That Music You’re Dancing To? It’s Code

On a computer, Sonic Pi looks like any other coding language. It’s a mess of numbers, parentheticals, punctuation marks and keywords, splattered over an LCD screen. But offscreen — and through a set of quality speakers — those keystrokes produce music you might dance to on a Friday night. Some artists have eschewed traditional acoustic…

Baratunde Thurston’s Work Diary: At the Intersection of Tech, Race and Society

Since publishing “How to Be Black,” his best-selling 2012 satirical memoir about black identity in America, Baratunde Thurston has built himself into a one-man multimedia company. In recent years, his thoughts on race and technology have powered email newsletters (“Recommentunde,” with tips about what to read and stream), podcasts (“Spit,” about the surprising implications of…

Take It to 11

Good morning. I’ve spent the week making like Danny Meyer, the restaurateur, who many nights makes it his business to visit the dining rooms he maintains across the city, even as his Shake Shack empire expands across the nation. Of course I don’t own any restaurants. (That would be hilarious.) But this week The Times…

5 Stops on Germany’s Whiskey Trail

Among drinks enthusiasts, Germany is famous for producing some of the world’s best beers. And a few of the country’s valleys have attained cult status among wine lovers — in particular, Mosel, Rheingau and the Ahr. German schnapps are pretty much a known quantity, while the country’s herbal bitters have an even broader recognition, or…

Sasheer Zamata Finds Humor at the A.C.L.U.

Sasheer Zamata, the actress, stand-up comedian and former “Saturday Night Live” player, doesn’t think of herself as a political comedian. “I talk about my life, and being a woman, and being a black woman in America,” she said. But on a bright morning in early fall, she tucked her leopard-print high heels under the table…