Thanksgiving is my favorite American holiday. It’s not pure, exactly—name me a celebration that doesn’t carry some baggage—but it is simple. Get together with people you care about, take a moment to reflect on what you’re thankful for, eat until your eyes roll around in your head. It’s very direct. No country is as in love with itself as the US is, and nothing reflects that love as much as the Thanksgiving plate. It swoons over […]
I spotted Seakor for the first time when we were shopping for furniture a few weeks ago; it’s an unassuming Polish deli on a corner of the Richmond opposite a gas station, graced by a sign that says “& SAUSAGE FACTORY.” Who wouldn’t be intrigued? It was always easy to get Polish food in the UK, one flat we had in Brighton was slapped next to a Polish corner shop (or perhaps the shop was […]
German food gets a surprisingly easy ride. We all know the jokes about English cuisine, or the wincing references to Scandinavia’s pickled herrings, or the apparently endless parade of cabbage-based dishes that represent an Eastern European dinner table. And yet somehow German grub—which essentially combines all of those into a single menu—doesn’t come in for the same skepticism. At least, that’s what I figure given the number of German food spots around the Bay. Sausage […]
It was a weird day to start this project. Qatar kicked off the World Cup—Qatar, where being gay is illegal and potentially punishable by death. Here in the US, today is the trans day of remembrance; the night before, some mouthbreather in Colorado shot up and killed a bunch of people at a gay bar. These abhorrences are not unconnected. So yeah, weird day. But the World Cup is so compromised that I knew it […]
• Laura Hazard Owen’s Nieman Lab piece on what journalism will lose if Twitter goes away brought many of the costs of the current drama together in one place. I’ve downloaded my data and mothballed my account. • Sorrow compounded when I finished reading Lincoln in the Bardo. I’d picked it up after hearing George Saunders interviewed by Alexis Madrigal on KQED radio, having enjoyed A Swim in the Pond in the Rain last year […]
I love the World Cup. Football all day for weeks on end, players from all over the planet—the greats, the unknowns—thrown in together, each one hoping to get their moment in the spotlight. Amazing victories, drama, tragedy, high stakes games, athletic prowess on full display? It’s amazing. At the same time… I hate the World Cup. Or, more specifically, I hate this World Cup. I wasn’t too keen on the last one in Russia, either, […]
Joan Didion, for all her complexities, continues to have… a moment? No, it’s too extended for that. And she was too anxious, too awkward for it. Still, it’s happening: even though she died last year, her words keep coming. Even her stuff keeps coming. I loved this explanation of hers, from a talk (via Lithub) that’s in her book released earlier this year. It’s those obsessions that shape what we are, really. Underneath we’re the […]
Smells are brilliant and infuriating for writers because they are just so hard to express. Here’s an Atlas Obscura piece, an excerpt from Jessica Leigh Hester’s Sewer, describing the waft of fatbergs that clog the pipes beneath London. These moments that overwhelm the senses are fascinating.
• Weird, the Al Yankovic Story was brilliantly stupid. This is a group of people living their best life: Weird Al just having a ton of fun, Daniel Radcliffe continuing to go off. (Asked recently by a Guardian reader “Do you just tell your agent: “As long as it’s weird, I’m in?””, he replied that his approach to scripts was: “If you sit down and lecture somebody on how shame keeps us from love, that’s […]
You can call it on the Golden Age of Podcasting™: it’s over, it’s done. What started, sort of, with Serial has come to an end—and not just because Adnan finally got out. After a blossoming of studios and projects over the last decade, things hit a plateau when the services all rolled up into a handful of dominant players, and we are now going through an inevitable and depressing dip as the dominance turns into […]
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