Syria has condemned US President Donald Trump’s statement that it is time to recognise Israeli sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights, while its close military ally, Russia said changing the status of the territory would violate UN agreements.
Syrian state news agency cited a foreign ministry source on Friday as saying Trump’s statement showed “the blind bias of the United States” towards Israel.
It did not change “the reality that the Golan was and will remain Syrian, Arab,” the source said.
“The Syrian nation is more determined to liberate this precious piece of Syrian national land through all available means,” the source told Reuters, adding that Trump’s statement was “irresponsible” and showed “contempt” for international law.
Another close Syrian ally, Iran, also upbraided Trump for the comment he made on Thursday, which marks a dramatic shift in US policy over the status of a disputed area that was captured by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war and annexed in 1981 – a move not recognised internationally.
Last week, the US dropped “Israeli-occupied” designation in its annual human rights report, though the State Department insisted the wording change did not mean a policy change.
Iran said the statement was “unacceptable”. “This illegal and unacceptable recognition does not change the fact that it belongs to Syria,” an Iranian foreign ministry spokesman was cited as saying by state TV.
Turkey, which is heavily involved in the eight-year-old Syrian conflict, said that Trump’s statement has brought the region to the edge of a new crisis.
“We cannot allow the legitimisation of the occupation of the Golan Heights,” President Tayyip Erdogan, who is opposed to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, said in a speech at a meeting of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation in Istanbul.
Both Iran and Russia have deployed forces into Syria in support of Assad during the Syrian conflict, with Iran sending both its own forces and also backing regional Shia militias such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah that have helped Damascus.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has pressed the United States to recognise its claim and raised that possibility in his first White House meeting with Trump in February 2017.
Trump’s statement has given a boost to Netanyahu in the middle of his re-election campaign. Israel will vote on April 9.
“Well,” the newswoman said to Donald Trump, “you’re under a tremendous amount of pressure lately.”
“Why do you say that?” he asked.
Story Continued Below
It was April 6, 1990, and Paula Zahn on CBS actually had plenty of reasons to think Trump might be feeling anxious. It hadn’t been two months since the hyper-public, tabloid-tawdry revelation that his philandering had shattered his marriage to the mother of his first three children. He and his executives were grappling with the flawed, frantic opening of the newest, gaudiest, most expensive and most debt-bloated of his three casinos in Atlantic City. And reporters who covered money instead of celebrity had started to suss out the unsteadiness of Trump’s overall financial state.
“Both in your professional life and your personal life,” Zahn offered.
She asked how he was doing.
“I feel great,” Trump replied. “I’m doing well.”
Nearly three decades have passed. Even in Trump’s perma-perilous presidency, this is a juncture that pulses with risk. Newly empowered Democrats in Congress are ramping up multiple investigations, and talk of impeachment is impossible to avoid. Looming largest over this tumultuous battlefield, though, is the report special counsel Robert Mueller appears poised to submit to Attorney General William Barr—the culmination of nearly two years of labor and the subject of immeasurable speculation. While Trump often awards himself and his administration “A-plus” grades, many others question whether he will be able to sustain his rosy self-assessment once the details of Mueller’s findings become public.
Every flurry of tweets from the president—and last weekend’s two-day grievance bender against late-night comedy and cable news shows was a particularly strong example—begets new pronouncements that Trump is coming unglued from the strain. George Conway, husband of close Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, hauled out the clinical definition of narcissistic personality disorder to make the case that Trump is not only unfit for office but becoming catastrophically worse. And psychiatrists are speaking with dire predictions about the potential for a deranged person with extraordinary powers to create global mayhem and destruction.
“He has very poor coping mechanisms when he is criticized or when he feels humiliated,” Bandy Lee, a forensic psychiatrist from Yale and the editor of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, the second edition of which is out this month, told me, “and at these points he generally goes into attack mode and he threatens others or tries to get revenge. The Mueller report is of a scale that is probably unlike what we have seen him undergo before.”
Worst-case scenario? “Obliterate observing eyes of his humiliation,” Lee said. Meaning? “Destroying the world. That, very quickly, becomes an avenue, a perceived solution … for individuals with his personality structure.”
Make what you will of such medical predictions, but the historical record tells a different story. The back-and-forth with Zahn is an instructive (and comforting?) reminder about overstating Trump’s fragility. The Trump campaign in 2015 and ’16 careened from kill shot to kill shot, of course, and just kept going, right to the White House—and that was not the first time he flashed his ability to mitigate calamity and deftly skirt what might have seemed like an inevitable comeuppance. Whether or not Trump could remain not only financially solvent but reputationally intact was an open question for the entirety of the first half of the 1990s. So many times, he could have been snuffed, stopped, rendered a relative footnote, his place in the history of this country limited to status as a gauche totem of a regrettable epoch of greed. That, needless to say, is not how the tale played out. Trump is many things. A developer. A promoter. A master media manipulator. A grown-old rich kid. The president of the United States. Above all else, though, he is a survivor.
“The ultimate survivor,” former Trump casino executive Jack O’Donnell told me recently.
But it’s not just that Trump has survived that’s important to consider at this moment—it’s how he has done it. Armed with extraordinary audacity, constitutional sangfroid, a stomach for tumult, an acumen for recastingobvious losses into strange sorts of wins, and the prodigious safety net bequeathed by his wealthy, wily father, he has plowed past myriad hazards. And he did it by tying himself tightly to his bankers and lenders in New York and to gaming industry regulators in New Jersey—who let him live large until they couldn’t let him die without fatally wounding themselves. He effectively inhabited hosts, using them to get bigger and bigger in the ’80s until he was practically perversely invincible by the ’90s—not only “too big to fail,” as the late Wayne Barrett once toldSusan Glasser and me, but “too big to jail.”
Perhaps his past escapes are the reason he appears oddly calm as most of the country leans forward, awaiting word of bombshells from Mueller. Over the weekend, when outsiders perceived mounting anxiety in Trump’s Twitter barrage, people who spoke to Trump by phone told reporters that “he seemed to be in good spirits.” The volume of tweets, they surmised, was just a product of too much time on his hands in the White House.
His bravado and bluster can’t mask, his critics say, the true jeopardy he faces. The stakes now are too high, the arena too large, the political currents too strong, for Trump to expect the same results. But if he does fail, pinned to account by the weight of evidence uncovered by Mueller, one thing is certain: It will be the first time.
***
Those who believe in the power of Trump’s survival skills to protect him from even this unprecedented threat draw an analogy between the Republican Party—its members of Congress and especially the Senate—and the institutions that have enabled him in the past.
“The banks were heavily invested in Trump, and they couldn’t have him go down,” former Trump campaign staffer Sam Nunberg told me, “and the Republican Party can’t have him go down.”
“I think he believes that the presidency is too big to fail, too powerful to be taken down,” O’Donnell added. “And I think that this is kind of something that he learned in the ‘90s, where the banks basically said to him, ‘You’re too big to fail, we have to back you.’ And they did it, time and time again, in Atlantic City.”
To be determined in the coming weeks and months: how well those lessons will hold up.
“This is a man who has lived dangerously for decades by flirting with the boundaries of propriety, legality and civility,” Trump biographer Tim O’Brien told me. “And he is now faced, after years and years of getting away with it, with consequences that are far beyond anything he’s encountered before. … The things that I think have allowed him to survive in the past will be of practical, personal use here in terms of him maintaining a stiff upper lip, if he’s able to.” But the more material applicability of the Machiavellian takeaways from his ‘90s scrapes? “I think they’re going to be absolutely of no use if the legal consequences are realized at their full magnitude.”
Others who know Trump well aren’t so sure.
“No matter what they do, he survives. No matter what they try, he survives,” longtime New York Democratic strategist Hank Sheinkopf told me. “Can Trump survive this? He absolutely can.”
In the middle of 1990, after all, he was more than $3 billion in the red. He had for years spent too much to buy too much, all with mostly borrowed money. The yacht, the airline, Manhattan’s Plaza Hotel. “Trophies,” he called them. And his casinos, first two, now three with the lurching launch of the Trump Taj Mahal, cannibalized each other. Even record rakes of cash weren’t enough to simply service all of Trump’s debt. On the horizon was the first of his six corporate bankruptcies.
“Trump is on his way down—and probably out,” business journalist Allan Sloan wrote that June in Newsday.
People didn’t stop at mere predictions. They also poked fun.
“I envision Donald Trump a year from now doing the ads for stomach-flatteners or ginsu knives on late-night TV. Or as a Worldwide Wrestling Federation commentator,” Gail Collins, then a columnist for the New York Daily News, told David Von Drehle, then a reporter for the Miami Herald.
Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown likened Trump to late-in-life Elvis. “He probably will wind up in that sort of Graceland, you know, wearing a diaper,” she told Steve Kroft of CBS News.
Spy, the puckish satirical magazine and inveterateneedler of Trump, in its August 1990 issue took a tongue-in-cheek look at what they foresaw as a sad, middling future for a balding, paunchy Trump. Their crystal ball, though, was not all wrong. They anticipated a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing, and a rough version of reality television, too—and a public offering that would permit Trump to use money from shareholders to make money of his own (“Now YOU can own a piece of the Trump!”).
But beyond the smart set’s schadenfreude were Trump’s real-life results.
After weeks of negotiations, the cluster of 70-some-odd banks that had loaned him billions of dollars gave him an additional $65 million loan. It was the first in a yearslong sequence of bailouts and extensions and breathing-room reprieves. They had loaned him so much money, it was no longer only his problem—it was theirs. He all but dared them to take him down. “He has a good bit of leverage over the institutions,” a Harvard Business School finance professor told the Boston Globe at the time. “His adjusted net worth is minus several hundred million dollars, by my estimate, and he is alive only because his bankers are too red-faced to pull the plug on his life-support system,” the chairman of a money management firm wrote in the New York Post. “The most important thing,” an official in the office of one of his lenders said in The American Banker, “is to make Trump survive.”
The banks over time clawed back a passel of Trump’s possessions (the yacht, the planes, the Plaza), but they didn’t take his casinos—because they didn’t want them. “The last thing they want to do is manage casinos,” an analyst from Moody’s Investors explained to the Associated Press. And the last thing the gaming officials and city leaders in New Jersey wanted was to have them close. The relationship was the same as with the banks back in New York. Desperate to prop up the flagging gaming industry, looking continually to the casinos to inject into the struggling seaside town at least the appearance of vitality and prosperity, they needed Trump as much as Trump needed them. A prerequisite to owning a casino in Atlantic City, understandably, was financial stability, and regulators could have stripped Trump of his—repeatedly—but of course didn’t. Trump’s casinos amounted to roughly a third of the market. “The whole economic development of the town,” said O’Donnell, “it was dependent on this. And so they just—they caved.”
Trump had managed to turn an apparent weakness into a significant advantage. The banks put him on an allowance … of $450,000 a month. The Trump Tower triplex was safe.
“The man is a Sherman tank in a Brioni suit,” New York Post gossip columnist and Trump pal Cindy Adams told USA Today.
“Hey, look, I had a cold spell from 1990 to ’91,” he said in 1994 in New York. “I was beat up in business and in my personal life. … But you learn that you’re either the toughest, meanest piece of shit in the world, or you just crawl into a corner, put your finger in your mouth, and say, ‘I want to go home.’” And Trump didn’t want to go home.
He wasn’t entirely in the clear, though, until 1995 and ’96, when his need for money finally superseded his desire for absolute control and he took his casinos public. He sat in his office and looked at O’Brien, then a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. He was “back,” he said. People bought stock in Trump and lost money in droves. Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts proved to be a good investment for just one person—Trump. “It was to get other people to get him out of that debt,” a former member of the Trump Organization told me. In addition to his selling of his stake in his foundation-laying Grand Hyatt and tens of millions of dollars of wrangled, well-timed loans from family trusts, it’s what saved Trump—along with a partnership with Hong Kong investors that turned his long-held plot of land on the Upper West Side that always cost him money into one that began to actually make him money. Construction on what would have been Trump City and now would be called Trump Place (and then wouldn’t) started in 1997. And two years later, in front of some of the buildings, Trump let the magician David Blaine get “buried alive” for a week in a plexiglass coffin. It was, said Blaine, a stunt famed illusionist Harry Houdini always wanted to do. For Trump, the publicity ploy made for an apt ode to the art of escape.
Trumpologists and culture critics frequently cite showman P.T. Barnum as Trump’s preeminent antecedent, but another, less noted inspiration was Houdini, the author of a forthcoming Houdini biography told me. “He always found—especially when it just seemed like it was over for him—he found some new chapter, and some new way to sort of get his success going again,” Joe Posnanski said. “He created this handcuff act, and the handcuff act becomes huge, and then that sort of runs its course. And then he comes up with the milk can, and the milk can sort of runs its course. And he comes up with the Chinese water torture cell, and that runs his course. And he starts hanging upside down and escaping from straitjackets.”
It makes Posnanski think of Trump.
“With Trump, you just think, ‘OK, this is it. This is totally it, you know?’” he said. “He’s bankrupt, people are laughing at him, he’s this, he’s that—but it’s never over for him.”
“Trump,” said Sheinkopf, the Democratic strategist, “is incessantly pulling Houdini acts.”
Recall all the “gaffes” that were to have torpedoed his indelicate, unorthodox 2016 presidential bid—peaking, of course, with the “Access Hollywood” tape revealed in early October in which he swaggered about sexual assault.
***
Those who predict Trump will ultimately fall don’t disagree that he has benefited from well-placed safety nets before. This time is different, they insist, because his high-wire act is being performed at unprecedented heights.
“Significantly higher,” O’Brien said. “He’s been on a financial tightrope, and a familial tightrope, but he’s never been on a legal tightrope like this one. Not even close. This is fundamentally new because of the legal consequences, and those legal consequences don’t end with the filing of the Mueller report. He still has issues that are still very serious in the Southern District of New York; in some ways, they may be more serious than the Mueller investigation in terms of potential consequences and how far they dig into his world.”
Bandy Lee is worried. The forensic psychiatrist from Yale has studied thousands of people with the mental disorders she perceives Trump has. Their behavior, untreated, had predictable and unpleasant results. She foresees a similar unraveling for Trump, albeit with a wild card she has never encountered in any of her patients: the awesome power of the commander in chief.
“Under stress, we can see the limits of one’s ability to cope, and we can see that the president has reached his limits fairly rapidly, in terms of not being able to sit with the advancing special counsel’s investigation. You can see there is a heightening of activity and creation of crises, distractions, if you will, in order to distract both themselves as well as the public away from the bad news he is continuing to receive,” Lee said.
“He has very poor coping mechanisms when he is criticized or when he feels humiliated,” she continued, “and at these points, he generally goes into attack mode, and he threatens others or tries to get revenge.”
Our conversation took place before Trump resurrected his feud with the late John McCain, but I couldn’t help thinking of Lee’s warning as I listened to the president on Wednesday belabor his grudge before a crowd of workers who were expecting some good news on the economy, not a hit job on a war hero. Maybe this, just like the days of name-calling with George Conway, really are the signs of a mind in turmoil.
And yet—and this is just the reality of the record—Trump shrewdly, bullheadedly, even blithely pushed past crises in the ‘90s that would have felled almost anybody else. And then, perhaps convinced of his own invincibility, he blew through a litany of accepted social and political checkpoints on his way to the Oval Office and his high-backed chair behind the Resolute desk.
“Pressure,” Trump said in an extended interview in Playboy in 1990, “doesn’t upset my sleep. … I like throwing balls into the air—and I dream like a baby.”
That same year, on June 14, he turned 44. The next day, he missed about $45 million in debt payments for his casino called Trump Castle. “He is absolutely on knife’s edge,” James Grant, the editor of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, told Newsday. The day after that, Trump had a party. More than a thousand employees in Atlantic City showed up at the bash on the boardwalk, according to news reports. “We love you, Donald!” they cried. He was presented with a chocolate cupcake, a 12-page birthday card and an 8-foot-by-10-foot portrait of himself.
“Nobody wants to write the positives,” Trump told the cheering crowd. “Over the years, I’ve surprised a lot of people. The largest surprise is yet to come.”
Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups are obviously incredible, the envy of their chocolaty peers. But as Easter approaches and we begin to consider our springtime candy lineups (I assume everyone does this), it might be time to admit that specialty Reese’s — we’ll use the seasonal Reese’s Egg as an example — are better.
There are several key differences between Reese’s Cups and Reese’s Eggs, including size, shape, and the amount of peanut butter within the chocolate shell. Most notably, the cup has ridges and the egg does not.
But Reese’s, it turns out, do not need ridges to be the best versions of themselves. In fact, they just need to be shapeless, chunky globs.
People like Reese’s because they combine two good things that are also good together: peanut butter and chocolate. If a consumer wanted chocolate only, they’d eat a Hershey’s bar or one of those weird truffles in the corner of a Whitman’s sampler. It makes no sense that a Reese’s liker would not want each bite of their Reese’s to taste like a Reese’s: that is, like peanut butter and chocolate at the same time.
The trouble with the ridges: The thick edge they create disrupts the cup’s delicate peanut butter-chocolate balance. A bite including ridges will not contain as much peanut butter as a bite containing exclusively innards — and the latter is superior.
The best possible Reese’s bite is achieved by nibbling away the ridges around the entire perimeter: a method dubbed “stripping the gear” by the official blog for Hershey’s Chocolate World in Las Vegas (an authority on the matter). But there’s really only one of these bites inside the typical Reese’s; the rest are marred by the ridges. On a Reese’s egg, however, the entire surface is smooth and ridge-free. Every bite is the good bite, the perfect marriage of PB and C.
The egg they used in their test also contained 9 grams more peanut butter than the cup. (In fact, the egg contains the second-most peanut butter of any standard size Reese’s iteration, beaten only by the Reese’s Heart.) And what is the candy called? A Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup (or Egg, or Heart, or whatever). It’s right on the label!
Any one of us could walk into CVS any old day and buy a 2-pack of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, house them, feel great, feel slightly bad, then feel fine again. But we can only do this with Reese’s Peanut Butter Eggs — or Hearts, or Christmas Trees, or Pumpkins — during some parts of the year.
This, of course, is incredibly alluring. We’re all vulnerable to the psychology of exclusivity, even if it’s just a limited edition holiday candy. When I see a Reese’s Cup in the checkout line, I feel nothing. But when I see a Reese’s Egg, I simply must have it. Who knows if one will be there the next time I find myself in this badly lit Duane Reade? (It probably will be.) And who knows when the next round of soft seasonal Reese’s will appear? (There will be pumpkins in the fall.)
Finally, the eggs are better because they come from hens.
Reese’s eggs taste 37x better than normal Reese’s bc they come from exotic peanut butter hens
If you disagree and think Reese’s Cups are the best, that is your opinion. However, you are legally obligated to send all your Reese’s Eggs to me by mail by Easter Sunday (April 21). Thank you.
I’m a fan of true crime the same way some people are fans of Halo Top.
After a long day, I’ll crack open nearly any true crime account and eat up the terrifying, true-to-life details with a metaphoric spoon. Whether it’s a movie, series, or podcast, I live for moment-to-moment reconstructed investigations, retrospective interviews with emotional eyewitnesses, and the big reveal of that one mistake that gets the criminal caught. Put plainly: True crime is very much my thing.
So, you can imagine my surprise when only an hour and a half into The Act, I had an overwhelming urge to turn off the TV — and then possibly throw up. This is true crime in its most brutal and most transparently self-serving form.
The Act isn’t bad television. A stunningly accurate eight-part dramatization of the murder of Dee Dee Blanchard, the series has everything a true crime aficionado could want. Half scam story and half murder trial, the lives of Blanchard and her daughter Gypsy Rose are particularly extraordinary, even in the sensational world of true crime.
If you’re unfamiliar with their history, here’s an abbreviated version.
Gypsy Rose Blanchard, widely believed to be a victim of Munchausen syndrome by proxy, was abused by her mother Dee Dee for nearly two decades. Led to believe she was afflicted with an array of illnesses that ranged in severity from allergies to cancer, Gypsy underwent numerous, invasive medical procedures at her mother’s insistence — including the surgical installation of a feeding tube. Nearly all of these procedures were later revealed to be unnecessary.
‘The Act’ walks the audience through each horrifying fact of the ordeal with painful specificity.
As Gypsy grew up and discovered that she was not in fact ill, she aggressively pushed back against her mother’s abuse. Ultimately, Gypsy snapped. In 2015, Gypsy persuaded her boyfriend Nicholas Godejohn, whom she had met online and who had a substantial history of mental illness, to stab Dee Dee to death.
At present, Gypsy is halfway through serving a 10-year sentence for her role in the murder. Godejohn was sentenced to life without parole just last month.
The Act‘s dramatization of these events, led by the incomparable Patricia Arquette and the increasingly masterful Joey King, walks the audience through each horrifying fact of the ordeal with painful specificity.
In Episode 2, viewers watch helplessly as Gypsy awakes from anesthesia to discover every one of her teeth has been extracted by a dentist, who was given her mother’s permission but not her own to conduct the procedure. Staring in the mirror, Gypsy cries in agony while examining her raw gums. The makeup done on King here looks disturbingly accurate in depicting the body’s physical reaction to the described trauma.
A few episodes later, the audience is asked to stare at the mutilated back of Dee Dee as investigators swarm the crime scene. Gypsy has taken back control, and now her mother is facedown in a pool of blood, clutching the pink sheets of the bed they once shared. It’s a gruesome image, difficult to shake.
Image: Brownie Harris / Hulu
If you fact-check the series as you watch, you’ll soon realize that The Act has almost everything correct, nauseating details included. Since her arrest, Gypsy has been vocal about the details of her life and reporters, lawyers, and investigators have gone to considerable lengths to confirm her version of events for the public record.
The series seems to exist not because it is important, but because it is tantalizingly weird.
But with an eight-hour runtime, The Act‘s efforts to maintain accuracy quickly morph from due diligence to exploitation. As the torture mounts, the point of the series seems to be lost. Rather than offering insight into the characters’ respective mental illnesses or circumstances, The Act seems to stew and almost revel in its depictions of abuse and murder.
While genre competitors like American Crime Story‘s The Assassination of Gianni Versace and The People v. O. J. Simpson offer up broader societal contexts to justify their graphic recreations, The Act makes few observations about why these crimes happened and even fewer as to why recalling them matters. The series seems to exist not because it believes the Blanchards’ story is important, but because it is tantalizingly weird, an easy framework for creating scenes that are sure to receive big reactions from audiences.
Moreover, there’s little justice to be had in the Blanchards’ story. This isn’t a tale of good overcoming evil, of the good guys getting the bad guy in the end. What happened between Dee Dee and Gypsy Blanchard is sheer horror and its results are unquestionably tragic. An abused woman is now incarcerated, her mother is dead, her mentally-ill boyfriend will die in prison — and few lessons can be learned from their shared, real-life nightmare.
What could have served as the basis for a productive discussion on mental health and society’s role in protecting children instead manifests as a kind of modern-day carnival side show, prioritizing the audience’s voyeuristic tendencies above all else.
Although meticulously factual and spectacularly acted, The Act is the kind of entertainment that ultimately makes the enjoyment I get from the true crime genre feel seriously questionable, if not entirely indefensible.
For a genre already on slippery moral ground, this true crime account doesn’t seem to serve a purpose outside of letting its audience gawk at its source material. And for this true crime fan, that’s not enough to justify coming back for more.
“No swimwear is required for your evening with us,” reads this restaurant’s dress code.
Located at the southernmost point of Norway’s craggy coast, Europe’s first underwater restaurant has opened, fittingly dubbed Under. And it’s not just a restaurant.
Designed by Norwegian firm Snøhetta, it’s a 34-metre rectangular prism slightly submerged five metres under the sea. Seriously, it looks like a modernist shipwreck.
Yep, that’s a restaurant.
Image: Snøhetta
Right at the end of the monolith, sitting on the seabed, there’s an 11-metre-wide, floor-to-ceiling window which allows its 35-40 diners to check out any underwater action.
According to the design team, the municipality of Lindesnes where the restaurant is located, is known for its intense, rapidly changing weather conditions — just imagine dining here during a storm.
Under’s dining room.
Image: Snøhetta
Snøhetta founder and architect Kjetil Trædal Thorsen says the structure “challenges what determines a person’s physical placement in their environment.”
“In this building, you may find yourself under water, over the seabed, between land and sea. This will offer you new perspectives and ways of seeing the world, both beyond and beneath the waterline.”
Under just washed up.
Image: Snøhetta
The menu from Danish chef Nicolai Ellitsgaard from restaurant Måltid will use locally-caught, sustainable wildlife and ingredients from the surrounding area like sea arrow grass, sea rocket and salty sea kale. And it’s not cheap, with the 18-course “immersion menu” sitting at NOK 2,250 ($266) per person, wine or juice pairing extra.
“Just on the other side of our iconic window — the ocean is bursting with fresh delicacies from the sea, so the journey from the kitchen to the plate is minimal,” said Ellitsgaard.
But the restaurant isn’t the only plan for the space — it’ll also function as a marine research centre, welcoming researchers and marine biologists to utilise external cameras and measurement tools to study any species living around the restaurant.
It’s not a fully fledged marine research powerhouse, but local analysis and species monitoring could be the key to the restaurant’s sustainability.
The little cove where Under sits is also home to sea life.
Image: Snøhetta
According to the design team, the concrete structure will eventually adapt to its underwater environment as an artificial reef for limpets and kelp — the kitchen will even be able to harvest ingredients from the building itself.
It’s this dual function that’s possibly the best part of the project, designed to open up a sustainability-driven dialogue between the kitchen and marine research teams — when is the best time to responsibly harvest from the sea, and which species?
Plus, the teams will apparently collaborate to help attract fish to the dining room window, so you don’t have to stare at an empty seabed during your dinner, and the researchers have species to study other than kelp.
Want to book a table? The nearest airport is Kjevik, Kristiansand, which is 85 kilometres (52 miles) from the restaurant. But its waiting list goes all the way to September, so good luck.
While the interior scenes of the show were filmed on sets in Los Angeles, the exterior shots of Monica’s apartment show a location in New York’s Greenwich Village, on the corner of Grove and Bedford Streets.
And that’s where Cox was jokingly “going home,” posting a video of her visit outside Monica’s iconic apartment with the perfect caption.
“The One Where My Rent Went Up $12,000.”
Aw. But also, pretty true.
So, how much was Monica’s rent? CNBC ran the numbers, estimating that the two-bedroom apartment would sit between 1,125 and 1,500 square feet — the news outlet put the average two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan at 975 square feet, which makes Monica’s apartment quite spacious — it had a balcony, a huge kitchen, and that glorious sunkenliving room too, remember?
So much SPACE.
Image: NBC via Getty Images
The show explained in Season 4, episode 4 “The One With The Ballroom Dancing,” that Monica enjoyed a cheeky rent-controlled apartment thanks to her grandmother, Althea, who was subletting it illegally for a presumably low amount — explains why Monica can afford that plush apartment with her hard-working chef paycheck.
According to the news outlet, the median rental price for a two-bedroom apartment like Monica’s in the West Village is currently $4,500 per month.
It’s not the only Friends related throwback Cox has posted to Instagram of late, with this perfect tribute to the show’s iconic “PIVOT!” scene.
If Cox posts an Instagram video of herself dancing with a turkey on her head next, we’ll collapse.
Fletcher Magee is a relatively unknown star. But after setting the Division I career record for three-pointers with 509 and producing a second-round showdown with Kentucky, Wofford’s senior marksman has a chance to follow in a legend’s footsteps.
Eleven years removed from Stephen Curry‘s memorable run with Davidson, Magee could propel a small school to the brink of college basketball excellence.
And then, millions of people would know his name.
Magee set the NCAA record Thursday during the second half of seventh-seeded Wofford’s 84-68 win over No. 10 Seton Hall. He knocked down a triple―his third of the contest and No. 505 overall―to pass Oakland’s Travis Bader, setting off a raucous cheer in his home state of Florida.
NCAA March Madness @marchmadness
NEW RECORD
Fletcher Magee breaks the all-time record for career 3’s with 505 & counting!
Magee finished with seven threes and scored a team-best 24 points to dispatch Seton Hall.
With a shade over seven minutes remaining, Wofford trailed 60-59. Magee’s triple sparked a decisive 25-8 run in which he connected on a trio of three-pointers. That ability to take over a game is simply one of several striking similarities between Curry and Magee.
Both players led their program to a Southern Conference championship. Both players stood atop the nation in three-pointers for a single season―while hitting at least 40 percent of them. Both players will have faced a No. 2 seed in the second round.
Longtime Wofford coach Mike Young has acknowledged the similarities.
“I’ve been in this league a long time, and I don’t think I’m going out on a limb to say Steph Curry’s the best player the SoCon’s ever seen,” he told Chris Dortch of The Athletic in 2017. “I don’t like to compare players, but in terms of Fletch’s ability to score and do it as efficiently as he’s doing it, from all points on the floor, let’s just say it reminds me of someone.”
That praise is merited. It will also be quickly forgotten if Magee and the Terriers don’t advance.
Up next for Wofford is Kentucky, which put together arguably the most impressive showing of March Madness’ Day 1. John Calipari‘s squad cruised to a 79-44 win over 15th-seeded Abilene Christian, which knocked down just five threes.
Unconventional though he is, Magee is fully capable of wrecking UK on the perimeter.
Jonathan Wasserman @NBADraftWass
Fletcher Magee, the ultimate no no no no no no yes shooter
Heading into the Big Dance, the Wildcats ranked 223rd in three-point defense. This season, seven opposing players have drilled at least five threes, and Kentucky is 3-4 in those games. Magee has buried five-plus trifectas 20 times as a senior.
Incidentally, Curry connected on five-plus threes during each of Davidson’s three March Madness victories in 2008.
Sure, Magee isn’t doing this alone. Wofford boasts the country’s second-best clip from long distance, largely thanks to Magee and Nathan Hoover, a 45.7 percent shooter from long range who hit four threes Thursday. Curry didn’t have a perimeter sidekick of that caliber.
Rob Carlin @RobCarlinNBCS
Fletcher Magee is incredible.. The kid runs one way then turns & fires in an instant.. Nathan Hoover is almost the same.. Wofford is fun.. #MarchMadness
But the Calipari-coached team knows its biggest threat.
Wofford will go as Magee does.
Kentucky―which may again be without star forward PJ Washington because of a sprained foot, per Alyssa Lang of the SEC Network―will do everything it can to slow Magee. After all, he’s previously taken down a giant; Magee netted 27 points in the upset of North Carolina in Chapel Hill last season.
Yes, the ‘Cats will likely be favored, and nobody would be surprised if the powerhouse program topples the SoCon champions. That’s what second-seeded teams are supposed to do in March.
However, they can only prepare so much for the greatest three-point weapon college basketball has seen in a decade. He isn’t just a volume shooter; he’s exceptionally efficient while hoisting more than 10 threes per game. He’s the driving force of a potential Cinderella story.
Wofford is fully capable of beating Kentucky. And if that happens, he’ll no longer be the cult hero compared to Steph Curry.
You know what, Julia Louis-Dreyfus could sell us anything.
But we’re not so sure how she is effective is at selling a lie, however, as exemplified when she stepped into a round of “Box of Lies” with The Tonight Show’s Jimmy Fallon on Thursday.
The Veep star is good fun, but boy, not so convincing when it comes to trying to dupe Fallon into thinking that she’s got a horse with a huge collection of sandals and high heels in front of her.
HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) — If this is what a slump looks like for Carsen Edwards, Purdue coach Matt Painter can live with it.
Edwards scored 26 points and third-seeded Purdue coasted to a 61-48 victory against Old Dominion on Thursday night in the first round of the NCAA Tournament.
The Boilermakers (24-9) will play reigning NCAA champion Villanova, the sixth-seed in the South Region, on Saturday.
Edwards, the Big Ten’s leading scorer, has been in a shooting slump recently and dealing with a sore back that he insisted was fine. The junior guard had shot 32 percent from the floor in his previous 11 games, and was 7 for 33 from 3-point range in the three games before the tournament.
“We don’t talk about a slump or things like that,” Edwards said. “I’m just focused on helping my team win.”
Against ODU, Edwards was again a high-volume scorer, going 7 for 23 from the floor and 4 for 12 from 3. But he also had seven rebounds and four assists.
“He hasn’t shot a high percentage this year,” Painter said. “Yet we won the Big Ten and we got a 3 seed. Ultimately, that’s what your goal is. He’s one of those guys you feel he can get out of it.”
Ahmad Caver scored 19 points and B.J. Stith had 14 for Old Dominion (26-9). The Monarchs shot 27 percent from the field.
The Boilermakers scored the last 11 points of the first half as ODU went stone cold. The Monarchs missed their last 11 shots of the half and went scoreless for 6:17 as Purdue took a control and led 32-19 at the break.
It got no better for the Monarchs in the second half. Matt Haarms, Purdue’s 7-foot-3 center, made a 3 from the corner to make it a 17-point game with 16:50 left. It was Haarms’ seventh triple of the season. A minute later, Edwards pulled up for a long 3 that made it 43-23 and prompted ODU coach Jeff Jones to call a timeout.
The lead was 17 with 7:13 left when ODU went on a 12-4 run.
“We weren’t going to fold on this stage,” Stith said.
Xavier Green’s running hook over Haarms cut the lead to 55-46 with 4:23 remaining. But it never got any closer.
BIG PICTURE
Old Dominion: The Monarchs reached the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2011 with Jones battling prostate cancer this season. The season ended with a thud, but it will still go down as one of the most memorable in the history of the program.
“They stuck together through difficult times, when normal teams might not,” Jones said. “As much as losing hurts I’m more appreciative of what these guys have done and how they’ve gone about it.”
Purdue: The Boilermakers played most of the game without guard Nojel Eastern, one of the best defensive players in the Big Ten. The sophomore rolled his ankle in pregame warmups and did not start. Eric Hunter Jr. started for the first time this season. Eastern tried to give it a go in the second half and played 10 minutes, but with Purdue mostly in control there was no need to push it.
Painter said he played Eastern mostly to get him ready Villanova.
Hunter, who came in averaging 12 minutes, played 23 minutes and had 2 points, four rebounds and three assists.
“Even though he didn’t score a lot of points, he didn’t turn the ball over. He had the best plus-minus on our team,” Painter said.
UP NEXT
Old Dominion: The Monarchs have to replace their top two scorers (Stith and Caver) and 7-foot-1 center Elbert Robinson.
Purdue: The Boilermakers are 0-3 against Villanova with their last meeting in November 2016.
The Baylor Bears are one win away from their fifth Sweet 16 in 10 years.
The West Region’s No. 9 seed in the 2019 men’s basketball tournament defeated the No. 8 Syracuse Orange 78-69 in Thursday’s first-round game in Salt Lake City. Syracuse was playing without guard Frank Howard, who was suspended for a rules violation.
Makai Mason led the way for the Bears with 22points, fourassists and threesteals behind fourmade three-pointers, while Jared Butler (14points, fourassists, five rebounds, twosteals and fourmade three-pointers) and Mario Kegler (13points and fourrebounds) provided enough support to clinch the win.
Baylor drilled 16threes in an impressive shooting display against Syracuse’s zone.
Elijah Hughes (25points on 6-of-11 shootingfrom deep) and Tyus Battle (16points) spearheaded the attack for the Orange in the loss.
Baylor Must Continue Red-Hot Shooting to Upset Zags
This game wasn’t supposed to play out this way.
According toKenPom‘s pace-adjusted rankings, Syracuse plays with the 253rd-fastest tempo, and Baylor checks in at No. 291. The Orange use their 2-3 zones to give opponents fits—suffocating drives in the lane and rotating quickly on the perimeter to contest outside shots.
The ACC and Big 12 representatives missed the slow-rock-fight memo and instead combined for 19 three-pointers in the first half in a back-and-forth shootout filled with momentum swings and long-range barrages.
Jesse Newell @jessenewell
Baylor and Syracuse’s 26 combined 3s a new NCAA Tournament record for this decade. Passes 25 from South Dakota State-Ohio State (2018) and … KU-Purdue (2017).
NCAA March Madness @marchmadness
Elijah Hughes & Makai Mason are lighting it up in SLC
Mason—who was grimacing from his foot injury—did much of the heavy lifting in the early going for Baylor. He drilled threes and then used his dribble penetration when the zone pressed up on him to set up his teammates. The Bears also flashed players to the high post at times and then kicked to the weak side to beat the 2-3 look.
Hughes lit it up from deep for the Orange as well, adding to the entertainment factor as the sides traded blows.
The Bears must continue shooting the lights out if they are to stun the offensive juggernaut that is Gonzaga.
The Bulldogs are No. 1 in KenPom’s offensive efficiency rankings and poured in 87 points in a victory over Fairleigh Dickinson on Thursday. They also led the nation in points per game during the regular season and can go to West Coast Conference Player of the Year Rui Hachimura, Brandon Clarke, Zach Norvell, Josh Perkins or Killian Tillie.
Dana O’Neil @DanaONeilWriter
Makai Mason took a 2-point shot on the last possession for Baylor. He will be slapped on the wrist for such nonsense. 3s only here.
Matching Gonzaga in a track meet is a daunting task for any team, let alone one that typically plays at a slow pace.
The only way Baylor can upset the West Region’s top seed is by slowing the pace, keeping it in the half court and shooting like it did in Thursday’s thriller. That type of shooting will prevent the Zags from getting out in transition with Norvell and Perkins handling the ball and the other playmakers filling the lane, and it will be easier for the Bears to swarm Hachimura in half-court sets.
Gonzaga’s defense isn’t invincible, either, and it struggled at times outside the weaker West Coast Conference. It allowed 103 points to North Carolina, 92 points to Creighton and 87 to Duke and figures to give up open looks in Saturday’s game.
Baylor knocked down those open looks against Syracuse and can shake up the entire bracket if it does so again in the next one.
What’s Next?
Baylor will face the top-seeded Bulldogs in the round of 32 on Saturday.
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