A priest in Sweden is going viral because of his good looks and love for fitness
When it comes to fighting climate change, few Americans surveyed say they trust China, the world's leading emitter of greenhouse gases, to do its part.
When the pandemic started last spring, Di Fara, one of New York City’s storied pizza joints, had the same question as countless restaurants nationwide: How would it make any money when customers were not allowed through its doors? One answer quickly emerged: Ship frozen (and slightly smaller) versions of its classic pies across the country in partnership with the eight-year-old e-commerce platform Goldbelly. Sales picked up so much that Di Fara converted its two-year-old second location, in a food hall, to essentially be a Goldbelly production line. Margaret Mieles, the daughter of Di Fara’s founder, who had already struck an agreement with Goldbelly in December 2019, credits the platform with helping the pizzeria avoid layoffs. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times It isn’t just iconic pizzerias that have relied on Goldbelly to survive lockdown orders. More than 400 of the 850 restaurants that sell food on Goldbelly’s platform have joined since the start of the pandemic, an influx that the company says has more than quadrupled sales over the past 12 months. On the back of that boon, Goldbelly plans to announce this week that it has raised $100 million in new funding. The question now is whether the trends that Goldbelly and its new investors plan to capitalize on will outlast the pandemic, or whether a surge in at-home dining will abate as more people feel comfortable eating in restaurants again. Goldbelly, which was founded in San Francisco in 2013, began by offering foods like deep-dish pizza from Lou Malnati’s in Chicago and Texas-style brisket from the Salt Lick in Austin, Texas. What it offers restaurants is largely logistics: providing the boxes and cold packs for shipping orders, and helping restaurants ship directly from their premises. In return, Goldbelly charges a fee, leading to premium prices. Shipping two Classic Neapolitan Pizzas from Di Fara, for example, costs $89. “We’re the first platform for food e-commerce, national e-commerce for restaurants and food-makers,” Joe Ariel, Goldbelly’s co-founder and CEO, said in an interview. “We’re basically opening up a 3,000-mile radius for restaurants.” While prominent chefs signed up early on, others were more reluctant. Justin Kennedy, the head chef at Parkway Bakery & Tavern in New Orleans, recalled dodging calls from Goldbelly representatives pitching the platform for more than a year, before relenting in September 2019. Even then, he said in an interview, he would ship perhaps 15 boxes in any given week. Then pandemic lockdowns devastated the restaurant industry. More than 110,000 restaurants nationwide had permanently closed by December, the National Restaurant Association estimated, and a survey it conducted found that sales in October had dropped from a year earlier for 87% of the full-service survivors. Kennedy shut Parkway in March 2020. When he restarted the business several months later, he began by shipping its signature po’boy sandwiches through Goldbelly. At the height of the pandemic, Parkway shipped around 200 orders a week, doing roughly the same business that it had done pre-pandemic — only now its customers included people far from New Orleans. “We got customers from Alaska calling us, asking us what to do for leftovers,” Kennedy said. “These are customers we would never have had.” Some restaurants seeking alternate sources of revenue during the pandemic turned to local delivery services; total orders on DoorDash’s platform in 2020, for instance, jumped roughly threefold from the previous year. But like Kennedy, many also turned to Goldbelly to ship their pork shoulder dinners, bagel brunches and huckleberry cheesecakes to locations as far away as Hawaii. (Goldbelly does not consider services like DoorDash to be rivals, since its food generally takes at least a day to arrive and requires cooking). Ariel recalled that early in the pandemic, what was then a 40-person staff pulled 18-hour days to cope with a surge in demand. The average order size has grown roughly 20% over the past year, and Goldbelly’s workforce has swelled to more than 130 people, including a new chief operating officer and chief financial officer. In the meantime, Goldbelly has changed how some restaurateurs think of their businesses. Danny Meyer, the New York City restaurateur behind Shake Shack and Union Square Cafe and an existing investor in the company, said his Gramercy Tavern had added items like a grilled eggplant parm — something that previously would never have been served at the Michelin-starred restaurant — in part because it would do well on Goldbelly. Spectrum Equity, the investment firm that is leading the new financing round, reached out to Goldbelly last year as it saw how the company was able to connect local restaurants with a national audience. “The pandemic has really accelerated trends that were already happening,” said Pete Jensen, a managing director at Spectrum, adding that Goldbelly’s growth has been “extraordinary.” Ariel said the fresh capital — raised at an undisclosed valuation — would help Goldbelly expand further, including by hiring more staff and augmenting new offerings like livestreamed cooking classes with celebrity chefs, including Marcus Samuelsson and Daniel Boulud. The company is looking to have more than 1,000 restaurants on its platform by year-end. The goal, Ariel said, is to make Goldbelly the biggest platform on which restaurants make money outside of in-person dining, while expanding their brands nationally. If Ariel’s pitch sounds like the precursor to eventually pursuing a public market listing, he does not deny it. “In the future, we do want to be a public company,” he said. “We think we’re just at the beginning of the food e-commerce revolution.” The big question is whether the company has enjoyed a temporary bounce or cracked open a permanent new level of business. Even Ariel concedes that last year’s growth rate “is not going to happen forever.” But there are some promising signs that eating restaurant-prepared meals at home is not going out of style. DoorDash, for instance, tripled its revenue last quarter even as coronavirus vaccinations became widespread. There is also the risk that Goldbelly’s success may draw other rivals. While Ariel played down the prospect of competition — his company’s name is being used as a verb, he said — some chefs did not write that off. “We’ll cook where the customers are at,” said Samuelsson, whose restaurant Streetbird is on the Goldbelly platform. But others, like Mieles of Di Fara, said they remained committed to the service. “I think, honestly, Goldbelly is here to stay,” she said. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. © 2021 The New York Times Company
In the final MVP watch, Stephen Curry and Chris Paul make appearances but it wasn't enough to topple Nikola Jokic's dominance.
On July 9, 1845, two months after departing from Greenhithe, England, Warrant Officer John Gregory wrote a letter to his wife from Greenland in which he described seeing whales and icebergs for the first time. Gregory, who had never been to sea before, was aboard the HMS Erebus, one of two ships to sail in Sir John Franklin’s 1845 expedition to find the fabled Northwest Passage, a sea route through the Canadian Arctic that would serve as a trade route to Asia. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Disaster struck. The Erebus and the HMS Terror became stuck in ice in Victoria Strait, off King William Island in what is now the Canadian territory of Nunavut. In April 1848, the survivors — Franklin and nearly two dozen others had already died — set out on foot for a trading post on the Canadian mainland. All 129 explorers ultimately perished, succumbing to brutal blizzard conditions and subzero temperatures. The doomed expedition endured in the public imagination — inspiring fiction by Mark Twain and Jules Verne, and, more recently, the 2018 AMC series “The Terror” — driven in part by rumors that the crew resorted to cannibalism. The wreckage lay quiet until 2014, when a remotely controlled underwater vehicle picked up the silhouette of the Erebus near King William Island. Two years later, a tip from a local Inuit hunter led to the discovery of the Terror in the ice-cold water of Terror Bay. John Gregory’s descendants would not learn about his fate until more than 175 years after he sent the letter home from Greenland. Some sailors had been identified after being found in marked graves. But recently, Gregory’s DNA and a sample from a descendant born in 1982 were matched, making him the first explorer from the trip whose remains have been positively identified through DNA and genealogical analyses — a process similar to that used in recent years to identify murder suspects and victims in cold cases. Jonathan Gregory, 38, who lives in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, got an email from researchers in Canada confirming that the cheek swab he had sent to them confirmed that he was a direct descendant of John Gregory. He had heard about his family’s connection to the expedition, but until the DNA match, “it was really theory.” (Although he goes by Joe, the similarity between their names “all makes sense,” Gregory said.) A relative living in British Columbia, whom Gregory had never met, sent him a Facebook message in 2019 after she had seen a request from researchers asking descendants of sailors from the expedition to send in DNA samples. “I took the plunge,” Gregory said in a phone interview. “For us, this is history.” Douglas Stenton, a professor at the University of Waterloo and a researcher on the project, said the team, which included researchers from Lakehead University and Trent University, started in 2008, focusing on documenting sites and recovering new information about the expedition. But in 2013, they became interested in the human remains, seeking to “identify some of these men who had effectively become anonymous in death.” “It’s really a story of human endeavor in one of the world’s most challenging environments,” Stenton said, “resulting in a catastrophic loss of life, for reasons that we still don’t understand.” The circumstances that led to the demise of the crews are still unclear. Researchers have continued to piece together clues about the expedition’s failure as artifacts have been found throughout the years. Gregory’s remains were excavated in 2013 on King William Island, about 50 miles south of the site where the ships had been deserted. He most likely died within a month after leaving the ships, Stenton said — a journey that “wasn’t necessarily an enjoyable trip in any sense of the word.” Gregory was between 43 and 47 years old when he died. Stenton said it was a relief to finally put a name to one of the sailors — and a face, as researchers were able to create a facial reconstruction of what Gregory may have looked like — because details about the expedition have “remained elusive for, you know, 175 years.” For the past eight years, Stenton said, researchers on the team were “very hopeful” that they would be able to match a sample from a living descendant to a sailor from the pool of DNA they had collected from remains. The first 16 samples they received failed to produce a match, making the Gregory pairing “very gratifying,” he said. Although the identification has not changed the narrative of the expedition, Stenton said that “the more individuals we can identify, there might be some useful information that could come up that might help us better understand” what happened to the explorers. He said he was grateful for the families who had sent in DNA, whether they were matched or not, adding that he was pleased to be able to provide Gregory’s family with details about the sailor’s final years. He informed them that Gregory was not alone when he died, as the remains of two other sailors were found at the same site. “There’s an eerie feeling about it all,” Gregory said, “but at the end of the day, I suppose it’s closure.” This article originally appeared in The New York Times. © 2021 The New York Times Company
Aryeo, a platform for centralizing and streamlining real estate content, announced it received $3.6 million in its latest seed funding round.
Switzerland is the most likely venue for a potential summit between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his U.S. counterpart Joe Biden in June, Russia's Kommersant newspaper reported on Monday, citing government sources. Biden, who in March said he thought Putin was a "killer", prompting Moscow to recall its ambassador to Washington for consultations, has said he would like to hold talks with Putin during a planned trip to Europe next month.
Lifestyle expert Anna DeSouza clues us in on ways to keep allergens, bacteria and airborne nasties at bay.
Have you priced lumber lately? The price of lumber futures on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange recently surged above $1,500 per thousand board feet. That’s a 300% rise from this time last year.
(Bloomberg) -- U.S. stocks fell and the dollar weakened as investors weighed risks to the economic outlook including inflation and a spike in Covid-19 cases in parts of the world.Technology and communication services led the benchmark S&P 500 into the red for the first time in three sessions. Apple and Microsoft weighed on the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100. Semiconductor stocks continued to be under pressure, with the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index dropping about 10% from a peak in early April. “Investors should brace for further bouts of volatility, driven by inflation data along with other risks, such as setbacks in curbing the pandemic,” wrote UBS Global Wealth Management’s Chief Investment Officer Mark Haefele. “But we don’t see inflation concerns ending the rally in stocks, which we expect to be led by cyclical parts of the market as the global economic reopening broadens.”Oil edged up as rising optimism around a demand recovery in regions such as the U.S. offset Covid-19 flare-ups in parts of Asia.Bitcoin tumbled to as low as $42,133 after a volatile weekend that saw Tesla Inc. Chief Executive Elon Musk whipsaw prices with a series of tweets that touched on the energy usage of the cryptocurrency and whether he was selling. Coinbase Global Inc. fell to a record low and below the reference price used in its April direct listing. Gold climbed to the highest in more than three months.Federal Reserve Vice Chair Richard Clarida said during a webinar that weaker-than-expected April payroll report shows “we have not made substantial further progress” on the central bank’s goals for employment and inflation laid out as thresholds to begin scaling back the central bank’s massive monthly bond purchases.Concerns that policy makers may have to pull back support sooner than expected to quell rising inflation have weighed on global equities. Investors this week will parse the minutes from the Federal Open Market Committee’s latest meeting for any discussion about accelerating price pressures, and hints of a timeline for reducing asset purchases.“Expect this volatility to continue as the market searches for direction,” said Mike Loukas, chief executive officer at TrueMark Investments. “The release of the Fed minutes on Wednesday will be interesting. With earnings season almost over, inflation will continue to hold center stage.”Elsewhere, the Stoxx Europe 600 Index edged lower and stocks in Asia were mixed.Click here for MLIV’s Question of the Day: How Far Can East-West Stocks Divergence Go?Here are some key events this week:Reserve Bank of Australia publishes minutes of its latest meeting TuesdayThe Fed publishes minutes from its April meeting Wednesday, which may provide clues to officials’ views on the recovery and how they define “transitory” when it comes to inflationThese are some of the main moves in markets: StocksThe S&P 500 fell 0.6% as of 2:40 p.m. New York timeThe Nasdaq 100 fell 1.2%The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 0.3%The MSCI World index fell 0.3%CurrenciesThe Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index fell 0.2%, falling for the third straight day, the longest losing streak since May 10The euro rose 0.1% to $1.2158The British pound rose 0.3% to the highest in about three yearsThe Japanese yen surged 0.2%, more than any closing gain since May 7BondsThe yield on 10-year Treasuries advanced one basis point to 1.64%Germany’s 10-year yield advanced one basis point to the highest in about two yearsBritain’s 10-year yield was little changed at 0.86%CommoditiesWest Texas Intermediate crude rose 1.3% to $66 a barrelGold futures rose 1.6%, the most since May 6For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2021 Bloomberg L.P.
Whether appropriate or excessive, an expanded cash benefit for parents is shrewd politics.
The violence in Israel and Gaza isn’t just a foreign policy crisis for President Joe Biden. It’s also a fraught political issue in his own party.
Shares of MicroStrategy (NASDAQ: MSTR) were falling today in tandem with a broader slide in cryptocurrencies, in particular Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC). MicroStrategy is a software company, but the stock's fortunes have become tied to Bitcoin as CEO Michael Saylor has essentially bet the company's future on the cryptocurrency. Under Saylor's leadership, MicroStrategy has been steadily buying Bitcoin, and Saylor has been so confident in the Bitcoin strategy that the company has been taking on 0% convertible debt to acquire Bitcoin.
With the first drawing for Ohio’s Vax-a-Million lottery system scheduled for May 26, state officials announced a change to the process Monday that will require participants to opt-in. The lottery system unveiled by Republican Gov. Mike DeWine last week will begin next Wednesday and continue for five weeks, offering residents a $1 million prize or a full-ride scholarship to a four-year university in the state. Ohio had initially planned to use state voter registration in addition to an opt-in program to automatically enroll every resident into the drawing but changed it Monday to opt-in only, state Health Director Stephanie McCloud said during a briefing.
Weber Shandwick, one of the world's leading global communications and marketing solutions firms, today announced that Jamie Dowd, North America Health lead, Weber Shandwick, and Sarah Mahoney, executive vice president, Digital Health, Weber Shandwick, have been named to PM360's 2021 ELITE 100 list in the PR Guru and Digital Crusader categories, respectively. Now in its seventh year, the PM360 ELITE list – which stands for "Exceptional • Leaders • Innovators • Transformers • Entrepreneurs" – recognizes the most influential people in the healthcare industry.
In collaboration with CCA, Huawei Technologies USA VP of Economic and Stakeholder Affairs, Glenn Schloss, will be joining Dion Hinchcliffe, VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, for a fireside chat titled, "How will supply chain instability impact innovation and the global economy?" The discussion will cover the new and unique pressures facing the global supply chain over the past few years, both as a result of geopolitical tensions and the COVID-19 pandemic. Schloss and Hinchcliffe, as a corporate executive and expert in the global innovation arena respectively, will draw on real-world insights and experiences and share solutions to address these challenges moving forward. The fireside chat will take place on Wednesday, May 19 at 1 p.m. ET, and can be registered for here.
Florida’s Department of Health on Monday announced 1,976 new confirmed cases of COVID-19 — the lowest count recorded since last month. The state also announced 59 new deaths. Of those who died, 58 were residents.
Your plants deserve their moment in the sun.
Get essential education news and commentary delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up here for The 74’s daily newsletter. In the wake of new mask guidance from the CDC, Dr. Anthony Fauci appeared on CNN to talk about the emerging science surrounding COVID-19 vaccinations and what Americans can expect as society attempts a partial return to […]
Since 2008, there have been 22 in-custody deaths, Sheriff’s Office says.
"I consider them both finales," Tobias Whale's portrayer tells EW. "They both have finale-level action and unpredictability in them."
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