Hasta La Gadget!

From the catwalk to the sidewalk: some of Italy’s most famous clothing designers have set haute couture aside for once and dedicated their creative verve to embellishing the streets of downtown Milan.

Twenty-four manhole covers designed by Giorgio Armani, Just Cavalli, Missoni, Prada and other important names from the world of high fashion, chiseled into relief and painted by hand, will now go on display on Montenapoleone Street in Milan, part of an exhibition called “Above the Below — Manhole Cover Art and the Wired City.”

While the columns and facades of palazzi in downtown Milan usually provide a canvas for unwanted urban art, rife with tags and graffiti, this time the protagonists are the discreet cast-iron manhole covers that passersby walk across every day and all weekend long. The web of wires and cables beneath these covers are the city’s information highway, bouncing signals from one point to another. An invisible metropolis of wires and connections exists beneath our feet, and Metroweb — a Milanese fiber optics company and the “patron” behind Tombini Art — has decided to bring this subterranean world to everyone’s attention.

In earlier editions of the exhibition, Italian and foreign street artists (including American Shepard Fairey, whose iconography of Barack Obama earned him international fame) were asked to redesign and decorate street manhole covers. This year, in honor of the International Expo in Milan, this open-air exhibition set along one of the most fashionable streets in the world was reserved for twenty-four famous Italians.

The exhibition will open February 24 and run until January 2016. As in the past, once Tombini Art is finished, the manhole covers on display will be cleaned up and restored, then sold at auction by Christie’s. Metroweb will donate all proceeds from the auction to charity.

Throw out your pour overs, get rid of the Chemex, and pledge allegiance to the French press because this simple brewer can make you great coffee AND foamed milk to boot.

There are many different ways to brew a cup of coffee, but not all of them can double as a tool for making fancy foamed latte milk like the French press can. We’ve long debated about which coffee brewing method makes the best cup — the French press was always up there at the top, yet never number one. But this new piece of information has given the French press mega bonus points.

We recently came across a smart tip that showed us how to make fancy latte milk in the microwave, and that’s when we learned about the French press foamed milk hack. Of all the different ways you can foam milk without a proper steamer, the French press offers the fluffiest, foamiest results. Watch the video above to see how it’s done.

Want to read more from HuffPost Taste? Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and Tumblr.

I am all for freedom of speech in this country. I have worked in politics for over 40 years to preserve this cherished right.

As an Orange County, California resident, I for one would like to welcome Apostle Jeffrey R. Holland of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon Church) to our county. He will be speaking to students at Chapman University tomorrow on “Faith, Family and Religious Freedom.”

I do, however, have a beef with the ongoing duplicity of the Mormon Church which Apostle Holland represents.

Mormon Church Funded Proposition 8

I discovered the Mormons Church’s massive involvement in the Proposition 8 campaign. I tracked the nearly $30 million that Mormon Church members contributed to pass California’s ban on gay marriage seven years ago. I turned over all my research to the Wall Street Journal which broke the story on September 20, 2008.

The Mormon Church adamantly denied any involvement in running and funding the Prop 8 campaign. Mormon Oakland Temple spokesman, Don Eaton told ABC TV News, “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints put zero money in this.”

Church spokesman Scott Trotter stated “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has fully complied with the reporting requirements of the California Political Reform Act. Claims that the Church had violated the Act and failed to report political expenditures made by the Church are false.”

Mr. Eaton and Mr. Trotter both lied seven years ago and the Mormon Church has been continuing its deceptive ways ever since.

Mormon Church Guilty of Election Fraud in California

Ten days after the Prop 8 election, I filed a sworn complaint with the California campaign ethics’ office, the Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC).

The FPPC took the case. It prosecuted the Mormon Church and conducted an 18 month investigation into all the Church did to pass Prop 8. The FPPC found the Mormon Church guilty on 13 counts of election fraud and fined them.

The Church amended its political expenditure filings and admitted to spending $190,000 that it had never reported. It produced documents with the names of 75 Mormon Church employees in Salt Lake City who had worked on the campaign. It turned out the Church had run phone banks from Utah and Idaho to call California voters. They had 25,000 Mormon Church members walking door-to-door all over California on the nine Saturdays before the election. They bused in Church members from Utah for rallies. The Mormon Church made 12 slick commercials, hosted elaborate web sites and even organized a massive lawn sign program for their members.

Mormon Church Created NOM

In fact, Apostle Jeffrey R. Holland and his son Matthew S. Holland personally helped create the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) in May of 2007 as a front group to qualify and pass Prop 8. This was done to shield the involvement of the Mormon Church in the Prop 8 campaign, just like they had done in several other states going back to Hawaii in 1995.

The Hollands, along with Matthew S. Holland’s political mentor and close friend, Professor Robby George, were the ones who hired Maggie Gallagher and Brian Brown to run NOM. NOM is still in business, and has become the most vehemently anti-gay marriage organization in the county raising and spending millions of dollars each year.

Mormon Church is Bleeding Members

The Mormon Church’s 20 year fight against gay marriage, and the way it demonizes its gay and lesbian members, have cost the Church an untold number of members. When forced to choose between the Church and their gay and lesbian sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, thousands and thousands of Mormons have lost their faith and quit the Church.

It’s no coincidence that according to a recent study conducted by San Francisco State University, Utah has eight times the attempted youth suicide rate of any other state.

Mormon Church Tries to Right the Sinking Ship

Ever since the Prop 8 campaign caused a huge national backlash against the Mormon Church, it has done everything in its power to improve its greatly tarnished image.

It did extend an olive branch in 2009 and supported a nondiscrimination ordinance in Salt Lake City, Utah. The law passed quickly, and gays and lesbians in Salt Lake City could no longer be fired or refused housing because of their sexual orientation.

Now six years later, at a flashy press conference in a Mormon Church building in Salt Lake City recently, Jeffrey R. Holland and two other Mormon Apostles announced that the Church was extending its support for nondiscrimination laws and protections to state and federal governments for all lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) Americans.

Hooray we thought. That was significant. But before we could pop the cork on the celebratory champagne, the Mormon Church backpedaled. There was a catch to its support for LGBT nondiscrimination laws. It turned out that’s not what the three Apostles meant.

A Mormon Church Double-Cross?

The Mormon Church now says that it won’t support these nondiscrimination laws unless even more onerous Arizona type “religious freedom” laws are passed, too.

The Mormon Church wants laws on the books that would allow a Mormon apartment building owner who doesn’t want to rent a unit to a gay couple, the “religious freedom” not to do so. Or a Mormon business owner the right to fire a lesbian worker simply because of whom she is, not because of the quality of her work.

So Apostle Jeffrey R. Holland, this wolf in sheep’s clothing, is coming to Chapman University tomorrow to speak on “Faith, Family and Religious Freedom,” code words for the Mormon Church’s campaign to pass laws allowing their members to discriminate against LGBT Americans.

This is wrong and will make matters worse, especially for those thousands of LGBT kids who commit suicide or try because Apostle Holland and his Church tell them that they are evil and not loved simply because of who they are.

I spend most Sunday afternoons hanging out with elementary and middle school kids, simplifying fractions, playing Connect Four and getting reacquainted with the basic rules of spelling. I recently learned that these few hours may actually be the most productive of my week.

A couple of years ago, I started helping students with their homework as part of a volunteer program for a Brooklyn nonprofit called 826NYC, which aims to instill a love of writing in kids. The decision to spend some of my time doing unpaid work — a decision I came to on a whim — has been critical to my well-being. But I haven’t been able to pinpoint exactly why. Turns out, it’s because it makes me feel like I have more time.

Workers who volunteer feel like they have more balance between work and the rest of their lives, according to a study from researchers at the University of Zurich. The findings, which were published this month in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, are based on an analysis of more than 700 workers’ responses to survey questions about job demands, time spent volunteering and work/life balance.

The results are “kind of counterintuitive,” said Romualdo Ramos, a graduate student at the University of Zurich and one of the authors of the study. “You would expect that if they are assuming this other role, then they would experience more strain,” he told me.

And yet other research yields similar results. A 2012 study from researchers at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Yale’s School of Management and Harvard Business School found that people who spend time on others are more likely to feel they have more time themselves.

Researchers performed a series of experiments in which they asked two groups to complete different assignments — spending 10 minutes on themselves versus 30 minutes on others, or helping someone with a task versus leaving a meeting early. They found that those who helped other people perceived that they themselves had more time — a feeling the researchers call “time affluence.”

“It’s not related to feeling more connected, it’s not related to feeling like your time is more meaningful,” said Cassie Mollinger, a marketing professor at Wharton and one of the authors of the study.

Rather, she said, “spending time on others makes you feel very effective and that you’ve accomplished a lot.”

Those findings resonate with me. I’m under no illusion that my volunteering efforts make a huge difference: I only spend a few hours a week with these kids, and sometimes I can’t understand their math homework. But I relish this time where all that’s expected of me is to try my best to help a kid understand the difference between cold- and warm-blooded animals or grasp the significance of the Louisiana Purchase.

When I leave the little library where I work with students, I feel better equipped to stare down the dark, depressing hole that is Sunday night and the daunting prospect of the rest of the week. For one thing, the reminder that I can direct my mental energy toward something other than McDonald’s earnings and minimum wage debates makes me that much more excited to tackle those topics when I get to work on Monday.

The research backs this up, too. “It does seem to be the case that people who volunteer are in their paid work more engaged,” Ramos told me. Companies are catching on to the notion that their employees will be more productive if they take some time to help others. It’s becoming common for businesses to offer their employees days off, or even weeks or months, so they can volunteer somewhere.

Still, probably the biggest thing I get out of volunteering is the fact that when I do something I could easily not have done, it makes me feel like I have time to do more. After I started volunteering, I spent more time doing other things outside of work too, like cooking, going to the gym and attending the occasional talk or reading.

Of course, it will be tempting to to give up the tutoring as I take on more commitments. Right now, the relationship between work and the rest of my life isn’t particularly strained. I don’t have kids, and my job almost always takes precedence over other commitments because I’m early in my career and trying to move it forward.

But according to the researchers, it would be a mistake for me to eschew my commitment to homework help just because I’ve gotten busier. A wise friend once told me that work only expands to the amount of time you have to do it in. And apparently, filling your time with obligations to help people is a more effective way to generate that feeling of “time affluence” than scheduling time to hang out with friends or pursue a hobby.

“When individuals feel time constrained, they should become more generous with their time — despite their inclination to be less so,” the authors of the Penn study write. I hope I heed their advice and continue to volunteer for selfish reasons.

While few American Jewish leaders will speak openly on the subject, many thoughtful Jews are worried that Prime Minister Netanyahu’s planned speech in the House of Representatives on March 3rd will actually harm Israel’s security interests rather than help them. They fear that the US electorate, which is clearly unwilling to get involved in another major conflict following on the costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, may see Netanyahu’s speech as war mongering — an attempt to push the United States into military conflict with Iran.

Until now, the implications of the positions taken by Netanyahu and the arguments he has made have not been closely followed by the American public or carefully scrutinized by the media in this country. However, a speech by Netanyahu before the Congress intended to influence the legislative process, especially now, after the tensions with the Obama Administration and the politicization of his speech both here and in Israel, will attract great attention.

The thrust of Netanyahu’s position is that anything short of an enforceable agreement by Iran to give up all efforts at achieving nuclear capability is unacceptable. However, it appears that the negotiators from United States and other of the P5+1 countries (Russia, China, United Kingdom, France plus Germany) are seeking an agreement that would permit Iran to retain its nuclear infrastructure but delay its ability to build a nuclear weapon by more than a year with sufficiently rigorous inspection and other protection elements.

Thus, explicitly or implicitly, Netanyahu may ask the Congress to reject any agreement reached by the negotiators and acceptable to the Obama Administration. In addition, he may ask the Congress to add more sanctions on Iran. Negotiations with Iran are already running into problems and it is very possible that they may fail. The threat of increased sanctions may be blamed for that failure. Even if the negotiation achieves the objectives set by the Administration, Congress may reject the agreement.

Either way, a failed negotiation with Iran will put the Obama Administration in a position to make good on the President’s statement “My policy is prevention of Iran obtaining nuclear weapons.” With sanctions and negotiation not working, the only open path is military action.

Whether Netanyahu’s intention is to lead America into war or only to increase pressure on Iran, the fear is that those opposed to another military intervention by the United States – and there will be many — will quickly seize on blaming Netanyahu and Israel for creating the conditions requiring military action. One can be sure that Iran will certainly do so and those opponents of Israel and anti-Semites here will readily take up that argument. In the end, they may prevail in stopping military action or if nothing else, create strong resentment by American citizens against Israel for pressing the United States into an unwanted war.

Netanyahu’s views have been expressed before and need not be restated before the Congress. There are other venues available that will not suggest that the Prime Minister of Israel is attempting to influence American legislators to take action that can lead to the United States going to war. The risk to Israel’s interests is too great to take for the putative benefit of airing Netanyahu’s views in an important forum.

Robert K. Lifton is former President of the American Jewish Congress and a founder, former President and now Board Member of the Israel Policy Forum. His memoirs titled: “An Entrepreneur’s Journey: Stories From A Life In Business And Personal Diplomacy” were published by AuthorHouse in 2012.