While apples and broccoli have become basic—constantly on the grocery store shelves year-round—rhubarb is a vegetable unicorn. It only appears for a very short and magical window. I’ll spot it in the market for maybe a month and before I know it, I’ve missed it. That’s why I buy bundles of it when I do happen to catch it, and I get right to work. Not cooking it down in a pot with a cup of sugar, no: My favorite way to prepare rhubarb for pies and cakes is roasting.  

Roasting keeps things from getting soggy

My first time working with rhubarb was right out of culinary school, making dozens of miniature strawberry and rhubarb tarts. It was actually my first time eating it too. We would roast the rhubarb together with strawberries to make these tarts; the filling tasted like nature’s sour candy. I was hooked on the stuff and I assumed all rhubarb desserts would have the same bright pink shade and puckering bite as those tarts. This was not the case.

I’ve eaten some soggy rhubarb cakes and mushy pies since then, and I’ve wondered why rhubarb could be giving everyone so much trouble. Upon talking to a friend recently, I realized that a lot of folks are cooking their precious spring crop in pots, essentially making compotes or jams, and then adding them to cakes and pies. While still delicious, cooking rhubarb this way leads to color loss (muted pinks and browns) and, because it doesn’t have much natural pectin, it turns a bit gloopy. But you can avoid that fate with a simple, and relatively quick, roast in the oven. 

How to roast rhubarb

There are a few different ways to do it depending on your preference. 

Open roasting

My favorite way, and the same way we did it in the bakery, is to chop up rhubarb into half-inch to full inch chunks, and add them to a bowl with cut strawberries. Add a couple tablespoons of sugar and toss it all together. (You can do this without the berries too.) Pour this mixture straight onto a baking pan and spread it out into a single layer. Bake this for 20 to 25 minutes at 350°F, or until the strawberries and rhubarb have little puddles of juice around them and slightly browned edges. Allow them to cool completely before scraping them off. 

Credit: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann

Covered roasting

Toss chopped rhubarb with sugar again, but this time, pour it all into a casserole dish or another type of deep baking dish. Cover the top with foil and bake for 20 minutes at 350°F. Allow the dish to cool with the foil in place.

After removing the foil, the rhubarb is still bright pink and ready to use.
Credit: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann

I prefer the open roasting method because this allows some of the moisture to escape, and so the flavors become more concentrated. The lack of moisture also allows the bright pink color to stay true, and even deepen, rather than leech away into the moisture. Personally, I think the biggest boon of this method is that the chunks of rhubarb do not turn to absolute slush. The plant cooks and softens within but also dries out slightly on the edges, creating a bit of support. You can toss the bits into a pie or cake batter and still discern the pieces on the other side. 

Whether or not you decide to roast, rhubarb is in season right now, so make the most of this festive plant while you can. 

Jonathan Goldstein’s Heavyweight, where he helps people confront things from their past, is one of the most beloved podcasts of all time. In 2023 when Spotify was making huge cuts, it was one of them. But earlier this year, Malcolm Gladwell’s Pushkin Industries picked it back up, and episodes will be returning soon. If you want more Heavyweight-ish stuff now, this list of podcasts will keep you satisfied. They share Heavyweight’s ethos—curiosity, empathy, a sense of humor, and beautiful audio. 

Wiretap

Credit: Wiretap

Wiretap is Jonathan Goldstein’s earlier CBC show, and it’s the spiritual ancestor of Heavyweight—weird, warm, and moving. Each episode blends scripted monologue with real-life moments and absurd sketches, all wrapped in Goldstein’s signature self-deprecating wit. It’s looser and more surreal than Heavyweight, but the emotional core is the same: people trying to make sense of themselves and each other. You’ll hear stories that feel like confessions told late at night, or voicemails from someone who knows you better than you know yourself. Listening to Wiretap is like reading Jonathan’s diary—and discovering it’s somehow yours, too.

Proxy

Credit: Proxy

Yowei Shaw is trying to help people. With her beautiful show Proxy, Yowei (who refers to herself as an emotional journalist) solves niche emotional conundrums, investigated by proxy—finding people with unresolved relationships and linking them up with a stranger who can help them better understand their problems. (Recently she connected a man whose wife left him for another woman with another woman who left her husband for a woman.) Yowei comes from the massively popular podcast NPR Invisibilia, so you can trust her to deliver a good story that is tender and professionally structured. There is nothing like Proxy, making it a space for unique conversations never heard before. 

Selected Shorts

Credit: Selected Shorts

Selected Shorts is like a mixed bag for audio lovers, a magazine and time capsule all in one. Every month, executive producer and host Mitra Kaboli releases curated audio documentaries, interviews, and discussions made by and with the best people in the business. This is the stuff from the past that has inspired some of the best things you’re listening to now. There is free content on the feed (I recommend “Call Now” by Sean Cole, a hilarious piece about lawyer ads) but you need a subscription to get all the goodies. 

Family Ghosts

Credit: Family Ghosts

In episodes of Family Ghosts, host Sam Dingman starts with a personal mystery—an old family rumor, a missing person—and digs until he finds gold. It’s the mystery that snags your attention, but it’s Sam’s thoughtful meditation on what it means that will keep you adding these episodes to your queue. These are stories about identity, legacy, and truth that often lack a tidy resolution, like so many of our relationships. It’s tender and comforting to hear about the complications that are happening in other people’s families. It’s why we peek into windows at night; it makes us feel less alone. 

This Is Love

Credit: This Is Love

Phoebe Judge’s This is Love has the same soulful curiosity and emotional depth that makes Heavyweight so beloved. It’s almost like Phoebe is painting a mural of the theme of love, and she is using human stories about love in all forms (friendship, romance, love for animals) to do it. Her voice is famously calm and steady, the kind that makes you want to sit still and really listen to what she has to say as she unspools stories of connection, devotion, and the unexpected ways love shows up in people’s lives. The show isn’t afraid of melancholy, but always offers a sense of awe rather than despair. 

Snap Judgment

Credit: Snap Judgment

On Snap Judgment, Glynn Washington is your emcee for a poetry slam of stories, starting out each episode with one of his own, told with such energy that you can feel it pulsing through your body. Then he hands the mic to his storyteller and you hear their story, expertly assembled with killer beats. The result? Movies for your ears. These stories—a foreign negotiator attempts to free an American journalist being held captive, someone experiences a glitch in the universe, an underwater photographer is saved by harp seals—will stick with you. Listen to just one story (I recommend starting with “The Border Hacker”) and join the huge community of Snappers who sit at the altar of storytelling master Glynn Washington, waiting for him to drop new beats.

Articles of Interest

Credit: Articles of Interest

Like Heavyweight, Articles of Interest is a meticulously crafted show that finds profound meaning in unexpected places. Host Avery Trufelman investigates the hidden histories behind clothing and fashion with the same mix of curiosity and narrative perfection that Jonathan Goldstein brings to his show. Both shows make the small feel big, unearthing emotional depth in things most of us overlook. There’s a gentle wit and generosity in the storytelling, making you feel smarter and more connected by the end of every episode. If Heavyweight is about people trying to understand their past, Articles of Interest is about understanding the past stitched into what we wear.

Beautiful / Anonymous

Credit: Beautiful / Anonymous

Episodes of Beautiful / Anonymous (short for Beautiful Stories from Anonymous People) take you to unexpected, human places. Every episode is a phone call to a stranger—host Chris Gethard sets his stop watch to 60 minutes and has a conversation with them, letting them take the conversation however they see fit. Chris Gethard brings a tender curiosity to every anonymous call, allowing space for the sometimes strange, sometimes funny, always heartfelt conversations that, like Heavyweight, often unlock a human mystery about someone. Chris has talked to a witch, a man whose wife is dying of cancer, a funeral director, someone who opens up about their heroin addiction, and many more. 

The Memory Palace

Credit: The Memory Palace

The Memory Palace and Heavyweight are kindred spirits, both obsessed with the weight of the past. But with The Memory Palace, the stories are quieter and a little bit more mysterious. Nate DiMeo tells true, often forgotten tales with the rhythm of a lullaby and the punch of a good short story, slipping history into your ears like a secret. Episodes don’t need resolutions or jokes to get you to feel all the feelings, but episodes will stick in your head for a while. “The House of Lowe” is an evocative story about a pioneering woman in fashion, “Below, from Above” is an account of the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, and “I’m Still Alive” explores the history of premature burials.

Endless Thread

Credit: Endless Thread

Most Endless Thread stories begin with something strange found on Reddit and evolve from there into a story about people IRL. Using storytelling, interviews, and discussions, hosts Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson find the people involved in the stories and bring their threads to life. What makes it like Heavyweight is the mixture of mysteries and personal experiences that will give you a glimpse into the lives of people around the world, both online and off.

Evidence is mounting for “a vast reservoir of liquid water” on Mars, according to a new article by Australian National University professor Hrvoje TkalÄiÄ and geophysics associate professor Weijia Sun from the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences, announcing their recently published paper.
“Using seismic data from NASA’s InSight mission, we uncovered evidence that the seismic waves slow down in a layer between 5.4 and 8 kilometres below the surface, which could be because of the presence of liquid water at these depths.”

Mars is covered in traces of ancient bodies of water. But the puzzle of exactly where it all went when the planet turned cold and dry has long intrigued scientists… Billions of years ago, during the Noachian and Hesperian periods (4.1 billion to 3 billion years ago), rivers carved valleys and lakes shimmered. As Mars’ magnetic field faded and its atmosphere thinned, most surface water vanished. Some escaped to space, some froze in polar caps, and some was trapped in minerals, where it remains today. But evaporation, freezing and rocks can’t quite account for all the water that must have covered Mars in the distant past.

Calculations suggest the “missing” water is enough to cover the planet in an ocean at least 700 metres deep, and perhaps up to 900 metres deep. One hypothesis has been that the missing water seeped into the crust. Mars was heavily bombarded by meteorites during the Noachian period, which may have formed fractures that channelled water underground. Deep beneath the surface, warmer temperatures would keep the water in a liquid state — unlike the frozen layers nearer the surface.

In 2018, NASA’s InSight lander touched down on Mars to listen to the planet’s interior with a super-sensitive seismometer. By studying a particular kind of vibration called “shear waves”, we found a significant underground anomaly: a layer between 5.4 and 8 kilometres down where these vibrations move more slowly. This “low-velocity layer” is most likely highly porous rock filled with liquid water, like a saturated sponge. Something like Earth’s aquifers, where groundwater seeps into rock pores. We calculated the “aquifer layer” on Mars could hold enough water to cover the planet in a global ocean 520-780m deep.

InSight’s seismometer captured vibrations between the crust of Mars and its lower layers from two meteorite impacts in 2021 and a Marsquake in 2022. “These signatures let us pinpoint boundaries where rock changes, revealing the water-soaked layer 5.4 to 8 kilometres deep.”

It’s an exciting possibility. “Purified, it could provide drinking water, oxygen, or fuel for rockets.” And since microbes thrives on earth in deep rocks filled with water, “Could similar life, perhaps relics of ancient Martian ecosystems, persist in these reservoirs?”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It’s taken a while, but I’ve finally found the thing I want generative AI to do for me: program a damn fine cup of coffee.

Program, that is, but not make—that’s the job of the Fellow Aiden, a coffee maker that crafts automated, precision pour-overs in a countertop-ready cube. Thanks to other folks who love their Aidens, as well as API tweaking and large language model training, I can hand this mechanical robot a GPT-generated recipe and get impressive coffee out of it.

Strictly speaking, absolutely none of this is necessary. Humans can make great coffee with fresh beans, decent gear, time, patience, and experience. Experiments will reveal the differences in light and dark roasts, Ethiopian and Venezuelan, washed and honey-processed beans, or how often one agitates the grounds. But faced with something brand new, even an experienced brewer can be stumped and spend a good deal of time and none-too-cheap beans trying to get everything just right.

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It’s been a mobile-only game for decades. Then a little more than a week ago Infinity Nikkireleased its 1.5 update (which introduced multiplayer and customization options) and launched the game on Steam.

But it “didn’t go over as planned,” writes the worker-owned gaming site Aftermath, citing some very negative reactions on Reddit. (Some players say that in response the game’s publisher is now even censoring the word “boycott” on its official forums and community spaces…)

Infinity Nikki players were immediately incensed by a bevy of bugs and general game instability, and made even more angry by several baffling changes to both the story and its monetization structure… Players globally are vowing to stay off the game until Infold Games addresses their concerns, including at least one Infinity Nikki creator who is part of the game’s partner program… [T]he Chinese Infinity Nikki community — as well as others — has been flooding Steam with negative reviews of the game… [T]he complaints are also impacting Infinity Nikki’s review score on the Google Play Store… The company said it’s working to fix the patch’s performance issues, which have caused game-breaking bugs for some players….

[T]he Infinity Nikki team also gave players some free currency, but there’s been problems there, too: Players say Infold had a bug in this distribution, which awarded players too much free currency. Instead of letting players keep that — it was Infold’s mistake, after all — they deducted the currency, some of which players had already spent, putting them in the negative. But the community is looking for more from the studio; it wants an acknowledgement of the “dumpster fire” of a situation, as one Infinity Nikki player told Aftermath, but also wants some of the biggest problems reversed… Beyond the problematic monetization strategy, players Aftermath spoke with said they’re also pissed off at a major change to the start of the game… Infold Games removed the game’s original start with the update; the new intro drops players into Infinity Nikki with little context and a new, unexplained character who is supposed to be a guide as Nikki is dropped into intergalactic limbo.
While the spend-to-upgrade-your-character model has always been inherently predatory, as one player put it, the new update pushed the system “much too far for a lot of players,” according to the article — “something made more egregious by the numerous bugs and strange gameplay changes.” The article now describes some players as “upset that the trust they’ve given Infold Games thus far has been broken.”

“Infold Games has not responded to a request for comment.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The United States and China said Monday they reached an agreement to temporarily reduce the tariffs [non-paywalled source] they have imposed on each other in an attempt to defuse the trade war threatening the world’s two largest economies. From a report: In a joint statement, the countries said they would suspend their respective tariffs for 90 days while they negotiate. Under the agreement, the United States would reduce the tariff on Chinese imports to 30 percent from its current 145 percent, while China would lower its import duty on American goods to 10 percent from 125 percent.

“We concluded that we have a shared interest,” said Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent at a news conference in Geneva where U.S. and Chinese officials met over the weekend. “The consensus from both delegations is that neither side wanted a decoupling,” he said. The agreement breaks an impasse that had brought trade between China and the United States to a halt. Many American businesses had suspended orders, holding out hope that the two countries could strike a deal to bring down the tariff rates while raising the spectre of price increases.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Business Insider tells the story in three bullet points:
– Big Tech companies depend on content made by others to train their AI models.
– Some of those creators say using their work to train AI is copyright infringement.
– The U.S. Copyright Office just published a report that indicates it may agree.

The office released on Friday its latest in a series of reports exploring copyright laws and artificial intelligence. The report addresses whether the copyrighted content AI companies use to train their AI models qualifies under the fair use doctrine. AI companies are probably not going to like what they read…

AI execs argue they haven’t violated copyright laws because the training falls under fair use. According to the U.S. Copyright Office’s new report, however, it’s not that simple. “Although it is not possible to prejudge the result in any particular case, precedent supports the following general observations,” the office said. “Various uses of copyrighted works in AI training are likely to be transformative. The extent to which they are fair, however, will depend on what works were used, from what source, for what purpose, and with what controls on the outputs — all of which can affect the market.”

The office made a distinction between AI models for research and commercial AI models. “When a model is deployed for purposes such as analysis or research — the types of uses that are critical to international competitiveness — the outputs are unlikely to substitute for expressive works used in training,” the office said. “But making commercial use of vast troves of copyrighted works to produce expressive content that competes with them in existing markets, especially where this is accomplished through illegal access, goes beyond established fair use boundaries.”

The report says outputs “substantially similar to copyrighted works in the dataset” are less likely to be considered transformative than when the purpose “is to deploy it for research, or in a closed system that constrains it to a non-substitutive task.”

“A day after the office released the report, President Donald Trump fired its director, Shira Perlmutter, a spokesperson told Business Insider.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.