Assembling the perfect charcuterie platter seems like an easy feat. You go down to the deli, you get whatever smoked meats and cheeses seem best, you cut them up and serve them with a lot of wine and scotch . In fact, most of us don’t even do the cutting ourselves, since we’re already at the deli. Well, cats and kittens, the truth is that method isn’t going to quite hack it, pardon the pun....

The ancient Italian city of Matera, located just off the heel of the Italy, is home to deep caves that have been used domestically for millennia. The Corte San Pietro Hotel takes shape amongst these caves in the Sassi District, a celebrated UNESCO World Heritage Site in central Matera. This centuries-old dwelling now welcomes guests from around the world to explore the history of Matera and its complicated topography. Like the landscape of the Sassi District itself, the Corte San Pietro Hotel feels like a fusion between a built environment and a natural cavern....

View in gallery Photographer Stephen Alvarez has been fascinated with the world beneath our feet from his youth, exploring the open caverns of his home state of Tennessee. This exploration is something that Alvarez has never given up, having now fused it with his other great passion– photography. Over 15 years, Stephen Alvarez has been capturing caves across the world in a series he calls Earth From Below. Alvarez has traveled to Abkhazia, to the world’s deepest cave, to the fern-tipped caves of Mexico and many places in between....

There’s no wrong answer when it comes to choosing a blade for your everyday carry, but a sub-par one will end up cutting you when you try to draw it, will snag on your pocket, is difficult to open, and often won’t hold an edge during daily use. Consider this: Your EDC knife is the cornerstone of your daily pocket load and should be as personal and as impressive as your wallet , as useful as your multi-tool, as helpful as your keychain, and as remarkable as your cell phone....

Anyone who’s ever held a controller or logged in to a multiplayer match knows the word “lag.” Traditionally, it refers to the slowdown or stoppage of action due to poor network or Internet connectivity. In this case, we’re dealing with TV input lag , which is the span of time between when a TV is sent a signal, and when it reacts. Usually this is a matter of milliseconds, which doesn’t matter for passive watching....

Despite its promise as the wearable of the future, Google’s Glass’s design has looked a little… dated, at best. Now, Google has teamed up with the design studio of Diane Von Furstenburg to produce a new line called Google Glass DVF: Made for Glass. The Google Glass DVF collaboration brings new designs to the latest headworn hardware from Google, a new set of options that look a lot more natural (and fashionable) than their Google Glass predecessors....

View in gallery The HD3 Complication Black Pearl Watch is the brain child of Fabrice Gonet, who set out to develop a stealthy, black timepiece styled after the iconography of the pirate era. Beyond the skull-and-swords Jolly Roger on its 9-o’clock side, we don’t really see the rest of that inspiration. What we do see, however, is a bi-axial tourbillon watch that truly lives up to the name of “complication”....

Breakups are hard, but it doesn’t have to be messy. So we’ve got you tips on how to break up with someone gracefully and without any messy miscommunications. View in gallery Everyone would agree that getting dumped is never fun. In fact, it’s pretty awful, especially when the breakup happens out of the blue, with no warning signals at all. But people tend to forget that it can also be difficult for someone who is initiating the breakup....

Do you need a quick coffee infusion before you can start your day? Then read on because we’re going to teach you how to make cold brew coffee at home. View in gallery The Cold Brew Coffee Craze In the United States, over 400 million cups of coffee are drunk daily by 64% of the population. It is the most popular hot beverage in the world and is also a classic starting point for any good date or budding love story....

View in gallery With only weeks remaining until the start of the Geneva Motor Show, Infiniti has revealed the new Infiniti Emerge-E. This sporty electric coupe has been given the “supercar” title in a few reports, so it is expected to pack one hell of a punch below the hood. Thus far, there are very few electric vehicles that even approach supercar territory, so it’ll be interesting to learn if this one does in fact follow suit....

View in gallery Those legs weren’t made just for walkin’. The people at M+O Design Studio see the leg not just as a tool of transport or an object of desire, but as a canvas for artistic expression. M+O have developed a series of stockings called “ Le Queues de Sardines “, a screen-printed collection of stockings and tights. They’re colorful, playful, serious, artistic and sexy, a varied range of stockings with different colors, characters and patterns....

Long before the rest of the class started talking about “lighter and leaner”, Lotus was writing the book. For 63 years, these champions of the power-to-weight ratio have built small and strong, eating the lunch of their larger, pricier counterparts. The performance market is starting to catch up, however. With materials getting lighter, engines getting stronger and systems becoming more efficient, even Lotus needs to push the envelope to keep up....

View in gallery Good Morning Your first sip of Morning Brew comes with a cordial Good Morning . Immediately following the customary salutation is a conversational tidbit, which might cover a giant tortoise’s 190th birthday celebration, killer robots, or something as tame as a periodic update from the Brew team. Markets View in gallery Morning Brew lets the numbers mostly speak for themselves with minimal market analysis, once again trusting you to understand enough to care....

View in gallery Does your mess of refrigerator photos, press clippings and reminders need photoshopping? The Photoshop Magnet Kit can help. Clean up your disaster of a refrigerator with your favorite tools, layer dialogs and color pickers from Photoshop. This pack of 11 refrigerator magnets allows you to organize your refrigerator with the tools of the trade of graphic designers the world over. Just don’t try to use it to fix that awkward smile of yours from your last family photo… [$25 at meninos]...

View in gallery High in the mountains of Croatia rests a stunning natural landscape lush with waterfalls, mammoth stone walls and mossy caverns. The Plitvice Lakes National Park of Croatia is amongst the country’s most popular tourist locales, providing its visitors an experience of how beautiful the alpine countryside of Croatia can be. In 1979, Plitvice Lakes became a UNESCO World Heritage Site for “outstanding natural beauty, and the undisturbed production of travertine (tuff) through chemical and biological action”....

The Sigma Corporation – widely known as one of the best third-party manufacturers of DLSR lenses on the market – today announced what it referred to as a “new generation of high image quality compact cameras.” According to Sigma , the camera incorporates a newly-developed Foveon X3 Direct Image Sensor. The generation name of this sensor – Quattro – is the source from which the camera line draws its name....

On Maslow’s hierarchy of needs , there’s no special tier for coffee, which means that the famed psychologist was an idiot. Coffee is the fuel that the world runs on, and should have been included along with life and liberty in the Bill of Rights as an item that is utterly inalienable. Even if the founding fathers couldn’t see it from under their powdered wigs, we hold this truth to be self-evident: coffee is necessary for work and existence to continue....

The moment you leave your house, especially if you’re going to be doing anything physical, or out of doors, you should be carrying plenty of water. Hydration is not only life, it’s imperative for preventing heat stroke, muscle cramps, and keeping your mind functioning properly. If you’re dehydrated, you’re more irritable, quicker to tire, easily nauseated, and can suffer from long-term health risks such as irregular heartbeat. Since your body needs approximately one gallon of water each day it is out in the wilderness, you should have as much of it on hand as possible, and the easiest way to accomplish that is a hydration bladder....

“Action Camera” has become something of a misnomer these days, as many of the cameras made for shooting activity aren’t necessarily geared to get true action shots. Sure, like the industry leader GoPro, many are made to capture all the upside-down, “holy-shit-do-you-believe-that-happened?” camera calisthenics, but some are moving toward refined first-person narratives, with others built for the slower underwater world, and yet others made to record slowly in 360-degrees for creating VR worlds to explore....

View in gallery It’s a secret to no one– Hard Graft makes some of the sexiest bags, laptop cases and personal effects holders in the world. We couldn’t help but share the new Hard Graft U Macbook Sleeve with you. We don’t even own a Mac Book and we want one of these. Like other Hard Graft gear, the U Macbook Sleeve is hand made in Austria of fine wool felt, premium Italian aniline leather and black elastic herringbone....