There’s a great article in the NY Times about the current renaissance of coffee taking place in the city that never sleeps. (I guess now it really doesn’t ever sleep.) It includes a comprehensive list of places with good beans and fancy machines, as well as a few choice cuts that are good information for anyone curious about telling the best from the rest.

The elaborate designs in the cappuccino’s foam at Third Rail Coffee in the West Village aren’t just to show off, but are a sign that the barista properly steamed the milk so that it holds its form …

These shops use only beans that have been roasted in the past 10 days (though some say two weeks is fine), so the flavors are still lively …

The beans are ground to order for each cup …

Today, most of the chains use about seven grams of ground coffee for a two-ounce shot. Espresso pods are filled with around five grams.

Baristas at the best places in town, like Bluebird Coffee Shop or Joe, tamp down between 19 and 21 grams. Often the espresso is even more concentrated because it’s pulled “short,” with less water, so that the final volume is a thick 1.5 to 2 ounces.

As I said, the list of shops is very comprehensive, here I’ll cut-and-paste a few that I know and love: ABRAÇO, CAFÉ PEDLAR, LA COLOMBE TORREFACTION, GIMME! COFFEE, JOE (AKA Joe: The Art of Coffee), NINTH STREET ESPRESSO, STUMPTOWN COFFEE ROASTERS.

Incidentally, I had a pour over cup of Ndaroini, a Counter Culture bean from Nyeri, Kenya today. (At Luck Bros, of course.) Definitely rated in my top 3 cups ever.

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Honestly, it’s kind of unbelievable, well not unbelievable … shocking, well not shocking, really … disappointing – it’s really disappointing that Krugman needs to publish a brief history of our financial times just to make sure everyone really knows what happens. We were screwed, people, by the very people who should have known better.

And yet …

Talk to conservatives about the financial crisis and you enter an alternative, bizarro universe in which government bureaucrats, not greedy bankers, caused the meltdown. It’s a universe in which government-sponsored lending agencies triggered the crisis, even though private lenders actually made the vast majority of subprime loans. It’s a universe in which regulators coerced bankers into making loans to unqualified borrowers, even though only one of the top 25 subprime lenders was subject to the regulations in question.

from Paul Krugamn – Disaster and Denial – NYTimes.com.
Aw, jeez. C’mon, my heart is breaking all over again.

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Adrian Tomine drew this cover for the January 13th edition of the NY Times Sunday Magazine.

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Apparently, this thing’s been around for awhile, but I just now found it, so forgive me.

The New York Times has a cool interactive page titled Graphc Novels: A Visual Language. It features slideshows and audio comments from 5 of the the coolest guys in comics, Seth, Art Spiegelman, Chris Ware, Joe Sacco, and Chester Brown.

It’s Seth who calls it a “Visual Language”, saying that comics are a combination of poetry and graphic design. Ware has a great moment when he calls comics “a third language” something like “words that can be read”.

While you’re on the site, be sure to check out The Funny Pages, published in the NY Times Sunday Magazine, for work from Seth, Daniel Clowes, and Megan Kelso. (They also published one by Jaime Hernandez, but it doesn’t seem to be on the site. Huh.

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