PicoBlog

Unless you live under a rock you’ve heard of the word guessing game Wordle, or at least seen those weird color-coded grids popping up on your social media feeds. In brief, the game gives you six chances to guess the day’s five letter word, with a structure similar to the old board game Mastermind — you guess a word, and the game tells you whether the letters in your word are in the solution word, as well as whether they’re in the correct place.

Bonjour! Bonjour! Gesine Bullock-Prado, that woman who can do just about anything and make us want to do those things too, has a new book: My Vermont Table. It’s part memoir, part an ode to the wonders of Vermont and very much a cookbook. A really good cookbook. Its publication date is March 14, which would make it a Pisces, but in Vermont, it would be a child of the Mud/Sugaring Season, that time between winter and spring when the snows thaw, the roads become almost impassable and the grand consolation is the sap that runs from the maple trees.

We stride down a shady beachfront lane and into a fishing village to peep boats with bright orange-and-blue paint jobs. Potted plants sit on stilted porches above the calm sea. As we gaze at the nearby isles and wade into the warm Gulf water, it’s hard to believe that we’d been on the ugly highway out of Pattaya only a few minutes earlier. Fifteen km south of this metropolis, serenity surrounds Bang Saray.

A little more than a year ago, I wrote about the proto-industrialization of Mughal Bengal. I had been intrigued by that word, proto-industrialization, and the suggestion that if things had happened a bit differently, the Industrial Revolution could have happened not in Europe, but in Asia. I dove deep into the topic, and learned a lot about the history of technology, economics, and the Indian subcontinent. But Bengal is not the only non-European region to have been called proto-industrialized, i.

For the Spaniards out there, this recipe will take you to a place deep in your memory. Turrón de chocolate, most famously sold in Spain under the brand Suchard, is something we all look forward to year round. Don’t take it from me…here are the memories of some of my Spanish friends (and one of my daughters!) Patricia Blanco, one of our R&D chefs who you’ve met before, says that “For me, turrón Suchard means Christmas, since you only can find it during the holiday season.

I was at an event a few weeks ago where a stranger made me cry. Not in a bad way, with an unkind word or lightly veiled insult. But by telling me something I didn’t know I needed to hear until the tears came. We all know that we should be our own cheerleader, back ourselves and celebrate our successes. We shouldn’t need outside validation. But I didn’t realise how much I needed to hear it from someone else until the women at the coaching stand in the Business Design Centre in Angel, east London looked me in the eye and told me, ‘You’re doing great’.

¡Hola Papi! is the preeminent deranged advice column from writer and author John Paul Brammer, now living on Substack! If you’ve ever wanted advice from a Twitter-addled gay Mexican with anxiety, here is your chance. Support this column by sharing it and subscribing below, or by upgrading to a paid subscription for access to more columns. Send Papi a letter at holapapiletters@gmail.com¡Hola Papi! I had my heart shattered a few months ago, and I still haven’t fully recovered.

Standing on the ground of Butler Island, just south of Darien, Georgia last week is something that I will not soon forget. There is simply no substitute to experiencing the landscape for yourself to begin to understand the scale of rice cultivation in the low country before the Civil War and the horrors of slavery. In 1838, Pierce Mease Butler traveled to the plantation with his wife and British actress Fanny Kemble.

A few days ago on a Friday, a friend pinged me about a crypto event over the upcoming weekend in Sonoma. While sipping coffee and scrolling through the agenda, I just realized it was related to Zuzalu, which I had been following for a long time. Initiated by Ethereum's visionary founder Vitalik Buterin in 2023, Zuzalu is an experimental concept of a "pop-up city." This temporary city brings together hundreds of global citizens for two months to live, learn, and innovate.