PicoBlog

Emerging from my topsy-turvy life to bring you a belated piece regarding New York Public Radio’s recent layoffs. Despite my tardiness, the issues within this newsletter are still very much at play. If you find value in this piece, and happen to know NYPR CEO LaFontaine Oliver, please forward it to him. While you’re at it, try asking if he’d be open to having an off the record chat with me?

I’ve been backlogged on AI articles since so many new products come out every day, so it is probably time for me to jump from LLM stuff back to Generative Art stuff! Last week, ControlNet on Stable Diffusion got updated to 1.1, which boosts the performance and quality of images, while also having models for more specific use cases. With ControlNet, you can generate a prompt of text on top of an image and have the same traits, or tweak a pose on a 3D model to any position and create a description to show how you want the final image to look.

Guitarist Johnny Smith was the humblest star I’ve ever met. Probably because he left behind stardom at 36 for the relative obscurity of another life. From 1946-1958, Johnny Smith was a staff guitarist for NBC by day and a New York jazz musician by night. He survived playing under authoritarian conductor Arturo Toscanini, sight-read Schoenberg with Dimitri Mitropoulos, was underpaid by Benny Goodman, and worked with Mary Lou Williams and Stan Getz.

Abi, photographed in 2022 by Ruth Crafer 1× 0:00 -49:50 Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade.Throughout her thirty year career, Abi Morgan has written some of our most memorable drama: Shame, Sex Traffic, Iron Lady, The Hour, for which she won an Emmy, Suffragette, and most recently the BBC one hit, The Split. In her work, female characters took centre stage long before that became the fashionable thing to do.

Caroline Corrigan is a freelance graphic designer and illustrator living in Albany, New York with her husband and 3 children: Graham, 5, and Maeve + Seren, who are 2.5 year old twins. I'm a freelance graphic designer and illustrator. I work from home in Albany, New York. In my very minimal down time, I like to draw, attempt decorating and home improvement projects, cook things my kids aren't excited about, read, watch movies with my husband from a long list I've been keeping on my phone for years, go for a long meandering city walk or a jog, or catch up with friends over a nice bottle of wine and a table filled with snacks.

For those of us timid or time-crunched bakers who would rather receive than make intricately arranged cookie boxes, there are still treats that overflow with joy that we can make and bring to every party and give to every person we pass by. My go-to sweets that are more assembly than baking include: Let’s also not forget that SJ’s fudgy almond cookie cake would ship and travel marvelously. If savory is more your jam, here’s a list [gift link] of 50 semi-homemade snacks and appetizers.

Goooood morning everyone! I am here with baked things. I’ve also been baking a ton lately (think: pumpkin pies, nutty cranberry scones because breakfast on Thanksgiving is a non-negotiable, and of course, cookies) because this time of year, I just find it easiest. Oven on, mixing bowl out, good music, great coffee = baked. So in the vein of me being VERY INTO sweet recipes right now and a little ho-hum on savory, I have made you my dream cookie.

I may have mentioned that it’s the holiday period in Israel, which means two-week vacations abroad for some, and a steady cycle of cooking for others, like yours truly. While I’d love to plop myself down in a foreign destination or two during this early fall holiday period at some point in my life, I’m a lover of the Jewish holiday period, the slightly slower pace, the steady gatherings of family and friends, time spent in synagogue, and the opportunity to dig into cooking and new recipes.

Molly Baz has reached celeb status. A Bon Appetit alum, she’s a cook, author, and recipe developer with her own wine label, kitchenware line with Crate & Barrel, and merch. Her MO is: bold colors, lots of abbreviations, and signature recipes like her Cae Sal (a.k.a. Caesar Salad—case in point). Her weenie dog Tuna appears in a lot of her content. I like Molly but I’m not a stan. I’m impressed by her post-BA trajectory and ability to build such a strong personal brand, but I’ve never been that enticed by her recipes (in part because she loves things I don’t, which often appear in her cooking: mortadella, anchovies, runny yolks.