Entertainment
Seven Lessons I Learned From Ina Garten’s Memoir
Ina Garten’s memoir — Be Ready When the Luck Happens — is out this week, and it made me realize something…
I discovered Ina in my mid-twenties, just as I was figuring out my way around a kitchen. I used her seminal first cookbook, The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook, so often that many of those recipes feel like members of my family: Coconut Cupcakes, Turkey Meatloaf, Roasted Carrots, Outrageous Brownies. Recipes that are famous enough that I don’t even have to elaborate, because I imagine you can picture them, too. I also distinctly remember how different the book felt from Martha Stewart and Gourmet magazine and other big food names of that era — Ina’s food was messy and real, without making any sacrifices in quality.
But Ina’s path to Barefoot Contessa Superstardom didn’t play out in a straight line. Raised by demanding, controlling parents — a joyless, emotionally bereft mother and an abusive father prone to unsettling bouts of anger — her life changed, as most of her fans know, when she met her famously adoring husband Jeffrey. She was only 16, visiting her brother at Dartmouth College, when Jeffrey, also a student there, spied her on the college green, and “in an instant was smitten.” The two of them married young, moved from military base to to base (Jeffrey was ROTC), spent a formative summer camping through Europe, and supported each other as their careers skyrocketed, often living apart in different cities and even continents to make things work. One of the more notable revelations of the book was that the couple separated briefly, right after Ina bought the Barefoot Contessa specialty store in the Hamptons and struggled to redefine her role as an equal partner in their marriage. There were other surprising tidbits — she can fly planes (!) — but for me, the most compelling thing about the memoir was the way she discussed her philosophy around food.
Good food is simple food.
Ina seemed to fall in love with quality-ingredient driven meals when she and Jeffrey camped their way through Europe in 1972 (above). She describes the perfect sandwich: “In the United States, a sandwich [was] two slices of bread from a plastic bag… Instead, the French take a length of a crusty baguette, one thin slice of delicious ham or prosciutto, maybe a little cheese, maybe a little butter or Dijon mustard, and voilà! The best sandwich you ever ate…the delicacy of it all is perfect.”
Three main flavors, max.
I haven’t been able to get this rule out of my head since I read it. “I don’t think there should be more than three prominent flavors in any recipe,” Ina writes. “My brain just can’t process more than that without becoming overloaded.”
But really bring out those flavors.
The goal is to help each ingredient taste like the best version of itself. “How can I make chicken more ‘chicken-y’ or chocolate more ‘chocolate-y’?” she asks. This is something that most cooks know inherently, but it helps to hear it again: “Almost every recipe, whether savory or sweet, needs an edge. Savory things tend to need something acidic, and sweet things tend to need something bitter to give them more depth of flavor.”
There’s a strategic way to enjoyably entertain.
The first time she and Jeffrey tried to have a “grown-up” party, they invited 20 people to brunch, none of whom knew each other –“bad idea.” Everyone sat in a big circle in the living room, saying very little. “To make things worse,” she writes, “I had decided to make an omelet for each person, which had to be prepared one at a time, so I was stuck in the kitchen for the entire party… while Jeffrey was in the living room trying desperately to keep the conversation interesting. Total disaster!”
Brightness is crucial, for both taste and visuals.
“Why is [chicken salad] always so beige?” she asked herself when she was developing a recipe for the Hamptons store. “I started with grilled lemon chicken and added raw sugar snap peas, julienned red and yellow peppers, freshly squeezed lemon juice, and good California olive oil. The colors were bright, the ingredients were fresh, and the lemon juice gave it all an ‘edge’ that made everything taste better.” (How good does that sound right now?)
When it comes to quality, be ruthless.
Ina is obsessed with using high-quality ingredients in her cooking, but it’s also a theme of any work she puts into the world. On choosing what recipes to feature, she asks herself: “Would a customer get out of bed, put on their clothes, get into a car, drive to town, find a parking space, and walk to the store to buy this dish? That was a hard test to pass, and I wanted only those recipes in the store and the book.”
Be yourself.
One of the more entertaining stories in the book is when her friend, the famous photographer Richard Avedon tells her that the design of her first cookbook, was “the worst I’ve ever seen.” Which made sense, sort of. His style was stark and minimalist, the opposite of Ina’s style: happy, casual, bountiful. She listened to his criticisms — who wouldn’t? It was Richard Avedon! — ultimately realizing that the reason for her success was that she wasn’t trying to be anyone else. She was only trying to be Ina.
Thank you for the inspiration, Ina. We love your cookbooks and your memoir.
P.S. Coming home dinners and the embarrassing food blunders I’ve made along the way.
(Photos courtesy of Ina Garten.)
Entertainment
Everything we expect from Samsung’s July event (Fold 8, watches, and glasses!)
Samsung’s next big event could reveal foldables, smartwatches, and its first Android XR glasses.
on
The biggest stories of the day delivered to your inbox.
Thanks for signing up. See you at your inbox!
Entertainment
AI just disproved a major math problem. A mathematician explains.
While the rest of the world was watching the World Cup on Sunday evening, mathematician Levent Alpöge casually announced on X that he had used Anthropic’s Fable 5 to disprove the Jacobian conjecture.
This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.
The Jacobian conjecture is a long-standing open problem in algebraic geometry that’s bedeviled highly accomplished mathematicians for almost 90 years. It was included in “Smale’s problems,” a list of unresolved math problems put forward by mathematician Stephen Smale in 1998.
But that proved no obstacle for Fable 5, Anthropic’s latest frontier AI model. (You may remember Fable 5 as the public version of Claude Mythos Preview, the AI model that Anthropic says has such advanced cybersecurity capabilities that it was too dangerous for public release.)
Alpöge is part of Harvard’s Society of Fellows, and his Linkedin profile notes an affiliation with Anthropic. We’ve reached out to Anthropic with questions about Alpöge’s work.
Meanwhile, for those of us who don’t understand polynomial functions from n-dimensional space, the question is: Does this represent a major breakthrough in artificial intelligence, or mathematics, or neither?
“This did not cause me to update my priors about what AI can and can’t do,” professor and mathematician Andrew Blumberg told Mashable. “This is exactly the kind of thing I would expect AI to be able to do. If there was a counterexample that was concise and easy to state that people haven’t found because it’s a pain to search through all this stuff, AI will find it.”
Blumberg, who has a joint appointment in mathematics and computer science at Columbia University, is involved in the First Proof project, an effort to test the capabilities of frontier large language models in solving research-level mathematics. So, it’s safe to say he understands mathematics and AI better than most of us.
Mashable Light Speed
‘You want to learn something from the answer’
Providing a counterexample to the Jacobian conjecture is still a significant achievement for AI in mathematics, Blumberg notes. But he also says there’s a big difference between providing a positive proof for a major math problem and providing a single counterexample that disproves it. Here’s the metaphor Blumberg used to explain.
“Suppose that Moses came down from the mountain with tablets, and on the tablet was written, ‘Cancer can be cured.’ Would you care? You don’t just want the answer to the question. You want to learn something from the answer. And the reason Smale thought this problem was important is because he thought that if we solved it, we would understand more things about the about the way nature is structured.”
In other words, Blumberg says, “this counterexample tells us essentially nothing. It’s just, you know, there are a lot of polynomials, and it’s hard for people to check them all, but it’s not hard for machines.”
The Jacobian conjecture isn’t the only math problem AI has tackled in recent months. OpenAI announced in May an “internal model” had disproved the Erdős unit distance conjecture, a central conjecture in discrete geometry.
However, in that case, the result was more productive, Blumberg says. That’s because OpenAI didn’t just provide a counterexample — but a disproof of the problem itself.
“The disproof there already has led to interesting things because experts in the area unpacked what was going on in the disproof and then used it to do other things,” Blumberg says.
And that’s not necessarily the case with the Jacobian conjecture counterexample, he adds — while conceding he’s not expert enough to see if there’s something special about the structure of the counterexample that we can learn from. “But it’s not in and of itself interesting.”
Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.
Entertainment
macOS 27 Beta has a secret Siri AI interface. How to try it.
You’ve waited long enough for Apple’s relaunch of Siri as an AI assistant, and now you can finally try out the Siri AI beta for iOS. But, psst, don’t tell anyone, but there’s even more Siri AI for you to try out with a secret Siri AI interface on Mac.
A Reddit user on the r/MacOSBeta subreddit has discovered a “hidden lightweight UI” for Siri AI in the macOS 27 Golden Gate beta. This feature basically provides users with an array of AI tools, presented in a pop-up menu whenever text is highlighted.
The Siri AI pop-up interface includes AI tools such as Rewrite, Proofread, “How does this sound?,” and “Edit with Siri.” There are also menu options for summarization and providing bullet points from the selected text.
Siri AI can also provide a selection of specific tools dependent on the context of what’s selected. For example, highlighting a phone number provides a pop-up to “Add to contacts” or when selecting an address the pop-up offers an “Open in Maps” option. There are tools for creating calendar events, composing messages and emails, and tracking flights and packages as well.
Why is the feature hidden? Well, as MacRumors points out, the Siri AI interface in macOS 27 developer beta 3 and public beta 1 is simply an unfinished product. Certain features don’t yet work how they’re supposed to. Some options don’t work at all. Clearly, Apple has yet to make it available because it’s simply not ready.
Mashable Light Speed
However, Reddit users say there is a way to turn the interface on in the macOS Golden Gate Beta. According to Redditor pdfu, if users running the macOS 27 beta simply need to open up the Terminal and input a few lines of code.
Please note: We do not recommend running terminal instructions or changing important OS files unless you fully understand what you’re doing. We have not tested these terminal instructions, so proceed at your own risk.
sudo mkdir -p /Library/Preferences/FeatureFlags/Domain && sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/FeatureFlags/Domain/WritingTools LightweightUI_macOS -dict Enabled -bool true
After that, the Reddit threat instructs users to restart their computer and the Siri AI interface will be enabled.
If you’ve had enough of the unfinished interface, you can turn it back off by once again opening Terminal and the following input:
sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/FeatureFlags/Domain/WritingTools LightweightUI_macOS -dict Enabled -bool false
It’s unclear if the Siri AI interface will launch with the official version of the new macOS. However, it’s certainly interesting to see Apple further brand its Siri AI relaunch as an all-in-one AI tool across the company’s products.
Injury-riddled Wings and Liberty tip Monday in rescheduled game
Twins, Guardians each seek cleaner baseball entering series
