The Periodical Table

An occasional look at the magazines laying around Beachwood HQ.

Noodle Head
"At Noodle Bar, a junior line cook had been cooking chicken for family meal - lunch for the staff - and although he had to cook something like seventy-five chicken pieces and the stoves were mostly empty, he'd been cooking them in only two pans, which meant that he was wasting time he could have spent helping to prep for dinner," Larissa MacFarquhar writes in her incisive profile of neurotic restaurateur David Chang in the New Yorker.

"Also, he was cooking with tongs, which was bad technique, it ripped the food apart, it was how you cooked at T.G.I. Friday's - he should have been using a spoon or a spatula. Cooking with tongs showed disrespect for the chicken, disrespect for family meal, and, by extension, disrespect for the entire restaurant.

"But the guy cooking family meal was just the beginning of it. Walking down the line, Chang had spotted another cook cutting fish cake into slices that were totally uneven and looked like hell. Someone else was handling ice-cream cones with her bare hands, touching the end that wasn't covered in paper.

"None of these mistakes was egregious in itself, but all of them together made Change feel that Noodle Bar's kitchen was degenerating into decadence and anarchy. He had screamed and yelled until a friend showed up and dragged him out of the restaurant, and his head still hurt nearly twenty-four hours later."

Chief Executive Tyrant
"Observers are often amazed when executives with impressive track records are mysteriously transformed into corrupt and tyrannical monsters once they become C.E.O.s," writes a Clemson management professor in the Sloan Management Review. [via What's Offline in the New York Times]

A) Really? On what planet?
B) I thought that was how they got there in the first place.

Jerry Yahoo
* Yahoo! started as "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" but stands for Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.

* "Sergey Brin and Larry Page . . . invented Google, a search engine that Yahoo! chose not to buy, mistaking search for a feature of web portals rather than a new approach to surfing."

Yow!

The Week Ahead
When The Week magazine first came out a few years ago, I was less than impressed. I don't if I've changed or they have, but now when I look at it it looks like the future; it's essentially a print blog, not unlike a more tightly edited version of Controversy, the late Sun-Times Sunday section. Like each, you don't even feel constrained by not being able to click links to get full stories. The rundowns and excerpts are enough. Coming soon to your daily newspaper. Or instead of it.

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The Week Daily is its oxymoronic website. There are no artificial news cycles anymore; and let's be clear, news cycles are artificial, not ordained by the Journalism Gods. They are products of printing press and circulation department limitations. A reporter files a story on a Tuesday evening and it sits around spoiling overnight instead of becoming instantly available to its audience. There is nothing sacred about that. There is no such thing as a monthly, a weekly, a daily or even an hourly anymore. Everything is - our ought to be - nowly. Like life. That doesn't mean stories ought to be published before their time, it just means there's no reason to delay publication once they are finished.

Treats
Print magazine is an example of a publication that is immensely enjoyable to read in, well, print form. It's a visual and almost tactile feast. Doesn't mean they couldn't do more with their website. Nothing wrong with pressing an advantage, though, and that's why I think daily newspapers might get somewhere with semi-glossy news photography weeklies, with a dash of editorial cartooning and graphic illustrations like those Thomas Frisbie has done on the Sun-Times editorial page.

Title Fight
Speaking of The Week, it reported recently that International Falls (Minnesota) won its federal trademark case making it the official Icebox of the Nation. "The townspeople celebrated by huddling around their wood-burning stoves as temperatures plunged to 40 below."

Bucktown Bayless
Just catching up with a recent New York Times Sunday Magazine snapshot of local hero Rick Bayless, who, it turns out, lives in a converted 1916 tavern in Bucktown.

"Our living room has the original pressed-tin ceiling and terrazzo floor of the tavern," he told the Times. "Where the beer lines went down into the keg room, you can see stains where a million drips of golden beer dropped."

Also:

* "We grow about $25,000 worth of produce for the restaurant out of our backyard in Chicago. Right now we are growing microgreens in the basement. We'll take them into the garden in the spring."

* "My parents had a barbecue restaurant in Oklahoma City called Hickory House, and I have all the pictures from opening day. The pork ribs were the specialty; dry rub, sauce on the side."

Phenomenon
* "Something seems wrong with the laws of physics. Spacecraft are not behaving the way that they should."

* "Three-dimensional pictures for all the family, with no need for special glasses, could be on the way."

* "As more commercial uses are developed for holograms, they may soon be found all over the place."