Media : In The News

Oh, Lenny Dykstra, keep singing us your tales of woe and redemption. The erstwhile Phillies legend, fresh out of prison, spoke to the New York Times.

He started his website, Nails Investments, in 2010, selling subscribers on his formula for buying stock options.

Five years earlier, he began picking stocks on TheStreet.com, an astonishing career detour for Dykstra, an aggressive and often reckless former Met and Philadelphia Phillie.

The site continued unabated while Dykstra served a six-and-a-half-month sentence in federal prison for bankruptcy fraud and other charges in 2012. His partner and editor, Dorothy Van Kalsbeek, already knew his system and wrote his column and picked his stocks, with his oversight. They consulted about the market in letters and during her visits to the penitentiary in Victorville, Calif.On the day of his release, he called her to pick him up rather than use the prison-issued Greyhound bus ticket. "I’d never been on a Greyhound bus before, and I had $5 to spend," he said...

Dykstra then shifted to the autobiography that he is planning with the author Peter Golenbock, the movie that might be made about his life, the present state of the Phillies and the book he read in prison, John Grisham’s “King of Torts,” which he claimed was the first one he had ever read.

Original source: The New York Times
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As Flying Kite witnessed on a recent trip out west, Philadelphia International Airport is now home to exercise equipment for antsy travelers. When we walked through, many of the stationary bikes were occupied.

Sitting on an exercise bike in Terminal D on a recent morning, Ms. Donofree was cycling at a leisurely pace, wearing jeans and checking her phone as jets taxied outside.

Without becoming sweaty, changing her clothes or paying fees to an airport gym, she was able to exercise while remaining near her departure gate, thanks to a set of newly installed workout machines.

In late June, the airport became the first in the United States to provide three types of low-impact stationary bikes for travelers to use in the terminal, free of charge, while waiting for their flights.

Original source: The New York Times
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Philadelphia named the top city in the country to retire in without a car.

If downsizing the empty nest, ditching the car and diving into vibrant, tightly packed city life are on a retiree's agenda, there's no time like the present to make that move. However, many of Walk Score's top cities -- New York, San Francisco, Boston, Washington and Chicago -- are also among the nation's most expensive. With an eye toward cutting costs, we took a look at some of the less expensive options listed. They're still near some of the costlier locales, but aren't quite as spendy...

[Philadelphia's] most walkable neighborhoods in Center City, the Old City and along the riverfront near Penn's Landing are pleasant enough, but the combination of easy transit access and building amenities such as markets, shops, bars and restaurant are bringing folks into Fishtown, Northern Liberties and South Philadelphia. Except for the extreme northeast, southwest and northwest corners of the city, about 95 percent of the city is easily accessible by means other than a car.

Transit ridership still has a way to go before it catches up to other cities along the Northeast Corridor, but retirees are joining young newcomers in places such as Manayunk and Kensington to take advantage of a city where the options are growing and the options for getting there are ample. Oh, and as is the case in Pittsburgh, the lottery keeps all public transit here free for seniors.

Original source: The Street
Read the complete list here.

The rapidly-expanding fast casual market is trending towards local, healthy, sustainably-sourced food. Philadelphia is now home to some of these national chains, in addition to homegrown examples such as Pure Fare. 

A handful of rapidly growing regional chains around the country — including Tender Greens, LYFE Kitchen, SweetGreen and Native Foods — offer enticements like grass-fed beef, organic produce, sustainable seafood and menus that change with the season. Most promise local ingredients; some are exclusively vegetarian or even vegan. A few impose calorie ceilings, and others adopt service touches like busboys and china plates...

SweetGreen, which has 27 outlets in and around the cities of Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Washington, was started in 2007 by three Georgetown University seniors and is tightly connected to that younger demographic; its founders, Nicolas Jammet, Nathaniel Ru and Jonathan Neman, are all still under 30. (Mr. Jammet grew up in the kitchen, the son of André and Rita Jammet, who owned La Caravelle, the luxe New York restaurant that closed in 2004.)

Original source: The New York Times
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Food halls -- like the wildly-popular Eataly in New York -- are a growing trend. Philadelphia's own Reading Terminal is undergoing a renaissance.

After a $3.6 million renovation to this historic indoor market in a former train station last year, its longtime merchants, including Pennsylvania Dutch farmers, have returned. The 80 vendors include 34 restaurants. Post-renovation newcomers include Wursthaus Schmitz, a German grocery and sausage stand that serves sandwiches ($9-11); the Head Nut, which offers spices, teas, nuts and candy; and the Tubby Olive, a gourmet olive oil ($16-31 a bottle) and vinegar shop.?

Original source: T Magazine
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The annual Bastille Day festivities at Eastern State Penitentiary have become a Philadelphia tradition.

Twenty years ago, Terry Berch McNally and a few fellow Philadelphia restaurant owners ran down to the stone walls of the nearby abandoned Eastern State Penitentiary. “Let’s storm the Bastille,” Ms. McNally said, Champagne and French bread in hand. Then it dawned on her. “Oh my gosh,” she said, “this sounds like an event. We could do this.”

Two decades later, Philadelphia’s take on France’s Bastille Day draws thousands to the prison walls in a wildly inaccurate recreation of the event that set off the French Revolution.

Every year since, Ms. McNally has played Marie Antoinette, the French queen who famously said, “Let them eat cake,” before losing her head to the revolutionaries. The performances change from year to year, addressing topical issues like the underfunded Philadelphia schools and the Hobby Lobby Supreme Court decision.

Original source: The New York Times
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The University of Pennsylvania was one of two institutions to win a Department of Defense contract to develop brain implants for memory deficits.

Their aim is to develop new treatments for traumatic brain injury, the signature wound of the wars in Iraq and in Afghanistan. Its most devastating symptom is the blunting of memory and reasoning. Scientists have found in preliminary studies that they can sharpen some kinds of memory by directly recording, and stimulating, circuits deep in the brain...

“A decade ago, only a handful of centers had the expertise to perform such real-time experiments in the context of first-rate surgery,” said Michael Kahana, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania and the recipient of one of the new contracts granted by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa. “Today, there are dozens of them, and more on the way; this area is suddenly hot.”

Original source: The New York Times
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Funeral for a Home, a project Flying Kite has covered extensively in the past, earned some national praise for its mission to memorialize a demolished home in Mantua. The Atlantic's CityLab attended and snapped some pictures.

The voices of the Mt. Olive Baptist Church choir echoed off the buildings on Saturday along the 3700 block of West Philadelphia’s Melon Street.

Their usual pulpit sits around the corner at 37th and Wallace. But this past weekend, they sang at the funeral of an unusual neighbor: a small, dilapidated rowhouse at 3711 Melon, torn down that night.

As the choir sang the gospel hymn, the words seemed fitting – “Precious memories, how they linger.” Soon, memories would be all that’s left of the two-story home, a narrow rowhouse that long ago lost its partners.

Original source: The Atlantic's CityLab
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Scientists at Philadelphia's Monell Chemical Senses Center take a look at how scents dictate behavior.

This effect of inducing others to drop everything and pay attention to me-me-me is apparently what we hope for with our own perfumes and colognes, at least to judge by the advertising. But scientists and perfumers seem to know remarkably little about which scent compounds — noxious or otherwise — produce particular effects, or why. We don’t seem to respond like those species in which a specific scent automatically elicits a fixed behavioral response, said Pamela Dalton, a scent researcher at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia.

Or at least we’re not aware if something like that is happening. A 2003 study at Monell found that scent samples from human males caused a neuroendocrine response in women, changing the length and timing of the menstrual cycle. Male scent also made the women less tense and more relaxed, at least when they didn’t know that what they were smelling was a man. (More predictably, a study this year reported that the scent of male, but not female, experimenters left lab rats feeling a stress level roughly equivalent to being restrained in a tube for 15 minutes.)

Ms. Dalton theorized that early perfumers might have adapted the sometimes unpleasant odors of other species as a way of taking on their power. Something like that certainly happens in the animal world.

Orginal source: The New York Times
Read the complete story here. 

The New York Times pens a love letter to local ice cream parlors.

In some circles, the nostalgic beauty of a quart of Yarnell’s Ozark Black Walnut in Arkansas or a scoop of Bassetts from Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia beats out any fancy high-fat, chef-spun ice cream.

"The best ice cream is what comes with experience," said Troy Moon, 47, a resident of Portland, Me., who holds a special fondness for pistachio ice cream from the regional brand Gifford’s, preferably eaten during a road trip though Maine.

It would be difficult to argue that any other food holds a stronger connection to memory than ice cream does. Ask most Americans about their favorite childhood ice cream and the descriptions will be vivid and specific.

Original source: The New York Times
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The Philadelphia Zoo is now home to a family of lions -- four cubs were born to a four-year-old mother. 

According to zoo staff, mother and cubs are doing well. Like newborn humans, lion cubs are essentially helpless, relying on their mother for care. Tajiri has been in almost constant physical contact with her cubs since their birth, and appears confident and relaxed as a first-time mother. Zoo staff continues to monitor them by video camera during this crucial time, giving Tajiri almost complete privacy in her off-exhibit den.

“We’re very excited to welcome Tajiri’s new cubs, the first lions born at Philadelphia Zoo in 18 years,” said Kevin Murphy, Philadelphia Zoo’s general curator. “We work with the Species Survival Plan® (SSP) breeding program of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA), whose goal is to manage populations of threatened, endangered and other species across AZA zoos, to maintain long-term genetic and demographic viability. This birth, Tajiri’s first, is a significant contribution to the lion population in the U.S., and we are cautiously optimistic as Tajiri continues to be a fantastic mother.”

Orginal source: Newark Star-Ledger
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Local visual artist Christopher Cairns and composer Michael Hersch collaborate on a new opera.

The visual artist Christopher Cairns’s sprawling studio near Philadelphia is filled with installations that include piles of skulls and forlorn figures slumped despairingly in chairs. Sculptures that evoke the victims of Pompeii are strewn across the floor near the white wall, which is made of crumbling bricks and shards of glass and will be replicated in the sets for “On the Threshold of Winter,” Michael Hersch’s new opera. Mr. Cairns’s eerie art seems an aptly somber pairing for the dark-hued monodrama, which will receive its premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Wednesday, Mr. Hersch’s birthday, with Tito Muñoz conducting the ensemble Nunc.

“I hope the audience feels some kind of connection,” Mr. Hersch said, “and that a potentially unfamiliar musical framework doesn’t obscure the human drama the music attempts to serve.”

Mr. Hersch, 42, weathered several traumas before composing the opera. In 2009, his friend Mary O’Reilly — a historian he met in 2001 in Berlin — died at the age of 45 from ovarian cancer. And in 2007, he received his own cancer diagnosis. “It seemed so implausible in light of our relationship,” he said. “I found the whole thing like a bad joke, and I told her."

He is now healthy, “but there is always that fear that hangs around and over you and never goes away,” he said.

Original source: The New York Times
Read the complete story here.

This New York institution is opening up a location on Broad Street. Oh, happy day!

Last night Douglas Quint and Bryan Petroff announced that they were bringing their beloved NYC ice cream shop Big Gay Ice Cream to Philadelphia....

As reported by Philly.com, Quint and Petroff will be opening at the SouthStar Lofts. They liked this location for the fact that it made them part of a "culinary neighborhood." "Something that we always try to do when we choose locations is make sure that we're amongst good company ... [In Philadelphia], we'll be in walking distance to Marc Vetri's restaurants, Kevin Sbraga's, and Jose Garces' restaurants." They've been working on securing the lease for the Philadelphia shop since the beginning of the year.

With an August or September opening, the Philadelphia location will be opening around the same time as the upcoming Los Angeles location. Petroff says that project got delayed due to some trouble with the city, but that construction will soon be underway. Petroff, who moved to Los Angeles recently, will be overseeing the LA build out while Quint works on getting the Philadelphia shop open.

Original source: Eater
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The yearly FOX network dance competition aired its Philadelphia auditions last week. Art Museum steps? Check. Murals? Check. Mummers? Check. You can watch the whole thing here. 

Original source: FOX
 

When it comes to major U.S. destinations, Philadelphia's hotels come out on top.

Hotels in Philadelphia are the best rated among all major destination in the United States. This finding is the takeaway of a recent survey conducted by TravelMag.com. The survey compared 30 destinations in the United States based on the customer reviews their hotels have received over the past 12 months.Specifically, the survey compiled all 3- and 4-star hotel ratings awarded by guests after their stay on the hotel booking site Expedia. These ratings, which run from 1 to 5, were then categorized into positive (4 or 5), neutral (3) or negative (1 or 2).

Original source: Travel
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