Choppye

The Mare Orientale, a lunar mare forming one of the Moon’s most striking large-scale features, shaped not unlike a bullseye

The Weeping Stones

Photographed off the coast of Okayama, Japan, The Weeping Stones is a photo series by the creative duo Trevor Williams and Jonathan Galione of Tdub Photo that captures the eerie blue light emitted by a native species of bioluminescent shrimp. More commonly referred to as sea fireflies, these rare creatures live in the sand in shallow sea water, floating somewhere between the extremes of high and low tide. At just 3 mm in length the shrimp are extremely small light sources, but when grouped together they take on abstract patterns that light up the water around them.

We’ve Got Eyes Everywhere

Photo by: Ren Hang

Luxury and the consumption of labor.

By Lisa Wade, PhD

I came across this fascinating poster advertising tea at The Coffee Bean in Irvine, CA. The ad features tea leaves balled up into small tea “pearls” and spilled into a person’s palm. It reads:

Three minutes to fragrant perfection.

It takes a full day to hand-roll 17 ounces of our Jasmine Dragon Pearl Green Tea.  But in just three minutes you can watch these aromatic pearls unfurl gracefully into one of the world’s most soothing and delicious teas.

This ad suggests that others’ toil should enhance one’s experience of pleasure.  The fact that it takes a significant amount of human labor to “hand-roll” tea leaves into balls — an action that is in no way asserted to change the taste of the tea — is supposed to make the tea moreappealing and not less.  We are supposed to enjoy not just the visual, but the fact that others worked hard to produce it for us.  A whole day of their labor for just three minutes of curly goodness.

This is a rather stunning value pervading U.S. culture.  Luxury may be defined not only as pleasure, or as the consumption of the scarce, but as the “unfurling” of others’ hard work.  What could be more luxurious than the casual-and-fleeting enjoyment of the hard-and-long labor of others?

And there’s this very persistent theme – that there are always a handful of dishes that go out of style once technological innovations turn up that make them simple to create. The evolution of the balloon whisk wrecked everyone’s taste for a “Dish of Snow” (basically egg whites whipped for a day until stiff by other people) in the seventeenth century and the food processor meant that all of the popularity of molded mousses evaporates overnight in the eighties.

then all of the sudden, when everyone could have spices, they weren’t special anymore. the french especially pulled back hard from the prolific use of spices and pursued simpler, “elegant” flavor profiles.