mycoremediation

Yesterday H prepared a fantastic mushroom and pasta dish with what’s called Kräterseitlingen (Pleurotus eryngii, le trumpet royale—elevate your minds!) as the main ingredient—the one in the background, not the psychotropic fly agaric in the foreground—and it turned out to be uniquely flavourful and relatively simple to make.

To serve four, one needs:
250 grams (9 ounces) of band noodles (fresh or dry)
250 grams (9 ounces, three large mushrooms) of King Trumpet mushrooms or substitute button mushrooms or chanterelles (Pfifferlinge)
2 teaspoons of butter
1 container of Crème Chantilly (unsweetened whipped cream, Schlagsahne) for texture
1 tablespoon of vegetable broth
A sprig of parsley
A clove of garlic
A large leek (Lauch) or onion
Salt and pepper to season

Begin preparing the pasta according to the instructions, boiling it in slightly salted water. Meanwhile dice the leek, garlic and mushroom, finely chopping the parsley. Braise the garlic and leek slices in a frying pan in the butter until the leeks turn glassy. Introduce the mushrooms and turn until lightly brown. Mix in the crème and broth and top with parsley over the pasta.

visual vernacular

Thanks to Present /&/ Correct, we can now correctly name an art movement known as Suprematism (Супремати́зм) through the careful temporary arrangement and proper disposal of trash that washes ashore by Hungarian photographer Balázs Csizik as a homage to the style.
Founded by painter Kazimir Severinovich Malevich in 1913, his work garnered international attention and a following after being exhibited in a 1915 show in Saint Petersburg (Petrograd), provocatively called the Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings 0,10 (like saying version zero point one, having erased the past and inching forward fresh).
Departing from Cubism and Russian Constructivism, Malevich’s art is distinctively anti-material and employed sparse compositions of simple geometric shapes and basic colours and are more akin representationally to a sort of visual grammar rather than a depiction of things. Though not allowed to be displayed per Stalinist cultural policy, Malevich’s work was quite resonant and influential, inspiring among others architect Dame Zaha Mohammad Hadid to create purely abstract buildings.

das münchner abkommen

On this day—with negotiations continuing through the night and on to the next morning—in 1938 Italian il Duce Benito Mussolini, France’s Prime Minister Édouard Daladier and British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain met with Adolf Hitler at a conference in Munich to lend a façade of legitimacy to Nazi Germany’s long-standing goal of annexing the newly-coined territory of the Sudetenland, lands with an ethnic Germany majority along the borders with the also freshly minted Czechoslovakia.
Despite the conspicuous absence of any representation of the Soviet Union or the Czech government or outlandish claims including Czechoslovakia being accused of plotting to exterminate the Sudeten Germans and being characterised as a vassal state of France created for the express purpose of being a base of operations for the French armed forces to overrun and finally vanquish Germany, afterward Chamberlain praised the summit as heralding “peace in our time,” though many others (including president Edvard Beneš and the Czech people) saw it as a dangerous and precedential tactic of appeasement. German diaspora who had mostly set up trading operations in Hapsburg lands suddenly found themselves in foreign lands after World War I and the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, bereft of much of the freedoms and privilege (reportedly) accorded to Prussian subjects prior. Because of the nature of their import/export business, these Germans living abroad were more affected than the native populations by the economic downturn of the Great Depression and their demands for autonomy—with the backing of the German government—became more and more shrill.

social confirmation

An important and timely instalment of Hidden Brain explores how a movement, a reckoning erupts as a cultural moment and the insufferable becomes no longer tolerated through overcoming or redirecting the discouraging mechanism of social or behavioural confirmation bias that reinforces grudgingly accepted norms by making us blind to the brittleness of custom and to the fortitude of our own convictions and has an interesting post-script, an unsung hero in the figure of Tarana Burke. After interviewing young survivors of sexual violence, Burke found herself without words but gathered resources over the next decade, founded an outreach network and gave her movement a name: Me Too. Another decade later, solidarity reached critical mass and the slogan championed behind a hash tag became a unifying message that the future is not going to look like the past.