The purpose of art is to delight us; certain men and women (no smarter than you or I) whose art can delight us have been given dispensation from going out and fetching water and carrying wood. It's no more elaborate than that. — David Mamet

Rachel Miller and Alex Caruso have taken a tiny space in Lynn and turned it into one of the most interesting and challenging restaurants in the US.

We went because we had an anniversary, and it was terrific. Nine courses, maybe ten? Caviar and potato chips with ethereal custard fluff was the first course. Fresh Portuguese barnacles — barnacles! — poached and chilled and served over crushed ice, with the delightful spicy dipping sauce that, I’m told, is simply ⅓ salt, ⅓ black pepper, and ⅓ lime juice. Beats mignonette by a country mile.

There was an amazing shrimp toast would not be out of place at Alinea. There was a tiny Vietnamese-inflected lobster roll in a tiny custom-baked Boston-style bun. There was a kabocha squash course with crispy confit duck tongues. All with some really daring wine pairings.

This goes beyond authenticity: it’s not your grandmother’s Vietnamese/French comfort food. (Neither Miller’s grandmother nor mine, I expect, was Vietnamese. My grandmother didn’t cook if she could help it.) This is really thinking through what terrific food we can make, in a world where we can get Nước Chấm and diver scallops. The only comparable I can come up with is Mandy Lee’s Escapism Cooking: Miller, like Lee, likes to have a lot going on, fireworks in the mouth and excitement on the plate. She’s very big on flavor and texture contrasts, and they pair nicely with some really complex wines (oh, that Lapeyre Jurançon had a lot to say!). But Lee’s book is, at least in part, performance art; Miller is doing stuff on the plate, four nights a week.

Once we come to the last episode, all the secrets are known, everyone is miserable, and we are headed — as we have always been headed — back to the beginning. The book was wonderful, and this adaptation really does a wonderful job when it gets to the end. Extraordinary performances all around, especially in parts that don’t absolutely require much from the actor.

Jan 25 26 2025

Quarto

Great Tinderbox Meetup today with Prof. Naupaka Zimmerman on using Tinderbox with R, pandoc, and Quarto to prepare scientific papers and presentations. It’s fascinating how well this kind of interoperability works. Watch the forum for the video.

Perhaps we need a Tinderbox/Quarto book club....

Near the very beginning of hypertext research, Michael Joyce distinguished exploratory hypertext, in which the reader follows links to explore what an author has written, from constructive hypertext — hypertext that invites the reader to extend the hypertext. This was an extremely inviting theoretical idea in 1988, since postmodern ideas about reading the writing were then new in mainstream American scholarship. As Joyce memorably suggested, constructive hypertexts are "versions of what they are becoming, a structure for what

does not yet exist.” The idea has had less impact on the engineering side of hypertext research, partly because computer science has never quite known what to do with postmodern thought, and partly because early efforts were not entirely convincing.

In Tinderbox, we typically make one note for an idea, and then make a new note for the next idea. That’s not the way cities are built: we make cities street by street, tower by tower, subdivision by development. That means a fast-growing city is bound to have some vacant dwellings awaiting new residents. That’s also common in note-taking.

1. When starting a new scientific paper, we often know at the very outset what the major sections of the paper will be. In many fields, this is canonical: you have an introduction, a review of the literature, a description of the experiment, a discussion of the results, and conclude with ideas for further work. Why make this piece by piece, and not all at once?

2. In a big piece of nonfiction, sources don’t really come one by one. Today at the library, you sit down to find out about why historians think History can inform contemporary opinion. That’s not going to be a single source, but you’ve only got space for a paragraph or two, and you don’t want to read the whole library. You’re going to need a handful of sources to satisfy Referee #2, and you probably don’t have time for more than a dozen. Why not make a dozen notes, and fill them up as you find books and articles with reading?

Newer View 2: Constructivity

In map view, you don’t want to have many “vacant” notes because, even on today’s screens, you can only fit 100 notes or so on the screen before things start to feel crowded. Because the Information City doesn’t label every note all the time, each note can use fewer pixels. By making different building look different, we may be able to remember what things are and find them when wanted. Vacant notes have black roofs, while notes that are in use have red roofs. An area in which we plan to work is simply a neighborhood of vacant buildings, ready to be occupied by new sources.

I’m two weeks in on a crash research project to take a new look into an old idea: The Information City. I’m going to try to blog this as it happens. I usually work alone, but for this project I’m honored to be joined by three researchers: Mark Anderson, Silas Hooper, and Kimera Royale; opinions here, however, are just mine.

Today, most large hypertexts maps look like this Tinderbox map.

Newer View 1: Too Many Words

That’s not too terrible: we’ve made some progress from the original Intermedia tangle.

Newer View 1: Too Many Words

We still are quite limited in how many notes we can fit on one screen at a time. In contrast to the situation in the 1980s when this Intermedia experiment was attempted, though, we can’t expect improved displays to get us out of our predicament: today’s displays are roughly as good as our eyes, and our eyes aren’t expected to improve very soon.

The main constraint on getting more notes into the Tinderbox map is that Tinderbox notes are identified by name, and all those textual names pose real problems. First, they use lots of pixels! Second, they need horizontal space, and my my experience they always demand more horizontal space than you are likely to have. Third, all those words make the map view something you want to read, which gets in the way of the map view’s inclination to express itself in space. This third idea was the topic of my Mexico City paper on “The Indefinite Idea Plane Artistically Considered”.

A long time back, Andreas Dieberger wrote an intriguing dissertation on The Information City, a way to visualize hypertexts as a cityscape. That was too hard to implement 25 years ago, but I think it’s time for a fresh try.

Newer View 1: Too Many Words

In this view, Tinderbox notes are buildings. Sometimes, a building might represent one note or several notes; the apartment towers are containers and their upper floors each represent one child note. The current selection in this view is the yellow house near the center of the view, called “Questions”. At the extreme right edge, you can just see a bit of the Release Notes tower whose green second story represents Release C02, which I am using right now.

The point is not that people are good about reasoning in three dimension. We aren’t, and this is a two-dimensional view of a three-dimensional space anyway. By reducing the amount of text, though, we can get lots more notes onto the screen, and we can still keep them organized in a way which (I hope) will make sense and be sustainable through a few hundred notes. (You can read the note by clicking on the corresponding house, of course, and I think we can do a lot with displaying the names of notes on hover or mouseover, perhaps building on Polle Zellweger’s fluid annotations.)

The models are absurdly simple right now. That might be fine: we don’t want to build a city or a palace, we only need the parts that serve us mnemonically, that help us find stuff we need. Just two weeks in: we’ll see how it goes.

The New Yorker recommends a slew of the best books of 2024. I spent more than any hour scanning this, and added far too many books to my booklist.

by Jorge Almazan

A fascinating discussion of features that make Tokyo a unique and livable city. The discussion of yokochō alleyways is particularly interesting. These narrow streets of tiny two-story bars and restaurants grew from a postwar effort to shut down the black market traffic that centered on Tokyo rail stations. Black-market vendors were removed from their haunts and sent off to new-built market stalls, and these grew into entertainment districts that people like and that show up all the time in movies. This is very on-trend: there’s maybe space for five customers at a time, but rents are low and you can cater to very specialized interests. If you squint, you can see the germ of Robuchon’s atelier and David Chang’s noodle bar.

I’m interested because a small group of us are reviving an old idea of the imaginary city as a view of a hypertext.

Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City

Photo: Lan Pham