What happens when you cook vintage Easter recipes? An unholy holiday meal
Molly Fitzpatrick | Fusion
Sam is conceptually disturbed by the bun bunnies: “Why do they have eggs? I know it’s Easter, but bunnies don’t lay eggs.” Which, fair: It’s a little like a pumpkin riding a broomstick, or a bald eagle wearing Uncle Sam’s top hat.
I expected the bunnies to be horrendously dry, but—while they are admittedly overbaked—they’re not that bad. The bread finishes sweet, and it’s easy to reach for another chunk of ear or tail once you’ve finished your first.
While we both agree that the buns look more like marsupials than rabbits (Happy Australian Easter!), I got positive reviews on their appearance. Sort of. “They’re cute, in that they look homemade,” Sam says. “They look like a child made them.”
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Searching for Sundar Pichai
Mat Honan | BuzzFeed
Google is also pushing hard into Indic languages. Although Hindi is the most widely spoken language in India, with more than 400 million native speakers, that’s a small slice of the nation’s 1.3 billion–strong population. Google says it expects the next 300–400 million Internet users in India to come online speaking native languages. And so Google has rolled out support for 11 of them.
“That’s this head-exploding concept, when you think about the vernacular languages,” Pichai says. “I wouldn’t be surprised if the leading newspapers in Tamil, my native language, had more circulation than the New York Times or other leading newspapers in the world.” (In fact, the biggest Tamil-language daily has a print circulation of 1.7 million to the New York Times’ 626,000. The second largest Tamil daily has a circ of 1.2 million.) “There are so many people who are very good at their native languages, but are completely cut off from everything. So in India, to go from 300 million users to a billion users, the path leads through vernacular languages.”
It also means bringing women online. This is a deeply personal issue for Pichai.
“My mom dropped out of high school for economic reasons, but she always was the one I turned to when I had difficulty with any of my schoolwork,” he says. “I could see the power of what she could contribute, but in some ways she couldn’t fully realize it because she didn’t have access to education. When you look at the internet, women account for less than one-third of the usage, and that number is much lower in rural areas, I think it’s an imperative for us to do that.”
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The Incredibly True Story of Renting a Friend in Tokyo
Chris Colin | Afar
Miyabi would show up and just be a friend. You know, a normal, companionable, 27-year-old friend. She has been paid to cry at funerals and swoon at weddings, lest there be shame over a paltry turnout. Last year, a high schooler hired her and 20 other women just long enough to snap one grinning, peace-sign-flashing, I-totally-have-friends Instagram photo.
When I learned that friendship is rentable in Tokyo, it merely seemed like more Japanese wackiness, in a subset I’d come to think of as interest-kitsch. Every day in Japan, it seems, some weird new appetite is identified and gratified. There are cats to rent, after all, used underwear to purchase, owls to pet at owl bars. Cuddle cafés exist for the uncuddled, goat cafés for the un-goated. Handsome men will wipe away the tears of stressed-out female office workers. All to say I expected something more or less goofy when I lined up several English-speaking rent-a-friends for my week in Tokyo. The agency Miyabi works for exists primarily for lonely locals, but the service struck me as well suited to a solo traveler, too, so I paid a translator to help with the arrangements. Maybe a more typical Japanese business would’ve bristled at this kind of intrusion from a foreigner. But the rent-a-friend world isn’t typical, I would soon learn, and in some ways it wants to subvert all that is.
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