Authentica, More Fun In More Places

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Milo & Seth Inman, December 1996

27 years ago our family was in Tamarindo, Costa Rica for a long weekend. We stayed at a lovely beachfront hotel. Tamarindo was a very small town at the time, attracting surfers who were escaping more crowded beaches in places like California and enjoying the excellent waves on this part of the coastline. This hotel set the vibe for the town, at least as we experienced it. Tourism has grown 4-fold in the decades since that visit, and still the beaches of Tamarindo offer a ratio of surfers to great waves that make it an ideal destination. Not only for skilled surfers but for those looking to learn. The town has grown, and at various points since that family outing I was concerned about how sustainable that growth was. I am now convinced it is on the right track.

Seth in the pool at Hotel Capitan Suizo, the edge of Milo’s towel in the upper right of the frame. The pool is one of the most beautiful in Costa Rica, and overlooks the Pacific ocean.

So much so that next week we are opening our fourth Authentica shop. In Tamarindo. At that hotel. We will finally be introducing our take on and old game –a product that I have been developing with one of our woodworking partners for the entire time since our first Authentica shops opened four years ago. And we will offer other new products that are particular to the Guanacaste region, and the Nicoya peninsula in particular. More fun.

New York Noise

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A particularly loud intersection on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The neighborhood is home to at least one of the noise cameras the city is testing. Sara Naomi Lewkowicz for The New York Times

When we lived in India we used to post frequently on this topic, but it has been a while. Happy to see (thanks to Erin Nolan and the New York Times) that another onetime hometown of ours is taking up the issue:

New York City, not exactly known for its peace and quiet, is expanding its use of technology to fine the drivers of loud cars and motorcycles.

New York City is known for its noise. A cacophony of sounds bombards residents every time they step outside — screeching subway cars, jackhammers drilling away, late-night revelers leaving bars and clubs. Continue reading →

Rubber-Induced Destruction

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Satellite images of Cambodian forest in 2000 (left) and, after being cleared, in 2015 (right). Forests were replaced by a grid of rubber plantations, as well as croplands. Source: NASA

If you have never seen ecosystem destruction firsthand, count yourself lucky. I witnessed, during visits over several years, as 1,000 acres of primary forest ecosystem was destroyed to make way for a rubber plantation. It was horrifying. And I am further horrified to read how what I witnessed was only a small part of a much bigger rubber-induced destruction (thanks as always to Fred Pearce):

Rubber resin collected from a tree near Lubuk Beringin, Indonesia. TRI SAPUTRO / CIFOR

How Mounting Demand for Rubber Is Driving Tropical Forest Loss

The growing market for rubber is a major, but largely overlooked, cause of tropical deforestation, new analysis shows. Most of the rubber goes to produce tires, more than 2 billion a year, and experts warn the transition to electric vehicles could accelerate rubber use.

The elephants are gone. The trees are logged out. The Beng Per Wildlife Sanctuary in central Cambodia is largely destroyed, after being handed over by the government to a politically well-connected local plantation company to grow rubber. Continue reading →

Ezra Klein’s Book List

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Courtesy Of Ifixit/Via Reuters

Ezra Klein has been part of my media diet for about as long as I have been posting in these pages.

He occasionally writes opinions that are the best thing I have read in a while, and this book list is among them:

This is another end-of-the-year book list, but with a twist. These are the best books I read about 2023. They are, for the most part, voices from other years helping me make sense of our own. In a world where information keeps speeding up and thinning out, books slow time down, thickening the moment in which we live.

I spent much of the year reporting on artificial intelligence. And my thoughts returned, again and again, to “God, Human, Animal, Machine,” by Meghan O’Gieblyn. Continue reading →

Coffee Grinder Matters

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Illustration: Dana Davis; Photos: Michael Hession

We do not normally offer product promotion nor seek endorsements other than for products we personally love enough to dedicate our lives to making them and selling them. Lesley Stockton is in the business of helping others make smart purchase decisions and does so with this same sense of personal devotion. I share one example today because this is the grinder I use, and I feel the same way about it:

The Baratza Encore Transformed My Morning Coffee (and Turned Me Into a Lowkey Barista)

I cannot overstate how much the Baratza Encore burr grinder improved my morning routine.
I strike a weird balance between investing heavily in my home coffee setup while not taking coffee culture too seriously. Like, I love a well-balanced cup in the morning, but I’m not about to weigh my beans on a scale to get the perfect coffee-to-water ratio. Of the $1,000-ish worth of coffee gear in my kitchen, though, my Baratza Encore burr grinder is the one thing I cannot live without.

 

Winning The Popularity Contest, Fungi In Our Pages

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courtesy of Laura Murray/Smallhold

The topic came to our attention a dozen years ago and is now mainstream enough that it is a regularly featured topic in our feed:

A mushrooming trend: how fungi became an It food

The mushroom moment of the past few years shows no sign of ending. What’s feeding its enduring popularity?

You can’t walk more than a few aisles in the grocery store these days without running into some kind of new mushroom product. Fresh white button mushrooms are increasingly joined by specialty varieties like lion’s mane, maitake or oyster mushrooms. There’s sparkling cordyceps tea and chaga coffee boasting a range of health benefits, mushroom chips and even chocolate bars infused with reishi. Continue reading →

Good Money After Bad

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The energy transition will lead to wide-ranging transformations across economies. | MONTAGE ILLUSTRATION BY NIKO YAITANES/HARVARD MAGAZINE; PHOTOGRAPHS BY UNSPLASH

We applaud the Fund, especially for this work, even if the source of their money is problematic:

Easing the Energy Transition

How the Bezos Earth Fund hopes to seed economic transformation

WHAT ARE THE BIGGEST economic obstacles to the needed rapid transition in energy supplies and the challenges of deforestation driven by climate change? Continue reading →

Power Rangers With A Different Approach

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Women rangers hugged a tree while collecting data during a forest patrol near the village of Damaran Baru, in Aceh Province, Indonesia. Ulet Ifansasti for The New York Times

We thank Muktita Suhartono for the story and  Ulet Ifansasti for the photographs:

Female Rangers ‘Don’t Go All Alpha Like the Men’ to Protect a Forest

Rather than take a confrontational approach with trespassers looking to farm or log in a tropical rainforest in Indonesia, teams of women rangers try dialogue first.

Asmia, one of 15 rangers whose job is to protect nearby forests from squatters who want to clear trees for timber or to farm the fertile soil.

Riding her motorbike while balancing a backpack, a wok and a sharp cleaver, Asmia expertly maneuvered her way up a dangerous cliffside: a three-mile trip along a precipitous dirt path, barely 40 inches wide, to reach the mouth of the forest.

Asmia is one of the 15 members of a team of rangers — 10 of whom are women — whose job is to protect their village forest in Aceh Province in Indonesia from the squatters who want to clear the trees for timber or to farm the fertile soil.

Two teams of rangers, each consisting of five women and two men, take turns each month on five-day forest patrols.

“Here, we once fought with a squatter, asking him to stop the encroachment,” Asmia said, pointing as she walked beneath the thick canopy of trees that shadow her rounds. “He insisted on clearing the land, as he wanted to grow coffee. He was persistent. But we talked him out of it.” Continue reading →

Corrupted Cop & Better News

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Cylindrical battery cells undergoing tests in the UK. Photographer: Jason Alden/Bloomberg

Thanks to Bill McKibben, in his newsletter–“A Corrupted COP New revelations show just how bad the oil countries really are“–for more details on this bad news but also for pointing us to better news that has implications for so much of the decarbonization opportunity set:

Battery Prices Are Falling Again as Raw Material Costs Drop

BloombergNEF breaks down the biggest annual drop in its lithium-ion battery price survey since 2018.

As the auto industry grapples with how to make affordable EVs, the task may get easier by one key metric. Battery prices are resuming a long-term trend of decline, following an unprecedented increase last year.

According to BloombergNEF’s annual lithium-ion battery price survey, average pack prices fell to $139 per kilowatt hour this year, a 14% drop from $161/kWh in 2022.1

Coming In From The Cold, Bloomfield’s Back

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The chicken for two (left) and the green toast (right), among other dishes from Sailor’s understated menu. Photographs by Eric Helgas for The New Yorker

Any time we have shared food stories related to our own work, it has been about the ingredients, the cultural origins of the item, and such. I have shared my own history with the restaurant business, which included no seamy side (that I knew of). Helen Rosner, a gifted food writer whose work we have linked to frequently, reviews a restaurant I hope to visit, and does something equally important.

She acknowledges the seamy side in this chef’s experience (only one cameo reference to this chef previously in our pages), points to the culprits who escaped comfortably–we can only hope that their removal has at least made the restaurant industry safer–and moves on to tell how the talent of April Bloomfield is now deployed. With the liveliest photo ever to accompany a review, Helen Rosner has my full attention:

A customer eating brandade.

A bite of the brandade.

April Bloomfield’s Quietly Triumphant Return

Sailor, in Fort Greene, is a destination restaurant dressed up as a neighborhood spot—which is maybe the best kind of restaurant there is.

One of my many rules of restaurant-going is: if you see an unsexy vegetable given pride of place on a menu, order it. We pretty much know what to expect when a kitchen touts its Brussels sprouts—dollars to doughnuts, they’ll show up crispy and maple-syruped—or carrots (roasted, goat cheese), or beets (roasted, goat cheese, nuts), but when a chef refuses to play the hits, and instead goes for the produce-aisle deep cuts, something exciting is likely afoot. Continue reading →