Bamboo Sushi’s albacore carpaccio w/chopped house smoked cippolini onions, pickled shiitake mushrooms, momiji, ponzu, and chervil
NG: Saddam Hussein’s chrome-plated Kalashnikov AK-47 is one of 540 stolen Iraqi artifacts recently returned to the country. More than 30,000 looted Iraqi antiquities and artworks have been confiscated inside and outside the country since 2003, according to the New York Times, but the total number is anyone’s guess. “We’ll never be able to determine how many pieces have been stolen, because many of the pieces were taken clandestinely from archaeological sites.” - archaeologist Brian Rose
‘l’horloge d’une vie de travail 1’ by Julien Berthier, a clock for calculating in real time the hours of work accumulated before retirement
Two days ago, hundreds of Afghans gathered in Kabul to denounce the United States for burning the Quran. They torched American flags, chanted “Death to America,” and carried signs calling for the death of President Obama. Some of them hurled rocks at U.S. troops. A student in the crowd said of the planned Quran burning: “We know this is not just the decision of a church. It is the decision of the president and the entire United States.”
He’s wrong, of course. The Quran burning is the brainchild of a Florida minister and his tiny fundamentalist church. It has been condemned by the White House, the State Department, the commanding U.S. general in Afghanistan, Christian organizations, and countless Americans. But when clerics in Egypt denounce the incendiary plan, we feel the heat. When thousands of Muslims rally against it in Indonesia, they do so outside our embassy. When an imam in Kabul threatens retaliation, he casts a shadow on all of us: “If they decide to burn the holy Quran, I will announce jihad against these Christians and infidels.” This is how it feels to be judged by the sins of others who destroy in the name of your faith. You’re no more responsible for 30 Christian extremists in Florida than Muslims are for the 9/11 hijackers. Yet most of us, when polled, say that no Muslim house of worship should be built near the site of the 9/11 attacks. In saying this, we implicitly hold all Muslims accountable for the crime of the 9/11 hijackers.
Now you know how it feels to be judged that way. It’s inaccurate, and it’s wrong. But of course [we know] the two situations are different.
A pastor who preaches at a nearby Florida church is aghast at the global outrage the Quran-burning minister has provoked. “He represents only 30 people in this town,” the pastor tells the New York Times. “It needs to get out somehow to the rest of the world that this isn’t the face of Christianity.”
It will, Reverend. Right after it gets out to the rest of the world that we don’t think the 9/11 hijackers are the face of Islam.
With fish stocks around the world depleted by overfishing and disrupted by climate change, farm-raised salmon stands as a viable if not entirely appetizing alternative.
Last Friday, though, the FDA took a potentially dangerous step by ruling that salmon whose genes have been altered so that they grow more rapidly than their wild counterparts are safe for human consumption, which has opened the door for salmon to become just another unhealthful cog in the industrial-food machine. And it may have foisted upon the public yet another cancer risk.
According to a report in the New York Times, FDA scientists found that the altered fish, developed by AquaBounty Technologies, based in the Boston area, were unlikely to escape into the environment and cross-breed with native schools of Atlantic salmon. The agency also found that even though the genetically altered salmon carry elevated levels of insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1), a suspected carcinogen, those levels are so minute that they pose no health risk. Precautions aside, it requires considerably more than the customary level of naivety to believe wild salmon wouldn’t be contaminated by their laboratory-designed cousins. But it’s the IGF-1 about which we truly ought to be concerned. This isn’t the first time we’ve had to worry about IGF-1. In the 1990s, the FDA approved the use of genetically engineered recombinant bovine-growth hormone (rBGH, also known as rBST) to induce cows to produce more milk.
If salmon and milk and a whole range of edible food-like substances (to use Michael Pollan’s phrase) yet to come contain elevated levels of IGF-1, when, exactly, are we supposed to start worrying?
