How FilmLA Blocks Bike Lanes

...treet was a ghost town, it’s collection of handsome 1920s office buildings making it a convenient stand-in for New York. Now people live, work, shop and eat there and, increasingly, travel by foot, bike and scooters. The constant filming has, long since, become a nuisance. At the same time states and municipalities around the country compete to offer race-to-the-bottom incentives and tax breaks to lure film companies away from expensive cities lik...

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The Institute of the Present

...while your mouth is full of dental tools. But then I asked myself why am I making fun of people who work with their hands and minds for long hours in order to alleviate suffering? If anyone deserves good pay and days off to golf, it should be dentists. Instead I thought I’d discuss what should be an April Fools Day joke but isn’t. And that is Los Angeles’ mayor Eric Garcetti’s appearance at a party last week with Lyft executives to celebrate their...

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More on How to Make Clear Ice

...did a whole National Geographic special on ice that includes a segment on making clear ice. And did you know that clear ice sometimes happens naturally? Behold this viral YouTube hit, “Walking on beautiful clean ice in Slovakian Mountains:” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WBqX7MSqWw Lastly, I want to leave you with one of the most satisfying videos I’ve ever watched, Tokyo bartender Hidetsugu Ueno carving ice into diamond shapes (note the use of...

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Saturday Tweets: Don’t Fear the Green Reaper

...the light relentlessly pierced through even the tiny slits in the shades, making it difficult to fall asleep. Thanks goodness I moved from that area. pic.twitter.com/ECmbRPxz4h — Robert Kwolek (@RobertKwolek) January 31, 2019 “The internet’s emphasis on metrics and quantity over depth and quality has engendered a society that values celebrity, sensationalism, and numeric measures of success.” – #TeamHuman, #39 Get the manifestohttps://t.co/QCJ0Ng...

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Everything Must Go: Tidying Up at the Root Simple Compound

...oint we remembered a book one of our readers mentioned, and which has been making the publicity rounds of late, The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up, by the tidying consultant Marie Kondo (aka KonMari–her method is called the KonMari Method). She’s from Japan, where people have the same hearty consumerist impulses as we do here in the U.S., but considerably less space for storage. When I first read about the book, I understood the gist of it, but...

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