Use Your Microwave as Dough Proofing Box

...nd/or to put off your baking time to a more convenient hour. Your proofing box and refrigerator thus become, to use an old person metaphor, like the fast forward and pause buttons on a VCR. Concluding note I’ve gotten back into bread baking after a pause, specifically making whole wheat breads. If you’d like to try baking yourself, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, I highly recommend the Josey Baker Bread book. Why? It’s to the point,...

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Our New Open Floor Plan

...ared them a “death trap.” Then the good natured Will Wallus of the Weekend Homestead came on the podcast to gently defend open floor plans. Naturally, I’m spending this month making our house, gasp, more open. Let me explain. When I installed the floor in the living room in the aughts I discovered an opening that used to exist between our living room and what we use as our bedroom. Back in 1920 this house was a one bedroom with a kind of sitting r...

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Poultry Outlaws: Chicken Laws Around the U.S.

...red. Miami: May have up to 15 hens, no roosters. Must be contained at least 100 feet from neighboring structures. Minneapolis: Must obtain permission of 80% of your neighbors that live within 100 feet. Must be kept penned. New York: Health Code § 161.19 Keeping of live poultry and rabbits. (a) No person shall keep a live rooster, duck, goose or turkey in a built-up portion of the City. (b) A person who holds a permit to keep for sale or sell live...

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A Visit to the Reversible Destiny Lofts

...erspacial character is echoed in the Loft itself and its surroundings. The urban hyperspacial maze that is Tokyo makes both the Bonaventure and the Reversible Destiny Lofts seem comprehensible by comparison. The Shinjuku train station, to take just one example, contains a dizzying number of public transit options on multiple levels connected to a massive shopping mall with escalators and elevators leading to what seems like infinite floors of reta...

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24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

...from reclining on them. The pervasive but social disregarded phenomenon of urban homelessness entails many deprivations, yet few are more acute than the hazards and insecurities of unsheltered sleep. Where do we go from here? The book was written almost 10 years ago in 2013, but the only thing that dates this book is Crary’s attack on blogging which he calls a “one-way model of auto-chattering in which the possibility of ever having to wait and li...

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