a matter of weeks, those, too, would be gone. I feel very lucky to spend my days walking my dog on the same loop I always take. But that walk, for the foreseeable future, requires no new purchases.

— The COVID-19 Recession May Change The Way Americans Spend Forever, Anne Helen Peterson in BuzzFeed News

Douglas Barnes, an Oakland-based hacker and cypherpunk, looked into this issue a couple of years ago when, inspired by Bruce Sterling’s Islands in the Net, he was doing background research on a project to set up a data haven in the Caribbean. ‘I found out that the idea of the Internet as a highly distributed, redundant global communications system is a myth,’’ he discovered. ‘Virtually all communications between countries take place through a very small number of bottlenecks, and the available bandwidth simply isn’t that great.’’ And he cautions: ‘Even outfits like FLAG don’t really grok the Internet. The undersized cables they are running reflect their myopic outlook.’’

— Mother Earth Mother Board, Neal Stephenson in WIRED

There is an equation between calculated coyness and savage bears. But Pomplamoose has nothing on this video, where a skilled musician who works under the name Kawehi produces and mixes a cover of Heart Shaped Box. The signifiers are pure Pinterest, down to a bottle of wine and some pleasingly ratty lamps. It’s a very old house and a very old table. The camera moves and sweeps but the artist barely meets its gaze. She is lost in a rapture of real-time-audio mixing and 1990s grunge passion. We’ve lost the room and we’ve lost eye contact. The camera moves, then moves some more. At the end of a very dramatic performance she looks at the camera and smiles happily, as if to say, oh, you caught me! This is the future.

— The American Room, Paul Ford

Way back in December of 1958, pilots Robert Timm and John Cook took off in a lightly modified Cessna 172 with a bold plan: they would remain airborne in their airplane, dubbed ‘The Hacienda,’ for 50 straight days, in hopes of breaking the world record.

They added a 95-gallon fuel tank to the belly of the aircraft with an electric pump that could transfer fuel to the internal tanks in the wings. They also replaced the co-pilot’s door with a special accordion-style setup that allowed them to lower the door for better footing as they refueled and resupplied from fast moving cars that would meet the aircraft as it flew just a few feet above the tarmac.

After 50 days of sleeping in shifts and keeping the plucky 172 aloft, the record was their, but they decided to see how much further they could push it. After 64 days, 22 hours, and 19 minutes, the two men finally brought their little plane in for a landing. Their record, which stands to this day, isn’t just a testament to the reliability of the Cessna 172 Skyhaw. In a way, it also serves as a worthy metaphor for how the aircraft itself has thrived for decades.

— Why the Cessna Is Such a Badass Plane, Alex Hollings in Popular Mechanics

But as soon as a truckload of 8,600 bags were unloaded at the company’s fulfillment centers, they were flying out the doors to customers, leaving the company out of stock until the next truck came in. It was the same pattern at grocery stores. As far as most consumers could tell, there was no flour anywhere, at any time, even though about half a million bags a week were being sold. ‘A shipment of product would come in the morning and be gone in a few hours,’ says Underwood. ‘If your trip to the store or your visit to the website didn’t line up exactly with those short times, you’d never see any.’

Pressed to produce more, the company formed a crisis response team, which met via video chat three times a day, every day, for the first several weeks after the initial surge in demand. ‘The first thing we had to do was agree on what we could accomplish,’ says Colberg. ‘During a crisis there are a lot of problems to solve, and you won’t be able to solve them all. We decided the one we had to solve was how to get more all-purpose flour to consumers.’

— Inside King Arthur Flour, the Company Supplying America’s Sudden Baking Obsession, David H. Freedman in Marker

The goal of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, according to Nosrat, is to get home cooks cooking, but the show breaks new ground in so many other ways: through its revival of the instructional cooking show format in a TV era when travel documentaries dominate; through its unprecedented casting of women and people of color as culinary experts; through its focus on the ‘grannies’ who historically perform so much domestic labor uncredited; even through its radical vision of unalienated labor and food production. But while these parts of the greater subversive mission are deliberate choices, Nosrat’s simple act of eating on camera might prove to be one of the show’s most revolutionary triumphs.

— Netflix’s Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat Changes the Rules for Who Eats on TV, Jenny G. Zhang in Eater

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 App�tit, 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