★★ No sooner had the gray lifted and one’s guard lowered than the blue sky went away and snowflakes fell again. A rainy-day dampness was on the air. An oncoming extra-wide stroller filled all the space between snowbanks. A man walked by wearing bright blue-white low-top canvas sneakers, the toes gravely besmirched with slush-grime. Downtown the sun was coming out but the sidewalks were even slushier. Stray snowflakes still blew down, so bright in the sunshine it seemed as if they ought to have melted. By early afternoon the sky was clear and everything was dripping. The melt had come on so fast that the little islands of surviving snow in the wet bicycle lane hadn’t had a chance to lose their whiteness. In the intense shade and shelter of Jersey Street, the snow looked new-fallen. Back uptown, the sun shone on the red eye of a white pigeon, and on the thin stream of water pouring from a scaffold, landing with a rattle and spray on the top trash bag in a curbside pile.

Smog Thick

Running at 104 minutes, shot like a TED talk and with echoes of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, Chai’s film discusses the damaging impact of pollution on health, and she discusses how her own infant daughter had to have an operation straight after birth to remove a benign tumor.

“This is a personal issue between me and the smog,” Chai says in the movie.

The movie has reached more than 200 million views on Chinese websites, not counting Wechat or other social media, which makes for nearly one-third of China’s online population of 649 million.

One thing the internet is still not good at, relative to the effort it expends on all kinds of other things: translation of extremely common human languages. You don’t have to be generous with “Wechat or other social media” to conclude that Under the Dome has been viewed at least partially by an incredible number of people over the last four days, or to conclude that it is a historically significant document. But there doesn’t yet appear to be a full English translation available, and the responsibility of creating one has fallen to a student’s crowdsourcing project.

Hello!

I’m Linghein, and I’m a grade 12 student in Mainland China.

Tianyu(@tianyuf) and me start to translate this movie form the morning of Mar 1. We translated slowly because of the long time of this movie. We need your help.

I cut the video into several parts, you can choose one part to translate.

We suggest you to get Chinese subtitles form the movie and translate it directly.

The subtitles currently cut off at about nineteen minutes, which represents ~three days of translation.

This will get done, the system will work, etc. But maybe not until the American news cycle is done with the story? Just a reminder: The world’s internet does not really fit together at all.

Of all the winter squashes, my favorite is the spaghetti squash, because it is a weird mutant that makes no sense. What possible reason could it have to produce a fruit that transforms from rock hard when raw to silky strands when soft? What is the point? Some mysteries are unsolvable. Or, like, maybe this one has been solved and I just can’t be bothered to look up the answer.

In any case, spaghetti squash is a wonderful fruit. It take weeks to go bad, so just look for one that feels heavy — this means a higher sugar content — and doesn’t have any soft spots. It’s hard to mess up buying a spaghetti squash. It is also fantastically healthful; it has few calories, but high levels of fiber, vitamin A and C, and potassium, and it’s extremely high in beta carotene, which is probably good for your skin and eyeballs.

Typically the spaghetti squash is treated as if it were spaghetti, topped with tomato sauce and that kind of thing. This is an okay way to eat it, but because spaghetti squash lacks the starch of pasta, the squash will never really absorb sauce or be coated with sauce in the same way, which can lead to watery dishes. Spaghetti squash is in a category of its own, a crisp-tender mildly sweet filler. According to my cursory searches of Pinterest and food blogs, though, spaghetti squash is often cooked incorrectly. Here is a popular way it is cooked and also a way in which you should never, ever cook it.

Jesus Christ. Think about your food for a second, food bloggers. Here are some of the many, many problems with halving the squash, scooping out the seeds and guts, and filling the crater with what I am sure is a terribly amateurish sauce before roasting the whole thing. 1) This method assumes that your spaghetti squash and your filling will cook at the exact same temperature for the exact same time. There is almost no way this will happen. 2) Assuming you care enough to put salt and pepper and oil on the squash, you will only manage to season the very top layer of the squash, the part exposed to the air; the whole rest of the squash will be bland. 3) The sauce will not be able to penetrate and properly flavor the squash because you haven’t shredded it first. 4) Even assuming you’ve roasted and shredded the squash first and placed it back into the skin like a monstrous twice-baked potato, squashes are round and will flop around all rolly-polly if you try to use them as a bowl. Also, if you’ve roasted it properly, the squash will be basically falling apart. 5) Are those huge god damn sprigs of raw rosemary in that picture?

The proper first step of cooking spaghetti squash is thus: Slice it in half lengthwise, through the root. Scoop out the guts and seeds, reserving the seeds, throwing away the guts. Wash the seeds thoroughly and leave them on a dish towel to dry; you can roast them later as you would any other winter squash, they are delicious. Rub a bit of olive oil and sprinkle some salt and pepper on the squash and place them, cut side down, on a baking tray. Roast at 350 degrees until soft (maybe 40 minutes) and allow to cool. Then take a fork and kind of scraped the squash out, getting right down to the skin. It’ll come out, shockingly, in separated strands. Be gentle with this step; you don’t want to break them up any more than you have to. Place these strands in a large bowl and season more with salt, pepper, and oil.

Frankly, you can stop right there and have a very nice simple meal. But spaghetti squash can go further. So much further.

Spaghetti Squash Aglio e Olio

Shopping list: Cooked spaghetti squash as per above, olive oil, garlic, dried chile flakes, parmesan (or pecorino or really any hard salty Italian cheese like that), parsley, lemon

Slice about five or six cloves of garlic thinly (do not mince it). Set a pan on the stove over medium-low heat and pour in a bunch of olive oil. Throw in the garlic and the chile flakes and cook it until the garlic is golden brown. Toss in like a bowl’s worth of spaghetti squash and stir to combine. Add more oil if it looks like it’s sticking. When combined, serve on a plate with a lot of grated parmesan, chopped parsley, and a squeeze of lemon, and a little drizzle of more olive oil over the top. (I know the lemon isn’t traditional. Neither is the squash, so, like, shut up, Italy.)

Baked Spaghetti Squash With Vaguely “Greek” Flavors, Since I’ve Never Been To Greece

Shopping list: Cooked spaghetti squash as per above, can of tomatoes, spinach or chard, chevre, feta cheese, kalamata olives, fresh oregano, dried thyme, olive oil, garlic, leeks, red wine vinegar

Make some tomato sauce! Get a can of good-quality whole plum tomatoes, stick a food processor right in the can and blend the hell out of it. In a pan over medium heat, pour in just a touch of olive oil and then add in a few chopped cloves of garlic and the leek, which you have chopped. Cook until soft, then pour in the can of blitzed tomatoes. Add a splash of red wine vinegar (or, hell, red wine) and some good hard sprinkles of thyme and cook until it no longer tastes like raw tomatoes — maybe twenty-five minutes. Wash and chop your greens and peel about two stems’ worth of oregano leaves off and throw it all in the sauce. Slice your olives however you like them and throw them in, too.

In a Pyrex baking tray, like the kind you’d make a meatloaf in, lay down a very very thin layer of sauce, just the liquid part. Then put down a layer of spaghetti squash maybe half an inch thick. Then crumble your various cheeses and sprinkle them on top. Then do more sauce, then more squash, then more cheese. Continue until you’re out of room or out of food, making sure you end with a layer of cheese (you can throw down mozzarella if you want; fresh is best but if you want that classic American lasagna taste you can use the low-moisture stuff). Bake at 400 degrees until bubbly and slightly browned on top, maybe forty-five minutes. VERY IMPORTANT: allow to cool for ten to fifteen minutes before cutting into it, otherwise everything will turn watery and splash together. It’ll still taste great, it’ll just be harder to eat and be less impressive visually.

Spaghetti Squash Shakshuka

Shopping list: Cooked spaghetti squash as per above, sweet red peppers of some sort, can of tomatoes, tomato paste, garlic, onion, eggs, cumin, paprika, serrano chile, parsley

De-stem and de-seed the sweet red peppers. Pour some olive oil on them and roast them on a baking tray at 400 degrees until soft, about twenty minutes. (You could also do this by holding the peppers with tongs right over the gas burner to blister the skin, then peel the skin off. I don’t care about pepper skin since it’s going to be a puree but do what you want.) In the meantime chop the serrano; if you want it to be spicier, keep the seeds (I usually don’t), as well as the onion and garlic. When the sweet peppers are done throw them in a food processor or blender and blend until smooth.

In a cast-iron pan over medium-low heat, add some olive oil and then the garlic/onion/serrano. Cook until the onion is translucent, then sprinkle in some cumin and paprika, stir until fragrant and toasted. Prepare the can of tomatoes to your liking. Some people like chunks; I don’t, so I blend with an immersion blender. Pour in about half the can, and about a teaspoon of tomato paste. Stir and cook for about fifteen minutes until it tastes good, then add in the sweet pepper puree. Stir, season to taste (it’ll need salt) and cook another five minutes.

Add in the spaghetti squash and stir well to combine with the sauce. Cook for another five minutes to warm up the squash, taste and season again if needed. Heat your oven to 500 degrees. Make a few little hollows in the squash mixture and crack in some eggs — one normal-sized cast iron pan can hold maybe four at most — and immediately put in the oven. Check once per minute until whites are barely set and yolks are still runny, maybe four minutes. Sprinkle chopped parsley over the top and serve.

Spaghetti squash isn’t nearly as heavy and sweet and rich as its brothers, like the butternut, acorn, and pumpkin — which is exactly why I like it. Sure, it’s fun to play around with the fact that it sort of looks like pasta, and indeed it takes very well to Mediterranean flavors. But the best part about spaghetti squash is that it doesn’t taste like the season from which it comes (fall, technically, though it stores so well that we can eat it right through until spring). It’s light and mild and fresh, and lets you experiment with the more delicate flavors that would be completely overwhelmed by something as strong as a butternut squash. Just don’t ever fill the hole with sauce and roast it.

Photo by Personal Creations

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The top news app is ranked 115. QUESTIONS?

“LaCroix is not as exhilarating as taking ecstasy at Joshua Tree, blanketed by a glittering velveteen sky, but, boy, do I get stoked when I’ve remembered to pack one for the movie theater. And now that I’m free of a constant low-grade hangover, I’m left with a lot of time to just walk around, extra alert. I see all of us now. The truth is, for every dork that buys Sriracha-branded knee socks at Urban Outfitters, there’s a mid-30s lady quaffing crates of flavored soda water because that’s her ‘thing.’”
 — As we age we find our joy in surprising places.

★★★★ The snow was, at first and for a moment, nothing more than an extra gray on the grayness. On close inspection, it manifested itself against the dark neighboring balcony railing as a very few little flakes moving nowhere particular. Then behind those there was something like a driving mist, innumerable tiny flakes moving sharply northward, and soon not so tiny. By early afternoon the flakes were big and dropping straight down, laying a solid new coat on everything, March arriving fluffy and white. The three-year-old swabbed it up with a mitten, down to bare sidewalk, and had to be quickly stopped from eating what he’d gathered. Then he went sprinting off through the white in his lately hand-me-down boots, with the spider pattern in unlicensed Spider-Man colors. The toe of a hard old snowbank tripped him and he bounced up unfazed. He mountaineered along the ridge of old ice, stooped at a corner to try to make snowballs of the unsticky fluff. The wind was coming east on the cross street and he ran into it, squinting his eyes and sticking his tongue down and out. In the forecourt he went down on all fours to plow a path, and the snow quickly filled it in behind him. “It looks like Luke Skywalker is on the planet Hoth,” he said, mounting the low wall to knock accumulation out of the leaves of the shrubbery. Flakes landed on the smartphone screen and melted and scattered the pixel colors, like tiny costume-jewelry gemstones. As four approached, it was impossible to tell exactly where the curb was on the jaywalk with the seven-year-old across Amsterdam. The older boy was less ostentatious about catching the snowflakes as he went, but catch them he did: They were big enough to taste, he said, but they only tasted like water. There was ice in them now, flicking the exposed skin on the face. Outside the McDonald’s, a small dog on a leash lunged and barked at a snowblower.

You know how when you’re lying awake late at night and you can’t fall asleep no matter how hard you try because you are troubled by the bad choices you’ve made and the terrible things you’ve done and the knowledge that now there’s no way out of the prison you’ve put yourself into and you start to fantasize about how your life would be better if you could somehow go back and do all the things differently from the way you did them when you didn’t know any better but the more you think about it the more you realize that each decision you’ve made was predicated on an earlier, equally poor decision going as far back as you can remember and you start to understand that the only way anything could ever be okay for you and the everyone you’ve hurt — which is everyone you know — is if you were never born at all and so you shut your eyes and imagine a world in which you never existed and you see that it is good and you pull further out in your mind’s eye to view a vast unfathomable galaxy filled with stars and flares and spirals all shining on without you, finally you come to a state of brief but perfect, merciful rest? I don’t know what it looks like in your head but this is pretty much how I picture it.

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Which will come first: the end of winter, the moment when Jesus sends forth His angels and they gather out of His kingdom all things that offend and do iniquity and cast them into a furnace of fire so that the righteous might shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father, or the fixing of the broken escalator in Penn Station? It’s a trick question! They all herald the moment of the Final Judgment, so if any one of them occurs the other two are probably happening simultaneously.