Because everyone's tastes and preferences for beers differ so significantly, it can be hard to objectively decide which ones are the cream of the crop.
A gorgeous townhouse in the middle of New York's Upper East Side has just gone into contract for $41 million, according to the Observer.
Tony and Claire White, the sellers of the townhouse, wanted $46 million for the property, but the asking price eventually fell to $41 million.
Built in 1965, the 11,100-square-foot, 14-room townhouse was designed by Rachel 'Bunny' Mellon, the heiress to the Listerine fortune who was married to the banking legend Paul Mellon.
She was a close friend of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and a notable horticulturist who redesigned the White House Rose Garden — needless to say, she had impeccable taste.
There's good news for residents of San Francisco who rent spare rooms out to travelers over the internet on sites like Airbnb. On Tuesday night, the city approved the so-called "Airbnb law" to make that legal. It takes effect February 1.
It was never exactly legal to rent rooms out in San Francisco for fewer than 30 days, a time period that was more like running a hotel than subletting an apartment.
But for those who rent whole homes for fewer than 30 days via any internet site, like HomeAway or VBRO, or even Airbnb – that's still forbidden.
The new regulation only allows people to rent homes through these sites if they are San Francisco residents living in the unit for at least nine months a year. They also have to register as hosts with the city, promising under penalty of perjury that they meet those conditions.
This new rule is great for many Airbnb hosts but a blow to some of Airbnb's competitors such as Austin, Texas-based HomeAway Inc., which owns the HomeAway and VBRO sites. Those two sites mostly do short-term vacation rentals of whole homes, often vacation homes.
City officials explain that they are not trying to help a local company best its competitors. They want to discourage people from buying San Francisco property to pursue lucrative short-term rentals. They want to property owners keeping homes available to permanent residents, officials told the San Francisco Chronicle's Carolyn Said.
HomeAway's co-founder is complaining. "HomeAway supports the rights of cities and communities to craft reasonable regulations and ask our advertisers to follow local laws. However, this proposed ordinance discriminates against homeowners in favor of their tenants, giving tenants rights denied to owners," co-founder Carl Shepherd told us.
"We advise our owners to make their voices heard between now and February 1, in an effort to get the city government to draft a law in a way that works for all the people of San Francisco and not just the one local company for whom this ordinance was written," Shepherd says.
Meanwhile, all eyes are on New York, where Airbnb is fighting a similar battle to come up with rules for Airbnb hosts. New York has been cracking down on hosts who rent multiple units on the site, in search of what it calls "illegal hotels."
As the popularity of these internet home-sharing sites rises, so do some problems. People using the service, no matter where they live, need to be aware.
These restaurants include everything from the theatrical inventiveness of Chicago's Alinea to the conservative Southern charm of Charleston's Halls Chophouse.
And since TripAdvisor's users were behind the rankings, we decided to let their reviews speak for themselves.
"The menu was very creative with well prepared dishes appropriately priced. This was our first trip to Chicago and when we return, it will be on the top of our list of places to go. We met a couple who had been to the restaurant the night before and because they had such a fabulous meal, they came for an early seating the next day. If we had another day in Chicago, we would have done the same thing." - TripAdvisor reviewer tennis40love.
"We eat here every time in NYC and it seems to get better with every visit. Every course is a work of art, no wonder so many camera taking so many foodie pictures. That every single item tastes even better than it looks every single time says everything about quality and consistency. Lunches are a bargain. The wine list is exhaustive and the staff is first rate. This is a don't miss NYC experience no matter how many days in the city." - TripAdvisor reviewer Wayne N.
"We chose the River Cafe as it was a special occasion and felt that the Manhattan skyline lit up at night would be a fantastic backdrop. The tasting menu was DELICIOUS. We all loved each course and the chocolate Brooklyn bridge dessert was perfect to end it all. At first it seemed like it was an older persons type of establishment (men need to wear a jacket), but the location and food mean it is perfect for everyone." - TripAdvisor reviewer LosElvinos.
Author Malcolm Gladwell — who's sold some 4.5 million books— says that entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs and IKEA founder Ingvar Kamprad become so successful thanks to a rare combination of personality traits.
As he said on stage at on Tuesday at the World Business Forum in New York, they are open to experience, conscientious, and disagreeable.
Gladwell says the combination of openness and conscientiousness is as scarce as it is powerful.
There are lots of people who are creative without being conscientious, Gladwell said — the cafes of Brooklyn are full of them. And there's lots of conscientious people who aren't creative — like, he says, an accountant.
"It's rare to have those two qualities in combination, to be both someone with an imagination to dream up some radical way of doing things and the relentless focus to make it happen," Gladwell said. "Add to that the third thing: You also must be disagreeable."
But crucially, innovators need to be disagreeable ... They are people willing to take social risks — to do things that others might disapprove of.
That is not easy. Society frowns on disagreeableness. As human beings we are hardwired to seek the approval of those around us. Yet a radical and transformative thought goes nowhere without the willingness to challenge convention.
So what happens when you have openness, conscientiousness, and disagreeableness wrapped up in one person?
You have IKEA founder Ingvar Kamprad, who outsourced his manufacturing to Poland during the height of the Cold War, which Gladwell says earned him the moniker of "traitor" in his native Sweden.
Kamprad — open enough to invent new methods of making furniture, conscientious enough to relentless expand his business — was was also disagreeable. So he dutifully ignored his haters.
Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates has has purchased a 228-acre horse farm in Rancho Santa Fe, California, the Wall Street Journal reports. According to property records, the purchase price was a cool $18 million.
The estate formerly belonged to weight-loss expert Jenny Craig, who initially listed the property for $30 million several years ago. Its last listing price was $25 million, though it was no longer on the open market when Gates made the purchase.
The property, known as the Rancho Paseana, includes a racetrack, guesthouse, office, veterinarian's suite, orchard, and five barns.
Gates' daughter Jennifer regularly participates in equestrian competitions, and the family owns another horse farm in Wellington, Florida.
It's a beautiful property, with wide-open pastures and plenty of California palm trees.
Rancho Paseana is located about 20 minutes north of San Diego, in a valley in Rancho Sante Fe, California.
On a patch of palm-tree-abundant land by the Bay, the small city of East Palo Alto is an often forgotten corner of the Silicon Valley landscape.
Situated between the Google and Facebook campuses, the racially mixed city has seen rapid gentrification since the technology industry boom of the last decade. Tech workers in search of affordable housing have moved in, driving up rent and house prices and helping to level off an unemployment rate that is nearly triple that of the county.
Still, East Palo Alto can't manage to shed its reputation for once having the country's highest murder rate. Gang activity persists in the form of turf feuds and drug-vendetta-inspired violence, despite an overall drop in crime.
One issue deepening the divide between the tech industry and the city's locals is the lack of opportunities for East Palo Alto residents to get in on the success. There are very few places to learn computer science in the area.
Two students at Stanford University set out to change that.
Earlier this month, we featured Shadi Barhoumi and Rafael Cosman on our list of the 15 Incredibly Impressive Students At Stanford. The duo, who met and became friends as computer science majors, launched a learn-to-code program this summer called CodeCamp. More than 50 students, ages 14 to 23, who live in East Palo Alto learned to write and design software with the help of over 40 mentors from nearby high schools, universities, and tech companies.
At CodeCamp, students gather in the glow of a computer monitor, rather than around a campfire. Arts and crafts are replaced with coding sprints, and campers explore major tech company campuses instead of the woods.
Far from being your typical camp, CodeCamp gives these kids an outlet into the vibrant world of technology, which suddenly doesn't seem so off-limits.
When you think of a traditional camp, you might picture log cabins, a picturesque lake, and hoards of middle schoolers braiding macramé bracelets and competing in Color Wars. But CodeCamp is no ordinary camp.
In its inaugural summer, more than 50 middle school, high school, and college-aged students from East Palo Alto — all with little to no programming experience — learned to write and design software for free.
Its founders, Shadi Barhoumi and Rafael Cosman, became friends as computer science majors at Stanford University. The rising sophomore and senior spent last summer teaching programming at an after-school program at a local charter school, where they got the idea for CodeCamp.
“I had my qualms about diving, but once I got started, I knew I would never stop,” Robert Hernandez tells me before pulling a heavy black garbage bag up from the street curb.
We’re in downtown Brooklyn, New York, in front of a Key Foods grocery store, and Hernandez is just getting started for the night. A lifetime resident of the borough, Hernandez is middle-aged and Hispanic, and tonight he wears a baseball cap with the words “Never Give Up” emblazoned along the top. He’s offered to take me and Yana Maximova, a Portland, Oregon-based journalist, dumpster diving.
Just a year ago, Hernandez was frequenting the supermarkets in downtown Brooklyn as a customer. Every so often he’d see perfectly good food wasting away near the dumpster and would be tempted to grab it. It wasn't until a new roommate told him about dumpster diving and encouraged him to attend a monthly dumpster-diving group that he realized it was a viable practice. A group of "freegans," people who forage for discarded food as part of a larger anticonsumerist ideology, led Hernandez on a trash tour. During the nighttime walk, he saw what neighborhood grocery stores like Trader Joe’s, Garden of Eden, and Perelandra Natural Foods were leaving behind every day.
He was stunned.
“We have so many people starving in this country and then you head to the supermarkets and you see all this waste," Hernandez says. "It makes no sense.”
Hernandez now makes the rounds of downtown Brooklyn's grocery stores twice a week to pick through what they leave behind, which according to him, is bountiful.
The legal situation around dumpster diving is murky and depends on the city you're in. If you get caught in New York, what happens more or less depends on the attitude of the police officer. If you're looking through a dumpster and a cop is having a bad day, or a store owner complains, you can be booked for trespassing, littering, or disorderly conduct. But most of the time the police and store owners don't get involved, as long as you are clean and don’t make a ruckus. It’s only a mildly risky endeavor.
At our first stop, a still open Key Foods, we find 20 or so neatly stacked garbage bags from the supermarket on the street corner.
Maximova and Hernandez take to the garbage bags with gusto, stepping right into the pile, untying the first ones they grab, and sticking their hands and a flashlight inside.
Maximova has been dumpster diving since she moved to the US from St. Petersburg, Russia, five years ago. In that time, she has fed herself almost completely from food she finds. She tells me proudly that she even catered her entire wedding in Pennsylvania using dumpstered food.
I am more apprehensive about the idea. It’s not that I have any problem with garbage — a job at a swim-and-tennis club in my teenage years ensured I did my fair share of handling nasty garbage — but I am more skeptical that I am going to find anything of use. I have distinct memories of handling hot, sticky garbage bags filled with unidentifiable garbage juice. There was never anything remotely appetizing.
Nonetheless, I get into the pile and untie a bag. All I find is soggy cardboard and some mushy peaches. I’m starting to think this adventure might be a bust.
“Look for the heavy ones,” Maximova says. “They usually have the best stuff.”
She pulls out a heavy, half-empty bag and unties it. Inside is the first find of the day: no fewer than 30 containers of various flavored yogurts from Fage, Chobani, and a small organic company I’ve never heard of.
I rush over in amazement. A few customers cycle out of the store and look confusedly at us. We take turns pulling out the yogurt containers and wiping them off to place in a box. I look at the expiration date: more than two weeks away. Why the yogurt is being thrown away is a mystery, but I have a hunch.
Most Americans have little idea what expiration dates, sell-by dates, and best-by dates really mean. Many tend to use these dates as deadlines for when to use or buy products, despite the fact that they mostly indicate guidelines for stores. Often, as stores get new shipments of food to place on the shelves, older — but still fresh — food with approaching expiration dates gets replaced in favor of new inventory. The old inventory gets discarded, despite being perfectly good.
Emboldened by the yogurt find, we keep searching through the bags, but Hernandez has gone through seven or eight with no luck and loses interest. I find a bundle of grapes and a package of Brussels sprouts, but we decide to leave those behind.
It's here that I learn a counterintuitive rule about dumpster diving: Divers are picky about what they keep. Because there is so much good food thrown away every day there is a garbage pickup (three times or more per week), the question quickly evolves from “what will we find?” to “what do we want to take?” Instead of sticking around at Key Foods to look through every last bit of trash, we head to Garden of Eden, a high-end organic market a few blocks away.
There we encounter another hazard of dumpster diving: garbage trucks. Dumpster divers hunt during a small window of time, between when stores put out their garbage (usually when they close) and when the garbage trucks pick it up, usually within an hour or two. This can make dumpster diving a race.
At Garden of Eden, a garbage truck is busy emptying out a dumpster across the street, and it will be soon moving onto the Eden dumpster. We start looking through the dumpster quickly, and the garbage men don’t seem to mind. The Eden dumpster is overflowing with clear bags, which makes the process easier because you can see what’s inside and how salvageable it is. The only issue is that, because there are so many bags over the lip of the dumpster, it is hard to see what could be hiding underneath.
Within seconds, I find a large bag filled with breads of many different shapes, sizes, and types. From the other side of the dumpster, I hear that Maximova has found tons of produce and Hernandez has found some donuts. I sort through my bag. The bread is still fresh, and I reason that it will probably last a week or more and take out several rolls and a loaf of ciabatta.
I go over to have a look at Maximova’s find. There are multiple bags filled with hundreds of ripe plums and nectarines. She starts pulling them out four at a time and I have to stop her because there is no way that she or I or Hernandez will be able to eat all of it before it goes bad.
Not everything is good. There is a bag of mutilated avocados that look more like dirty guacamole than fruit. When I find a bag of potatoes and yams, I have to feel through for ones that aren’t damp. The general warm, wet temperature inside the bag is off-putting and I only take two sweet potatoes. Despite the disappointments, we’ve gotten quite a bit from this dumpster and we decide to move on.
We head off to Starbucks and Hernandez tells me that in the 1980s, he used to work at the American Stock Exchange as a data clerk. While the work was satisfying, he couldn’t stand the culture on Wall Street and he grew disillusioned with capitalism as a system.
"The money was good, but I couldn't stand to see the greed that people sold their souls for," says Hernandez. "It felt shameful."
“We’re killing the Earth by throwing away good food. It could be going to food banks, pantries, or churches. But instead it just gets thrown in a landfill,” says Hernandez.
Over the course of the night, we visit three Starbucks, all within a few blocks of each other. All three have bulging trash piles, but most of the bags have wet coffee grinds in them, rendering whatever else is in there useless. This is another problem for divers: sabotage, both intentional and unintentional. According to Hernandez, some stores, to dissuade divers from going through their garbage, will intentionally mix good food with liquids, coffee grounds, or other contaminating trash, essentially destroying it.
At the last Starbucks, we hit the jackpot — a clear garbage bag filled with the day’s unsold pastries and sandwiches. Inside are rolls, croissants, cake pops, pecan pies, brownies, scones, flatbread chicken sandwiches, egg salad, etc. The expiration dates range from a day or two away to a week. I bite into a croissant. It tastes as good as any I’ve paid for.
A Starbucks employee pokes her head outside of a door on the side of the store.
“All we ask is that you clean up after yourselves,” she says. “Otherwise we get fined.”
Dumpster-diving etiquette dictates that divers untie and retie garbage bags, stack the bags the way they found them, and avoid leaving litter lying around the area. Most, but not all, divers abide by this.
On our way out from Starbucks, Hernandez shakes hands with a tall, heavy-set man, who tells him that the Trader Joe’s dumpsters are now out. Hernandez thanks him and we keep walking. Hernandez tells us the man is homeless, one of the many he has made a point to talk to and show how to dumpster dive.
“It’s about extending a hand to humanity,” says Hernandez.
As if on cue, we pass a shivering homeless man on the street. He is covered in a torn, bright blue windbreaker and has a scraggly blond beard. His face is whittled down. All three of us stop. Hernandez walks up to the man and asks him if he’d like something to eat. He opens the bag of Starbucks sandwiches and tells him to take as many as he’d like. The man takes an egg-salad sandwich but refuses to take more, despite Maximova's insistence. He thanks us repeatedly. The homeless man seems overwhelmed by the generosity.
The incident brings up another interesting wrinkle: Most homeless people won’t go into the dumpsters. Both Maximova and Hernandez have tried to feed homeless people with their dumpstered findings — which they eat themselves — and have been repeatedly denied. Only rarely do homeless people take them up on the offer.
“It’s all about people’s perceptions,” says Hernandez. “Everyone is so brainwashed that food has to come from the store shelves, that it has to have a far-off expiration date.”
We head to the evening's grand finale: Trader Joe's. The chain is considered something of a mecca for dumpster divers all over the country. The stores are so large and throw out so much food that every day the dumpsters are put out, you can guarantee that you will find good food. Add in that so many of Trader Joe’s products — from meat to vegetables, fruit, cookies, and salad — are packaged, and you can see why its a diver’s paradise.
In front of Trader Joe’s are no fewer than 10 dumpsters, all filled with bags, most of which have usable food inside. On some nights, Hernandez tells me, the scene at Joe’s can become competitive, as divers from all over the city converge to pick through the findings. On those nights, Hernandez prefers to wait out “the wolves,” as he calls them, because he believes the competition is not in the spirit of freeganism, which is about community and sharing.
In quick succession, we find a dumpster filled with egg cartons, Brie, organic chicken, hummus, salad packages, squash, and pita bread. All of it is still fresh, and sell-by dates aren't even close. There’s another dumpster filled with packages of tilapia, but fish seems a little too risky for me to take. Maximova confirms this suspicion, telling me to be very careful with meat and fish. Any packages that have bulging plastic, look swollen, or smell funky should be avoided, she says.
It isn’t long before we’ve filled up the shopping bags we have on us, and we’ve barely gone through four dumpsters.
“I have no idea why they throw these things out,” Hernandez says. “I don’t know what their standards are. If I knew, maybe I’d understand why so much goes to waste.”
I thank Hernandez for taking Maximova and me out for the tour. He reminds me not to eat anything before washing it, a cardinal rule of dumpster diving.
Here's a look at my take home at the end of the night:
And here's what the produce looked like after it was washed with hot water and white vinegar (as per Hernandez's suggestion):
Just as Airbnb has achieved a fantastic victory in its home town of San Francisco, where city officials have finally made it legal, it is facing a PR disaster in New York.
The woman featured in a New York Airbnb ad campaign was once evicted for renting out an upstate property she didn't own over Airbnb, New York Magazine reports.
The story goes like this: Christopher Griffith leased a renovated 1880s Dutch barn he owns in Stuyvesant, New York, to Shell for $4,000 a month. Shell told him that "artist friends from around the world would show up and collaborate." He was down with that.
He didn’t realize Shell would be renting his property out (along with other properties she was leasing) over Airbnb, a violation of her lease with him. “Friends are one thing,” Griffith told Coscarelli. “Groups of social-networking strangers is a completely different ball of wax.”
In a crazy twist of fate, it was another social networking site, LinkedIn, that alerted him. LinkedIn showed him her profile and asked him if he knew her. Her LinkedIn profile indicates she worked in real estate and operates something called Shell's loft.
Griffith did some digging and found his property listed on Airbnb and a bunch of other sites — TripAdvisor, FlipKey, Dwellable, and Outpost — for about $450 a night.
Shell told New York Magazine that it was all a miscommunication, that she thought she explained "her whole life concept" to him.
Griffith evicted her but not before she rented his property out for a wedding, New York Magazine reports.
She came to Airbnb's attention during Hurricane Sandy for a wonderful reason.
She used Airbnb to house people stranded by the storm for free at her leased six-bedroom, 5,000-square-foot Brooklyn loft. It's listed on Airbnb for $750 a night.
That idea inspired others to do the same and in the end some 1,400 other Airbnb hosts offered their homes to people for free who were affected by the storm.
And that led Airbnb to create a whole ad campaign around Shell, including this ad that appeared in subways ...
... and this YouTube video
But the New York magazine article is causing an uproar. New York State Sen. Liz Krueger emailed us a statement about it:
"Now we learn that one of the Airbnb PR campaign's supposed shining examples of 'regular New Yorkers making ends meet' has in fact been renting multiple properties as a short-term rental business and was evicted from a property by its owner after his complaints to Airbnb went 'absolutely nowhere.' ... This is another wake-up call."
Sen. Krueger sponsored a 2010 "Illegal Hotel Law" that applies to the city of New York. It limits people from subletting apartments for less than 30 days.
We have reached out to Airbnb and Shell for comment and will update when we hear back.
"The aim of our page is to show the world the good side of Iran. Every time Iran is mentioned on TV or news, they always talk negatively and we are trying to show the good side"
A disclaimer on the site later read:
"This page is in no way political and we never had any bad intentions. We never thought the page would make headlines all over the world."
It appears the page is inaccessible. It is unknown whether this is due to the wishes of the page administrators, or government censorship, as claimed by Mashable.
Instagram and other social networks are blocked by internet filters in Iran, but most young Iranians have simple software which works around this. It's not uncommon for the government to crack down on certain sites.
Rich Kids or Tehran launched less than a month ago, quickly gaining media attention around the world, as well as almost 100,000 followers.
The exhibitions of wealth and sexuality have came as a surprise to many both inside and outside the Islamic Republic of Iran, which is subject to strict international sanctions and Islamic laws that prohibit alcohol and immodest dressing. Many of those pictured in the feed were said to be children of Iran's elite.
It would appear the wealthy and powerful have suffered little under sanctions compared with millions of others in the country. The site also recently spawned another Iranian Instagram account, Poor Kids of Tehran, which highlights images of Iranian street children.
If life is good, you will one day find yourself at a liquor tasting — scotch, bourbon, brandy — what have you.
And when you're in that moment — the moment before you take a sip — you're going to want to look like you know what you're doing.
So Business Insider recently asked an expert how it's done. Grand Marnier's master distiller, Patrick Reguenaud, recently held a tasting in New York City. There he explained that taking your first sip of liquor is actually three step process.
First you use your eyes. "Look at the color and describe it," said Reguenaud. Color will tell you about how long and where — as in what kind of barrel — the liquor was aged.
Then you use your nose. "Smell carefully and identify the aromas and flavors... find the right word for each flavors," he said. In other words, you want to be precise. Don't use general words like 'sweet.' Get specific, think: vanilla, toffee, chocolate — flavors you would actually taste.
Lastly, taste the liquor."With your first impression, taste and confirm the description you gave after you used your nose," Reguenaud said. "Be descriptive. Then wait a few seconds to get a second impression of the taste and describe that. At the end you'll have a global description of the spirit like a conclusion. For example — you could say that it's a good product with a mellow taste, or an exceptional spirit with a very long after taste."
Just be honest, and be literal. Tasting a spirit is a creative, sensory activity.
Jasper Newton "Jack" Daniel ran away from home when he was seven, some time in the 1850s, and moved in with Reverend Dan Call and helped him with his whiskey business. Call later adopted Jack and eventually sold him his whiskey business.
"Church people started talking about how the minister was working for God on Sunday and then making liquor on Monday. In order to keep the church family happy the Minister sold the business to Jack for $25," said distillery guide Jesse James.
Decades later Daniel came into work early one morning before anyone else had arrived at the distillery. He wanted to complete some paperwork and needed to open the safe. He had trouble remembering the combination, however, and grew so frustrated that he kicked the safe with his left foot.
Tour guides joke that Daniel could have saved himself by dipping his toe in whiskey. Instead, the blow to his big toe gave him a nasty infection and his foot had to be amputated. The gangrene continued to spread throughout his system and he eventually lost his left leg due to poor blood circulation.
Daniel, who never married and had no children, began turning more of the company’s operations over to his favorite nephew Lem Motlow and eventually gave him the business. He died due to complications from the gangrene infection on Oct. 10, 1911 at the age of 61.
The company was sold in 1956 to the Brown-Forman Corp., but the Motlow family is still the majority owner and continues to operate and manage the company.
You can go to any old New York bar to down a stiff drink, but if you're the kind of person that really wants to enjoy and savor a thoughtful cocktail, you'll need to look a little harder.
With help from Yelp reviewers, we put together a list of the best cocktail bars in New York City.
The bartenders and mixologists at these establishments know how to whip up everything from classic cocktails to innovative creations that won't fail to impress.
With a cocktail list the size of a short novel, Nitecap's knowledgeable mixologists are ready to effortlessly whip up a carefully crafted drink — even a nightcap — at your leisure.
"Nitecap goes the extra mile," says Yelp reviewer Sarah H., "whether it comes to their delicious old-fashioned or ensuring that the place is not sardine crowded."
Note: Yelp's search results are based on an algorithm that is designed to provide the best results based on a number of different factors including review text, ratings, and number of reviews. Because several factors are taken into account, this is why you may see a 3.5-star restaurant with 500 reviews showing above a 4-star one with 15 reviews.
Honestly, what's more "Brooklyn" than a vintage-style cocktail? Dram delivers strong, liquor-based beverages in a modern speakeasy setting. The bar also serves beer and wine, but come on — we know why you're really here.
"The drinks are pricey," Yelp reviewer Dinah B. admits, "but after watching the bartender vigorously at work, you'll agree it's worth the splurge."
Note: Yelp's search results are based on an algorithm that is designed to provide the best results based on a number of different factors including review text, ratings, and number of reviews. Because several factors are taken into account, this is why you may see a 3.5-star restaurant with 500 reviews showing above a 4-star one with 15 reviews.
An upscale bar and lounge in the Village, Analogue has the laid-back ambience to accompany the refined quality of the mixed drinks. Take your drink to the back "Record Room" and sip in style.
"The perfect place to go for a low-key drink," says Yelp reviewer Edmund T. "They have a wonderful selection of whiskey and they make some pretty tasty cocktails."
Note: Yelp's search results are based on an algorithm that is designed to provide the best results based on a number of different factors including review text, ratings, and number of reviews. Because several factors are taken into account, this is why you may see a 3.5-star restaurant with 500 reviews showing above a 4-star one with 15 reviews.
Earlier this week, IKEA unveiled a new line of furniture called REGISSÖR. The company claims it takes less than 5 minutes to assemble, and they even released a video showing someone putting together a bookcase in 3.5 minutes.
To test this 5-minutes-or-less assembly claim, we bought three IKEA REGISSÖR bookcases and got Business Insider reporter Pam Engel, executive editor Joe Weisenthal, and CEO Henry Blodget to each assemble one. Watch what happens.
Stanford is easily considered the best college in the west. It's also the best in the country, taking the No. 1 spot on our list of the Best Colleges in America this year.
Known in particular for its exceptional computer science and engineering programs, Stanford is an active hub for talented and impressive students in all fields, from art to tech to business.
We've profiled 15 incredibly impressive undergrads at this top "dream college". They're starring in feature films, playing with the U.S. National Soccer Team, teaching kids to code, and a whole lot more.
Catalin Voss developed a facial recognition app that revolutionizes the way we learn.
Class of 2016
By the time he was 15, Catalin Voss produced the No. 1 podcast on the German iTunes store and commuted back and forth between his native Heidelberg and Silicon Valley to work with Steve Capps, one of the designers of the original Apple Macintosh computer.
By freshman year he founded Sension, a visual interface company seeking to revolutionize the way we learn. Voss and his team of roughly eight employees developed a lightweight facial recognition software, one that could track and understand many points in a person's face.
Their software can be used in testing and web lectures to improve the user experience (it might prompt you with a question if it senses you're not paying attention, or explain something further if you appear confused), and provide analytics to instructors about which test questions stumped students the most. Voss expects the product to be adopted by most major standardized test associations and universities in the next year.
His passion project, however, is Sension's groundbreaking Google Glass app, which allows the wearer to recognize people's facial expressions in real-time. It begins clinical trials with young people diagnosed with Autism later this month.
Clancey Stahr raises seven-figure sums as a partner at a Silicon Valley venture capital firm.
Class of 2015
At 21 years old, you're probably more likely to expect Clancey Stahr to be pitching to venture capitalists, rather than being one. But Stahr has been working at cross-border venture capital firm ZenShin Capital for the last two years, advising startups on product design, business strategy, intellectual property, and general legal advice. He was recently made partner at the firm — the third after the company's two co-founders.
Stahr leads the firm's investments in two major startup clients, Iotera and Simple Emotion, and sits on Simple Emotion's board of directors. Stahr has also raised significant capital, an undisclosed seven-figure sum, for the first close of ZenShin's Core Technology Fund.
School doesn't stop for the Management Science and Engineering major, who still manages to get all his coursework done while working anywhere from 30 to 40 hours a week in Silicon Valley.
Stahr graduates in May and plans to continue in his role as partner at ZenShin, but hopes to someday start his own company.
Garima Sharma is working to end the child bride epidemic in India.
Class of 2015
This past summer, Garima Sharma set off to teach human rights education to girls in Forbesganj, India on a Stanford fellowship. While there, she interviewed 80 mothers in order to better understand the constraints that often compel parents to have their daughters marry at young ages.
India is home to 24 million child brides, according to the New Delhi native. The consequences of marrying so young can be devastating: A child bride is twice as likely to suffer from spousal domestic violence and 1.5 times more likely to die in child birth.
"The aspirations that parents have for their daughters shape decisions around education, marriage, and career choices," Sharma says. "I want to better understand the incentives that drive parents' decision-making process[es]." She designed a research study and spent more than 100 hours interviewing the mothers.
Sharma, who also designed and implemented a curriculum to engage adolescent girls in Forbesganj who are at risk of trafficking, plans to pursue a joint MBA/MPA-ID degree and one day run an organization that provides sustainable livelihoods to girls and women in small-town Indian communities.
Without apples we wouldn’t have some of the best treats out there: apple pie, cider, hard cider, cider donuts — basically everything that is right and good in this world.
So, if you’re looking to get away this weekend, why not spend some time picking apples? We rounded up some of the best places near New York City to get away for the weekend and come home with a bushel full of fall's favorite fruit.
But hurry! Apple picking season winds down near the end of October.
1. Applewood Orchards and Winery
For those wanting to spend the weekend drinking wine and eating apples, head to Applewood Orchards, which also happens to be a winery.
Located in the heart of Hudson Valley, the orchard also has plenty of attractions, including an herb and rose garden, wagon rides, puppet shows, and (of course) freshly pressed apple cider.
There is no admission, parking, or entertainment fees — you simply pay for the apples you take.
This apple orchard has been in the same family for nearly 100 years. Fishkill’s mission is to combine the historical identity of the “u-pick” orchard with sustainable farming methods.
They have Harvest Festival Weekends all through October, where they offer homemade food, donuts, cider, hayride, and live music. With views of the Catskills, you can relax while listening to live music and eating homemade pies.
Plus, you can pick peaches and nectarines if apples aren't your thing.
Wright’s 453 acres farm produces 100,000 bushels of apples annually. They also grow a variety of other fruits, including cherries, peaches, plums, and nectarines
The farm also has a roadside farmer's market that's open year-round and a bakery that makes assortments of pies every day — and plenty of pumpkins.
Masker’s has been around for over 100 years and has a 200 acre orchard chock full of apples for the taking.
They are located in the middle of the Hudson Valley, and are a good option for young families since they offer plenty of fun options for children including barnyard baby animals as well as pony and wagon rides.
The New York Times recently treated a group of second graders from a Brooklyn public school to the 7-course, $220-per-person dinner at Daniel, one of the finest restaurants in New York City.
The results were, predictably, adorable.
Not everyone was a fan of the ossetra caviar ("It looks like a forest!" "I can't believe I'm gonna eat fish eggs!") ... But the wagyu beef ribeye was much more popular, especially when eaten without a fork.And dessert was a huge hit.As many fine dining experiences do, this one ended with a toast. The group clinked glasses to "justice for all" ... and to vampires.
So what happens when you have openness, conscientiousness, and disagreeableness wrapped up in one person?
Smoky Mountains National Park website
On a patch of palm-tree-abundant land by the Bay, the small city of East Palo Alto is an often forgotten corner of the Silicon Valley landscape.
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Instagram and other social networks are blocked by internet filters in Iran, but most young Iranians have simple software which works around this. It's not uncommon for the government to crack down on certain sites. 
Who says kids can't appreciate fine food?
But the wagyu beef ribeye was much more popular, especially when eaten without a fork.
And dessert was a huge hit.
As many fine dining experiences do, this one ended with a toast. The group clinked glasses to "justice for all" ... and to vampires.
