By Gretchen McKay, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Protein bowls are appealing for many reasons, the biggest of which is they’re incredibly versatile.

Whether you top them with a lean meat like roasted chicken or a fatty, good-for-you fish like salmon — or opt for a vegetarian source of protein such as tofu or canned chickpeas — bowls can fill you up with countless combinations, while also making you feel great about how well you’re eating.

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Plus, they’re easy to assemble on a busy weeknight or quick lunch break, without the need for any fancy-pants equipment. Besides its namesake dish, all that’s really required to create the perfect lunch or dinner bowl is a cutting board for all the chopping (of toppings) and a small bowl for a bit of mixing (of sauce).

Start with a base of rice, quinoa, farro or another grain. Or choose a sturdy, leafy green such as spinach, Romaine lettuce or baby kale. After the chosen protein, pile on whatever crunchy vegetables are killing time in your fridge, add a healthy fat such as feta cheese and sliced avocado or a handful of nuts or seeds. Then, drizzle it with a yogurt-based sauce, vinaigrette or squeeze of lemon.

This recipe, which was adapted from a similar dish that showed up on my social media feed, features aromatic, Mediterranean-style chicken shawarma cooked in a loaf pan with red onion and then shredded. Chickpeas and assorted veggies complete the combo, along with a generous scoop of white rice.

If you prepare the grains and chop the toppings while the chicken thighs are roasting, you’ll only need about 5 minutes to pull it all together come meal time. Sweet!

Chicken Shawarma Bowl

Serves 4

For chicken

2 pounds boneless chicken thigh, fat trimmed

2-3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

Salt and freshly cracked black pepper

2 tablespoons plain yogurt

Juice 1 lemon

1 tablespoon dried thyme

1 1/2 tablespoons garlic powder

1 tablespoon smoked paprika

1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper

1/2 teaspoon turmeric

1/2 teaspoon cumin

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

Dash of ground nutmeg

1/2 large or 1 small red onion, thinly sliced

For bowl

1 1/2 cups cooked white or brown rice

1 cup whole canned chickpeas

2 small cucumbers, sliced into half-moons

1 red or yellow bell pepper, seeds and ribs removed, chopped

1/2 cup feta cheese crumbles

Chopped parsley, for garnish

For sauce

1 cup plain Greek yogurt

2 cloves garlic, minced

1 tablespoon chopped fresh dill

Juice of 1 lemon

Prepare chicken: Trim fat off chicken thighs, season generously with salt and pepper and place in a large bowl. Drizzle with olive oil.
In small bowl, mix yogurt and lemon juice, then add to bowl with chicken and toss to combine with a rubber spatula.
In another bowl, combine thyme, garlic powder, paprika, cayenne, turmeric, cumin, cinnamon and nutmeg. Add to pan with chicken, and toss well to combine. (Feel free to add more or less of any particular seasoning.)
Add sliced onion to bowl, toss to combine and then allow to marinate for an hour or up to a day in the fridge. Or you can place it in a loaf pan and cook it right away.
When ready to cook, preheat oven to 425 degrees, and bring chicken mixture up to room temperature (if it’s been in the fridge). Pack chicken and onions into a loaf pan, then cook in hot oven for 45-55 minutes (instant thermometer should read 160 degrees.)
While chicken is cooking, prepare rice according to package directions, drain and rinse chickpeas and chop vegetables. Prepare sauce by mixing together yogurt, garlic, dill and lemon juice, then set aside.
When chicken is done, drain excess juices from the pan and flip the loaf pan onto a cutting board. Cut the meat into thin strips or chunks.
Assemble bowls with a scoop of rice, 1/4 cup chickpeas, sliced vegetables and feta. Add chopped chicken, then drizzle with sauce. Season to taste with additional salt and pepper, if desired, and serve. Use leftover chicken (there will be plenty) for a salad or sandwich the next day,

— Gretchen McKay, Post-Gazette

©2024 PG Publishing Co. Visit at post-gazette.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

By 2023, artificial intelligence had seeped into enough corners of a nervous film industry — buoyed by Barbenheimer, but fully aware of an imminent 2024 shortage of new titles — to become a seriously effective tool of labor unrest. Last year’s Screen Actors Guild contract, achieved after a lengthy, costly staring contest with industry producers and streamer honchos, added some guardrails designed to protect actors’ collective livelihood, noting “the importance of human performance in motion pictures and (AI’s) potential impact on employment.”

Tye Sheridan knows about that impact. He’s an actor, having made a formidable screen debut in the 2011 Terrence Malick film “The Tree of Life.” He’s best known for Steven Spielberg’s “Ready Player One” and as Cyclops in the “X-Men” movies.

Sheridan is also really into AI. He co-founded Wonder Dynamics in 2017 with his partner, visual effects supervisor and filmmaker Nikola Todorovic. They now oversee 70 employees in the U.S. and in Todorvoric’s native Serbia.

What is Wonder Dynamics, besides a name promising both wonder and dynamism?

Its founders say it’s an affordable, easy-to-use shortcut for filmmakers with projects  calling for computer-generated characters. The AI platform (monthly subscriptions start at $20) offers the user a variety of characters. A robot. An alien. A bearded professor, with the slump-shouldered, underpaid air of the average adjunct.

Let’s say your screenplay calls for a shot of your alien running out of a building, stopping, looking both ways with a worried expression, and then running off again. In a real location, you film your real actor, running. You then take that raw footage and, with the Wonder Studio software, you turn your human into an alien, without any pricey motion-capture suits or lengthy post-production effects phase.

Todorovic and Sheridan have many fans and customers, including the Russo Brothers (“Avengers: Endgame,” “The Gray Man”). Joe Russo is on the Wonder Dynamics advisory board. The Russos hired Wonder to work on their next project, “The Electric State,” due in late 2024 or early 2025.

They also have their fair share of skeptics. One LinkedIn commenter said this of the Wonder Studio AI: “Someday this will be reverse. They will film a robot and use AI to bring back a legend from the grave.” Another said: “Say hello to job loss as well.”

 

In the wake of a Chicago Humanities Festival event featuring them, I spoke with Todorovic and Sheridan to get my head around the implications of what they’re selling. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Q: Consider me AI-agnostic at best, Tye. What’s your sales pitch?

Sheridan: Our main goal, really, is to create opportunities for artists. To allow stories that were completely unattainable to most filmmakers to be told. We’re trying to bridge a gap, reduce (filmmaking) costs, reduce the time it takes, for the industry and the creators. The audience just wants a good story, and there’s a lot of good storytellers out there that haven’t had the opportunity to tell their stories.

Q: Nikola, at the Chicago Humanities Festival talk, you explained your company’s approach to some of the ethical questions. You said that you’re not doing generative AI, you’re “just extracting (visual) information, observing actors moving and performing.” Can you elaborate on that?

Todorovic: We’re accelerating artists’ work, not generating it ourselves. We don’t train our models on existing art. We work with what the artists have made. We don’t really want a future where there’s no performance, or there’s no cinematography as we know it, and it’s all getting digitalized.

Q: So you’re saying you’re on solid ethical ground because you’re not leaving a human performer completely out of the process? That you’re selling the equivalent of responsibly sourced ingredients?

Todorovic: Yes. I mean, Tye is an actor. We don’t want to put him out of work.

Q: The other night you acknowledged the possibility of a film production future where shooting a movie in person, on a set, has become passé, or at least as rare as a black-and-white film. I guess I’m nervous about where this might go without guardrails. So. Assuage my fears.

Todorovic: It is a fear of ours as well. I hope that future doesn’t happen. We have to have performers, and performance art, which is a huge part of the magic of storytelling. Even if the future means (computer) generating certain environments, the performance in my mind is still going to be performed by an actor. Otherwise it’s hard to generate characters with feelings. That’s why we’re building our company holistically, and keeping it in the 3D space. That way the result is always going to be only as good as what your cinematographer did with the light, in real space.

The audience will tell us where it all goes in the future. Will the audience like watching something completely synthetic? I don’t think so. We love to watch other people. At Wonder Dynamics we don’t want to be part of the wrong kind of future.

Sheridan: It really does come down to the audience. They’ll dictate the stories we tell, and what the medium becomes. You also have to consider the economics. We’ve seen them change a lot in the last five, 10 years. Theatrical distribution has completely  shifted, and the economics of making certain films has changed. I’m not talking about the “Avatars,” but about the films getting pushed out of the industry because not enough people are going to see them.

Q: I have to assume that coming off a long strike, as both an actor and the co-founder of an AI platform company, you’ve taken some (heat) from some actor colleagues about this sort of technology.

Sheridan: When something has the potential to shake up our industry in a fundamental way, like AI, it’s our natural impulse to get defensive. If you’re an actor you’re afraid that what you value, what you have to offer, won’t be valuable in the future. People tend to jump to an extreme reaction and say (AI) is going to replace everyone. We definitely heard that during the strikes.

I also heard a lot of folks who saw the benefits, and there are some people trying to pump the brakes a little (on the anti-AI rhetoric).  Saying AI is bad or good, that’s too general. It’s like saying the internet is either one or the other.

Q: So how do you stay on the right side of the ethical line, when your technology could so easily go in the direction you say you don’t want effects-driven filmmaking, or filmmaking of any kind, to go?

Tudorovic: Every time we add a new feature, we have to use our compass to see if it will affect our ethical mission. You’re 100% right. This is probably something our investors wouldn’t like to hear, but yeah, we are tempted a lot. New research comes out, and you think, “Oh, this would be so cool, this is super flashy, this would be amazing for social media! A lot of the (generative AI companies) just want to build tools for social media, where they have billions of users. Instead of building tools for a few creatives, which is what we’re doing. I mean, you’re tempted to package something that could be a quick and easy new feature that gets you millions more users. But Tye and I don’t want to build something that we, as artists, don’t respect.

The fear comes from where we’ll all be in three to five years.

Phillips is a Tribune critic.

By Jim Rossman, Tribune News Service

I sleep with a fan blowing to move the air in my bedroom.

Over the years I’ve had all sorts of fans, but for the last few years, my choice has been a Dyson fan sitting on a small table.

The Dyson fan I’ve been using was the Pure Hot+Cool. The Pure meant it had a HEPA filter, and Hot+Cool means it’s a heater as well as a fan. I loved that the HEPA filter meant I was cleaning the air in the bedroom as I was being lulled to sleep by the cool breezes.

Earlier this year, Dyson asked if I wanted to review the latest version, the Dyson Purifier Hot+Cool Formaldehyde ($849.99, Dyson.com), which is quite a mouthful. It has a model number of HP09, so let’s call it that for this review.

What is it?

The HP09 is a beautiful machine, it is silver, gold and white.

If you are not familiar with Dyson fans, they are cylindrical at the bottom, where the air is drawn in and passed through a filter before being forced out through the oval-shaped exhaust at the top. So, when the fan is taking in air, that air is being filtered.

The Dyson HP09 Purifier Hot+Cool Formaldehyde, a fan/heater/air purification system, can be controlled with an app on your phone. (Dyson/TNS)

When I had non-filtering fans in the past, I’d turn those off when I was not in bed, but now I leave the Dyson on all day.

The HP09 has integrated sensors to analyze the air, displaying the live results on its LCD screen.

The HP09 has an app that lets the user run an air quality report showing the monthly average of your room’s air quality index. The air quality report will also show you the day with the highest average pollution and list the dominant pollutants and their exact levels.

Formaldehyde filtering

According to the EPA, formaldehyde is a colorless, flammable gas at room temperature and has a strong odor. Exposure to formaldehyde may cause adverse health effects.

The EPA says formaldehyde is found in resins used in the manufacture of composite wood products like plywood, particle board and medium-density fiberboard. These are very commonly used wood products found in many homes and offices.

It is also used in glue, paint, permanent press fabrics, lacquers and finishes, as well as in some paper products.

Formaldehyde is also a byproduct of combustion and can be found in the emissions from gas stoves, kerosene space heaters and cigarette smoke.

The HP09 has a catalytic filter that continuously traps and breaks down formaldehyde molecules into water and carbon dioxide. This filter never needs replacing.

HEPA filtering

Besides the formaldehyde filter, the HP09 has a replaceable HEPA filter that captures 99.97 of particles 0.3 microns in size and it has a layer of activated carbon to remove odors and gases.

The filter is not hard to access or replace, and the app displays the amount of filter life remaining.

I’ve been running the HP09 for almost three months and my filter life is showing 61 percent remaining.

Replacement filters are available from Dyson for $79.99.

Room temperature

Besides the excellent filtering, don’t forget the HP09 is a whole room fan and heater. There are 10 fan speeds, and because of the air flow method used, the noise level is low.

In heat mode, you can set a target temperature and the HP09 will automatically turn on and off the heat when its needed to keep you comfortable.

There is an automatic mode, which changes the fan speed to keep the air clean as needed.

Light sleepers will appreciate the night mode, which purifies the air with the quietest settings and dims the display.

Finally, if you just want the HP09 to purify the air and not be blowing on you constantly, you can reverse the output direction, so that instead of blowing the air out the front, it blows out the rear of the machine.

Other features

The HP09 can oscillate up to 350 degrees, to heat or cool an entire room. The oscillation is also customizable, so you can set the angle you need for your situation.

There is an included remote control, with a built-in magnet so you can keep it on top of the HP09, but I keep mine on my nightstand.

You can also completely control the unit from the Dyson app on your phone or tablet. You connect the HP09 to your home’s Wi-Fi network, so you can use the app to control it from anywhere, even when you are away from home.

It is compatible with voice control from Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri and Google Home, so you can make adjustments with just your voice.

Conclusions

The Dyson HP09 is a little on the expensive side, but people with serious allergies or sensitivity to pollutants and chemicals will find it does a terrific job at keeping the air clean. Just knowing your room’s air quality is a huge step in keeping the air clean.

It is a room-sized fan. It is not a whole-home solution. It can heat or cool relatively large rooms, but it works best if it can concentrate on one area. I found it perfect for our bedroom.

We like to burn incense occasionally, and when we do, the HP09 has no problem detecting the increased smoke in the air and jumping into action.

The app control and voice control are both super convenient, and I love the fact that the formaldehyde filter never needs changing.

There is an ongoing cost of changing the HEPA filter once or twice a year, but that’s not too much to pay for better air.

Jim Rossman is a tech columnist for Tribune News Service. He may be reached at jrossmantechadviser@gmail.com.

©2024 Tribune Content Agency, LLC.