Unsolicited Thornburgh

Crime, food, Mexicans, fatherhood, and even some reporting. Brought to you by Nathan Thornburgh and a team of imaginary interns

[thornburgh]

The Tbilisi Photo Festival is about a lot more than just photography.

[thornburgh]

An interview with "one of the last true muses": Nestan Nijaradze of the Tbilisi Photo Festival

[music]

After hearing much demand from the bloggers and fans on Tumblr, we have finally launched a #music tag page.

Track the new tag to stay up on the best new music, videos, artwork and photos on Tumblr, hand-picked by members of the community. The tag editors come from different...

[thornburgh]

Awesome

[roadsandkingdoms]

When McDonald’s and KFC first opened up in Pakistan in the 1990s, there were manic scenes. Snaking queues, traffic jams for miles and kids running amok in play areas. Burger joints had existed before, but the fried chicken and ‘would you like fries with that’ phenomena swept through the country, paving the way for spinoffs in every neighbourhood and small town. But long before the golden arches began gleaming through Pakistan, there was always the poor man’s burger: the bun kebab. The bun kebab builds on the familiar burger formula: it’s a patty in a bun. But its flavors stretch far beyond the western world, combining Pakistanis’ love for spices and fried food, all in one go.

More from Saba Imtiaz’s Karachi dispatch: bun kebabs on Roads & Kingdoms

[thornburgh]

A Week in Timbuktu

A Week In Timbuktu (via Roads & Kingdoms)

It would be fair to say that the Hotel Colombe wasn’t ready to receive guests. Since closing down at the end of March last year when the latest incarnation of the global Jihad swept south out of the Sahara desert and into Timbuktu it had been quietly falling apart. The hotel’s faultlessly polite…

[simonbooks-blog]

J.D. Salinger’s biography to publish in the fall from S&S. 

<———- THRILLED.

[markcoatney]

FYI, we are testing the Tumblr “Respect” button as we speak…

[thornburgh]

Taxi Wallah

Taxi Wallah (via Roads & Kingdoms)

The Indian-built Padmini spent decades as the tricked-out battleaxe of Mumbai’s taxi fleet. The cars are being replaced by newer models, from Tatas and Hyndais, but not before photographer Glasweegee got a chance to go inside the cabins of a dying breed.

[roadsandkingdoms]

Gordes is often anointed in guide books and tourist office pamphlets with bland monikers like the “jewel of Provence”. Indeed, the hilltop village is the very image of Provence, the first town to pop up on a Google search, right up there next to the violet lanes of lavender. It’s true that its beauty, especially in the morning when the sun climbs over the towering chateau, or in the early evening, when the staircase of stone buildings is bathed in amber and the valley behind the town looks like it was created in the mind of Matisse, can break you. You will find yourself saying stupid things like “let’s give up our crude urban existence and find an old stone home that we can covert into a little B&B.” They have a name for this in these parts: Peter Mayle Syndrome. Side effects include marmalade making, furniture building and a sudden desire to crush your own olives.

Pilgrims in Provence: A search for the soul of southern France 

[losangelespast-blog]

The intrepid reporters of the Los Angeles Herald-Express radio-flash car, combing the city for breaking news, 1949.  

[markcoatney]

[thornburgh]

The best of the media minds are reproducing.

[roadsandkingdoms]

[Editor’s note: Following Dougie Wallace’s half-insane photoessay on the bingedrinkers of Blackpool yesterday, here’s a more literary take on the phenomenon in Wales, from writer Nemonie Craven. Updated and republished from her late, lamented How to Live Blog]

I was struck the other...

[thornburgh]

Nemonie Craven gets in a limo with old friends, drinks heavily, and has an epiphany in the bathroom. Nicely done.

[fokyeahyolandi]

[suicideblonde]

THEIR KID IS AWESOME!

[madillac]

They have a child?

[uglyrenaissancebabies]

British Library, Harley 4425, f. 140.

Fuck you, baby.

[roadsandkingdoms]

[Photo by Glenna Gordon]

Follow this photographer. Her photoessay from Monvrovia on Roads & Kingdoms today is sad/beautiful, and she Tumbls well, too: great stuff from West Africa and beyond at scarlettlion.tumblr.com

[thornburgh]

Today's Tumblr recommendation from Roads & Kingdoms. I second it.

[roadsandkingdoms]

Foodporn for Peace: Chicken Liver Salad, Jack Fry’s, Louisville, KY

On the weekend, I went to Louisville for the Christian wedding of one US Army intelligence officer to another US Army intelligence officer. The night before the ceremony, I had gone nearly straight from the airport to an American bistro called Jack Fry’s in the Highlands, and at Jack Fry’s I went straight for an Old Fashioned and for this dish, sauteed chicken livers with poached egg, brioche croutons in a vinaigrette of red wine, bacon and shallot.

Liver is not usually my first call. The last time I faced a plate of chicken liver, it was a year ago in the Pankisi Gorge in eastern Georgia at a Chechen roadside restaurant. Pankisi is pacified now, but not that long ago it was one of the rougher places on earth, a hideout for the Muslim insurgents fighting the Russians on the other side of the mountains in Chechnya, a den of gangsters and heroin cookers and arms dealers.

And yet then as now, in a roadside restaurant serving Chechen food, you get a food that I had always known as the particular domain of the Jews: chicken liver. My father makes a ridiculously good and simple chopped liver in his home in San Francisco, just onion, hard-boiled egg, chicken liver, pepper. Making that dish is perhaps the most Jewish thing he does, and eating it is certainly the most Jewish thing I do.

And no, my father’s version doesn’t include a bacon vinaigrette, nor does the sauteed onion, pepper and liver combination of the Muslims in Pankisi. But forget the accessories: it’s worth celebrating the fact that we all share this food—California half-Jews, Muslim insurgents, bourbon-loving Kentucky Christians—like we share Abraham. We are People of the Book. We eat chicken liver.

[thornburgh]

Yes, liver. Helluva dish, too.

[cmonstah]

The most aesthetically pleasing cupcakes in the world. (Taken with instagram)

[thornburgh]

They look terrified

[roadsandkingdoms]

Sweet, sour, bitter, boozy: Peru’s national cocktail ranks high on the list of world’s greatest adult beverages

Master the mix with R&K’s Pisco Sour video from the bar at Central Restaurante, Lima, Peru