Bulgarian cuisine tends to be meat-heavy, but the popular Smokini (12) includes many vegan and vegetarian options as well as traditional staples. Parmesan quinoa bites are moreish, while glazed beef tongues beside pureed parsnip riff on a Balkan classic dish. Sit on the covered top-floor terrace. Mains from 8 lev (£3.50).

John Harder and his mother Helen Harder, both of Portland, enjoy pepperoni pizzas at Pizza Villa while talking with new co-owner Rob Minervino. Staff photo by Derek Davis

LANGE: That’s a lot of people. It feels dangerous to me. I don’t mean to be a conspiracy theorist, but do we really understand what any of this stuff is? It makes you want to retire to the farm.

Sixty thousand years ago, a narrow fissure opened up in the Amargosa Valley, releasing water pooled deep in the earth and creating Devils Hole, the opening to an underwater cavern. Scientists disagree over just how it happened—whether by way of underground tunnels, ancient floods or receding waters—but several desert fish were separated from the larger population and trapped in Devils Hole. There, a tiny sub-population—the Devils Hole pupfish (Cyprinodon diabolis)—evolved in extreme isolation for tens of thousands of years, eventually, according to scientific consensus, becoming an entirely new species.

Neither sibling had plans to follow in their father’s footsteps. Tom Minervino studied political science and journalism, then worked as a sportswriter for a few small Maine newspapers and as a freelance writer. Meg Minervino studied Spanish, and health and exercise, then moved to Atlanta, where she became a personal trainer. When she grew homesick for family and moved back to Maine, her father told her he could really use her at Samuel’s, so she started tending bar there and managed the place for him.

Red Coin 14: Spit the red koopa out after you go through the next door flap and it will pop a coin-holding shy guy on the way back.

BKN-76ERS-NETS:PHI — The 76ers are one win away from advancing to the Eastern Conference semifinals.

Waterborne basecoats are much different from solvent. Not only do they require dedicated waterborne equipment (including a specific paint gun), but the drying process is totally different, too. Solvent systems are more prone to trapping solvent during drying, which can stay in the paint film for months, or even years, causing problems.

“At the beginning, people hated me for this,” she said. “One day, I was catering a party for a politician, and the women took off their aprons and left.” Faced with her crew’s insurrection, Gachechiladze almost gave up on the gig. “But the minister said, ‘I will close your restaurant if you don’t do those fucking elarji balls.’ So I did them. And then, five years later, I went to a Georgian restaurant in Ukraine and what are they serving? My elarji balls.”

For his first papercraft model, he picked a Commodore 64, the very first home computer he used as a kid. He went on to include Nintendo Gamecubes in four colors, the Amstrad CPC 464 and the Apple II, complete with a screen featuring the classic game Oregon Trail.

A couple of incidents the next day deepened this mood. I was on my way to Tromsø, in Norway. To get there without making an extended southern detour to Oslo, I had to take a three-hour taxi ride from Inari to the Norwegian village of Lakselv, which has an airport. As we drove northwest, the landscape and the sky merged into a white haze, with only the dark-etched undersides of branches to distinguish one realm from the other. It was beautiful in an unearthly way, as if the world had become a silver-nitrate photograph of itself. Road signs grew fewer and farther between, with Sámi place-names appearing under the Finnish. The road was covered with packed snow and the driver was going fast. On a long, straight, desolate stretch, we came over a rise and saw five reindeer galloping straight toward us. The driver cursed in English: “Shit.” I braced myself, felt a slam, and saw one of the animals thrown into the air. It had antlers, and, as the previous night’s guide had informed us, a deer that still had them in late winter was female, and probably pregnant. We backed up and found it lying, dead, in the snow. The taxi was dented but drivable, and after reporting the accident we continued on our way, both of us badly shaken.

Overlapping with Artistic Encounters with Indigenous America is the Met’s Art of Native America (on view till October 6), the largest-ever show of its kind to be held at the museum. Drawing from the extensive collection of Valerie and Charles Diker, Art of Native America provides a millennia-spanning survey of Native American art, but its primary focus is the century-and-a-half period of major conquest. At the start of that period, Indians occupied almost the whole continent; by its end, most of them lived on one of a few hundred reservations. The 116 works on display in the exhibition represent fifty different cultures and most major indigenous art forms—everything from a basket woven in the 1930s by the Pima artist Lucy Makil to an ivory toggle from the Bering Strait region, whose surface was finely incised with a wolf’s face around the second century A.D.