PicoBlog

Once you reach a certain stage of midlife, you start seeing lots of content with ominous clickbaity titles like, The Three Exercises You Should Do Every Day to Keep Your Body From Deteriorating or How to Keep Brain Atrophy at Bay. If you are a woman, you also are treated to articles telling you what not to wear, which hairstyles will age you, and why gray is the new hair power color.

Apple has opened a totally new store location — its first in the U.S. in over a year — at American Dream in East Rutherford, New Jersey. This unique setting requires extensive context to fully grasp, so that is what I’m going to provide. American Dream is a colossal indoor mall set on some nondescript swampland in Bergen County — the county where shopping is restricted on Sundays. Despite having a direct line of sight to Midtown Manhattan, the mall is difficult and time-consuming to visit from New York City without a personal vehicle and almost impossible to access on foot.

Here’s October’s bonus article for paid subscribers. Your support makes Tabletops possible every week. Thank you. If Apple Stores occupy one side of mall culture, the far opposite end is occupied by the urban exploration and dead mall scene. Apple Stores capture attention because of their energy, perpetual state of change, and fresh architecture. The inverse is true of forgotten retail: it’s the absence of people, change, and new ideas that fascinates.

Let me ask you a question…what’s more American than apple pie? Using zucchini instead! Maybe you know, but apples aren’t actually native to the Americas while zucchini comes from Mesoamerica…so maybe there’s nothing more American than a Zucchini Pie! You might think an apple pie made with zucchini instead of apples sounds strange, but I’m telling you that it actually makes a lot of sense. What do we love about apples in a pie?

I recently published an in-depth analysis about the political preferences of LLMs where I applied 11 political orientation tests to 24 state-of-the-art conversational LLMs. Given all the turmoil around the release of Google’s Gemini, this is just a brief follow-up to the aforementioned study. Namely, I applied the IDRlabs Woke Test to several popular LLMs. I administered the test 5 times to each model and averaged the results. The Wokeness Index is simply the average of the IDRlabs Woke Test 8 dimensions of results.

In June of 2023, California’s Gavin Newsom pooh-poohed the hoopla over trans-identified males competing in female sports in an interview by Fox News. He asked that we show some “humility and sensitivity” about what he viewed as a non-issue.  What does that even mean? I think it means, Suck it up, buttercup. Newsom said that of the 520,000 NCAA athletes, only a few dozen are trans.  Newsom seemingly gathered that data point from Outsports, that reports that 36 players have openly admitted to being transgender.

Appropriation can feel complicated (...sometimes). When it is so blatantly obvious, there is little hesitation in calling it what it is. And then there are the other times – you know, those moments where you catch yourself smiling, indulging in the initial overwhelming joy of seeing an aspect of yourself in an unexpected place (often a space that has felt unattainable), and then the complexity of discomfort sets in like a pit in your stomach and you aren’t exactly sure what to make of it.

I’m going to keep this short and sweet, but not too sweet. I guess I should say, this is tangy, which is what happens when you bake fresh apricots. They get tart and tangy, which makes them one of the few fruits (one could argue, or at least I could) that is even better cooked than raw. We had fresh apricots when I lived in California, but I never knew how abundant they were in France until I moved here.

Hello and happy-end-of-May to you. I’m bringing you a recipe today that was commissioned by California Grown, a group that represents agricultural commodities grown in the Golden State, and with that I’d like to offer a little backstory about my relationship with them. I’ve always been a fan of a culinary underdog (my obsession with fruitcake, anyone?). A few years ago I was mouthing off on the internet about how another maligned favorite of mine, prunes, are criminally underappreciated.