The first cup of coffee that 2012 U.S. Barista champion Katie Carguilo served tasted rich and flavorful to me, but it wasn’t up to Carguilo’s high standards. “This coffee is really chocolatey, really nutty, but it tastes a little bit too bitter in the finish,” she explained. “The grounds were too fine, so the water couldn’t get through, and it overextracted the coffee.”

coffee

Kurt Vonnegut’s 1963 novel Cat’s Cradle, a central plot element is called ice-nine. The substance, created in a lab, was made up of familiar H2O molecules, but they were locked in a novel crystalline structure that froze solid at room temperature.

Vonnegut, science fiction, science

“As for your term papers, I should like them to be both cynical and religious. I want you to adore the Universe, to be easily delighted, but to be prompt as well with impatience with those artists who offend your own deep notions of what the Universe is or should be.” // Suzanne McConnell, one of Kurt Vonnegut’s students in his “Form of Fiction” course at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, saved this assignment, explaining that Vonnegut “wrote his course assignments in the form of letters, as a way of speaking personally to each member of the class.” The result is part assignment, part letter, part guide to writing and life.

Vonnegut