Almost exactly 24 hours later—Night Two—I was seated at the poured-concrete, U-shaped counter of Indigo awaiting a dish called Homogenization of Mandingos. It hadn’t been easy to find the restaurant, located in what looked from the road like the unoccupied half of a convenience-store strip mall in Northline, well outside The Loop. Once inside, I found a warm but spare room with a cinder-block wall painted copper-orange. Like everything else at Indigo, the room was the conceptual and physical construction of its precocious young chef, Jonny Rhodes, and his wife, Chana. Rhodes grew up a half-mile away, served time in the Marines, and then got his cooking education from a series of kitchen stints and what he calls “YouTube University.” He imagines Indigo as the first stage of an oasis in the area’s food desert, that will come to include a greenhouse and micro-farm on the property as well as the adjacent grocery store. For now, he is content serving three tasting menus—Carnivore, Herbivore, and Omnivore—which function as his own sometimes impressionistic, sometimes literal history of the African diaspora. Rhodes introduces his dishes with discursive monologues of context. We had already eaten Descendants of Igbo, a tribute to the African yam made with pureed sweet potato and smoked pecan butter. Also, a dollop of sweet crabmeat lolling in a warm pool of milk and butter that bore some tangential relationship to the dress of assimilation, called Turtle Necks & Durags. Rhodes is a charming and magnetic lecturer, but also a gifted cook, with a deft grasp of how to balance high concepts with equally compelling technique and flavor. Now it was time for the Mandingos. The origin of that loaded term, Rhodes explained, was in a West African hunting-and-gathering people. Only in America, where the slaves who shared their physique were simultaneously prized and feared for their strength and power, did it become a racial epithet.

Lix’s novel takes its cue (and its place on this list) from a less gifted but still oft beloved member of the Alien franchise: Alien3. Like Alien3, Lix’s novel takes place in a prison that finds itself caught between a prisoner rebellion and a deadly, evil threat from the darkness of space. Sanctuary is a prison for super powered teens too dangerous to be kept on earth, and Kenzie has trained her whole life to become one of its elite guards. At least until she’s caught in a riot and finds herself trapped within, and her escape plans are sidelined by something far more dangerous than the inmates.

The Louisville Bats, the city’s minor league baseball team that’s a Triple-A affiliate of the Cincinnati Reds, will break out new jerseys and hats and become the Derby City Mint Juleps twice this month as Kentucky Derby season ramps up. The team will wear the new gear Saturday, the same day as Thunder Over Louisville – the biggest fireworks show in the country – and again April 27, a week before the Run for the Roses. Four Roses will offer $3 bourbon flights during the latter game, and the first 2,000 fans to show up will be given Derby at the Diamond vintage glasses. The Bats tried this last year as well, rebranding as the Louisville Mashers for a night in a promotion with Evan Williams Bourbon. More information and merchandise are available at derbycitymintjuleps.com.

Even though so many of my friends’ kids had slept like champs in the Rock ’n Play, I knew that I shouldn’t leave my son in there for long periods of time, and, on some deeper, unspoken level, I knew that I shouldn’t put him in it at all. Those safe-sleep guidelines were branded on my brain. But should and shouldn’t can take on weird new gradations of meaning during the fog of early parenthood. When my son was six weeks old, he was hospitalized for three days with a fever that settled into a bad, persistent cold. He was horribly congested for months; during that period, I doubt he ever slept flat on his back for more than an hour or two at a time, because sinus pressure and nasal drip would leave him coughing and struggling. Where he really slept was in his stroller, or his bouncer, or his carrier, or on top of me or his dad, or in the Rock ’n Play. He wasn’t a fussy baby—he wanted to sleep, and I wanted to help him. No matter how shattered a new parent might be, her metrics of risk assessment can remain largely rational: she may be weighing the roughly 0.00068-per-cent chance that her child will die in a Rock ’n Play versus the extremely high chance that her child will not sleep unless placed in a Rock ’n Play.

In addition to choosing the right equipment, a vital element of any successful robotic grinding, sanding, or finishing application is the control of the contact forces. Poorly-controlled process forces lead to inconsistent quality and frequent rework. Human operators instinctively use their own sense of touch to apply constant force while accounting for part variations. For robots, among many methods, forces can be controlled passively using pneumatic devices, or actively with feedback from multi-axis force and torque sensors. This session focuses on examples of passive force control as well as active force feedback implemented to monitor and control robot motion for successful grinding and finishing. Learn about the possibilities, review the components of a successful application, and discuss how complementary technologies give robots a sense of touch in grinding and finishing applications.

Removal is usually a messy and laborious process, with or without asbestos. The material must be wetted down and scraped and the underlying wallboard wiped clean. Once the popcorn is gone, the ceiling often must be repaired with joint compound and repainted. Even if there’s no asbestos, you probably should hire a drywall or painting contractor for the job. (For a glimpse of the process, visit www.ronhazleton.com.)

A paradox of the Rock ’n Play, and of infant “sleep aides” and “sleep guides” in general, is that, to some extent, these products are intended to solve a problem that should not be solved. No infant should sleep all night long, on an incline of any degree, because she needs to eat every few hours; what’s more, a baby who sleeps poorly when flat on her back—which is to say, many or most babies—is also a baby who is at lower risk for Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, or SIDS. (SIDS deaths fell precipitously after 1992, when the A.A.P. issued its flat-on-your-back sleep guidelines.) “Babies are not supposed to sleep through the night,” Rachel Moon, the chair of the A.A.P. Task Force on SIDS, told me. “Putting a baby on her stomach, and all these things to make babies ‘sleep better,’ quote-unquote, are dangerous because they make babies sleep more deeply, and, with SIDS, when they sleep more deeply, they can’t wake up.” Moon added that infant sleep is regarded as much more of a crisis in the U.S. than in any other country, owing to a lack of both paid parental leave and extended-family support networks. “When they have to get up in the morning and function for work, of course mothers and fathers get desperate for sleep,” she said.

Julie Cassetina, a spokesperson for Wayfair, also described black Christmas trees as attention getters that come with a chance for more creativity than traditional trees.

Another vulnerable area of any business is the administration department. Responsible for a business’ financial planning, record keeping and logistics, an administrator is often the backbone of an organisation. An administrator’s role is therefore crucial for avoiding a data breach, as if any of their responsibilities are performed incorrectly sensitive data could quickly be obtained by malicious third parties.

Sam Minervino handled the bulk of the cooking at Sam’s Harbor Lunch on Portland’s waterfront. It closed in February, 1988. Staff photo by John Ewing

Red Coins 7-9: Follow the tape trail heater skelter up to the top with the three tongue enemies to find these three coins in a cloud you can pop. 

The eldest child of an engineer father and a psychiatrist mother, Zilhão was inclined to subversiveness from an early age. The Portugal of his youth was a country emaciated by 48 years of dictatorship and five centuries of colonial empire. Young João rejected the constraints of the fascist regimes of António de Oliveira Salazar and Marcello Caetano, and joined the student protests against them. He was a high school senior when Caetano was overthrown in an army coup.