Can Bar Kabawa's Caribbean Patties Become the Next Momofuku Pork Bun?
That was my question after a recent visit to Bar Kabawa, the just-opened bar from the Momofuku group, which specializes in two things: rum drinks and patties to eat with them. Chang launched the famed brand in 2004 with the opening of Momofuku Noodle Bar; the place kicked off a worldwide obsession for Chinese steamed pork buns.
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San Francisco Chronicle
2 hours ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
Review: Spy thriller ‘World Pacific' turns wartime intrigue into farce, folly and adventure
No one is to be trusted in the fantastic, fanciful and often extremely funny novel, 'World Pacific,' from San Francisco writer Peter Mann. Much like Mann's debut novel, 'The Torqued Man,' this second, equally farcical novel, revolves around real-world events that touch, at least tangentially, on World War II. But this time, the setting, to which the novel's title 'World Pacific' refers, leads several dubious and unreliable characters toward the 1940 World's Fair on Treasure Island. One of these characters, and perhaps the most dubious of them all, is Richard 'Dicky' Halifax, a self-proclaimed author-adventurer, very much in the spirit of the real-life Richard Halliburton, who disappeared in 1939 in the same manner as Dicky does in the first few pages of this novel, while on an ill-prepared sailing journey from Hong Kong to San Francisco on a Chinese junk. The excursion is, in part, funded by a subscription service for young readers. In Dicky's case this subscription service would be 'The Dicky Halifax Junior Adventurers Club,' a series of letters that not only weaves in many an inappropriate reference to Dicky's crotch, but also operates as Dicky's central voice within the novel. Written in a folksy devil-may-care style, these letters, presented as chapters within 'World Pacific,' highlight Dicky's escape from many a tight spot. Or as Dicky writes in an early chapter, leading to his current predicament of being lost at sea: 'Dear boys, This is where the story starts to get hairy. Of all the close scrapes I've had, all the times I've blundered into a hornets' nest or was caught taking pictures of military installations on Gibraltar or got dragged to a pretty lady's bed only to find I was flaccid as a gym sock, this one took the cake.' The writing, particularly in the Junior Adventurers Club chapters, feels wonderfully inventive, often playing with clichés of the period and then elevating them through Dicky's individual voice and upbeat, foolish optimism. But Dicky is certainly not alone in this novel. While the connection to a talented émigré painter of Jewish descent, Hildegard 'Hilde' Rauch, feels at first tenuous, it soon becomes clear from a letter addressed to Hilde from her comatose brother that the now-lost-at-sea and presumed dead Dicky, might just be the key to understanding his current state. Or, as the suicide note from her brother so eloquently puts it, 'I just can't bear to live in a world without Dick.' Besides what becomes a sizable number of euphemisms and allusions (one, by sheer absurdity, that kept me laughing for a good five minutes), there is a plot to this novel, and a very twisty one at that. For, even as Hilde searches for answers and Dicky stumbles from one madcap adventure to the next, another character — Simon Faulk, a British intelligence officer on the hunt for Nazi spies and who also harbors a serious grudge against author-adventurer Dicky Halifax — takes the stage. All of which confirms that, along with being a quixotic tale of adventure complete with truth-telling sidekicks and wild goose chases, 'World Pacific' is, like Mann's first novel, a spy thriller of ingenious quality.
New York Post
4 hours ago
- New York Post
Pop Mart shares surge 12% after CEO says mini Labubus could launch as soon as this week
Shares of Labubu maker Pop Mart surged nearly 12% Wednesday after the company announced it would soon launch mini versions of its wildly-popular dolls as early as this week. Pop Mart CEO Wang Ning said during an earnings call that the new mini Labubu monsters will be made to hang off phones. The stock, which trades on the Hong Kong exchange, soared 11.9% to close at $40.75 — the highest level since Pop Mart went public in 2020. 3 Pop Mart announced it would soon launch mini Labubu dolls. AP Previous new releases from Pop Mart have sold out in minutes, causing the website to crash. Wang, who founded the toymaker in 2010, said Pop Mart is on track to meet its revenue goal of 20 billion yuan, or $2.78 billion, and that $4.18 billion 'this year should also be quite easy.' While most of Pop Mart's revenue comes from China, it has seen rapid growth in the Americas region in the first half of this year – with revenue jumping 1,142% from the year before. 'I think for overseas markets we're still very positive, and we also believe there's still very broad space for growth,' Wang said. Pop Mart currently has about 40 stores in the US, and it plans to launch a phase of 'relatively rapid store openings' – with 10 more US shops to open by the end of this year. The Chinese toymaker said Tuesday that its profit soared nearly 400% in the first half of the year. 3 People line up for the opening of Germany's first shop for Labubu dolls. AP Shares in the company have jumped more than 200% so far this year, pushing the Beijing-based company's market cap to over $46 billion – dwarfing Mattel's $5.7 billion value. The Labubu craze has been partially fueled by Pop Mart's move to sell them in 'blind boxes' – so shoppers don't know the exact color of their Labubu until they open the package. Videos of these 'unboxings' have gone viral online, and celebrities like K-pop singer Lisa, Rihanna and even soccer legend David Beckham have jumped on the trend – dangling Labubus from their designer bags and car keys. Charlie Gasparino has his finger on the pulse of where business, politics and finance meet Sign up to receive On The Money by Charlie Gasparino in your inbox every Thursday. Thanks for signing up! Enter your email address Please provide a valid email address. By clicking above you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Never miss a story. Check out more newsletters The dolls have been sold out in stores around the world, and resales can fetch hundreds or even thousands of dollars on online marketplaces like eBay. That's created a market for knockoffs called 'Lafufus' – though US regulators issued an urgent warning Monday that the fakes 'break apart easily' and can 'pose a serious risk of choking and death to young children.' 3 Labubu dolls have been sold out in stores around the world. REUTERS The demand for Labubus helped Pop Mart post net profit of $636 million, a 396.5% spike compared to the same period in 2024 – handily beating estimates of a 350% rise over the entire year, the company said Tuesday. Revenue skyrocketed 204.4% to roughly $1.93 billion, far stronger than the 62% growth seen in the same period last year.
National Geographic
13 hours ago
- National Geographic
What do your dreams reveal about you? It depends where you're from.
Lu Chin's mid-16th century painting entitled "Zhuangzi Dreaming of a Butterfly." Zhuangzi was an influential Chinese philosopher who lived around the 4th century BCE during the Warring States Period, a period corresponding to the philosophical summit of China's Hundred Schools of Thought. Photograph by CPA Media Pte Ltd/Alamy Stock Your dreamscape is the land where anything is possible. One minute you're walking through a beautiful meadow—and the next you're falling to your death over a cliffside. Your teeth may fall out for no apparent reason, or you may see a snake slither out the corner of your eye. The average adult spends roughly a third of their life asleep, which means there are plenty of opportunities for our minds to experience these personalized dreamscapes. But do dreams actually mean anything? That depends on who you ask. 'Anthropologists say that if you understand what a given group believes about dreaming, you have understood their whole [culture],' says Robin Sheriff, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of New Hampshire. Western psychologists like Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung have popularized some of the most well-known ideas about dream interpretation, but these doesn't necessarily align with how experts in fields like anthropology and folklore understand dreams. Here's what you need to know about dream interpretation and how your culture may influence what a dream means to you. What is dream interpretation? Dream interpretation can be traced back to ancient Rome and ancient Egypt, but Sheriff says the practice likely has roots in prehistoric cultures without written records. Before dream science, also known as oneirology, was developed, dream interpretation was a cultural practice that could connect people to cultural ancestors or spirits. 'Dreams held deep significance in traditional Chinese culture…particularly within a supernatural worldview where ghosts, spirits, and ancestral souls were believed to actively participate in human affairs,' said Ze Hong, an assistant professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Macau who has researched Chinese dream interpretation from an evolutionary perspective. Dreams were often regarded as meaningful channels of communication from the spiritual realm, capable of revealing hidden truths or predicting future events, Hong says. In ancient Rome, records show that dreams were seen as divine communications from the gods, and dream oracles played an important role in interpretation. Hong says this kind of practice also existed during China's Zhou Dynasty, which lasted between 1046 B.C. to 256 B.C. Hong explains that oneiromancy, the practice of divinatory dream interpretation, became widely used to provide insight into personal relationships, illness, and even political decisions. However, this practice has declined in popularity over Chinese history, said Hong, particularly by the end of the Imperial era in the early 1900s. The connection between dreams and the spiritual realm is something that anthropologist Roger Lohmann also found while studying the dreaming culture in Papua New Guinea. Though Westerners might view dreams as purely metaphorical, Lohmann, an associate professor of anthropology at Trent University in Ontario, Canada, says dreams in Papua New Guinea can be interpreted as a parallel journey that your soul went on while you slept. This meant that dreams could be interpreted as being prophetic or revealing hidden information, Lohmann said. He recalls sleeping in a village near the border of Indonesia and waking up from a nightmare about his research notes catching fire. (This is the story of the world's oldest nightmare.) 'I interpreted that [dream] as an expression of my anxiety about that something going wrong with my computer,' he said. '[But] I told the story to a man who was visiting me that morning and he said 'Oh, you better watch out. Be very careful with the fireplace,' because he interpreted that dream to mean something that's likely to happen in the future.' The guidelines for interpreting dreams in Western cultures today typically come from psychologists Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. The father of psychoanalytic theory, Freud wrote in 1900 that dreams represent the dormant wishes of our subconscious and could be a way to carry out repressed instinctual, or even hypersexual, desires. Over the next six decades, psychologist Carl Jung proposed his own interpretation of dream theory that says dreams might be a conversation between our conscious and subconscious selves. Jung, who had a complex friendship with Freud, believed that instead of revealing repressed desires, our dreams are meant to process our waking problems and find potential solutions. (The brilliant women of psychiatry who were overshadowed by Freud and Jung.) Jung's dream theory also includes the idea of a collective subconscious, which suggests dreams can be interpreted in a symbolic way through distinct archetypes, such as the hero, the mother, and the trickster. According to Jung, these archetypes could be found across cultures and had universal meanings. However, this theory is quite different from what anthropologists have found when studying the importance of dreams and their meaning across cultural contexts. Interpreting dream symbols across cultures Depending on what culture you are dreaming in, common themes or symbols can have drastically different meanings. Take a snake, for example. In Western cultures familiar with Freud, dreaming of a snake may be interpreted as something potentially sexual, Lohmann suggested, or Jung himself wrote of snakes as representing power or danger, declaring that a 'state of instinctual hell is represented as a snake with three heads.' Hindu interpretations, however, suggest that dreaming of snake could foretell wealth and fertility—if you're eating it in the dream, at least. Hopi and Pueblo tribes in the American Southwest also link fertility to snake dreams, although particularly in relation to agricultural cycles and the fertility of land. On the other hand, Pentecostal Christian communities in Zambia may interpret that snake in your dreams as proof of the devil. There isn't a set interpretation of snakes in the traditional Chinese practice, said Hong—Chinese dream interpretations were more likely to be concerned with more culturally significant symbols such as dragons or suns, signs of divine favor. But some historical documents suggest that a pregnant women dreaming of snakes once would have predicted the birth of a son—or, contradictorily, also a daughter. Do dreams mean anything? A person will have countless dreams in their lifetime, but that doesn't necessarily mean that all dreams are equally important. By the end of the Imperial period, which was right around when Freud and Jung were forming their dream theory, Hong said that it became popular to view the origins of dreams as supernatural and related to a person's psychological state. 'For instance, dreams caused by 'overthinking during the day' were often dismissed as uninterpretable and meaningless,' he said. (You can learn to control your dreams with lucid dreaming. Here's how.) In the Western tradition, how much or how little a dream means is up to the person having or interpreting the dream. 'Dreams, like poetry and art, offer ways to think about human experience,' Sherrif said. 'There may be better or worse interpretations or analyses but we have no objective means of ascertaining their accuracy.'
