Last week I received the gift of a virtual hang1 with Auyon Mukharji. Learning more about what fuels the Darlingside musician-turned culinary historian and cookbook wrangler was pure joy.

I first encountered Auyon in what feels like another lifetime (pre-COVID, toddlers at my ankles, newly slinging books as an indie bookstore employee). It was late summer, early evening, crystal clear bluebird skies morphing into moody shades of violet. Four musicians took to a small stage on a village green, opened their mouths, and enveloped all present in a celestial-like trance.

Fast forward to 2025, I snatched up an early copy of Heartland Masala, a deeply researched, rigorously tested gem of a book that Auyon co-authored with his mother, Jyoti. In May of this year, I serendipitously crossed paths with Auyon at the inaugural Cookbook Social2 .

I am so grateful Auyon agreed to share his story with Four Top readers. I hope you enjoy reading this conversation as much as I enjoyed being in it.

How did you start your day, food-wise?

I had some milk kefir from Cultures for Health, with a bunch of dried fruit, granola, and nuts. I had a little bit of leftover beef liver as well. An appetizer for breakfast, basically.

Proper fuel, well done.

For the readers who aren’t familiar with your work, tell us what you do.

“What do you do?” — in the US at least, often means, “How do you make money?”

In the arts, you make so little money that frame doesn’t always work. I’ve started responding by saying that “what I do” is I like hanging out with people, and I try to do that as much as possible.

Darlingside is a vehicle to hang out with my bandmates, whom I love very much, and to tour, which I love doing.

Heartland Masala was a project that let me hang out with my mom and engage with my culture on a deeper level. I’m an Indian American mutt. I was born in the US, and the book project was the first time I was interacting with my Indian ancestry in a way that wasn’t mediated by my parents. And then we got to tour3, hang out with people, and talk about it.

I do like spending time alone, but having these outlets to share things I’m thinking about, things that I’m working on, things that I’m making, that’s a way I like self-defining.

How did you spend time with your family growing up?

I grew up in the suburbs of Kansas City. My parents met in medical school in India. My mom retired from medicine to become a full-time mom when I was born, because my older brother has an offshoot of autism — he’s on the spectrum and has a moderate learning disability.

Art and making things were a big part of our upbringing. My dad and my dad’s entire family did a lot of art and writing. My dad4 retired from medicine a couple years ago, and he’s full-time painting now.

There’s a stereotype around Bengalis that the men are very artsy, nerdy, wandering around, thinking about poetry, carrying umbrellas. I’m half Bengali (dad), half Punjabi (mom), so my dad, I think, plays into that — less the umbrella part, more the focus on arts and that being an important part of existence.

When my older brother was diagnosed, my mom decided to start him on an instrument, because she’d heard that could be helpful. And so when my younger brother and I came along, we were also started on instruments. There was a lot of often atonal and badly-played music in the house. Tiny violins and a piano.

Did you start with violin?

Yes. I was not a very good student. I didn't love it. I would do things like record myself practicing, and then play that tape back while I was reading Calvin and Hobbes. I could be a much more competent violinist. But I'm not, because I didn't really focus on it until I started songwriting.

Well, I can’t imagine how much more competent you could get, but that is interesting.

No one envisioned me becoming a musician. The chops I was demonstrating as a thirteen-year-old violinist — no one was like, “Wow, I really hope he goes to conservatory.” No one said that.

I discovered songwriting in college, loved it, and then found the mandolin, which is tuned like a violin, and eventually came back around to the violin. It’s a very funny thing, the way these things can work.

You shared the Bengali stereotype of men carrying around poetry books. What sort of books/music/art was in your home?

I think it was, and remains, a difficult thing to transmit culture as immigrant parents. My parents tried to teach us Bengali. I understand it and speak it like a child who’s missed a lot of school. We read Indian epics as bedtime stories, often.

But we were very much like American kids. For a while, thought everyone had a weird home life they'd go back to, with an elephant-headed god. But it turned out that’s not what a lot of the children I went to school with had. Navigating that was a whole kettle of fish. All things Indian stemmed from the family — there wasn’t a sense that “Indian” was a thing divorced from family at all, for me. Which is why the cookbook project was such a cool thing, to sort of have some agency in it.

I read Anglo-Indian literature, like Enid Blyton, and authors who were famous in India and the Commonwealth. Mad Magazine. When I was a kid, I really liked the Redwall series by Brian Jacques. In high school — Of Mice and Men hit me hardest, I think, especially with an older brother who is differently abled.

What was the food scene like in your house growing up?

We as a family were very food-oriented. My mom didn’t learn to cook until she arrived in the U.S. She was very focused on getting into med school. It’s relatively standard for upper-middle-class Indian families to have a cook. Eventually, my mom had a correspondence course with her own mom and her mother-in-law. My mom’s home palate was very much Punjabi food, which is what one experiences when you go to the most standard Indian restaurant. Bengali food was not something my mom was exposed to growing up in a Punjabi household, so she didn’t really get exposed to a lot of those flavors in a real way until she started dating my dad.

My dad loves chocolate, cheese. “Eating well” is perhaps too highfalutin, but my dad cared deeply about food as did my mom.

My younger brother, especially, would ask my mom to make a lot of things, and forcibly stretch her repertoire by checking out a book for himself and a cookbook for my mom from the school library. She claims to be able to make a Linzer torte blindfolded, still.

What was your favorite food as a kid?

I loved kadhi, fried chickpea dumplings in a yogurt sauce. My brothers and I would see other kids eating pizza and burgers though, and often begged for that kind of thing. So we had to have a family discussion one night, because my mom was (quite reasonably) only going to make one meal for everyone. And so we decided — my dad facilitated — we were going to alternate Indian and Western, back and forth. But my mother’s Western cooking was extremely Indian-inflected; she put whatever spices she wanted in it. So, she would do a pork chop, but Indian-spiced.

You mention in the introduction to Heartland Masala that you have had side jobs in kitchen-adjacent places.

My first job was working as a bag boy at Price Chopper, which was terrible. I did like that I could get the macaroni and cheese and chicken legs on my breaks. I got a big upgrade when my younger brother, who is extremely good at talking and convincing people to do things, put in a word for me at the local Swiss pastry shop, André’s, that also did lunches and was a confectionery store; it’s also the Swiss consulate of Kansas City, wildly.

André’s remains the best chocolate-covered almonds and chocolate-covered orange peels I have had — and I have done an immense amount of research. Heroic amounts. I started out as a janitor, and loved it. I learned how to sweep and mop quite well. I feel very good about those skill sets. Eventually I got to sling pastries up front.

In college, I worked at a grocery store. I was a water boy at an Indian restaurant; I worked Friday, Saturday nights. I would go to work at the restaurant and then go straight out afterwards to hang out with friends, and just reeked of Indian food.

People were starving around you all the time.

Yes. After college, I managed a pizza shop. My one proper kitchen stint was a part-time job at an excellent restaurant in South Dartmouth, Massachusetts, called Little Moss. Lisa and John, the owners, are friends and were kind enough to take me on for a couple months. I helped out with their in-house bread program, and I had an awesome time baking for 20, 25 hours a week.

I also learned that what I love about cooking is diametrically opposed to restaurant work. I love taking my time, moving extremely slowly, and fooling around — none of that is appropriate for what a line cook is supposed to be. I also worked at a camp in the kitchen.

When the band was starting out, we would take turns cooking for each other, so I was cooking for a party of six once a week. And now, when we are in the studio, my role is primarily food-related. My bandmates are excellent audio engineers, and I take care of all food things.

What are your specialties?

I like working my way through cookbooks. I’m usually thinking about comfort food, things that can be eaten in bulk, and at variable timing too. I’m not going to put out soufflés for anyone, because the recording takes priority.

Oftentimes what I’m making is very much shaped by constraints. At one point, all we had access to was a microwave, so I was doing a lot with the microwave — a lot of eggs, various things. I brought in a George Foreman. I tried making squid on the George Foreman at one point, and the studio did not have great ventilation, so it smelled of squid for weeks. I think the George Foreman in general is banned from that studio.

Recently we were in West Springfield, Massachusetts, and the emphasis was on getting me back in the studio as quickly as possible. I got a very good sense of the ethnic markets; it’s not known to be a culinary mecca but there’s a lot of great stuff in West Springfield. I found a man making wraps, shawarma, and falafel. He is making the lavash, or the bread, in front of you. Like, he’s doing the whole thing. And there’s not really a schedule. The name of the place is Alnassir International Market. Highly recommend.

You prepared for Heartland Masala by taking on a sort of self-directed independent study. What are some of the cookbooks or writers who influenced you?

• My Bombay Kitchen | Niloufer Ichaporia King also has one of my favorite cookbook arcs. She released a cookbook in 2008, won a James Beard Award, and then she stopped writing cookbooks. That was it; not because of the Beard, but because she made such a beautiful piece of work, and said what she had to say.

  My Bombay Kitchen focuses on Parsi cooking, and the Parsis are of Persian ancestry, they settled largely in Mumbai. And they love to party, and they love eggs and chips. The book is a celebration. Niloufer Ichaporia King is friends with Alice Waters and that sort of slow-food world, and she does a Parsi New Year meal at Chez Panisse every year. The book is beautifully researched, it has a lot of personality, and it has these really charming illustrations that her husband, David, did. I think the willingness for her to get nerdy and get in there was very formative for me.

• Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat | Samin Nosrat’s writing is excellent, but really Wendy MacNaughton, the illustrator is, for me, the hero of that book. The fact that illustration can do so much more lifting than photography can was really instructive.

• Little Perfections: Eating in Singapore | T.W. Lim was the person who, when I was writing Heartland Masala, I asked him — “What do I want to do with this book? My mom has the recipes as the backbone, but what am I going to do beyond this?” — he was like, “What if you just really lean in to the nerdiness?” He also has a wonderful newsletter called Let Them Eat Cake.

• Colleen Taylor Sen is a historian I reference a lot and have gotten to interact with. She’s lovely — she’s based in Chicago, an Indian culinary history scholar.

How much work went into testing your mom’s recipes?

My mom teaches cooking classes, and distributes handouts that are somewhere between a recipe and an outline. They have all the ingredients, and most all the steps. Students take notes. But it’s not meant to be “you take this home and this is exactly as it is” — it’s more that you’ve seen this done now, so you can do it.

She sent me all the recipes and initially I had maybe a 30 percent success rate. So I said, “There’s something missing here. I need more details.”

My mother, who is a very powerful woman, said, “Maybe the problem is you.”

"Maybe the recipes are awesome," right?

This is where it got a little violent! I recipe-tested everything three times — twice on my own. So that 30 percent success rate rose to 60 percent. Then my mom and I did them together in our home kitchen, and that was where all of the fireworks flew — a lot of crying, a lot of very, very rude things said to one another.

Finally, we had each recipe tested at least once (and mostly twice) by a small army of friends-and-family volunteers.

(Page here, with a hugely enthusiastic review of how well the recipes turned out).

One of my favorite recipes in the book is Kachumbar, of which Jyoti notes,

“Due to water quality and hygiene concerns, dishes composed of dressed raw vegetables do not feature prominently in traditional Indian fare. The most conspicuous exception is kachumbar, a relish of onion, tomato, and cucumber. Unlike Western salads, this dish should be served by the spoonful as a fresh, crunchy counterpoint to the cooked food—think salsa fresca rather than a Caesar.”5

Tell us about your visual inspiration.

I love the way that illustration is similar to music, or a piece of music, or a song, extremely multidimensional. You can have a song, for instance, that is extremely poignant and sad, but also weirdly uplifting and can be bright, moving. Similarly with illustration: you can have things that are a little heavy, or saying something serious, but are also really fun.

Once I realized that I wanted to include some history and dig in, I wanted to counterbalance some of the writing with illustrations that were really fun to look at. That allowed me to dig a little deeper into some of the history, and basically get a little more serious with that, because I had something else on the other side of the seesaw.

I wanted this to be a book that people opened and were excited to just look through. And once you get too many words on a page, it risks not being quite as much fun. Fun and levity felt important to the thing that my mom and I were making.

The idea that something is “too high-level for an audience,” I really dislike. I don’t subscribe to it. It’s only too high-level if you don’t bring the audience along with you. But if you do the work to bring the audience along with you, nothing’s too high-level. They might not agree with where you land, but you can get there.

When you’ve got a lot going on what keeps you grounded?

Sleep. And a daily calisthenics/yoga routine that can be as long as an hour and a half, or it can be fifteen minutes on a sticky bar floor, if that’s all I’ve got.

I think a lot about food, and eating well. Foraging, just interacting with food in some way feels really important. And hanging out with friends, or having some sort of social interaction. Those four things are the framework that can make time feel really good or not, depending on whether I’m able to access them.

What staples do you make sure to have on the road?

I have relieved myself mostly of the staples by having a relatively regular fasting practice. my 24-hour cycle is just the intermittent thing of — I usually eat between noon and 8 PM. If I have my druthers and I’m at home, I will do a 36-hour once a week — just, like, Sunday night through Tuesday morning. Knowing that, on that fast day, I’m gonna be, by 5 PM, a little bit high, naturally, from your body fasting. Being comfortable without food is probably the biggest thing. Coffee is a thing that both my mom and I, and the band also, enjoy. And dark chocolate and nuts.

You mentioned you really like to work through cookbooks when you’re cooking for the band. Is there one you’re working on now?

Yes. I am very much into Chesnok.

Oh, wow — she’s amazing. I love Polina.

I like her a lot. I’ve been reading Chesnok, slowly working my way through it, and I’m really enjoying it. I just got some blue fenugreek seeds from Kalustyan’s. I’m psyched to dig in more.

Favorite kitchen tool?

A sharp knife. I really like a good cutting board, too. And kitchen rags. I like a relatively unending supply. That makes me happy.

What's the best book you've read this year?

Ed Yong’s An Immense World is mind-blowing.

He’s not a guy who’s afraid of going high-level, but he brings you along. Close to the end of the book, he quotes the Insane Clown Posse, which is a crazy thing to do. A-plus.

What are you listening to right now?

I've been listening to a lot of friends recently—Caitlin Canty, Henry Jamison, and You Won't. The most common soundtrack for long drives, though, is Kevin Stroud's History of English podcast, which makes me squeal with delight.

You travel a lot — do you have a city that you love to go to for its food?

Portland, ME and Providence, RI are both favorites. New York City, of course. In truth, though, I don't need much to get excited about a food scene. I lived in rural Texas for a month, in Corpus Christi, and the tortilla selection at the H-E-B was all I needed. I’m really happy right now in Northampton, where the farmers markets are excellent.

I got to visit Singapore a year and a half ago, and that was, I think, the closest I’ve felt to a sort of spiritual pilgrimage in a while. The hawker centers were unbelievable. Just incredible.

To sign off, what are you currently obsessed with?

I love my Cayson apron. I think it’s my favorite piece of clothing. I often keep my apron on way longer than necessary. I even travel with it.

What else? I have a slackline up in the yard, and that’s, again, part of being settled in a place. That feels really good.

Thank you, Auyon! And thank you all for reading.

If you enjoyed this post, please tap the ❤️ button to keep interesting conversations of this sort coming your way. I’d also love to hear about your favorite way to hang out with friends new and old.

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Welcome to Four Top Issue No. 94, aka the second and final 2026 Super Summer Dispatch. Below you’ll find food stuff, book reviews, a film that premiered the year I graduated from high school, a series on the art of the interview, how much I don’t know about wine, and a deep dive on Aldi. Fuel for whatever life throws your way.

Sending gratitude from the woods of Maine. I’m so grateful you’re here. Next month, a return to a more regular rhythm. And if you haven’t yet picked up this gem of a summer read, add it to your cart. If you’re local, save the date/time of Sunday, September 20 at 4PM. Subscribers learn more/get first dibs, next issue.

XOXO, Page

PS: A gentle reminder that via the indie bookstore online darling Bookshop.org, I post affiliate links for all books mentioned within. Please support your local indies, but if you’re far from one or prefer the convenience of a link, I earn a small bit of change from each book purchased.

1. Super Choc O Food

In the “treat yo self” category, a new-to-me-discovery from gourmet chocolatier Valerie Confections and interior design firm Commune. These two Los Angeles-based businesses have been hawking a triptych of admittedly rich bars for over a decade, selling them individually or as a psychedelic purple/aqua/pink set.

The near half-pound darkened milk chocolate bar contains almonds, cashews, peanuts, macadamias, golden raisins, dried pear, apricot, sunflower seeds, and soy salt. Excellent post-lunch, as an addition to a dessert plate, a host/hostess/teacher/best friend gift, stocking stuffer, or cheeky addition to the candy drawer.

2. Fiction Faves | Famous Men + Tata (and the rest of the July reading list)

I read seven solidly good novels in July. Two stood out.

In Famous Men, a familiar writerly premise: elder creative statesman takes young protégé under his wing. While behaving questionably behind closed doors, the aforementioned creative genius exerts the external persona of a paternal patron. To be more specific: young Will Miles, a lunch lady’s daughter, has the great (mis) fortune of being born in the same small Midwestern town as famously prolific writer Nathaniel Fellow. Will, whose paternal origins remain a mystery, needs to escape her high school reputation (and a skeevy stepfather). She secures admission to college in New York City, where Nathaniel teaches. As she low-key stalks Nathaniel, Will secures a position as his assistant. Will runs errands, collates papers, repairs office walls, and takes Nathaniel’s credit card for a whirl.

“I went to Gristedes. Pineapple, dark chocolate, deli turkey from the counter, whole milk, frozen shrimp, a loaf of fresh rye, avocados, cashews, a twenty-two-dollar hunk of cheese I couldn’t pronounce, because the sample tasted like the smell of Rosendale Lake when the algae blooms washed up on the shore. In New York, you could get any fruit or vegetable you wanted no matter the season, all of it bright and misted every few seconds with fresh water. Once you get used to certain pleasures, it’s hard to go backward. The total came to $274; around $150 more than he owed me. I handed out Nathaniel’s card, feeling like someone.”

The age-old story of catching a bus to the bright lights big city sparkles with the kind of writing that author Julie Butin is rightfully known for.

My other top pick: Tata, courtesy of Valérie Perrin, author of Fresh Water for Flowers, Three, and Forgotten on Sunday. Perrin, born in Burgundy, now lives in Paris; the work is translated by Hildegarde Serle.

Agnes, a world-renowned filmmaker, is having a terrible year. Her dashing actor of an ex- husband has left her for a younger model; when the book opens, he and his new paramour have whisked Agnes’s fifteen-year-old daughter off on a seaside holiday. Agnes, for her part, is spending her birthday in a morgue, identifying the body of her beloved aunt who she thought died three years prior. Once the mystery is set in motion, Agnes embarks on a mission to figure out who, if not her aunt, Agnes had buried, and in the process uncovers a treasure trove of family secrets.

On the honorable mention front…

• My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein complemented my February read of Francesca Wade’s tremendous biography.

• I didn’t love Country People as much as the deeply inventive North Country, but the tale of an academic family making a pilgrimage from California to a small liberal arts college town in Vermont obviously rang a lot of my geographic bells.

• Down to Earth is a fun, romantic, read-in-an-afternoon romp from cookbook author/collaborator and farmer Julia Turshen. A Hudson Valley farm-meet-cute filled with delicious food imagery. And you know I love those 831 Stories on my bookshelf.

• On the topic of books that offer immense visual satisfaction, my latest Fitzcarraldo addition (now out from New Directions Publishing), Dooneen, is an inventive tale along the lines of Nonesuch and the On the Calculation of Volume series. Bartholomew Port moves without warning, via some sort of unexplained magical transport, from London to his native Dublin. A housing crisis permeates the city, echoing the historical Troubles and igniting a dystopian experience for all the city’s residents.

• Finally, my favorite of the backend five, Earth 7. A gobsmacking, smartly experimental work that propels the reader to a future moment where the Earth is on its last legs. Dylan is a teenager living with her scientist mother in some sort of underwater pod. Like most (all?) teenagers, there’s tension in the mother/child relationship. Dylan wants out. Mother is doing what she believes is best.

3. The Critic and Her Publics | The Art of the Interview

Season Four of Merve Emre’s1 outstanding podcast is now in progress and worth a follow. The Art of the Interview, episode one, features Chana Joffe-Wait (Peabody Award-winning journalist and This American Life producer) outlining the sorts of questions she uses to get beyond surface conversations. Novelist Sheila Heti spends episode two recounting conversations with writers including Rachel Cusk and Elena Ferrante.

Further Reading

Rachel Cusk, The Art of Fiction No. 246 | The Paris Review

A Correspondence with Elena Ferrante | Brick

The Ferrante Letters | Sarah Chihaya, Merve Emre, Katherine Hill. Jill Richards

Sheila Heti on Boarding Schools and the Mind of a Writer | The New Yorker

The St. Alwynn Girls at Sea | The New Yorker

Nice White Parents | Serial Productions and the New York Times

4. Clockwatchers | The Criterion Channel | Jill Sprecher

A late-90s workplace film of the highest order. Parker Posey carries a briefcase. Lisa Kudrow wonders why the boy won’t call her back. Toni Colette steals a rubber band ball. Alanna Ubach obsesses over her no-good, very bad sports car-driving man.

I’m into the soft jazz elevator music soundtrack. The terrible men who don’t bother to learn the names of their female temps. The boss lady who, rather than lending a helping hand, exerts a power-hungry schoolmarm vibe. The happy hour with free hors d’oeuvres and plastic monkey drink charms.

5. and Christian Wiman (and two other poems I adored this month)

Poetry is a genre I approach with a beginner’s mind. I studied bits and bobs in high school and college. I had the privilege of learning from Paul Muldoon at Bread Loaf and took a semester-long course on Emily Dickinson that, it’s not hyperbole to say, changed my worldview. Another semester found me elbow-deep in John Milton. These days I find it the perfect foil to a divided attention. An invitation for laser focus, for larger truths, for finding friction, fast.

Popa’s newest work — If You Love That Lady — invites the reader to breathe. Linger in the space between lines, stanzas spare as the larder at winter’s end. My eye goes to the food, of course:

Marigold rows of pleated tangerine—

who wouldn’t remember the yolk

of Europe's eggs, breakfast outdoors

but also to the churches, the letters, the airports. Hummingbirds and cicadas, geese and olive trees, mountains and the sea. A deep reverence for legacy, literary roots. A fine volume to remind you what it is to be alive in the world.

I also picked up Christian Wiman’s latest, The Dance. Within, the grave weight of a bone marrow transplant and the death of a disabled child balanced by visually driven reflections on the seasons, fences, the “Studio, 4:00 p.m.” It is, in other words, every day stuff elevated to the otherworldly.

Further Reading

Night as a Verb | Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Mice | Paul Muldoon

6. How a Major Grocery Store Chain Can Dramatically Lower the Cost of Food | Odd Lots

Grocery gab has entered the group chat; The Daily talking skyrocketing grocery store prices, Frank Bruni musing on Costco Cliques, Big Food taking a hit. Summer 2026 saw the opening of Aldi in midtown Manhattan. This interview with the Odd Lots duo revealed Joe’s adoration for produce aisles and Tracy’s frequenting of Connecticut Walmarts. I learned a lot.

7. Salanova® Red Oakleaf | Johnny’s Seeds

The garden, thanks to my head farmer husband, is in a good place. Despite a late start, we turned out a modest early summer crop of sugar snap peas, a more robust showing from the newly incorporated snow peas. The fava beans, a favorite with pecorino and crisp white wine, failed royally, producing a pauper’s total of two. The cabbage, like all other brassicas we’ve attempted in past years, also didn’t take, save for a few leaves with mockingly large holes. Lettuce, three kinds, A+ all. Shishito peppers are popping, enough to share with the neighborhood. Kale and Swiss chard reliably plod along at a steady pace. I’ve lost track of the spinach. Upon our return from Maine, I suspect we’ll be hawking tomatoes by the quart, frying endless pans of eggplant, and eating beans straight off the bush. Zucchinis will run the length of my arm and hopefully we’ll have enough cucumbers to slice for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

The aforementioned red oakleaf lettuce is a new variety this year and I absolutely adore it.

Further Reading

A Wilder Way: How Gardens Grow Us | Poppy Okotcha

On evenings when my nervous system is amped up, I hang out with Poppy in her Devon, England-based garden. Winner of the Jane Grigson Trust - Sous Chef Award for New Food and Drink Writers 2025.

8. Domaine du Pagau White Châteauneuf-du-Pape Cuvée Réservée Blanc | 2020

There are plenty of reasons to skip right over this entry, number one being the price of the bottle and number two being I don’t have the first clue how to write about wine. Nevertheless, July saw the consumption of not one, not two, but three of my most favorite bottles of all time. I’ll get to the other two next month, but tell me, what compels you when being presented with a bottle of wine? When the sommelier or kindly wine shop attendant offers up a list worthy of a week’s grocery shop: apple, peach, plum pear, lemons, limes, orange, grapefruit for good measure? Perhaps you prefer notes of toffee, bitter chocolate, smoked sea salt, espresso? Or is the balance, the texture, the notes of your favorite flora, tree, wet grass after a thunderstorm? Work in progress, this one. For now, if you like something with a full body, an outlier in the Rhône region, this bottle’s a true treat.

9. Caramelo Tortillas

A provisions pit stop at Sissle & Daughters is always a good idea. One item I never leave without is the Caramelo tortillas, a constant in the chiller. They’re incredibly light, gossamer thin, and sturdy enough to handle more toppings than you think. You can order online and find a list of local stockists here.

Read more about the “croissants of tortillas”:

The Self-Taught Cook Who Mastered the Flour Tortilla | Helen Rosner

10. How to End a Story | Helen Garner

Thanks to I made an impulse grab for Helen Garner’s collected diaries at the library last week. I’m enjoying it so much I’ve ordered a copy of my own. I’m a terribly inconsistent (read: almost never) journaler. Despite my deep adoration for notebooks and pens and strict adherence to a daily, weekly, monthly planner I’ve never embraced a regular practice. Garner’s entries,

“Letters are too slow; the telephone is too fast.”

and

“Good sensible people often withdraw from one another because of secret differences, each becoming absorbed by what he feels is right and by the error of the other. Conditions then grow more and more complicated and exasperating, until it becomes impossible to undo the knot at the crucial moment on which everything depends.” —Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther

are giving me the courage to try, try again.

Before I go…

What books did you read and love in July?

What’s the food stuff you’ll pay a ridiculous amount of money for because it brings you joy?

If you could interview anyone the world, who would it be and why?

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How, if not by the calendar, do I know summer is here? I feel it at the end of the day when there’s time for a late-afternoon swim or a binge watch of America’s Sweethearts: DCC. Garlic scapes have come and gone along with sugar snap and snow peas. There’s more garden lettuce than we could possibly eat. On Sunday, we found nearly three hours to take in a pleasant, if middling, alien-tinged blockbuster. Monday offered up another two to fawn over a flock of crime-solving sheep. Farmer’s market trips appear on the agenda every few days. We’ve eaten all the strawberries. The freezer is filled with ice cream and popsicles. I streamed a movie that lingered on Notes for months and started a charming new series (then two, then three — ended up being too scary for me!) that demands just the right amount of attention.

In today’s letter

what menus can teach us about history ✨ bathtubs in the kitchen ✨ teenage girls on the lam ✨ recipes for honey-lavender feta and summer salads ✨ fruit is too sweet ✨ reviews of six newly published novels ✨ philosophy of the home ✨ the case for America’s best hot dog ✨ how I misunderstood an Olivia Laing book ✨ chez panisse prints ✨ wodcast ✨ my obsession with Hacks continues ✨ a hidden link for the best new britbox binge (of course I’m referring to the other Bennet sister ✨ why david sedaris is the best dressed author out there

1. A History of Menus is a Menu of History, Stephen Lurie (Pudding)

A big thank you to Gourmet for introducing me to Pudding. I recommend reading this gorgeous, leveraging-tech-in-the-right-way history of menus through eight courses on the biggest screen possible. My favorite? Celery in a Celery Crystal Vase (we’ve long established I’m here for any sort of relish-adjacent nosh).

2. Ode to the Kitchen Bath, Daniel Felsenthal (The Paris Review)

Lucy Dearlove, of Lecker fame, highlighted this poignant reflection on the seemingly immodest location for his tub. The New York State Tenement1 House Act of 1901 required landlords to provide running water; because of the tenement houses' diminutive size, and the relative enormity of the kitchen space, it became standard to bathe next to the stove. Felsenthal reflects on the symbolism of the bathtub in gay culture and how in his home, the presence evokes his partner’s dead husband.

3. Fruit Is Too Sweet, Ellen Cushing (The Atlantic)

As one who succumbed to the Sumo Citrus craze and buys Driscoll’s Sweetest Batch blueberries by the pound, I was properly chastened by Cushing’s exploration the recent rocket-like rise in Brix scores, why sweetness without acid is just plain boring, and the danger in trading “complexity for convenience.”

4. America’s Greatest Hot Dog, Alan Siegel (The Ringer)

Costco’s current CEO, Ron Vachris, who started at the company as a forklift driver, recently garnered 9 million views for lunching on the company’s $1.50 hot dog (reflects the combo price, inclusive of a soda or bottle of water). Over the course of the 2025 fiscal year, customers gobbled up 245 million combos. The hot dog is so beloved that, “Julia Child herself used to eat two Costco dogs at a time with mustard and sauerkraut.”

5. So Much Madeira: What the Founding Fathers ate — and drank — on July 4, 1777, Victoria Flexner (The Atlantic)

Last year, food historian Victoria Flexner wondered: if the Founding Fathers weren’t grilling burgers and uploading snaps of flag cakes to Instagram, what was on the table?

“The quantity of alcohol served at such a meal would be astounding by today’s standards (in part because people at the time rarely drank water). One bill from a dinner at City Tavern in 1778 for 270 people included 522 bottles of Madeira, 24 bottles of port wine, 116 big bowls of punch, nine of toddy, six of sangaree, two tubs of grog for artillery soldiers, one gallon of spirits for bell ringers—and an extra fee for the dozens of glasses and plates that, perhaps unsurprisingly, broke during the course of the evening.”

6. Feast By Firelight, Emma Frisch

Here’s a simple takeaway for anyone who is, like me, primarily cooking al fresco this summer: take your meat or veggies, wash, prep, place in a Ziploc bag with olive oil and salt and pepper. When it’s time for dinner, light the grill or campfire and you’ve got dinner in minutes. I’m also going to play around with Camp Mess Nachos, a frittata to use up all the bits and bobs at the bottom of your crisper drawer, and BBQ tofu.

7. Obsessed with the Best, Ella Quittner

Ella Quittner’s spring release is as big a winner as all the enthusiasts note. I knew we were soulmates from the brief section, “A Note on Ingredients” - “I buy enormous tubs of Carnation malted milk powder, and I’m constantly shocked by how quickly I go through them.” My kind of woman. As soon as I’m back in my kitchen, Adult “Pasta Os” “Made of Spaghetti” will be on the menu.

8. Madeira, Photography by Nadine Ijewere, Introduction by Nuno Mendes

The fifth volume in a decadent cookbook series from Apartamento Magazine and Belmond, this love letter to the Atlantic island of Madeira, off north-western Africa is filled with sumptuous photography and recipes, but isn’t your usual cookbook. A travel diary of sorts, the highlights are guest contributions from Violet Bakery’s Claire Ptak, food and travel writer Rafael Tonon, and chef Nuno Mendes. The first in my personal collection, I’m beginning the hunt for sold-out past volumes now.

9. The Art of Simple Food, Volumes I and II, Alice Waters

and ’s Dinner Plan conversation sent me straight to my bookshelves to dig up these classics filled with fresh produce, minimal ingredients and interventions. If you are, as Waters suggests, heading into the market with an open mind, you can purchase produce in whatever helter-skelter manner you please, assured that when you return home, these volumes will gift you easy-to-execute preparations with only the most common of pantry staples. Also, if you’re a fan of David Lance Goines (responsible for the cover of the Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook and the restaurant signage), Omnivore Books has a small collection of signed work for sale.

10. The Observer’s Guide to Japanese Vending Machines, Tanner Bowden

An incomplete catalog of the more than 4 million vending machines that reliably dole out hot drinks, cold coffee, cake, cigarettes all manner of essentials and pleasures. On my wishlist in case any loved ones are reading.

11. Waffle House Vistas, Micah Cash

A sports tournament adjacent visit to a Maryland Waffle House prompted me to revisit this beauty from The Bitter Southerner to share with my dining companion once we returned home. Why do we love Waffle House?

“The photos in this book present an honest politics. They remind us that food is love. They remind us that many thousands of people from every imaginable background eat together each day, back to back, shoulder to shoulder.” - Maurice Carlos Ruffin

12. Watermelon Pool, Bonsoir Lune (translated from Korean by Frances Cha)

If I still had little kids at home, I’d pick this up to go along with the most charmingly color-pencil-illustrated picture book2 filled with happy swimmers navigating the icy-cool flesh of an enormous watermelon. Perfect for enduring the past, present, and future heat waves.

13. Grilled Feta with Honey and Lavender, Nigel Slater (The Observer)

Add a baguette, garden veggies, perhaps some grilled chicken sausage, and call it a night.

14. Six Perfect Summer Salads (Financial Times)

I’m starting with the dynamite Gilda Pasta Salad by Tom Jackson and Punjabi Panzanella by Sabrina Gidda.

15. Fujianese Food Deserves To Be the Next Chinese Cuisine to Go Global, Fuchsia Dunlop (Financial Times)

Because I never miss a Dunlop dispatch. With sentences like, “The noodles relaxed into the faintly thickened broth in silken swirls,” you can see why.

16. The Best Food of 2026 (So Far), (New York Magazine, Grub Street)

I’ve recently griped about my beef with best-of lists, but with talk of martini trolleys, French-fried yuba, and hyper-seasonal salads accompanied by the most lovely illustrations, The Ellaphant in the Room, I’m going to let this one slide.

17. Alia Shawkat Reviews New York’s Viral Frozen Yogurts (Interview Magazine) + Every Generation Gets the Fro-Yo It Deserves, Helen Rosner (The New Yorker)

A native New Englander, I spent my middle and high school years in Columbus, Ohio, a place filled with excellent ice cream (didn’t see that coming, did you?) among a zillion other charming qualities. Graeter’s was within walking distance of my school and it was my favorite shop to frequent with my dad (who just received a special shipment for Father’s Day, highly recommend for summer gifting). When hanging with my friends we usually opted for California Yogurt (Oreo Cream Cheese and Chocolate Pretzel, two of my BFFs reminded me, were regular favorites).

18. My Dream Birthday Cake column, Nicola Lamb (Kitchen Projects)

This periodic column makes me want to throw our family’s yellow cake/chocolate frosting/rainbow sprinkle (sometimes homemade, sometimes boxed) formula to the wind and have a go at: Baked Italia, aka a Cherry & Barley Ice Cream Cake. Fancy Lemon Drizzle. Chocolate and Toasted Coconut Cake. Crumb Top Blueberry Muffin Blueberry Cake. Carrot Cake.

19. Penknife Food Book Summer Reading Challenge, (Penknife)

Hysmith, a food scholar and author of the food history newsletter, Penknife, has offered up a foodie summer reading bingo-like challenge filled with many fun ideas and a robust reading list to go along with. I’ve printed it out and have pinned it to our family corkboard.

Books

Summer ready

20. Alan Opts Out, Courtney Maum

The term “beach read” is, at best, divisive, and at worst, derisive. For me, a beach read is a book best taken in the yard, by the sea, or in a dark, air-conditioned cave. The genre is irrelevant but the pace should be swift, the plot nimble. I’m game for a laugh or to be scared out of my wits.

I’ve long been a fan of Courtney Maum who has written novels such as I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You and the outstanding memoir The Year of the Horses. So I wasn’t completely shocked that I fell head over heels for her latest release. But having not clocked it as the perfect kick off to my summer reading, I was taken aback by how much I loved this fun romp of a read.

Alan, an advertising executive, lives with his decidedly social-climbing, if well-meaning wife, Vivian and their two daughters in the Bellport a fictional, if nearly real, neighborhood in Greenwich, Connecticut. Recent transplants from the midwest, each family member goes about acclimating in their own way, blinders on. Alan wheels and deals until a pitch takes a horrifyingly wrong turn. Vivian’s aspiration to join the ranks of a local social club sees her jumping through all manner of hoops to cement her place in the shiny, shellacked community. The daughters, near-teens, have their own priorities (saving animals, going to Starbucks).

What in other hands could be read as a disdainful dowdy review of consumerism is, in Maum’s hands, an empathetic, often hilarious look at the consequences of misplaced priorities. The books’s commentary on social dynamics could easily read mean spirited, but it doesn’t and it’s a huge triumph. The reader is rooting for this family, urging them to look up from their silos and rediscover the joy in being together.

21. Pool House, Mary H.K. Choi

For those looking for a dark take on the fickle nature of fame, and a mother-daughter relationship as angular and cold as the modern pool house in which this novel is set, this might be your next summer read. Moon, a former Miramax poster child and Stevie, her young adult daughter who works at a Chipotle-like franchise, are struggling. Money’s tight, roles for middle aged women are seemingly nonexistent, and by all accounts, future prospects are bleak. Moon’s television sitcom husband and real-life lover dies, rallying her former on-screen son to join the pity party and, as a result, multiply the family dysfunction by a billionfold.

If I’m being honest, I lost interest about three-quarters of the way through if only due to the slow realization none of the characters possessed the ability to face their own shortcomings or give each other an ounce of grace. Choi is a keen-eyed observer and her moody take on Los Angeles is to be commended in its refusal to be starstruck, blinded by the shiny glow of fame. It’s a provocative tale that refuses to make concessions in the name of your good feelings.

22. The Fervent Whites, De’Shawn Charles Winslow

For a few years, I maintained a subscription to The Washington Post for the book coverage, ably led by . After the recent unpleasantness that resulted in a decimation of the books section, I promptly unsubscribed with a strongly worded comment or two. Thankfully, Charles continues to share his bookish thoughts on this platform, which is how I discovered De’Shawn Charles Winslow’s latest 208-page thriller.

It’s 1982 and Ella and James, residents of the Hudson Valley community of Fervent, have just been released from prison. Convicted of murder a year and a half earlier, the couple is exonerated by a late-breaking confession, leaving them free to deal with the grief over their adopted son Morgan who died while they were behind bars. Notorious in Fervent for their hot tempers and noticeable for being two of the few non-Black residents (their son Morgan was Black), the community warily welcomes the Whites back. Tensions are high, especially between Syl Upshaw, who, in divulging a long-buried secret may have led Morgan to his death and her best friend, Fate Jolly whose sexual orientation had been an issue for James in the past. A deft investigation of race relations set against the backdrop of a summer-perfect thriller.

The real deal

Reviews for the next two novels are unnecessary. If you read any sort of current book coverage, these two, thanks both to the talent of the writers and the publishing machines behind them, are seemingly everywhere. But they’re good. Very good. If you’ve already digested as many reviews as you can handle, scroll on.

23. Whistler | Ann Patchett

Most people like, if not love, Ann Patchett. She’s a patron saint of the independent bookstore and writes books that quietly devastate with their unadorned observation of complicated families. That’s not to say she’s for everyone; I’ve read thoughtful criticism of her work, wondering at its understated nature.

Patchett’s newest family drama stars Daphne Fuller, a beloved English teacher at a prestigious Manhattan girls’ school. She’s living a fulfilled if controlled life in Westchester County with her husband Jonathan, a retired hospital administrator. A chance encounter with Daphne’s beloved former stepfather, Eddie, sets her on an unexpected journey into the long-buried seismic family event that took Eddie away from her, her sister Leda, and mother.

When, post-reunion, Leda (now a therapist) asks Daphne why she’d never talked about the incident, Daphne replies in the way of a stoic New Englander,

“I packed it away,” I said. “I put the whole thing in a box and shoved it behind the hot water heater in the basement. Then I forgot about it. Isn’t that what people do? They pack things up and then years later they hire you to unpack it for them.”

Whether the chin up, soldier on approach reigns superior is the question the entire book hinges on. Whistler makes the case for opening oneself up to stories and the power they have to bring us together, heal old wounds, and impart lessons for the future.

24. The Things We Never Say, Elizabeth Strout

Artie Dam lives in a small New England town. He’s a (mostly) beloved teacher, husband, and father to Rob, who, many years ago, survived a car accident that killed his high school girlfriend. Though Artie is surrounded by people all day long, he’s lonely. We watch him engage in the humdrum of life, making small talk at cocktail parties, wondering at the political schism that threatens to swallow up his neighbors. He sails his boat, sits down to dinner with his wife each night, and maintains a small cadre of friends in whom he confides. Then he decides to kill himself (don’t worry, the suicidal ideation is revealed near the outset). When his body makes other plans, Artie must decide whether to reengage with life and family, and what to do with a long-held secret.

This isn’t a book you read to escape the world. Strout reports on the extraordinary nature of every day life, holding up a mirror to the current moment and asking the reader take a good long look.

Art and philosophy

25. Contrapposto, Dave Eggers

In June, a mere 25 pages into cracking the spine on Eggers’ latest narrative, I offered up a bold prediction: this would turn out to be my favorite book of the month. I stand by it. While there are fissures within, it’s a surprisingly cohesive work, focused on the lifelong friendship between Cricket and Olivia. Cricket possesses an inherent talent for drawing; Olivia, a year his senior, plays the role of talent scout, inspiration, and muse. As the two weave in and out of each other’s lives, each forges a distinct path through the unscrupulous art world marked by ingenuity, determination, and scandal.

What I loved most? Cricket’s dedication to the physicality of art, to tasks that externally read more manual labor and less highbrow masterpieces. It’s something that’s been on my mind as of late: what we produce in a world that is ever-more online and directed by an AI-led workflow. While Olivia heads off to college and travels the world, Cricket continues his study in a different way:

“Instead he learned trades. When the Whistlestop bathrooms needed to be retiled, Cricket watched and learned. When half the roof blew off during a summer storm, Cricket helped frame it and seal it and hammer home the shingles. The satisfaction he felt finishing any of these jobs—he did Roulin’s bathroom at home too—surprised him and differed little from the happiness he felt when he drew something well. When he built a new deck for his mother, he sat in the backyard for an hour, just looking at it. Was there a difference between a deck and a truthful rendering of the human form? He presumed there was, but he couldn’t place it.”

Beyond questions of art, what constitutes it, who decides its worth, is a deep meditation on how we live in relationship with others and ourselves.

“No one tells us! No one tells us that our spirits stay delightable, surpriseable, porous and tingling. Every year, Cricket felt more—of everything—and every year his eyes had only gotten better, younger, his aperture opening, opening, opening.”

26. Crudo, Olivia Laing

I went into this book blind, in that I had zero idea it was based on real-life experimental writer Kathy Acker. Whether that information would have shifted my reading experience, we’ll never know, though I suspect not greatly, given my unfamiliarity with her work. The narrative follows Kathy as she turns 40 and readies herself to marry, though she seems ill-suited to the task.

“She needed to be more alone than she was, it was already causing problems […] Her husband’s sad eyes upset her but also infuriated her, she detested being responsible for anyone else’s happiness. Like can’t you just figure out what you need and get it? Why do you have to keep asking me. Kathy could share, but on her own terms.”

Later on, Kathy admits that she is “repulsed by her own indolence.” On the brink of 40, she wants a different life, “ideally an architect called Ben Pentreath, whose rented rectory in Dorset she coveted unbearably.” The struggle is a common human issue, making decisions, commitments, and then sticking with them. Laing’s ability to strip a character down to his/her/their most unappealing essence and then reveal that they simply reflect the feelings we cannot admit even to ourselves, therein lies her genius.

Laing notes that she wrote the book in real time, reflecting the political events over the course of a summer, while imagining how Acker would have reacted to each more troubling than the last. It’s a successful, if discombobulating, creative endeavor that leaves the reader wondering: would the real Kathy Acker have approved?

27. Philosophy of the Home, Emanuele Coccial

I picked this up for an outside project and found myself highlighting line after line after line. Coccial is an associate professor of the history of philosophy at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. The book covers setting up home and its various rooms, what it means to live in relation (or opposition) to the city, and the effect of accumulated objects on our energy. Also, some seriously good reflections on technology,

“When my daughter is at school, I spend my days in front of a strange object made of polymers, plastic, ceramic, copper, iron, nickel and silicon. I spend a lot of time talking to it. Sometimes hours. This object very often responds. It does so in a very articulate and often boring way, in different languages. Unlike the nineteenth century, which gave the name ‘spiritualism’ to this kind of experiment, we prefer to talk more soberly about ‘Zoom sessions’. We prefer not to admit it, but computers or mobile phones are machines that turn animism into an ordinary commonplace experience. During our WhatsApp calls or Zoom meetings we don’t see a computer or a telephone. We see souls, subjects and consciousnesses encapsulated in a body that is not biological. It would be naive to reply that what these machines really give us are signs or representation. Words or images are independent – in time and in being – of what they represent. The presences that infest my computer or my telephone are not. For long hours the metallic object is visited and plagued by various consciousnesses. Technology has filled objects with spirit. There’s nothing particularly disturbing about this sort of cyber-animism. It merely extends the domestic the minds that haunt these objects. They refuse to obey common sense: instead of granting spirit only to beings anatomically identical to us, they insist they can see intentions and ideas in a block of marble or bronze, and claim these objects speak to them.

A few parting thoughts…

28. At the Altar of Comme des Garçons With David Sedaris, Tyler Watamanuk (GQ)

More fashion profiles of seriously good writers, please. Especially when they involve literati choosing pieces like this,

“The topcoat was downright monastic: a regal silhouette with fluted draping like falling water and a twisting hemline. The blue fabric was the deep, dense color of bottled ink. It gave him the air of a reluctant high priest.”

And this,

“the real showpiece was the long, layered skirt made of sporty mesh—like baggy basketball shorts remixed for the runway. He wore one of its layers tucked and set with care, suggesting the fantasy of a Y2K-era Allen Iverson attending the Met Gala.”

29. What We’re Reading This Summer: Pocket Reads New Yorker writers name their favorite short books (The New Yorker)

Is your feed also filled to the brim with writers sharing their most favorite slimmed down narratives (while also proclaiming Lonesome Dove a must read)? Me too.

30. Summer Books | Thirty-four TLS Writers Share Their Holiday Reading (Times Literary Supplement)

In which I discover Mary Beard is a judge for this year’s Booker Prize, Paul Muldoon weighs in, and Claire Lowdon reminds me of a slim book I ADORED and highly recommend (Practice, Rosalind Brown).

31. Robby Hoffman Will Always Feel Poor, No Matter How Rich She Gets, The Daily

Still mourning the end of Hacks, grasping onto media that keeps me connected.

32. This Is TASTE 800: How Long Gone’s Jason Stewart on Erewhon Losing the Pizza Plot, Noma’s LA Adventure, and a Visit to Ballerina Farm

Jason Stewart goes back to his roots and talks all things contemporary food culture with Matt Rodbard.

33. When Faith and Doubt Hold Hands | with Elif Shafak, Wodcast

An excellent first guest for this new podcast about the words that shape our lives. If you haven’t read 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World, please make it the next book on your list. One of my absolute all-time favorites.

34. Hen’s Teeth, Iron and Wine (featuring I’m With Her)

If the two-week radio silence didn’t tip you off, the subtitle of my last newsletter — I’m about to destroy my kitchen — explains where I’ve been.

Up until demo began, I’d felt somewhat in control of the situation. Appliances, faucets, and a very large sink were ordered. Check, check, check. Cabinet plans were drawn, revised, and approved. In early June, I confirmed paint colors, ordered light fixtures, and monitored the progress of our terra cotta tiles and very British pedestal sink. Check, check, check!

Other tasks (namely choosing a suitable worktop for our island and sink area — expensive! complicated! so many options!) have me ready to wave the white flag of defeat and nosh picnic-style on bare floors for the rest of my days.

We’re coming up on three weeks of eating out of a half-working fridge, perching paper plates on laps and the old weathered cedar table out back. Yesterday, under the glare of the mid-June sun, the girls and I made a noontime run to the farmer’s market. Two small totes carried sweet ruby red June strawberries, tiny tart crimson raspberries, a single ball of whole-milk mozzarella, half a dozen sourdough bagels, sugar snap peas, hummus, two veggie-packed tubs of kale and couscous salad, a quart of coconut squash soup, and hot dumplings for lunch, plus the requisite kosher dill pickles on a stick. Heaven.

All of this is to say, my brain’s a hot mess. Staring at a blank page doesn’t help.

Luckily I’ve found many a task well-suited to a distracted mind, including:

• Watering the garden.

• Perfecting bacon on the grill at sunrise.

• Dipping blousy, just-picked butter lettuce into Trader Joe’s A+bake blue cheese dressing.

• Watching Sarah Ahn and Nam Soon Ahn accept the James Beard Award for Umma over and over and over again.

• Listening to Maggie Hoffman and Matt Rodbard review the best cookbooks of 2026 so far (note: the first thing I will back when back in the kitchen this fall, Gooey Malted Cookie Dough Chocolate Chunk Bars courtesy of Ella Quittner).

• Dreaming about a return trip to Cote 550 (I missed Ruth by a day, an hour, a matter of minutes??).

• Binging the new-to-me Homing podcast featuring my favorites: Matilda Goad, Skye McAlpine, Nigel Slater, Jeremy Lee, Ruth Rogers (ALL credit to for the recommendation).

In today’s letter

aga sagas ✨ a more reasoned approach to AI ✨ persephone books ✨ dave eggers ✨ the reign of the narrative cookbook ✨ 831 stories + beloved chef turned romance author ✨

BOOKS

The AGA saga

Sometime around the end of my first decade, when color-coordinated GAP t-shirt and legging ensembles no longer hit quite right, I became a serious adult reader.

The transition was sudden and permanent. With the precision of the King’s Guard, I executed a decisive about-face away from Judy Blume and Christopher Pike. Tattered box sets of The Babysitter's Club and Sweet Valley High, were permanently relegated to a chipped, third-hand bookcase in the corner of my room.

With the confidence of a pre-teen who hasn’t yet been humbled by puberty, I committed an act of quiet rebellion.

One day, upon entering the library, I turned left to the adult section. My usual route was to the right, up the stairs to the children’s section, Guarded by a kindly librarian who donned thick bottle cap glasses and (even as the summer equinox approached) primary colored turtlenecks, this was my home.

Standing in front of the tall and amply stocked metal shelving units, I gazed upon a sea of soft pastel covers, showcasing turquoise water and creamy sand-covered bluffs. The morning light reflected off plastic-wrapped covers featuring gilded gold lettering in large looping script.

The first volume I chose was The Shell Seekers by Rosamunde Pilcher. Totally engrossed in the sweeping, if milquetoast family saga, the experience was not unlike falling in love. I felt grown up, consumed, deeply invested. I’d boldly left behind the world of teenage angst and fallen in with a more mature crowd.

“She found she was very tired, but it was a gentle tiredness, assuaged and comforted by her surroundings, as though her house were a kindly person, and she was being embraced by loving arms. In the warm and firelit room and the deep familiar armchair, she found herself surprised by, filled by, the sort of reasonless happiness she had not experienced for years.”

-The Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher

What I didn’t realize at the time, was that this was not the sort of volume serious adult readers read. The Shell Seekers was not simply part of the wrongly maligned “Women’s Fiction” category but would become a touchtone for the “AGA Saga” genre.

“AGA Saga” landed with its intended target, author Joanna Trollope, as a derisive term, causing her “some irritation” throughout an otherwise wildly successful career.

According to Wikipedia, the AGA saga,

“is typically interpreted to refer to “a tale of illicit rumpy-pumpy in the countryside” according to a 2007 article in The Observer.^[5] In setting, according to an earlier article in that paper, it offers a “gingham-checked world” associated with “thatched English villages” and “ladies in floral dresses”.^[6] Guardian book critic Laura Wilson described an Aga saga setting as “complete with sprawling, untidy farmhouse (flagstones, dogs, Wellington boots, and much nursing of mugs of coffee)”.^[7]M

Sounds pretty fantastic.

I’m somewhat new to the AGA craze, having just heard about the stove a few years back when I received a set of smartly covered, beautifully end-papered cookery books from Bath-based Persephone Books. Good Food on the Aga was originally published in 1933, less than five years after the AGA landed in Britain. Invented in Sweden in 1922 by Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Dr. Gustaf Dalén, the multifunctional cooker boasts constant, gentle heat. In modern times, it’s become a status symbol, used by of-the-moment chefs and wildly successful influencers.

I’m not immune to the hype. There’s something romantic about the idea of a twenty-four-hour-a-day fire in the heart of the home. But for now, I’ll be sticking to my modern, double-oven choice and leaving the AGA on a future project wishlist.

FOOD

Takeout is for everyone

No AGA on hand? No kitchen doesn’t equal no cooking, though it certainly makes me more inclined to proclamations like, “By the end of summer, we will decide who makes the best bacon egg, and cheese in the county!”

Here are the things I love about not having a kitchen:

• Washing dishes outside.

• Ordering Wild Flours bread, spreading it with a thick smear of salted butter, and calling it a meal.

• Diving deep into archives because every single recipe develops works (not to mention perfect for those of us armed with only a cutting board and a knife).

• Being more thoughtful about the amount of food I’m buying.

• Spending time with narrative-driven cookbooks that are as much about the story as they are about the food.

• Creating a new note on my phone for no-cook/grill-only dinners that will serve me for many years to come. This week’s saves included:

Morbier Cheese, Blackberries, Watercress, Figs, Pomegranate, and San Daniele Ham (Alexandra Stacey via The Dinner Plan w/Maggie Hoffman)

Cold Sliced Steak with Arugula and Parm (Carla Lalli Music, That Sounds So Good)

Grilled Pepper and Torn Mozzarella Panzanella (Deb Perlman, Smitten Kitchen)

Focaccia Sandwiches with Mortadella and Parmesan Cream (Rachel Roddy, The Guardian)

Lemony Swiss chard with Chickpeas and Feta1 (Hetty Lui McKinnon, To Vegetables, With Love)

Also, PS from my monkey mind: did you know that Julia Turshen wrote a novel? An ROMANCE?! I’ve preordered it, and you should too.

CRITICS

AI isn’t ALL anything

Just like there’s bad takeout and good takeout, AI (yeah, I warned you about the rough transitions) is not necessarily good or bad (unless, sidenote, we’re talking about the new Snap AR glasses, which are just very, very bad). No matter what your opinion on the situation, we can’t stuff this genie back in the bottle. Critical reviews of the technology are, of course, important.

Unfortunately, there’s a flood of rather flat criticism painting the technology as one hundred thousand percent terrible. I’m as terrified as the next parent who fears a generation of children unable to think for themselves, write a coherent essay, talk to each other, etc. But I’m also willing to be challenged, to be made to understand it — the good, the bad, and the downright ugly.

That’s why this week I was delighted to come across not one but two super smart, deeply thoughtful essays on the topic.

the old world is dying (Jasmine Sun)

@jasmine’s substack

🌻 the old world is dying

It’s a scary time to be twenty-two. Recently, I’ve been watching videos of college commencement speakers getting pummeled by boos for talking about AI. I’ve seen the charts showing post-graduate employment rates for engineering majors falling by 5 to 15 percent. And it’s not as if young pe…

Read more

3 months ago · 1173 likes · 107 comments · Jasmine Sun

Jasmine Sun is producing some of the most interesting stuff on the internet. This dispatch, written in the form of a very unannoying pep talk, offers oodles of good advice, the best emphasizing the crucial role human relationships will play going forward. You must, in short, “Become the good hang.” Also,

I have no solution except that real work has a feeling. I know the difference between reading a book and its summary, like athletes know when they’re pushing themselves in training versus phoning it in. The reason to write your own essays isn’t that Claude can’t do it better—it’s that writing is thinking and you shouldn’t wither away your brain. Use AI to get smarter and don’t let it make you dumb. There’s a cognitive equivalent to lifting heavy. Do it three or four times a week.

Less complaining, more doing. Amen.

Think for Yourself (Dan Chiasson)

Chiasson is a poet, writer, and English professor who, in a time-stamped diary, nails the argument for more touching of grass/less scrolling. I’ve re-read this piece three times now, drawn to the honesty of the writing process pocked by inevitable distraction.

“How is this going? I now ask myself. It’s certainly not what I intended to start. I actually find what I’m doing here pretty annoying. Was the mention of Louise gratuitous? Are my sentences, I don’t know, too gooey? Among the many humiliations of AI is that it seems to invite us to sentimentalize impulses and values that we would ordinarily interrogate, complicate, half accept on wary, provisional terms. My life is not all irises and calves and ponds; while writing this I also scrolled, googled, posted, and did other attention-attenuating online things that make up something like my new, now not-so-new process of resisting before succumbing to distraction, a mental tug-of-war I never chose and that I do not find especially fun or good for my moods, and maybe not so good, either, for my writing.”

FORECAST

Contrapposto (Dave Eggers)

I don’t know much but I’m pretty sure I might name this my most favorite book of the month, if not the first half of the year. I’m only 25 pages in. Place your bets. Meet me back here for the June, linked issue to discuss. I’m willing to be wrong, but I think I might be right.

After a positively biblical deluge over Memorial Day weekend, the weather gods blessed us with a couple days of crisp Maine-like weather, perfect for sipping hot coffee while wrapped in sweaters not yet put away for summer. Tomorrow marks the beginning of a kitchen renovation at our house, so please forgive any misplaced commas or less-than cogent reviews.

May brought all manner of delicacies to the table: bougie hot dogs; a design-forward Ferrari launch complete with handmade tortellini from Massimo Bottura; the inaugural Cookbook Social; and, judging by the onslaught of beach book lists, the unofficial kick-off of summer reading season.

In today’s letter

a trio of story-forward cookbooks ✨ caity weaver backlist ✨ a ten-course dessert-focused tasting menu ✨ Superiority Burger’s Brooks Headley showcases a masterful command of voice ✨ War and Peace update ✨ two terrific memoirs nobody’s talking about ✨ my favorite frontlist hit ✨ the best of the best summer reading lists ✨ ICYMI interview with the woman teaching us all how to re-center reading in our lives.

Essays

What a Mess, Brooks Headley (Steak Zine) | Good food writing isn’t about piling on juicy descriptors or florid adjectives. It’s about voice, specifically the writer’s voice1. Superiority Burger’s Brooks Headley talks pit beef, crusty vegans, and local 80s Baltimore bands. He shares secrets (spoiler: his Italian grandmother added VELVEETA to her polenta to up the creaminess) and deftly describes early culinary forays into cooking.

My 14-Hour Search for the End of TGI Friday’s Endless Appetizers, Caity Weaver (Gawker) | For those whose first introduction to Caity Weaver was last month’s tremendous bread expedition, this 2014 gem — courtesy of New York Magazine and The Dinner Party newsletter — reveals Weaver’s singular zealous devotion to the mozzarella stick.

A Ten-Course Tasting Menu Where Dessert is the Whole Point, Helen Rosner (The New Yorker) | I’m not sure I’ve ever seen my kids more entranced than the frigid winter day I brought them into Eunji Lee’s tiny Manhattan pâtisserie, Lysée. Visually stunning, Lee’s creations — marble cakes, madeleines, and of course her famous corn cake — are far from the sort of food you’re likely to conjure up in a home kitchen, and that’s part of the fun.

Cookbooks

La Copine (Claire Wadsworth and Nikki Hill) | If you don’t know about the culinary desert oasis that has so captivated Hollywood, the authors and owners of La Copine stand ready with stories of raucous star-studded affairs and incognito shots of espresso and chocolate almond cake with extra creme fraiche on the side. This beautifully designed book offers an intimate look at the lightning bolt love affair that not only brought Claire and Nikki together but planted the seed for an unlikely culinary smash success.

Many a recipe to love, including: Whiskey Brisket (smoked brisket sandwich with red-eye barbecue sauce, Copine mayo, and spiced peperonata); the cult-favorite Crispy Papas with lemon mayo, rosemary, and chives; and a Gem Wedge with fresh figs, Gorgonzola dolce, crispy prosciutto, and green peppercorn dressing.

The Taste of Country Cooking, 50th Anniversary Edition (Edna Lewis), (New forward by Toni Tipton-Martin) | The first time I fell down the Edna Lewis rabbit hole was during the magical week I spent at Ballymaloe Cookery School. Our days were packed with instruction and cooking, but early mornings and mid-to-late evenings were wide open. I’d brought with me a couple of books I’d long had on my shelves but hadn’t yet cracked the spines on. One was Sarah Franklin’s tremendous collection of essays: Edna Lewis: At the Table with an American Original.

If you’re not familiar with Edna and her body of work, this conversation from the most recent Cherry Bombe conference is a lovely place to start.

📚 The Kitchen Book (Ella Risbridger) | If you’re reading this dispatch from London, it may be that you (lucky, lucky) already have your hands on Ella Risbridger’s latest book. While I patiently wait for my copy to arrive from a bookshop across the pond, I dug out my copies of The Year of Miracles (recipes for grief and growing things) and Midnight Chicken. I think it was Nigel Slater that first introduced me to Ella, a self-professed acolyte of Slater’s work. I find deep comfort in Ella’s honest approach to writing and cooking; a meditation on grief offered up alongside the healing properties of roast chicken. Ella possesses a rare ability to share interiority in a manner that feels authentic. Less wallowing, more reaching out across an abyss. A human looking you in the eye and saying: I’ve been through some things, I bet you have too; it’s going to be alright.

Also…

• Vadouvan coronation chicken salad with lime yoghurt using a rotisserie chicken.

• Gorgeous heavyweight linen napkins that would dress up any summer picnic.

• Pasta Worthy of a Pilgrimage.

• Brown Butter Buckwheat Cookies with Smashed Dark Chocolate Honeycomb, from Rose Wilde, recipe courtesy of Maine Grains

• 10 Spring Salads to Carry You Into July, from the lovely veg expert Anna Jones.

• First Bloom will open in NYC. It was only a matter of time.

• 100 “Best” Restaurants in New York City. A deeply flawed list — Le Veau d’Or is nowhere to be seen.

• Thank you, Kaitlin Phillips, for letting us know that Prada has hired an in-house mixologist (I’ll take the trio of tiny martinis, obvs.)

• Radio Bakery will open a second location on the Upper West Side.

• The World Has Officially Reached Peak Bagel. Bold statement. If we weren’t about to take a sledgehammer to our kitchen, I’d have Moonrise Bagels en route.

• Toni Farmer Teaches Food Resilience From the Backyard. ‘Tis the season for garden content galore.

• America’s Hottest New Club Is…The Grocery Store? Does that mean I can dance in the aisles?

• The Infatuation’s 24 Hour approach to diner life.

• Titi Gardening Apron I received this gorgeous frock for my birthday; it’s as beautiful as it is utilitarian. The perfect topper for my warm-weather uniform of cut-offs and white/black t-shirts.

• The 2026 James Beard Media Award nominations are out.

• ICYMI: Grape Sherbert, Rhubarb Quick Bread, and the best fried tofu sandwich

Summertime reads

‘Tis the season for a million and one summer reading guides filling your feed. Some of my faves, in no particular order:

• A Translated Summer Reading Guide (Martha’s Monthly) | I enthusiastically second: The Son of Man, Just A Little Dinner, Lázár, The Sisters, and The Birthday Party.

• The Summer Reading Guide (The Atlantic) | It might be time to read The Transit of Venus.

• Feed Me’s Summer Novel Reading List (Feed Me) | Obviously Loved and Missed is one of the best books ever.

• Paperback Summer Reading Guide (Fiction Matters) | Yes, I know this is behind a paywall, but is tremendous. Worth the cost of a cup of coffee for a look. So many books I’ve never read that I’m not quite sure where to begin!

Memoirs x 2

Dandelions | In Dandelions, a 2022 family memoir, Thea Lenarduzzi explores the geography of home through the lens of her Nonna, Dirce.

Read more

I am so pleased to share my conversation with reader and writer extraordinaire Petya K. Grady.

For the uninitiated, Petya is a reader of the highest caliber, approaching the practice with rigorous care. Her weekly newsletter (which is an absolute must-read) — A Reading Life — is, in her words,

A space for anybody who wants to live an intellectually inspired life, especially when circumstances don’t make that easy.

Among other lovely gifts, Petya offers up erudite book reviews, structured reading projects, and deeply thoughtful discourse with a diverse cast of writers and readers.

Welcome to the Four Top table, Petya.

Tell us about your childhood home and what sort of books, music, or art filled the space.

I was born in 1981, in a town outside of Sofia, Bulgaria, during the last leg of communism. Both of my parents were engineers; STEM careers were really important to the building of communism. Even so, there was this big push by the government to create a very cultured and educated population.

We lived in a small one-bedroom apartment, filled with classics lined up on massive bookshelves. My dad really liked science fiction. And my parents, even though they were very technical, scientific people, read serious literature.

Every tiny town and village had a local theater with regular productions.

Homes were very orderly, minimal, and clean. There was just this pressure — I don’t know if it was fear exactly — but you felt like you were always being watched in some way.

Because it was the last leg of communism, there wasn’t much material consumption the way there is here. That’s been interesting for me to reflect on, now living in this consumerist utopia, or dystopia, that we have here.

Were your grandparents also a part of your childhood?

Both of my parents grew up in villages, so on both sides, I had grandparents with agricultural jobs — small farms and gardens that were very important to them. When I was little, we spent many weekends there with a big project, like digging up potatoes.

All the kids were so annoyed because that’s not what you want to do when you’re 14. But now I look back with so much love and nostalgia; I remember the grown-ups just laughing the whole time, doing this ridiculous manual labor.

What else did your grandparents grow?

Potatoes and corn mostly. Plums too. On one side, my grandparents collected hay for the animals — you know that famous scene from Anna Karenina — that was us! A lot of that land is still in the family, but nobody grows anything now because the grandparents have passed away.

What was on the dinner table? Did your parents cook?

My mother hated domestic work. She cooked for us, but you could tell she wasn’t happy about it. Now that she only cooks for us every once in a while, she’s excited to make our favorite dishes when we come home, and I think it tastes better because she’s excited. But she was not excited at the time.

It’s really funny — I’ve had this conversation with Alicia Kennedy (author of the brilliant On Eating) because her mom was the same way. My mother’s resistance to teaching me and my sister to cook was,

You’ll figure it out when you have to. Don’t even worry about it.

At the same time, both my grandmothers loved to cook, and I have very sweet memories of visiting them on weekends or over breaks. They baked homemade pastries for breakfast and cooked giant meals for the whole family coming together.

In Bulgarian culture, our celebrations are built around a traditional meal. You’d have a Christmas meal, or we’d celebrate St. George’s Day in the spring. A lot of our gatherings were connected to the religious calendar, which is really interesting because during communism, we were not allowed to be religious. Younger generations were told religion is the opiate of the masses. But the older people could still go to church and make these traditional meals.

What does your mom make when you come home now?

When I close my eyes and think of Bulgaria, I think of roasted peppers. You can fill them with many things, but we like them vegan: stuffed with rice, carrots, and onions. We also love the traditional Bulgarian bean soup — buttery white beans cooked down with carrots, tomatoes, tomato sauce, and onion — and you eat it with crusty bread and a tomato-cucumber salad.

When I’m homesick, that’s what I make.

On Mother’s Day you posted a picture of a gorgeous Turkish breakfast spread that your husband and daughter prepared. Why is that particular breakfast special to you?

My husband Kyle and I went to Istanbul on our honeymoon and loved it so much, we’ve returned many times. Have you been?

No, it’s on my list.

Oh, you must go, especially as someone who appreciates food. When you go to a Turkish hotel, you just roll out of bed and go to a terrace or a beautiful space, and there’s this spread of gorgeous ingredients, ready to be plated. Scrambled or boiled eggs, five different types of olives, five different types of fruit — perfectly ripe of course— some kind of pastry, really nice yogurt, a really good brined cheese.

For my first Mother’s Day we decided we’d go to brunch like everybody else. My daughter was barely a month old, so it was completely overwhelming and stressful. I told Kyle I’d never leave the house for Mother’s Day brunch again.

The next year Kyle created a beautiful Turkish breakfast spread. I won Mother’s Day forever. We’ve done it every year since. One year, we went camping with friends, and he made it on a little camping picnic table — you can do it anywhere.

This time of year, all the good fruit is out: apricots, cherries. And it’s easy to time because everything just kind of sits and waits for you. The only downside is the cleanup — oh my gosh, all the dishes.

What do you eat for breakfast on a typical busy weekday morning?

I’m 45, so I’m trying to eat more protein. This is not a source of joy for me. I always used to just have coffee and go. But two years ago, I worked with a nutritionist, and the first thing she said was, “We’re going to fix your breakfast.”

I make what I call a German bread sandwich — they call it health bread in Germany, like a dense dark bread — with feta cheese, some kind of green thing like cucumber, and kiwi if I’m eating fruit. I try to eat two eggs as well to get some protein.

I really like having the same breakfast every day. I don’t need to switch that up.

You’re a creature of habit. Are you like that with lunch too?

For lunch I go into an office three days a week. When I go in I either bring leftovers or I have a grilled chicken salad from the little cafeteria in the building.

My taste for food has expanded so massively since moving to the States and marrying my husband, who loves to cook and eat. But when I’m on my own — it’s really funny — when he travels I just revert back to eating the same things. Most of my meals are just going to be ingredients. Not going to involve cooking.

Your husband loves to cook. How does that work at home in the evenings?

When I met my husband, we were both in grad school. He’s seven years older, and he was a vegetarian at the time, and he’s vegan now. Everything I know about food and cooking I’ve learned from him. I know I ate before I met him, but I have no memory of it.

In college, I was eating cafeteria food. Before that, I was at home with my parents. There’s this big chunk of time — grad school, a job between college and grad school — where I was clearly eating because I did not die, but I don’t remember it at all.

I remember Kyle saying, “I’m going to come over and we’re going to make dinner.” I said, “Okay, how can I help?” And he’d say, “Sauté the onions for the pasta.” That just meant nothing to me — I needed him to break it down completely. Long story short, I’ve learned to cook from him, which is great because we essentially have the same cooking style now. Early in our marriage, he did most of the cooking. Now it’s both of us.

If we have time, we love to make a really big meal. He loves to explore recipes and try new things — he’s the kind of person who, if he had a falafel sandwich for lunch, will not eat falafel for dinner. We’re constantly trying new things. He works at a school, and they have a lunch club: five teachers take turns making lunch for each other once a week, so you only have to cook for the whole group one day.

I love that — the best kind of work potluck.

Because he’s vegan, everybody agreed to make everything vegan, so they’re all learning and cooking for everyone. I, for my part — I don’t have it in me to look up recipes, but if he makes something good I’ll taste it, remember it, and cook it myself later. That’s our dynamic.

Do you guys have any favorite cookbooks?

• The Inspired Vegan, Bryant Terry (don’t sleep on the black-eyed peas and mustard greens, perfect for New Year’s Day)

• Jerusalem, Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi

• East, Meera Sodha

When you’re working, what’s your beverage of choice?

It’s a beverage journey. I love coffee. I can feel myself starting to shake a little in the afternoon if I just keep drinking it, which I absolutely will do; I’d drink coffee all day if I could. That’s my one daily joy. I don’t think I’m going to give it up.

We are not loyal to any particular brand, but I do love Ethiopian coffee, and that’s our go-to for our house pour. I love SEY Brooklyn.

I tried mushroom coffee, and I could not do it. A friend said it was great, and I did not agree.

I’m with you. Do you take anything in your coffee, or just black?

When I was in college, I got a job at a coffee shop and started drinking it with half-and-half and sugar. Then in grad school, all the cool kids were drinking it black, and Kyle told me that if you’re making good coffee, you can actually taste it better black. So I switched.

I feel really passionate about pour-over coffee because it really does make a difference. A Chemex pour-over takes a lot of the bitterness out. It’s a little harder to do on office days when I’m trying to leave, but make it with a Chemex, and you can drink it black.

Let’s switch gears — I want to talk about books.

You read so much. I get the sense you must have a way of knowing when a book is going to fuel you — whether that’s for your creative writing, for everyday life, or for your newsletter. How do you know you’ve found a good one?

It’s very rare for me to DNF a book, because I do so much thinking about what I like and so much reading about books before I sit down with one that by the time I’m reading something, I’m pretty confident I’m going to find it compelling.

What has made my reading feel really special lately is reading books in conversation with one another. When I do that, it feels like I’m pouring into a bucket and I can see it filling up. Before, when I was trying to read for breadth, I just picking things randomly.

Now, when I find an author I really like, I tend to go back and read more by them, and read more authors who are around them somehow. The first one is the starting point, and everything that follows is an expansion. It’s almost like gathering clues about an author and their body of work. It makes it easier to remember people’s work too, because I’m encountering it again and again.

(Author’s note: I love this below post of Petya’s about her reading projects. It details how she builds lists of authors who are, in some sort of way, linked.)

A reading life

What to Do About (Reading) Goals

I wasn’t going to write this post because of how banal the topic of goal setting has become and how much resistance many of us now feel toward the pressure to optimize every single moment of our days. That resistance is justified. But every time I find myself circling a reading-related question, I try to write it through here, because if I’ve learned anything from nearly two years of this Substack, it’s that…

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8 months ago · 219 likes · 56 comments

You’re creating your own canon of authors in conversation with each other.

For sure. My prime example of how incredible that can be is Checkout 19 by Claire-Louise Bennett.

I remember reading it and thinking,

I can’t even keep up, what are we even talking about?

But I kept going. I began to track the list of authors she’s reading or thinking about or reflecting that she hasn’t gotten to yet. I felt so connected to that way of thinking, of just organizing your life around the lists of books you’ve read and loved and not liked and feel like you should have read and haven’t yet.

Where do you find inspiration for new books?

I follow writers on social media and see what they’re reading. Because once you like someone’s writing, you like their taste — it’s almost a shortcut. Especially when you’ve read everything they’ve written — I can’t read more of you, but I can read more of what you like. That seems to me like the surest way to find something new that not everybody’s already talking about.

Who are some of the writers you follow on social media?

Some of my favorite writers are obviously not on social media, but I try to track them down anyway — I do a lot of detective work.

• Catherine Lacey

• Brandon Taylor

• Katie Kitamura

• Ayşegül Savaş

• Stacey Yu (a debut novelist with a book coming later this year called Kitten).

I also really love the critic Merve Emre. I’m always like, what is going on in your big brain? How many hours are in your days? She has this hyperfocus thing where she’s just working all the time.

I just started a new series called Source Material where I interviewed Emma Copley Eisenberg. The series explores what authors draw from when writing their books (Author’s Note: Petya loved Eisenberg’s recent Fat Swim) with an aim to understand what inspires them. Emma gave me a whole set of books that answered the question of what books she considered inspiration, theoretical references, or works she was fighting with while writing Fat Swim.

Do you dare name your favorite book of the year so far?

My favorite discovery overall — this is not a single book, but I started reading Vigdis Hjorth late last year and I’ve now read everything she has published in English. She’s amazing.

The other book I can’t stop thinking about is Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt.

Did you hear that she has another book coming out that’s in the same universe — from the point of view of the drug-addicted daughter?

Lord help us. That’s amazing. Loved and Missed is so beautiful.

She said she was writing it and at some point realized there were too many stories trying to be told, so she took a different perspective and ran with it. I think it’s from the daughter’s point of view and also the friend’s perspective. I don’t know when it’s coming out. I heard her on a podcast talking about it.

I didn’t know that news — I can’t wait. Great choice.

Outside of books and food, what else gets you going? Music, podcasts, television, film?

I probably need to make more time for quiet. Because I have a day job and so much of my day is client work, so when I’m away from that I feel like I’m constantly catching up. There’s just so much I want to have heard and read already. Figuring out audiobooks was one of the biggest gifts for me.

I really like podcasts.

• The New Yorker’s Critics at Large is my way of keeping up with what’s going on in contemporary culture.

• Granta podcast for literary interviews. There’s a female editor who interviews people on that podcast has an amazing voice and asks incredible questions.

• Most mornings when I’m cleaning up the kitchen before the day starts, I listen to The Daily from the The New York Times.

• Amy Poehler’s Good Hang. I’m a very serious person. I’m really in my head, and laughing and being lighthearted does not come naturally to me at all. So I appreciate her podcast because it feels smart but also joyous in a way I need sometimes.

The one television show our family has started watching together is Top Chef.

That is the one show our whole family will watch.

We just went to New Orleans for my birthday and ate at Nina Compton’s Compère Lapin. Our daughter knew how to talk about the dishes in this incredible restaurant and had us all laughing as she picked them apart.

How do you manage with so much going on? When you’ve got a newsletter deadline tomorrow and clients at the door — what gets you across the finish line?

I need to be getting more sleep. One way I’m getting it done is by not sleeping as much as I should be. I’m thinking about it a lot because I don’t think that’s sustainable. I’ve been writing this newsletter for two years, publishing once a week, and I think I’ve missed maybe two weeks in all that time.

But more importantly, I get it done because it’s a labor of love. Even when I’m really tired, I just kind of want to do it. I don’t remember posting anything and feeling like I just need to get something out. If that ever changes, if I get tired of it, maybe that’s a signal. But something about the format and the consistency of the publishing schedule has made it easier — people are waiting for it, it’s like a contract in a way.

Kyle and I joke that, as a working parent at the end of the day, you just have to keep moving. Like a shark. The moment you sit down, you’re done, you can’t do anything, you’re so tired. But if you just keep going, you get it done. That’s sort of how it’s felt.

Before you go, please tell us three things you are currently obsessed with and absolutely cannot live without.

• Bulgarian Feta. Bulgarian feta is the best feta, full stop. People thank me for this recommendation all the time.

  

• HydroBalm Tinted Lipstick, Westman Atelier At $50 this newly launched sheer tinted lipstick feels like a luxury. Very thin color (not matte), juicy and hydrating, it feels like it’s doing something skincare-y to your lips. I don’t know exactly what that means, but it’s amazing.

  

• Painting, Writing, Texting I just read this book by Chantal Joffe, the British painter. Her painting is on the cover of Loved and Missed, actually. In this book, Chantal becomes good friends with Olivia Laing, the writer. Olivia Laing has been a subject for her — she’s done multiple paintings of her — and this book is a collection of paintings and essays that Olivia Laing wrote about Chantal’s work and their friendship, and about where art comes from, where writing comes from, the overlaps between them, what it’s like to be an artist and feel every time you finish something and start something new, like — I forgot where ideas come from and I hate myself. It’s incredible and visually stunning because it contains a lot of Chantal’s paintings.

Thank you, Petya! And thank you all for reading. If you enjoyed this post, please tap the ❤️ button to keep interesting conversations of this sort coming your way.

POETRY

While My Daughter is in Surgery I Think About a Night in a Hotel in Florence | Ellen Bass

She’d bought a black leather jacket from a stall on the Ponte Vecchio.
The yellow light of the stones gleamed on the river
as she slipped her pale arms into the sleeves, wrapping herself in the animal skin.
We lingered over linguine Alfredo and stopped off for a last gelato,
walking the long way back, only to find our bags
packed and stored behind the hotel desk.
With my blundering Italian, it seemed I’d booked our room for only one night.
They were terribly sorry but it was a holiday, a delirium of people crowding the city,
and though they called other hotels, there was no room at any inn.
When we asked if we could sleep in the lobby, they hesitated
and then they said they had—it wasn’t really a room—but there was a bed.
And they led us along a labyrinth of hallways up and down a maze of stairs—
a route so elaborate we wondered how we’d ever find our way back—
to four walls that rose up within other walls deep in the heart
of the heart of the building. A tiny chamber
with no windows, no space even to open our bags.
But the bed—so strangely ordinary—was made with clean sheets
and a thin coverlet as if it had been waiting there—
maybe for centuries—for us to arrive.
The darkness was absolute—not a glint of light
from outside, no street lamps or headlights,
no stars or moon to push time forward.
No sound of voices, horns, tires. Not a dog barking
or a feral cat knocking the lid off the garbage.
Not a leaf rustling toward autumn. Or a mosquito whispering.
Not the suicidal wings of a moth against flame.
There was no flame. Nor any pebble
clattering down the medieval stones, plinking into the tea- colored water.
What are the names of the nights when you regret nothing?
When the sorrows that came before and the sorrows
that would come after part
like a stream parts when it bends around a rock.
There’s nothing I left behind of that night.
Not the smell of the leather that enveloped her,
not the ochre reflections of the buildings, their narrow balconies
rippling in the water, not the darkness that held us becalmed
as though the universe granted us one night of reprieve
from its endless cycles of birth and death.
We were young. Even I was young. And we laughed
at our good luck and slept.1

Newsletter author’s note: A sublime example of a title that does the heavy lifting. It completely and totally wrecked me. That’s all.

DUE

MEMOIR

Dandelions, Thea Lenarduzzi

Telling someone else’s story —2 heck, telling our own stories — is always an experiment in memory.

“There are gaps in this version of the tale, though, as if Nonna were reading a book whose pages are warped and sporadically stuck together, having been dropped into water and dried in a fierce sun. Time and space have shrunk. Consequences have lost their causes. The order seems wrong.”

In Dandelions, a 2022 family memoir, Thea Lenarduzzi explores the geography of home through the lens of her Nonna, Dirce. Born into Mussolini’s fascist regime, Dirce’s journey takes her from Italy to England and back again. It’s a detail-laden family deep dive that attends to the idea of home. In a post-publication interview, Lenarduzzi explained that in Italian, “casa” means both “house” and “home” — a structure and a feeling. While convenient for those with well-adjusted, formulaic childhoods grounded in a single home, the linguistic limit of the singular word is obvious. “Casa” challenges those whose identities straddle different cultures, as well as nomads uprooted from their place of birth.

Dandelions work seamlessly as a convenient metaphor. The golden-topped weeds harbor the potential to travel up to 500 miles from where they begin. Dandelions are nomadic, making themselves at home in diverse landscapes, shining as symbols for Christ’s Passion and the Resurrection (medieval Christian art), bitter herbs honored at the Passover Seder, and a torch for the downtrodden and marginalized.

Lenarduzzi traces Dirce’s story through personal anecdotes, historical politics, art, literature, and food. My background in Italian literature and history is, in a kind understatement, lacking. Of course, I inhaled the Ferrante quartet and dabbled in the volume of Umberto Eco purchased after an inspiring professor sang his praises. Lenarduzzi references many a contemporary and classic author, but the best part is when she explores Dirce’s relationship with the Italian romance author Liala. Dirce would passionately consume Liala’s work in “a matter of fragments snatched, when her mother was out or asleep.” I also appreciated Lenarduzzi’s expert weaving of history throughout, a gentle course on the rise of fascism and Mussolini’s iron grip on culture and language through the lens of one family.

This isn’t a food book, per se, but food plays a pivotal role. In the following passage, the food — its preparation and presence — acts as an effective vehicle for bringing family together, the sharing of stories.

“The tarassaco3 will have been collected in the morning and passed over to zia Lucia, whose bright yellow house springs from the side of Nonna’s. She wilts and dresses the leaves the way her mother taught her. And now the heavy dish can make its way from hand to hand, each of us automatically looking up to see who has yet to claim a share. Eventually it will reach the men, where one of them will do the final honours and wipe a crust around the sides thinly gilded with oil. This used to be Nonno’s prerogative; now it goes, unspoken, to whichever of his sons is around to claim it. After them, who knows. All the while more stories will bubble up, about us or about others, and sometimes you hear the beginning, sometimes the middle and other times the end, as they leap from multiple mouths and clamour for air. Listen to this one. Wait, let me tell you. It was like this. Did I tell you about the time. T’immagini? And someone, perhaps me, will tell the one about Nonna stooping behind an abandoned warehouse in Manchester to gather dandelions. The looks she got! But aren’t they good – bitter and delicious – once seasoned to taste?”

One more compelling bit for the writers and editors amongst us,

“You’re a writer, it’s your job to write, just do your job,’ she says, in a matter-of-fact tone intended, I think, to be helpful.

I am also an editor, whose job is to trim and tweak and tease out other people’s stories. Trim, tweak, tease – these are the words I use to explain to writers what I have done to their prose. Or I ‘nip and tuck’, as if altering a skirt. I am aware of certain impulses in this process, of the needs I have as a reader. For the sense of an ending, for example, which should never be a summing-up, but rather an opening-out – an invitation for more, from other sources in other minds. I like to leave a few teasing threads, to encourage readers to finger the words like I have. I think about the rhythm of the words as they build towards a full-stop. Or the placing of a comma, a hesitation, that could make everything different. I am only beginning to understand these impulses, and that sometimes the story I want to write or shape might not be one the teller wants to tell.”

A smart work that, for me4, redefines the potential of the genre.

TRE

FOOD

The Best Italian Breakfast in Hotels and Charming Houses, Lucrezia Margotti, Stefania Petruzzelli

As my algorithm inexplicably fills with morning routines and “how I pulled off dinner in between ten million pick ups,” a book to class up our constant lurking. The good folks over at Maretti Editions — a small Italian publishing house focused on art, culture, and food titles — have designed a sumptuous photographic romp through some of Italy’s most sensuous breakfasts.

The Best Italian Breakfast in Hotels and Charming Houses is a reality read of the best sort. PLEASE NOTE: This is not a volume for those who want to debate the merits of intermittent fasting or protein maxing5.

Want to indulge fantasy morning routines on a more global scale? In a case of curious timing, the Financial Times is also weighing in on The World’s Best Hotel Breakfasts6

Have a lovely weekend.

It’s the sort of palate-cleansing masterpiece well-tailored to the current moment. Twenty-six image-rich essays, each short enough to squeeze in with a midday avocado lunch piled high with sprouts, fried tofu, and garden greens2.

A few weeks back, I purchased seven sturdy stalks of rhubarb (don’t worry, I’m coming back to the book). My original plan was to drop them in a homemade pie dough I’d defrosted. Unfortunately, I harbor an endless capacity for excellent plans and spotty execution. The pie dough, rolled and ready, remained unfilled. I reconsidered, rerouted, recommitted. Rhubarb Quick Bread took a stalk and three-quarters off my hands.

For what to do with the rest, I revisited Kate’s book. Rhubarb, she notes, has long been admired for its medicinal properties, especially to cure ills of the gastronomical sort. These days, it's not uncommon to find it sweetened, gently coaxed into compote or doused with pouring cream in an Elizabeth David-like fool. Kate’s suggestion? Simmer champagne vinegar, sugar, and maple syrup over low heat. Slice the rhubarb and pile into wide-mouthed glass mason jars. Pour the pickling liquid over top, adding garlic, mustard, coriander seeds, and pink peppercorns. Chill.

Just as this pickled rhubarb promises to clear the digestive tract of any unwelcome debris, there exists another recommendation for the common ailment of cluttered mind. An efficient palate cleanser for tasks left undone — pie crusts unfilled, submissions unedited — can be found in The Hungry Ear: Poems of Food & Drink3.

If it wasn’t a gross copyright violation, I’d upload the entire book, prescribe a poem a day, and await your report of a calmer mind and increased creative output.

Instead, I offer you a single Friday-morning meditation, courtesy of former U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove. May we all be so lucky to spot the small, miraculous moments in everyday life.

Grape Sherbet

By4 Rita Dove

The day? Memorial. 
After the grill 
Dad appears with his masterpiece—
swirled snow, gelled light. 
We cheer. The recipe’s 
a secret and he fights 
a smile, his cap turned up 
so the bib resembles a duck. 

That morning we galloped 
through the grassed-over mounds 
and named each stone 
for a lost milk tooth. Each dollop 
of sherbet, later, 
is a miracle, 
like salt on a melon that makes it sweeter. 

Everyone agrees—it’s wonderful! 
It’s just how we imagined lavender 
would taste. The diabetic grandmother 
stares from the porch, 
a torch 
of pure refusal. 

We thought no one was lying 
there under our feet, 
we thought it 
was a joke. I’ve been trying 
to remember the taste, 
but it doesn’t exist. 
Now I see why 
you bothered, 
father.

PS: A gentle reminder about the Four Top storefront on Bookshop.org. It’s a nimble space, constantly growing and changing; a peek into what, if I had my own storefront, I’d stock. Every time you buy a book via my link, I get a bit of pocket change, which helps fuel future creative endeavors. So if you can’t make it to your own local indie bookstore (which I very much recommend you do!), please consider buying your books here.

Reporting in from St. Louis, where the arch is indeed impressive, and the kids competing for the title of World Robotics Champion are inspiringly all-in. May we all embody this bull-by-the-horns energy and fully commit to whatever’s on our plate today.

In today’s letter:

‘round the clock pierogis ✨ cate is the new martha ✨ clear thoughts on eating and food writing ✨ toothsome ✨ the british pub taking NYC by storm ✨ an unlikely champion for agragrian poetry ✨ jack white ✨ gillian welch✨ the inspiring state of lit crit ✨ seven book reviews including two hot new releases agitating about the role of technology in family life + the return of a new orleans legend + a beloved series continues + beach read preview + NYRB spinner picks ✨ three (meditative, intellectual, sexy) podcast recommendations (hint: don’t sleep on these links👇)

Be kind. Be well. Do the work. XOXO

Read more

Spring has landed, flaunting her fair and fickle ways with such euphoric enthusiasm that I no longer wonder at the mania accompanying her arrival. Of course we feel a bit off kilter, tear ducts constantly firing and brains inexplicably fogging. Outside, the rain pours and then the sun, piercing in its brightness, scalds our winter-weary eyes.

Parents of school-age children flit to and fro, forgetting which day is for crazy socks and which is for tug-of-war (let us all pray we don’t end up like the man in the final episode of The Pitt). On outdoor runs, rescheduled from mid-winter lunchtime jaunts to efficient pre-dawn jogs, the weather is tempestuous — windy mist one morning followed, the next, by a distant hint of heat hovering over a gentle arctic breeze. Outside my kitchen window, the pink-blossomed tree we once took for dead, exuberantly explodes.

Spring is big energy season. It requires fuel and lots of it. Caffeine does the trick, especially if brewed in one The World’s Smallest Coffee Shops. My pollen-addled brain runs on increasingly large glass jars filled with strong, cold brew laced with a secret weapon.

Sleep, if you can get it, helps.

My algorithm deigns to know what’s best, offering up all manner of wellness hacks. I succumb to a sponsored ad for a muscle scraper that I think might solve all my aches and pains. Stretching would be better.

I scroll. I feel ill. I read. I feel better. It’s not rocket science.

In this newsletter, a bit of fuel to invigorate those frazzle-dazzle minds:

a glorious escape into summer hot cocoa ✨ a trifecta of new releases ✨ weeknight chicken ✨ in search of the best bread ✨ tech bros and german fairy tales ✨ french melon ✨ a cabin in the woods ✨ what will become of the liberal arts ✨

Be well. Be kind. Do the work.

“Summer on a Maine island means a host of rainy mornings, even days, spent in front of the fireplace. The gray light in the window, the feathery murmur of rain on the roof, the banshee wail of the fog siren down past Doughty’s Landing at the naval station, the resonant splash of rainwater tumbling into the rain barrels—the signs were there the moment I woke up, huddled in a bundle of flannel sheets and army blankets. Not a morning to stay in bed—the fog had seeped through the cottage and the covers—but a morning for a fire. A quick dash to the outhouse, then logs wrestled from under the cache under the stairs, kindling chopped—and a tongue of flame would flicker up, the tang of bubbling resin and salt rising from the driftwood to mingle with the aroma of eggs and bacon frying and coffee brewing.

I would select a mystery from the corner bookcase stuffed with vintage, dog-eared paperbacks, and—breakfast dishes pushed to one side of the fireplace and feet propped up against the other, well-wrapped in a blanket and the rocker tilted to catch some light from the nearest wall fixture—I would hold the book open with one hand while warming the other with a steaming cup of cocoa.”

-“A Cup of Hot Cocoa” | Simple Cooking | John Thorne

Before Substack and WordPress, before Al Gore took initiative in creating the internet, there existed a robust culinary newsletter tradition. John Thorne’s contribution, Simple Cooking, featured a combination of personal observation, dogged research, and simple recipes meant for the home cook. Back then, newsletters were both a more straightforward and more labor-intensive affair. Thorne and his predecessors (André Simon, Jack Shelton, Craig Claiborne, among others) didn’t stress over notes or followers. They wrote, presumably less distracted, and then muddled through formatting, printing, and postage prices. But Thorne, who in 1987 turned many of his newsletters into the book Simple Cooking, foresaw the issues:

“With the book's publication, Mr. Thorne seems to be on the verge of gaining public attention. ''What interests me is the attempt, rather than the achievement,'' he said while preparing breakfast. ''If you achieve success, then you have to spend the rest of your time and energy propping it up.''

More than twenty years later Dwight Garner asked Thorne whether he spent any time on the “Web.”

“Way too much time. Aren’t distractions blessings in disguise? The Web is a huge trash heap where, if you dig long enough, you’ll unearth something that, if not a treasure, is at least salable on eBay … or, in my case, well worth weaving into a culinary narrative. But the hunt is what makes it so much fun.”

I fear the thrilling hunt Thorne refers to is, as time passes, less and less attainable. Instead, every day begins with a battle: overflowing inboxes, addictive apps, endless notifications. To access my meditation guide, I must ignore sleep scores and urgent missives from advertisers and colleagues, marketers and long-lost friends, who have made their way into my home before the first hint of caffeine hits.

It’s all enough to sow a deep longing for foggy Maine mornings and closely attended drink rituals.

“I would get up periodically through the morning to fill it with a fresh cup, whisked up and poured in steaming hot over a tablespoon or two of Marshmallow Fluff, and return to the fire to enjoy its continued company and that of Gervase Fen, Lord Petre Wimsey, or Father Brown. The Fluff would soon melt and broach the surface of the cocoa, while still maddeningly out of reach. Only when the cup was empty could it be seized: the last swallow was a chocolate-and-egg-white-tasting sweet and luscious mass, the treat’s treat. I loved the vulgar stuff, not only the taste but its visual pleasure: that thick, vivid smear of white swirled into the dark brown sludge that floated at the bottom of the cup.”

Thorne’s essays are a philosophical juxtaposition of strong opinions and gentle scene-setting. With a firm hand, Thorne opines on toast and potato soup, bread and olives, James Beard and Valentine’s Day, and the Worst Excesses of the 80s (which include kiwis, Calphalon, and Paul Prudhomme).

“Ordinarily, I’m a coffee drinker: the cocoa pot, dusty and unused for months, was glad to see me. Cocoa-drinking represents a slower-paced pleasure than I usually allow myself. For it is a drink meant to be savored, just like good coffee or tea. But unlike those beverages, whose straightforward stimulation sets up for a good talk or a day’s work, cocoa offers only simple pleasure as its reward. And it’s a pleasure that—unless we’ve just come in from an afternoon of cross-country skiing—seems too full of unjustifiable calories and subsequent guilt. A cup of something like Swiss Miss carries less onus because, though its calories can be equally real, its “instant” banner translates into “made by someone else.” The soothing notes of the packaging speak to us as surrogate mother, saying “you look good and tired, dear—let me make you something nice and hot,” thus providing comfort while relieving us of guilt. Too bad it tastes lie cardboard impregnated with chalk.”

In case the above break in regularly scheduled programming didn’t offer the reset you seek, an extended PS (and don’t sleep on the Good Morning link up top).

LONG FORM | I Found It: The Best Free Restaurant Bread in America (Caity Weaver)

Bravo to Caity Weaver for taking on this noble hunt. Smart and humorous, this culinary masterpiece is filled with ferociously dedicated research on the history of the gluten-forward dietary staple.

BREAD | Carissa’s Salted Soured Pickled Rye Bread

It bears reminding that this beloved bakery bread does well not only with a dab of salted butter but also a spoonful of orange marmalade topped with Brie Fermier.

FRUIT | Charentais Melon

Whilst procuring the aforementioned Brie Fermier, my cheesemonger urgently pressed a small globular melon into my palm, whispering it to be the source of Cindy Crawford’s life-changing QVC serum. I stared back dumbstruck, thinking only of Hacks Season 1 and trying to remember if D’Jewerly ever made it onto the 24-hour shopping channel. I apparently left the store with the melon, and I don’t regret it.

RECIPE | Pan-Seared Chicken with Peas and Prosciutto (New York Times Cooking)

A unanimous five-star hooray from the Maplewood Farm household.

SHORT DOCUMENTARY | The Man Who Stayed (Hannes Schäffer)

Found a barely more than ten-minute hole in your day? Here’s your meditation (with thanks to Ted Gioia for sharing it in The Honest Broker, which I love and is where I discovered it).

EDUCATION | Hampshire College and the Death of a Boomer Utopia (New York Magazine)

Putting a call out for anyone who wants to meet up and go deep on the role of the liberal arts in our current culture.

PODCAST | TBTN

Background noise, I turn on so I don’t get left behind. A tech bro professes his love for German children’s literature (1:04:45-ish).

FICTION | Yesteryear (Burke), The Oyster Diaries (Lemann), Transcription (Lerner)

It’s been a long time since I’ve been so completely and totally enamored with brand-spanking new releases. Tune in next week for fully fleshed out reviews. In the meantime, I recommend each without reservation.

Day ten of month four, and goodness me if it doesn’t feel like I just swept up the last of the Christmas pine needles. Much of last month found me on the go, chasing spring-breaking children. Luckily, I rounded out the month with a few days in London, revisiting old favorites and spending three and a quarter hours at the city’s most controversial lunch spot.

Hosting a single 1 PM seating five days a week, The Yellow Bittern is clear about its intention. Proprietor Hugh Corcoran and his partner Lady Frances Armstrong-Jones (daughter of Princess Margaret’s first husband, the Earl of Snowdon) invite (interesting, they hope) people to take the midday meal as an act of subversive resistance. Everyone, Corcoran has been known to argue, can find the pocket change and time to step away from the hustle of modernity to connect at the table.

Initially offering an à la carte menu, the restaurant now offers a single set menu. The price, 50 pounds sans alcohol, covers enough food to negate the need for much more than a light dinner of half a toastie and a couple bites of salad for a late dinner (which is, yes, what my husband and I noshed on after a long stroll complete with pub stops back to our hotel).

Corcoran is a fine (excellent) cook. Our meal included the famous wheaten bread and butter, watercress soup, scallops with green garlic, beef shin pie, rhubarb almond tart, and carrageen moss with whiskey sauce. We opted out of the optional oysters and cheese, though had my stomach been able to hold it, I would have welcomed both.

Though the place has been accused of having a political agenda, there’s no overt propaganda. No paper leaflets fluttering about. Ottolenghi (who, for the record, I adore) has been heard muttering about the project's hubris. There is a downstairs shop filled with used books and copies of Luncheon magazine.

In a whisper, The Yellow Bittern gently demands that guests slow down. Be here. Pay attention. This, while difficult in the world as it is, makes it no less a noble pursuit.

In today’s (absurdly long) letter

111 eggs + 30 guests + 1 bedroom flat = party ✨ false memories ✨ a stunningly saturated cookbook ✨ the savoy, two ways including a first-hand look at simpson’s grand divan ✨ 9 essays on everything from baking at the top of the world to the glory of Publix subs ✨ 8 book reviews including memories of a catholic girlhood | nonesuch | a parish chronicle | all things barbara pym | and what will likely be a smashing US success from a nascent twenty-three-year-old rising talent ✨

You’ll note I’m skipping full sections on watching and listening recommendations this month. Here are the quick Cliff Notes:

• I slogged through the new season of Industry that honestly made me feel gross.

• I inhaled the show regular readers already know I am deeply obsessed with.

• I watched a gorgeous, food-infused, tragedy of a movie starring do-no-wrong Tilda Swinton.

• I listened to these albums and gladly started paying for a subscription to The Honest Broker. Ted Gioia loves old books and smooth jazz and so too do I.

Be well. Be kind. Do the Work.

The Omelette Party: Can Jemima Kelly recreate Martha Stewart’s mythic midnight dinner party? (Financial Times, Jemima Kelly)

Last fall, as part of a client project, I spent a week or so with Martha, plastering her classic and newly reissued Entertaining with a rainbow of sticky notes. I marveled at the copious bushels of vegetables, perfectly formed cabbages, radishes, carrots of a tangerine hue. But mostly I dreamed of whether I could pull off the infamous omelette party.

On Algae Oil (From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy, Alicia Kennedy)

A clear-eyed personal reflection on the latest in the spiffy squeeze bottle cooking oil craze. In a favorite tiny Vermont mart, I circled the stuff for several weeks before finally giving in to the “in-the-know” prestige automatically granted via countertop lazy Susan placement.

The Most Beautiful Freezer In the World (The New Yorker, Cree LeFavour)

Cree LeFavour has long written books about living on the edge. A couple years back, she embarked on a challenge that pushed the physical limits of that category. I followed the series when she published it on Substack and am thrilled to see it in essay form.

Kitchen Projects for Easter and Spring (Kitchen Projects, Nicola Lamb)

If you didn’t hit the mark with your Easter/Passover baking or TGIS (that’s Thank God It’s Spring) menu, Nicola Lamb’s got your back. I made the festive buns from Sift last spring, and I just felt so f*&^-ing proud when they came out of the oven.

How to Eat Rhubarb (The Dolce Vita Diaries, Skye McAlpine)

In case you’ve not the time for firing up the oven, Skye McAlpine reminds you that chopping a few stalks of in-season rhubarb, sprinkling with a pinch of sugar, and giving them a quick roast opens up a myriad of mouthwatering sweet and savory treats.

Kia Damon’s Audacious Florida Cooking (Hannah Goldfield, The New Yorker)

I don’t care what you think you know or feel about the Sunshine State, apparently you haven’t lived until you’ve had a Pub Sub. I never miss a Hannah Goldfield column but this one bursts with joy from the outset.

“Around lunchtime one recent Friday, the chef Kia Damon stood in front of a produce display at a Publix grocery store in St. Cloud, Florida, bobbing her head like a d.j. “Yeah! Yeah! Take a shower!” she said, holding a finger in the air as a sprinkler system released fine sprays of mist onto neat rows of cabbage and kale. “Me next!” Damon, who wore loose denim overalls with a baggy T-shirt and a vintage Orlando Magic hat, was eager to cool off: we’d just spent several hours on an airboat tour of the marshes of Lake Tohopekaliga, scanning the waters for gators and herons under the high glare of the sun.”

Read more

During a busy season (no complaints!) full of clients and children on perpetual spring break, I’m skipping all the up-front niceties today in favor of simply saying: if you’re reading this, I’m deeply grateful. Really, truly grateful.

Be well. Be kind. Do the work.

BOOKS

Michael Silverblatt, once crowned the “best reader in America,” passed away in February. His audio archive reveals a laudable legacy: more than 1,200 interviews with the likes of Don DeLillo, Jamaica Kincaid, Fran Lebowitz, Eileen Myles, Dave Eggers, Mary Gaitskill (who has an excellent short story in this week’s New Yorker), and, and, and.

Sarah Fay’s 2010 Believer interview with Silverblatt shares three things a host/moderator/conversation partner should assiduously avoid when conducting an interview:

A neutral and faceless appearance
Asking questions that produce the same answers the guest has given before
Trying to make the guest confess that they’ve had a relationship with an animal

(I’d argue the third missive might prove more than a bit interesting. Moving on.)

Silverblatt didn’t care for his conversations to be characterized as “interviews.” Before meeting a guest, he aimed to read their entire body of work, but didn’t labor over question-filled scripts. Preferring to “work without a net” Silverblatt gave his guests the gift of attentive presence. A consummate re-reader, he paid rent on a second apartment to house all his books.

What’s abundantly clear from Fay’s 2010 conversation is that Silverblatt’s tolerance for smoothed-over anodyne AI writing would have been zero.

“I believe that words and their arrangement in the sentences are what get our attention. I want, as Barthelme has his Snow White character say in his first novel, I want to hear words I have never heard before. I want the words and sentences to peacock around, to open their plumes. Art speech—I’ve called it that after art songs—is a form of speech no one can speak unless someone else is speaking it. In other words, when I start to speak it you can see a writer lift up their eyebrows and say, “Oh, it’s safe to noodle around. It’s safe to throw in a word or not know where the sentence ends.” In other words, to speak from the realm of style rather than from the realm of information or communicative exchange. I want to hear their styles, I want to hear the emotion that goes into shaping a style.”

The same conversation also plumbs the value of silence.

“With the kind of people I’m speaking to, silence is part of the vocabulary. And almost inevitably, the vocal delivery of a joke or something humorous is about the beauty of a well-placed pause before the aspirated word. I leave in what’s called “dead air” in the technical world of radio. Now that we’re digital, you’d be amazed how the minutest of pauses can be edited out of a sentence. And I don’t want them edited out. I really don’t, because part of the information that the listener is getting—especially the listener who knows the writer, who’s been thinking about or is excited about this writer—is how quickly the writer comes up with an answer to a question. We watch athletes as they pause and ready themselves, and writing is just another skill by someone who’s brought a form to perfection or their own version of perfection. And when someone thwacks the ball at them, we want to see how much aggression is in the return. It’s part of the information of the interview and shapes the interaction.”

In honor of Silverblatt’s tremendous service to the book trade, I’m sharing his legendary reading rules, first published in this 1997 LA Times article.

The Bookworm’s Rules

1) Sit. If you’re lying down you’ll fall asleep.

2) Read at least 100 pages in your first session with a new book. You must get well in.

3) If you’re reading for pleasure, finish a book before starting a new one. Don’t keep three or four going.

4) If your eyes get tired, try cotton compresses with witch hazel--they’re soothing and refreshing.

5) Read a book about a country you’ve never visited.

6) Ask close friends to name their favorite book, one that changed their life or one that accompanied a change in life. You will learn not just about the book, but about the person who recommended it.

7) Don’t be embarrassed to keep a vocabulary list. Reading without understanding is not a virtue.

8) Don’t torture yourself or read out of duty. A great book has an obligation to enrich and alter your life.

9) There are certain books you’ll find you’re not ready for. Please suspend your judgment of them. It took me seven years and six tries to read Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying.”

10) If you can’t discard preconceptions that come from bad classroom experiences--for example, “A Tale of Two Cities” and “Silas Marner” are not Dickens’ or Eliot’s best works--if you’ve X’d them out of your list, you’re missing something of pleasure. You’re ready now. Try them.

FOOD

There’s something about mud-soaked, wind-swept March that feels admirably minimal. One must not enter the tempestuous month with any sort of seasonal expectations. Unlike other shoulder seasons (June, September, December), there exists no big event to which we can redirect our attention. No school’s out for the summer | back-to-school | holidays of all stripes to distract. In this come-what-may maelstrom of a month, orange marmalade is as bright and perfect a balm as any.

I like it all ways, slathered on top of a thickly buttered scone, hot out of the oven, please. Toast, crumpets, and english muffins are all suitable vehicles. Last week, after picking up a sesame-encrusted sourdough loaf from Wild Flours Bread, I made a tartine with the stuff. Slicing the loaf into generous chunks, each piece received a thin layer of marmalade. topped with generous dollops of ricotta, fresh basil leaves, and mortadella. Alongside a quick batch of kale chips, sprinkled with my favorite flavor shortcut, this was dinner.

• Blake Hill Marmalade | This award-winning marmalade was recommended in a recent episode of TASTE with the “Anarchist Who Built Zingerman’s” Ari Weinzweig. Small batches are made in Windsor, Vermont, by Vicky Allard and Joe Hanglin, a married couple who hail from England and Gibraltar, and now make their home on a 1800s farming property. I’ve two jars of Seville Orange and one of Meyer Lemon en route.

• Nigel Slater | When I think of marmalade, I think of Nigel Slater. Slater writes about all manner of food stuff in a meditative style best consumed in small bits. Marmalade is a welcome, repeat guest in his work. Each volume in his Kitchen Diaries series is a treasure. I’m also a fan of A Thousand Feasts which challenges food writers to think more expansively about how we approach the task. Here, a brief excerpt from “Marmalade Day,”

  “Marmalade is always a pot of joy. Button-bright, glistening and quivering on the spoon, it has none of the cloying sweetness of honey, a clarion call to the start of the day. Whisper it: this thick orange jam does not feel quite right at any other time of day. It glows like a candle on the greyest January morning, cheering us out of the door to work. No preserve causes such controversy, thick-cut or hair-thin, dark or pale, softly set or firm. Mine will be barely set, light in colour and as much golden jelly as peel.”

• Chewy Marmalade Oatmeal Cookies | These took less than ten minutes to throw together and made for a lovely post-lunch treat. I imagine they would do quite well as a doorstep gift for someone needing a burst of optimism, kids with a big test to study for, or anyone in need of a brief bout of procrastination.

  

POETRY

Domesticity, as a wild place. Indeed. Pierce’s latest, Dear Beast, just dropped.

Domesticity | Catherine Pierce

Sometimes everything hurts with how desperately

I love it, and I do mean desperately. Like I want

to hold tight to every tender object, the gifted rock,

the basketball sneakers. Everywhere, piles

of undone, the tangle of should and will and want.

So many hours blurred to the necessity of sleep,

and how is any corner supposed to stay uncobwebbed

when also I need to consider mortality, love

the word gloaming, tweeze a tick from behind a knee?

How am I supposed to keep safe everyone

in this house while holding open the door

and saying have fun, make good choices, know the world?

Outside the wind has kicked up and the trees shush

even the leaf blowers. The hunger in my chest

could nearly lift me off the ground. Once I thought

domesticity was a gentle trap, a bed soft with quicksand.

Now I know it is a wild place, toothed and flowering.

Unnavigable, and not for the tenderhearted.

Source: Poetry (March 2026)

TRAVEL

In preparing for an upcoming trip to London, I stumbled across a specific and comprehensive resource that any Brit-bound bibliophile should bookmark: Literary Listings London. Going to/living in London and want a one-stop shop for all sorts of bookish events? Look no further.

Literary Listings London

The only website listing all London’s book talks and literary theatre.

In a matter of minutes, I secured a Thursday night seat at an event featuring with Nelio Biedermann (author of one of Spring’s buzziest novels) in conversation with beloved journalist and Substack newsletter author Pandora Sykes. The chat happens to be at Hatchards Piccadilly which happens to be a mere eight minute walk from The Wyndham where I’d already secured a seat to witness the greatness that is Rosamund Pike in Inter Alia. Lucky me.

On the same night, I could have just as easily paid a visit to Mimi Pond, author of the graphic group biography of the Mitford Sisters or listened in on any of sixteen scheduled events. Over the weekend, I might swing by the Football Writing Festival: Arsenal Special featuring Nick Hornby, former football player and pundit Martin Keown, and former football player Rachel Yankey. Or I could catch Life of Pi author Yann Martel discussing his latest novel, Son of Nobody. The possibilities are endless.

Megs is a freelance creative director who pens the Pizza & Other Things newsletter and, with her husband George, runs St. George Pizza in the small town of Warren, Maine. This summer, they’ll open the door to Upstairs Books1, a vintage cookbook store. Megs and I chatted about — among other things — her origin story, what fuels her work, and the tools she can’t live without. I loved our time together, and I hope you do too.

In today’s letter

Blueberry Hill ✨ the book for people who hate to cook ✨ Oyster River Wine ✨ St. George Pizza ✨ Rabelais Books ✨ Megs’ cookbook picks ✨ planners ✨ love for Dropbox ✨ middle age birding ✨ early morning baking ✨ dirty martinis for the win

Let’s start with your origin story. In my personal writing and the freelance book collaboration work I do, I’m always fascinated by what fuels creative people. Talk to me about where you grew up and what kid Megs was like.

I am technically from the North Shore of Boston. Both my parents are from neighboring towns, about fifty miles outside the city, and have, particularly my tiny little mother, incredibly thick Boston accents. But most pivotally, we moved to Vermont when I was six and lived there till I was fourteen. I grew up in a town called Clarendon. The closest, quote unquote, big town would be Rutland.

I think living in small-town Vermont was pivotal to my upbringing. We lived in a pretty remote area, kind of on top of a mountain, and a huge thing for our family was that every Sunday we would have family day. We’d drive to one of the many beautiful neighboring towns and walk around, experiencing the history. My dad was a history teacher; my sister’s now a historic preservationist, so that tracks.

The day would usually end with a trip to a bookstore. My parents weren’t big on us having any sort of video games or toys, but they would always let us get a book. Actually, they loved us playing with Barbies because we were making up our own games, creating our own worlds.

So we’d always do this super fun day where we’d go on a local adventure, buy a book, eat nachos and go home. So that, I think, is in a nutshell the upbringing that led me to my current interests, you know? I have a lot of respect for oral histories, small communities, and the art of small business—particularly in selling things deeply rooted in creativity, like bookstores.

I was surrounded by a lot of really creative people growing up in Vermont. My best friend’s mother was a ceramicist, and it was just a really wonderful upbringing. I was very involved in art. I look back at that time so fondly, and my sister and I—she actually lives very close to me up here in Maine—we yearly take a trip back to Vermont just to hang, reminisce.

That’s amazing. Sort of what people talk about when they talk about halcyon days. Okay, so what role did food play when you were a kid? I can kind of guess at it from hearing what your parents were like, but what was on the table? Did your parents cook or garden?

We had a little hobby garden. My parents weren’t super passionate cooks, but the act of procuring the food was important—whether it be from our own garden, farmers markets, or local farm stands. Both my parents grew up in Irish Catholic families with a lot of kids, so there wasn’t ever sort of the passion for cooking ingrained in them as children; it was more of a fight-for-scraps-of-food situation. And they also married very, very young, my parents, so I also think they were just kind of like basically twenty-year-olds bumbling through how to domesticate themselves.

The family meal was pretty sacred in our house. We were very much the family that had dinner at the dinner table every night together and talked about our day, which I feel like is kind of a lost art in the contemporary era.

Do you have any meals you remember or specialties that you loved? Either that your parents made or something you ate outside the home?

My parents cooked super comforting meals. My dad actually used to cook this mustard chicken from a cookbook I adored, The Blueberry Hill Cookbook.

I have that cookbook2!

(Note to reader, I actually have The Blueberry Hill Menu Cookbook which followed the original Blueberry Hill Cookbook but post-conversation tracked down a first edition of the original and promptly made it mine!

Note to reader #2: turns out Megs actually had Tony Clark’s New Blueberry Hill Cookbook, so between the two of us, we’re really working on the entire Blueberry Hill canon.)

Oh, amazing. I remember just being very obsessed with the book and the plastic binding, all these signs that I would be an art director kind of popping up. I read it like it was this magical tome. And it was always really special whenever we’d cook something out of that. I remember my mom always made the blueberry pancakes, and that would be a special breakfast. And then my dad would make the—I think there was a mustard chicken, maybe with scallions, I want to say. It’s been a while since we’ve had it as a family, but yeah—I feel like when the cookbooks came out, that was always a special situation, as opposed to, you know, the Tuesday night American chop suey situation.

Okay, let’s talk about your first job and early career.

So, again, kind of in continuation from being super involved in the arts as a teenager, I graduated with a degree in art history, moved to New York, and worked in probably the driest aspect of the art world at a place called Artist Rights Society, representing artist estates. If Gossip Girl wanted to use a Warhol, I would draft the contract.

So on paper, it sounded cool. And I did get to go onto the original Gossip Girl set! But it was one of those jobs where everybody who was there was creative or had an interest in the arts, and you almost used it as your buffer job that launched you onto the next phase of your career. While in New York, I went to FIT for a year and pursued a graphic design program, which essentially was just “Here’s how you use Adobe Creative Suite.”

From there, a professor recommended an internship out in Portland, Oregon. I fell in love with Portland, eventually landing a job at the major advertising firm Wieden+Kennedy. Portland has a lot of parallels with the creative network I felt like I had as a child in Vermont. It’s just a very flourishing community in terms of creative mindset and output.

But despite all that, I really missed New England, specifically the ability to drive fifteen minutes and be in another small town, or drive seven hours and be in New York City. As much as I love Portland, it is a bit of an island, with the closest exclusive city being Seattle, which is three and a half hours away. I just felt very removed from a lot of my family. I feel like the pandemic accelerated everyone’s five-to-ten-year plans.

My sister and her husband had been living in Maine for about twelve years at this point. I’m incredibly close with my sister, and I was like, let’s just go to Maine and see what happens. This was early 2021. The world was in such disarray. And we decided, why not? We were both still working remote jobs, my husband and I, and so we just packed up and moved out to the midcoast of Maine—specifically to this town my sister had brought me to visit a few years ago. She took me to Oyster River Winegrowers, which is a little vineyard, actually just down the street from us now, and I remember thinking, what an amazing place.

And so this was when you opened a small market called Goods Maine. Was that in Warren or a different location?

So that was in Camden, Maine, about twenty minutes away from Warren. And actually, speaking of Oyster River, they had opened up a tasting room. The location next to them, which was a coffee shop, had moved down the street, leaving a vacant space. George and I had long discussed some sort of little general store thing. Childhood Sundays going to tiny Vermont towns with my family probably played a role in this dream. One weekend George and I were at the barn in Warren at Oyster River, whispering about plans. A woman who worked there said, “I think I can hear what you’re talking about. And if it is what you’re talking about, you should check out the space next to Oyster River in Camden.”

We opened up a shop called Goods. It was initially a food-themed boutique without actually selling food, save a few packaged goods. A year in, we transitioned to selling actual sandwiches and drinks. So we turned it from sort of a little boutique market to an actual little sandwich shop, just because there weren’t really any sandwich shops in Camden at the time. It just kind of felt necessary.

Had you done any sort of restaurant work before?

I worked in restaurants before, but mainly on the serving side. So I had familiarity with being in the back-of-house from a front-of-house point of view.

The closest prep I had was working as a counter girl at an old pharmacy called Guptill’s. I made milkshakes and deli sandwiches, tuna melts and grilled cheeses mostly.

Tell me about the transition from closing Goods to opening St. George Pizza.

For context, George and I really bond over projects. It’s just what we’ve done the entire time we’ve been together, probably to our family and friends’ deep annoyance. They’re always like, “Are you guys doing something else?” But it’s kind of an entrepreneurial mindset, you know what I mean? Name one person who started something and was like, “And never again shall I take that leap!” It’s kind of addictive.

Pizza really came from the fact that George loves cooking. He’s very passionate about it. He’s absolutely the chef in our house and he’d been working on pizza for years. We had talked about if he was ever going to do it, it would be here in Maine. We’d made the decision to close Goods, and we wanted to pause, to enjoy the summer. George has a full-time job right now, and I still freelance. So our intention was not rush into anything, even though we thought pizza might work in the future.

Then we found out a building in our town was up for lease. Our decision to grab the space was fifty percent George’s passion, and fifty percent the town needed something. It had just gone through so many iterations that didn’t make sense, either business-model-wise or audience fit. The café that was initially there—they were doing breakfast, lunch, dinner, which wasn’t sustainable for this size town.

Prior to us, a couple from Seattle did a supper club that was $275 a head, twice a month. In terms of economics in the town, you’re basically eliminating ninety-nine percent of the people who live here from attending. It felt like a real waste of this beautiful space, a really stunning community gathering area. The landlord was threatening to turn it into offices and subdivide the space, so there was the sense that we needed to do it for the town. And pizza—being George’s passion, and also the fact that everybody loves pizza—it’s a product that you can offer at a reasonable price. No one feels excluded from it, and that felt really important to us. And no one’s really doing Sicilian pizza up here. So it felt like a differentiating stylistic point as well.

So to fast forward, St. George Pizza has been a big hit. You guys host community events, trivia, movie nights and the food is obviously tremendous. But the real reason we started talking was because of a post you threw up on Instagram several weeks back announcing your latest venture: a vintage cookbook store called Upstairs Books. Tell us more.

Sure. The space—it’s such a small space that dictates what is going up there. Mirroring how we came into the pizza of it all was the feeling that the town needs something else. So if we have the means to do something else, let’s add one more thing here to help bring people downtown and into our pizza place. We initially talked about maybe it being a little bar, maybe being an extension of St. George’s, but quickly decided that in terms of renovations, that would have been kind of a waking nightmare.

Reflecting on the Goods experience, I didn’t want to deal with expiration dates. I want to be able to offer product that is evergreen. So all these considerations. And I just really love bookstores. I love books. I sold cookbooks at Goods and I think it’s such an interesting way to talk about culture in an accessible way for most people. Food is such a beautiful starting point for conversation—not to get too heady about it—but it’s just this really beautiful subset of bookselling. I had such a good time doing it at Goods; it was my favorite part. It’s going to be such a beautiful little nook of all these interesting volumes of recipes, past and present.

I love that. It sort of reminds me of the idea that food writing is actually never really just about the food itself—food is a jumping-off point for larger conversations. So let’s talk about some of your favorite cookbooks. Are you starting to stockpile titles?

I kind of wish that we had kept more of our inventory from Goods, to be honest. But we didn’t have that much left when we closed down. It was always a really popular section. But from a single Substack and Instagram post, we’ve already had so many people reach out about donations.

Amazing.

So that’s great. There are a couple of larger used book warehouses in New England that I’m going to absolutely use as an excuse to do little road trips. But I think kind of the standard for the shop is donations. It’s nice that I haven’t even had to ask, and people have been so generous about it. Cookbook buying can be this compulsive thing where you end up with so many. So it’s nice to have an excuse to unload some and share them with other people. I think people are really excited about that.

I think that’s absolutely true. Tell me about a couple of your favorite titles.

One that is really essential to us in terms of really kicking off the pizza exploration for our family is a book called Pizza Camp by Joe Beddia. He used to run this one-window pizza place in Philly where it was only takeout. People would line up. Bon Appétit named him the best pizza in America, and from there, he completely blew up. I’ve never actually had his pizza. We got the book when we were still out in Portland. And that’s how George started to hone in on his recipes.

There’s another book from the sixties that, that I think is so funny and kind of reminds me of my mother: I Hate to Cook Book by Peg Bracken. The writing kind of cracks me up.

It’s kind of the style I write in for my Substack, where it’s this person who clearly has a love for food but is also sardonic and self-deprecating. That’s one of the first cookbooks that I was like, “I feel seen.”

Okay, before we go—you have a million different things going on. You’ve got a freelance career, you’ve got a pizza restaurant, you’ve got a cookbook empire waiting to be built, your husband has full-time work. What tools are essential to your work?

I am—and this is kind of, I apologize, a basic answer—but I have a Shinola day planner that I’ve used for the past decade. I also use this Dropbox application called Dropbox Paper. I swear to God, I’m the only person on earth that uses it, because I actually did an advertising campaign for it years ago.

It’s essentially a competitor to Google Docs, but it’s formatted so much better. I’m such a visual person. The checklist, the way it’s organized—it just makes inventory and any sort of checklist so much easier. So I use that day to day, both with the operational aspects of the pizza place, and I’m sure I’ll use it for the bookstore as well. It’s where I draft all of my Substack newsletters. It’s so many things in one service. I don’t know if I should recommend it, because I’m pretty sure they’re sunsetting it.

And then ultimately, I feel like I need the day planner because I just need to have that analog, tactile reminder. Something about the digital aspect of it all doesn’t remind me about these day-to-day in-person things. I need to have the actual writing down, and I need to have that balance.

Yep, I’m exactly the same way. What’s your beverage of choice?

I am a cappuccino girl. I feel like I’ve gone fully nineties again where I’m like, full whole-milk foam cappuccino. And if not, then I’m drinking a lightly dirty gin martini.

Nice. What do you do when you ever have a spare five minutes to decompress or to reset—when you’re feeling overwhelmed or you need to check out?

The town that we live in has this beautiful river that goes through it, and it’s actually adjacent to the pizza place. The pizza place is named after it, the St. George River. And we’re lucky enough to just live up the hill from it. Taking our dogs on walks (despite the fact that they’re two Australian shepherd mixes and absolute psychos) is always alleviates stress. I feel like I’ve become the stereotypical birder, where you walk down the river and see a pair of bald eagles just casually flying above, or herons fishing in the river. This ecosystem that is really stunning, and it’s such a beautiful reminder of the season. It’s constantly changing. It’s a tidal river, too, so the tide goes up and down. Taking these daily walks, with or without the dogs, is a really nice grounding activity. It’s great for my blood pressure, but also a nice reminder of the place that we chose to live and the space that we’re choosing to build something in.

I love that. I’m also convinced that birding is something that, as you hit middle age, you used to look at other people and think, what a ridiculous activity, and now I’m totally entranced when I see a bird on my window.

Yeah, it’s really weird. How can you not be moved by the majesty of nature? I don’t know.

All in. Okay. Final question. When cook at home, what’s your go-to dinner?

My specialty is I make handmade udon noodles and make a little stir-fry with that. I think I’m better with the baking and long-process stuff. I feel like George is—he’s also a pianist, so he is really good about learning something over and over and over and then kind of improvising. So he loves to riff on stuff, whereas I follow the recipe exactly. And baking is always usually a nice cheat code for that.

Okay, so are we going to see a bakery in the future? Because, you know…

Oh, no, probably not.

I think the bakery lifestyle is tough. Cake Zine recently released early morning diaries of bakers, and they’re all like, “Well, when my alarm goes off at two…”

Yeah, no. I told you, I like a gin martini.

I’m right there with you. Well, Megs, thank you so very much for taking the time.

Thank you.

This monthly round-up includes a healthy dose of culture consumed that escaped last month’s mainstream algorithm. Example: maybe Wuthering Heights saturated your feed, but you missed McSweeney’s Is It a Red Flag? | Wuthering Heights Edition. You’re welcome.

I’m skipping over the Watchlist portion this month because a lot of my viewing time was spent transfixed by the glorious athleticism demonstrated in Olympic Ski Mountaineering and the like. Two things of note: yes, I am watching Love Story (the soundtrack! the clothes! the surrounding controversy!), and if you want a how-in-the-heck-did-they-film-this-documentary (as in what story did they tell the subjects) recommendation, check out Mistress Dispeller. Also, Seven Dials was an A+ snow day hit.

In today’s letter

a bevy of bivalves ✨ the spring 2026 cookbook forecast ✨ food guides for Hong Kong, Paris, and Portland, ME ✨ two new podcasts from New York Review of Books and the folks over at The Rest of History ✨ charlotte gainsbourg ✨ a stunning novella from one of Denmark’s most beloved writers ✨ nigella on repeat ✨ ducks, newburyport ✨ etc.

Be well. Be Kind. Do the Work.

O, Lurida! Settling down among the oyster beds (Orion)

Can cheap oysters save the restaurant economy? (Financial Times)

A Florida Oyster Fishery and Its Community Fight for Their Future (Civil Eats)

I Want What I Want (This American Life)

My answer to the question of whether to start with oysters is always yes, so I surprised myself when I realized the few I threw back at the end of a recent ski day were the first I’d consumed slopeside. Highly recommend binging on the brackish bites in the bitter cold, along with this quartet of perfectly salty dispatches from the likes of Orion (and one of my food writing faves and current writing workshop teacher Kate Lebo), the Financial Times, Civil Eats, and, from This American Life, a truly unbelievable one 19th century Edward Dando who repeatedly ordered hundreds oysters at a time and then skipped out on the check.

I Tried the “Sardine Fast” (Vogue)

No Sugar: A Diary of Deprivation (The Paris Review)

On the deprivation front, a yin-yang of focused consumption (sardines) and self-imposed restriction (sugar) that leads me once again to the tried and trite truism: everything in moderation.

I particularly appreciated the impetus for Cake Zine editor and baker Tanya Bush’s week sans sugar, a sort of tiring of the things that brings so many passionate artists and craftsfolk to their work in the first place,

“I think about Deb, who works as a book editor and spends her days reading drafts in their least legible forms. Her job is to make a manuscript into something the rest of us consume. By the time it’s on sale, she’s moved on. She barely has time to read for pleasure anymore. I never really eat my own desserts in their finished state either, just the components. I remember how I used to sit in front of the oven window watching butter and flour swell and brown and shatter. How does the rough puff puff? Anna once told me that when she watches movies she can see only the choices, the camera, the angle, the coloration. When I eat dessert at a restaurant, all I can taste is what’s wrong.”

Bush’s memoir with recipes — Will This Make You Happy: Stories and Recipes from a Year of Baking — drops Tuesday. Curious about what else is on the epic 2026 spring cookbook list?

Read more

Like it or loathe it, AI won the headlines battle this week.

Matt Shumer nearly broke the internet with his compelling PSA about the speed at which AI will change the way we work. Jasmine Sun reported on the AI populists in DC while building her own personal editor. Romance authors are working with AI to produce novels in under an hour (one author went, mind-blowingly, from a production of 10 novels per year to 200). And on the sponsorship side of the equation, Gwinny is posing her health practice and restaurant questions to Claude.

Personally, I’m having fun playing with Spotify's new (beta) prompted playlist, which lets you draft creative prompts about your ideal playlist. For the below, I asked Spotify to take me back to my high school art classroom (circa 1993-97) where we were allowed to blast local radio station CD101 while expressing all manner of teenage angst. You can listen to the Hard Fork gents explain how it works, here.

Also on the listening front, if you take in one podcast this week, let it be this, The Media Theory That Explains 99% of Everything. You can also read an edited transcript here. Let’s chat “auditory anxiety” in the comments below.

Derek Thompson

The Obscure Media Theory That Explains '99% of Everything'

The world is full of theories of everything. The smartphone theory of everything argues that our personal devices are responsible for the rise of political polarization, anxiety, depression, and conspiracy theories—not to mention the decline of attention spans, intelligence, happiness, and general comity. The…

Read more

6 months ago · 95 likes · 11 comments · Derek Thompson

Be well. Be kind. Do the work.

READ

Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife

The writer Gertrude Stein is as famous for her storied salons as she is for the body of work she produced. A unique combination of intellectual prowess, rejection of societal norms, and unconventional creativity cemented Stein’s good-standing in many a university course catalog. Contributing equally to the longevity of her work was her undeniable self-assuredness and desire for fame.

Stein’s work spawned generations of rabid fans in the form of creative geniuses. Faith Ringgold, Eileen Myles, Kenneth Koch, William Burroughs, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery and the like praise her groundbreaking approach to language. Beyond famed writers and artists, enthusiastic readers harbor an insatiable appetite for the posthumous publication of Stein’s personal effects. All of this has, over the years, led to a prodigious and steady supply of scholarly and intended-for-the-GP1 work focused on Stein’s life.

Author Francesca Wade’s entry to Gertrude Stein’s canon, is eminently readable and, in a word, excellent. Penned chronologically, Wade begins with Stein’s 1874 birth, detailing Stein’s intellectual development and early flirtations with psychology and science which had a clear impact on her writing. In recalling the productive summer of 1912, Stein,

“later recalled, her interest had been primarily in “people, their character, and what went on inside them.” Having moved away from typology, during the Spanish summer she “first felt a desire to express the rhythm of the visible world.”

For the first time, Stein explained, individual words began to feel “more important than the sentence structure or the paragraphs.” Drawing perhaps, on her neurological research at Johns Hopkins as well as William James’ ideas of thoughts as a stream of consciousness, Stein was thinking deeply about perception, and the way the brain processes language. She briefly experimented with inventing words, but soon went back to English: Stein was beginning to imagine a kind of writing so original that to read it would almost require a rewiring of the brain’s neural architecture, to unlearn all the ways we expect written language to behave.”

One of the most interesting features of Wade’s book is its exploration of “literary executorship” and the question of what happens to an author’s private correspondence after their death. With an individual as audaciously ambitious as Stein, the assumption is that she would have welcomed any sort of posthumous publicity but Stein’s partner Alice B. Toklas struggled mightily with how to preserve the legacy of her "Baby.” Toklas, who continued to reside in the storied 27 rue de Fleurus in the 6th arrondissement of Paris, was approached by many scholars and interested parties, vying for her attention underneath the watchful eye of a prized (and ever-increasingly valuable) art collection. Visitors made their case amidst pieces crammed frame-to-frame, a visual record of friends past and present. Stein’s early purchases, made in concert with her eventually estranged brother Leo,

“covered a range of styles: the classical Romanticism of Eugene Delacroix; the Impressionists Monet, Degas, and Renoir (controversial a generation earlier, now more palatable to contemporary tastes); and more daring works by Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Toulouse-Lautrec, who rebelled against their predecessors’ naturalistic use of form and color.”

Add to that Stein’s longtime friendship with Picasso and even the casual art appreciator understands she and Tolkas basically dwelled in a domestic museum.

An Afterlife is a book to be read, pen in hand, so as to tick off each name that Wade diligently peppers her compelling narrative with, alongside weighty questions about how one’s legacy is preserved.

SPORTS

No One Gave It to You: Four Conversations with Writers and Artists About the Role Athletics and Training Play in Their Creative Lives

The latest issue of The Believer landed in my mailbox last week along with a fluorescent lime green swim cap tucked into thick, colorful pages chock full of cultural criticism, literary nonfiction, and interviews. While the quarterly’s content generally skews artsy, this issue is all about sports. It is a tremendously successful departure. Within:

• an analysis of a single Steph Curry shot as art object (Kiese Laymon);

• a review of the USA Ultimate (frisbee, that is) Masters Championships (Will McGrath);

• an interview with Thomas McGuane (Mattie C. Govan);

• a review of the Katie Taylor/Amanda Serrano boxing match (Laura van den Berg).

Most pertinent to any writer/readers of this newsletter, Jenny Odell’s conversations with four creatives on the role of sport in their work.

From basketball player and professor Marcus Burke,

“With writing, you kind of have to stay in it, in the same way that if you want to be in shape as an athlete, you have to continue to train and train and train. And there are different aspects. For example, I feel like reading is like the weight lifting of writing. Because sometimes it can be arduous. It’s making you better, but you don’t necessarily feel the payoff initially, as you’re engaged in the act. And it only shows up later in this mysterious way, if at all.”

And this, which certainly pertains to the writing life as well,

“A season’s never a season unless you think about quitting a couple of times.”

Daniel Alarcón, on bearing witness to his son’s first professional sporting experience:

“The first time I took my oldest son to a soccer game, it was a Quakes game, the major-league soccer team in San Jose [California]. We’d watched soccer on TV a fair amount. And so we walked up to the stadium, and then up the steps, and then we looked down on the field. And he was, like, visibly—he must have been eight or something—he said this phrase I’ll never forget. He goes, “This is so unusual for my eyes.”

BLVR: Yeah, that’s exactly what it is.

DA: It’s just like, Oh, whoa. Because when you watch a game on TV, you never see the whole field, so that’s amazing. You’re also used to the game with commentary, because you watch it on TV, so to watch it without commentary, with your own observations and the conversations with the people around you, is intense. And the other thing that I think—you know, it wasn’t exactly the case with the Quakes game, and might not be the same with the Ballers either—is that to see truly elite athletes playing at that level, doing things you could never even dream of doing, is extraordinary. It’s like going to the ballet. It’s like going to the opera. These are people who are savants in their field. They’re athletically gifted, physically endowed with skills and talents, and they put in so much hard work to be there that you or I could never dream of. We could play baseball all our lives, forever, and never hit a fastball.

R.O. Kwon on powerlifting,

“I’ve been reading little bits and pieces of studies about the emotional effects of picking up something heavy and then putting it back, or pushing something heavy away from you, and how satisfying that can be for our brains. It’s like metaphorically taking a whole giant load off yourself and knowing you can do that over and over again. And knowing you can do more and more.

I had been writing only in longhand while working on this in-­progress novel, and then just months ago I started doing a lot more computer work again. And I started going through the panic attacks and heightened anxiety that I had experienced while writing Exhibit and doing publicity for it. The coincidence was almost exact. It took me a minute to realize that the high spike in anxiety was like, Oh, dear god, we’re back at a laptop, dealing with words about a made-up world. Are we really doing this again? I think with lifting or any sort of physical exertion, the physical proof that we can change to some extent, that’s really useful.”

And from runner and journalist Alexis Madrigal,

“[…]there are these drives within human civilizations, in some cases, to remove all bodily elements from what it is to be intelligent, from what it is to think, from what it is to do these things. And that feels wrong, like it’s a loss of possibility not to realize that all our body’s capabilities have bodily components as well as mental components.”

WATCH

The Secret Agent

There’s a running joke in my house about the title of this film, which I, for some reason, cannot stop confusing with The Night Manager WHICH has absolutely zero connection to The Secret Agent (besides the fact I recommend both without reservation).

ANYWAY.

The Secret Agent is set in Brazil during the late 1970s when the country was controlled by a corrupt dictatorship. Wagner Moura plays a research scientist targeted for his refusal to capitulate to strong-armed exhortations from state authorities.

So much is conveyed without language, via dream-like cinematic sequences and masterful facial expressions against a backdrop of Carnival. There are moments of horrific absurdity such as when a severed leg, found in the belly of a shark, comes to life. The wrong people get caught in crossfire intended for an innocent man. Revelers ravenous for a reason to celebrate pack the streets as the morning’s newspapers track the mounting death toll.

Fashionistas will crow about the spot-on, seriously stylish 1970s Brazilian lewks. Friction-forward advocates will appreciate watching with subtitles (unless you speak Portuguese), forcing focus on the fast-disappearing single-screen viewing. It’s not an easy watch but it’s a worthwhile one.

ELEGY

Signing off with a brief list of things that over the last month have caused me to launch my pen across the room and exclaim, like the middle-aged woman I am, that far-off decision makers are ruining my diet — cultural and otherwise — in highly unsavory ways.

• Goodbye to my beloved Eat column, whose contributors have included Gabrielle Hamilton, Yotam Ottolenghi, Bryan Washington, Dorie Greenspan, Samin Nosrat, Sam Sifton, Tejal Rao, Tamar Adler, Mark Bittman, etc. etc. etc.

• See you laters are in order for the slow transition of and eventual demise of the Sunday Routine.

• Adieux to my childhood favorite and pre-show standby, Café Un Deux Trois

• The Washington Post foolishly demolished its books section.

• People are disrespecting and thus disappearing the pumpernickel bagel from local shops. Reading the below left me completely rankled,

“There are plenty of theories about why demand is dying for pumpernickel bagels: The dark color doesn’t photograph well; the flavor is too overpowering for most sandwiches; younger customers just prefer a blander bagel; people have simply forgotten about them.

Too overpowering for sandwiches?! What. An. Absurd. Thought. Ever tried a tuna melt on the stuff? Salami and pickles with a thick slice of stinky Brie Fermier? Turkey and Swiss complete with cole slaw and Russian dressing? Spicy radishes and pea shoots atop Boursin? Get it together, people.

What a wild and woolly winter ride we’re on. Snow blankets the south, frozen begonias bedevil a frost-kissed Florida. Perpetual snow days plague school officials with questions about whether to dust off virtual learning modules (please, no). Bare western slopes give a whole new meaning to the term ski bum. Yesterday morning’s run at 23 degrees felt downright balmy, a soft wind beckoning beings who haven’t chanced a daily dose of Vitamin D (for fear of freezing their faces off), refusing to emerge from their assumed positions — hunched next to radiators, stoves, fireplaces, baseboard heaters — for a quick hit.

‘Round these parts, we’re feeding the birds; turning endless pots of creamy Irish oats into fluffy pancakes; restocking hot chocolate; and watching lots of movies.

Today, a quick missive filled with cultural fuel to help you while away the hours.

Be well. Be kind. Do the work.

READ

War and Peace

Let me begin by saying I have never, ever once thought to myself, I should really give War and Peace a go. Never once as a dedicated library kid. Never in high school, as my love for AP English suggested I might build a career on/in/adjacent to/around books. Not in the hallowed halls that housed halcyon liberal arts lit seminars, nor while inhabiting graduate-level classrooms nestled in the crooks of forest-blanked mountains. Never once, restocking the Classics section at an independent bookstore.

And so, it is with great surprise that I announce that I have embarked upon what promises to be a year-long love affair with War and Peace.

I landed in this place via Simon Haisell, author of the Footnotes & Tangents newsletter: a home for big books read at a “gentle pace.” In 2026, he’s hosting read-alongs for War and Peace, Midnight’s Children, and the Wolf Hall trilogy1.

On the first day of February, I hopped on the War and Peace train, one month late. And because I harbor an unshakeable hang-up of always wanting to be on top of everything, I’m taking on a few chapters each day to catch the proper one-a-day pace as quickly as possible.

CRITICS

Vigil

I’m struggling with this one.

Here’s the thing: when you spend many years in the independent bookselling world (as I did), you access forthcoming books many months in advance.

When I was a bookseller, I habitually read books well before reviews came out, allowing opinions to organically percolate and evolve as I shared thoughts with fellow booksellers. Customers would hear about a highly anticipated novel, and I would sneakily, if somewhat obliquely, opine.

Now that I’ve returned to the land of the public reading class, I am once again reading with a chorus of criticism humming in my ear.

Normally, this is just fine. Book/music/art/food/television/movie criticism often does a good, if not excellent, job winnowing down the endless stream of options. When done properly, criticism puts a work in context, leads the reader down intriguing rabbit holes, and encourages a deeper and often more satisfying reading experience.

And yet. Sometimes you’ve got to plug your ears and forge ahead.

I pre-ordered George Saunders’ Vigil well before its January 20 pub date. I love Saunders’ language and all-encompassing view of this mixed-up, oft-focused-on-the-moment world. Saunders, who penned the magnificent Lincoln in the Bardo, faces death and its aftermath with humor and curiosity. Vigil, clocking in at 200 pages, promised to revisit the big unknowns about what happens when we pass from this world to the next. A champion pick all around.

Saunders embarked on his book tour2 like a champ, starting before reviews released. And then: a pan here, a five-star there. To say the reviews are mixed would be an understatement.

I returned to Daniel Mendelsohn’s seminal 2012, “The Critic’s Manifesto,”

“For all criticism is based on that equation: KNOWLEDGE + TASTE = MEANINGFUL JUDGMENT. The key word here is meaningful. People who have strong reactions to a work—and most of us do—but don’t possess the wider erudition that can give an opinion heft, are not critics. (This is why a great deal of online reviewing by readers isn’t criticism proper.) Nor are those who have tremendous erudition but lack the taste or temperament that could give their judgment authority in the eyes of other people, people who are not experts. (This is why so many academic scholars are no good at reviewing for mainstream audiences.) Like any other kind of writing, criticism is a genre that one has to have a knack for, and the people who have a knack for it are those whose knowledge intersects interestingly and persuasively with their taste. In the end, the critic is someone who, when his knowledge, operated on by his taste in the presence of some new example of the genre he’s interested in—a new TV series, a movie, an opera or ballet or book—hungers to make sense of that new thing, to analyze it, interpret it, make it mean something.”

Criticism: good.

Deciding for yourself whether a piece of art (using that term broadly) is worthy of praise: also good.

Want to have a go at making up your own mind on this one? Here’s the gist: Vigil drops the reader at the foot of a bad man’s deathbed. The man isn’t a murderer (directly) or a thief. He’s not preyed on young women or committed war crimes (as far as we know). And yet, it’s clear he hasn’t used his power for good. A visiting angel arrives at the man’s sickbed and gives the task of redemption a good go.

At its best, Vigil is an imaginative, courageous book filled with all manner of dialogue that most authors wouldn’t have the guts to try. Anyone wrestling with the bigger questions of life and what happens when we cease to live it will likely find it an interesting exploration. At its worst, it is a curious novel, wrestling with eternal quandaries in fairly few pages.

BOOKS FOR COOKS

Wild Sorrel Books

A huge hurrah for those willing to take on the stock and risk of opening a cookbook store in a city that already houses some truly great legends. I loved this conversation between Troy Chatterton and Matt Rodbard. Troy is opening a cookbook store, ⁠Wild Sorrel Cookbooks⁠ that will carry new and used/rare books for the home cook. Stories about how Troy scored stock from Dorothy Kalins (founding editor-in-chief of Saveur, author of The Kitchen Whisperers) and took on a Saturday shift at Bonnie Slotnick are fantastic.

If it opened tomorrow, I’d pop in for a trio of

• How I Cook, Ben Lippett

• Everyone Hot Pot: Creating the Ultimate Meal for Gathering and Feasting, Natasha Pickowicz

• Obsessed with the Best3, Ella Quittner

NOSTALGIA

The Muppet Show

If you hear this — It’s time to play the music. It’s time to light the lights. It’s time to meet the Muppets on the Muppet Show tonight — and are transported straight back to your childhood TV room (because that’s what we called it in our house, today’s kids who experience screens in a mobile manner would probably find that hysterical), you too are closing in on 50 at a rapid clip.

The BBC offers an excellent round-up of all the reviews. But you don’t need them. It’s pure joy, especially Sabrina Carpenter’s charmingly addictive Manchild, saucily serenaded as she weaves through tipsy Muppet bar patrons who’ve been served one too many. Add on renditions of Islands in the Stream and Don’t Stop Me Now, and I’m sold.

I adore January, the month of my mother's birth and her proclaimed favorite. While she has now, unbelievably, been gone nearly four years, I feel her presence strongly in the quiet corners of these slower-paced midwinter days. January offers itself as respite from all sorts of obligations. It can be, rather than a frenzied resolution-ruled scramble, a time to reignite the flames that fuel our lives. And if the weather hits just right (and depending on your perspective, it’s batting a thousand right now), there’s no shame in honoring early bedtimes, getting lost in books, and hunkering down at home.

Before diving into today’s monthly round-up, I’m pulling one timely note to the top. An incredible auction for literary lovers, Publishing for Minnesota is chock full of children’s books, offers of manuscript reviews, query letters, and conversations, it is LIVE until tomorrow.

Publishing for Minnesota benefits Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota; Women’s Foundation of Minnesota; Midwest Immigrant Bond Fund; Dios Habla Hoy Church Food Distribution (South Minneapolis); Community Aid Network MN; and Central Area Neighborhood Development.

In today’s letter

All the books I read in January, including two unequivocal recommendations • Offer of a sneak peek behind the paywall at Vittles and Snaxshot • An eight-hour and counting album playlist, heavy on the Mingus • A favorite show, on hiatus since 2016, returns • Poetry x2 • A compelling rebuttal to the death of reading • Etc, etc, etc.

👩‍🍳 Gourmet is back, kind of/sort of/in name only, with Ruth’s blessing. For the purposes of market research, I’ve subscribed. Noting the following:

• Peddling in unsubstantiated hot food goss is a fun way to prime readers for longer food-centric missives. The opening bid includes tips on the relationship between Bari Weiss and Clare deBoer (I’ve been wondering) and the Hugh Cocoran/Yotam Ottolenghi feud (why can’t we all just get along??). I’d prefer more substantiated rumors vs. anonymous suppositions, but I’m here for it.

• Alison Roman guest-posted with a truly gag-inducing visual on a seriously ugly and supposedly delicious pork bathed in milk. I don’t know, it might be the best thing you’ve ever tasted, but if that showed up on my dinner table, there’s no way my admirably adventurous eaters would touch it.

• Leaning into potential nominees for the Best Food and Travel Writing series, the first three food-centric longer-form articles cover food at raves, Kyrgyz culinary traditions, and rice pudding as a rebellion against ever-increasing kitchen efficiency.

🍊How Citrus Curiously Shaped Our History | With thanks to Bee Wilson for highlighting this informative and sunshine-filled dispatch that covers scurvy, a top-secret Loewe perfume project, and the fact that countless bushels of mandarins I purchase in my weekly shop are apparently NOT mandarins at all. Also, for those of us late bloomers working on long-term projects, we’d do well to keep in mind that citrus takes nine years to grow its first fruit.

☕️ Hey There, Hot Stuff | Coffee lovers, rejoice! Apparently, those of us who haven’t yet jumped on the matcha train are the very definition of health.

🐓A Chicken in Every Pot | My husband and I have, for years, batted around the idea of a backyard flock. Thus, when the latest (February 12, 2026) New York Review of Books issue landed on my doorstep, I turned immediately to Ian Frazier’s storied round-up of books on the matter. Calling my husband into the room, I read, with great flourish, the dramatic opening in which Mike, a Colorado rooster, lost his head only to survive an additional eighteen months without it. Pre-WWII, chicken was a rarity at the family dinner table. During the war, rations of red meat were reserved for the troops, while civilians were encouraged to manage their protein needs through chickens and eggs. The McNugget, introduced in 1983, marked another inflection point in America’s obsession with the did-they-or-didn’t-they-cross-the-road superstar.

🍝 Big Parma’s Salty PR Plot | Are we entering the age of peak agenting?

“Late last year, Parmigiano-Reggiano got itself a talent agent. As the Hollywood Reporter announced, the consortium signed with United Talent Agency, which historically has represented people like actors, screenwriters, and athletes (you know, humans) to “further its message of gastronomical excellence and high quality ingredients, production and distribution,” likely through things like product placement in entertainment. The Parmigiano Reggiano Consortium did not respond to my request for comment, but a food product having its own talent agent is a rarity, or perhaps unheard of, in the world of media—when I asked another agent friend about the alliance, she said it had been the talk of the office, with her colleagues joking that they should sign pecorino in retaliation.”

🧊 Are Contemporary Fridges the Problem, or Is it Us? As someone who compulsively overbuys bread and then has to figure out how to freeze it, but then forgets and buys more and ends up with unknown quantities of baguettes, boules, and brioche, I’m pretty sure it’s us.

🍽️ The Quiet Joy of Doing the Dishes | A lovely meditation from Dwight Garner who admits,

“I’m not, in general, the tidiest human being. My favorite haiku, which I keep meaning to have well-printed and framed, is by Kobayashi Issa:

don’t worry, spiders,
I keep house
casually.”

🥘 How Losing My Limbs Turned Me Into a Different Kind of Cook | Yewande Komolafe released her second book, My Everyday Lagos, when I was still living the bookseller life. I loved it so much, I jumped at the chance for a first-person meeting at Frenchette, where she hosted a menu takeover and book signing. To learn of the absolute warrior she is, beyond the kitchen, was an inspiring gift.

🥣 Fiber Isn’t the New Protein | A profane-laced, smart Snaxshot1 take on what’s going on in the CPG sector as fiber makes a play for protein’s power.

🧁 Helen Goh on Everything Cookbooks | Andrea Nguyen and Kate Leahy hosted an enlightening conversation with Helen Goh, formerly of Ottolenghi, where they covered, yes, her new book Baking and the Meaning of Life: How to Find Joy in 100 Recipes, but also revisited the long, winding road Goh followed to culinary stardom. Also, her Perfect Vanilla Cupcakes are, as tested at our house, indeed perfect. Worth a listen for anyone who feels it's too late to make a change.

🗞️ Pete Wells, Reinvented | The former New York Times food critic isn’t taking much of a sabbatical. I particularly enjoyed his Expense Account chat. While you’re over there, check out J. Lee’s season closer with Keith McNally.

Also…

• Food52 implodes and America’s Test Kitchen saves the day

• André Simon Food and Drink Book Awards Shortlist

• James Beard 2026 Semifinalist list

• Matt Rodbard expands on the December Guardian article, “Google AI summaries are ruining the livelihoods of recipe writers: ‘It’s an extinction event’” as the first guest on IACP’s new podcast. Also, his 2026 food trends drop is on point. In my old job, I used to go live for new book releases. Time to find that old selfie stand and give it a go?

• To celebrate the release of EVERYONE HOT POT: Creating the Ultimate Meal for Gathering & Feasting, Natasha Pickowicz makes the podcast rounds with Maggie Hoffman and Cherry Bombe.

• Cabbage, cabbage, everywhere

• How Do You Review a Bad Restaurant? (comment below if you’d like a gift subscription to Vittles, I have a few to give away!)

• I never knew how easy it was to make crispy, excellent wings at home. Basic and perfect for all upcoming Super Bowl (Winter Olympics??) viewing parties.

📢 A Bizarre, Challenging Book More People Should Read | Thanks to this article, I’m picking Your Name Here back up. (Yells into the void) Anyone else want to talk about it??

✍🏼 Days Before His Suicide, Hemingway’s Hopeful Note to Sister Immaculata | Reminded me it’s high time to read A Moveable Feast and catch up on my PBS miniseries queue, starting with Hemingway.

Welcome to the occasional paywall, which helps me to pause other paid opportunities to bring you these mega-monthly round-ups. Most of my essay and shorter link work remains free. I am so grateful for your support!

Read more

In today’s letter

Doing one thing at a time • The last word in notetaking • A multidisciplinary approach to thinking • Zotero • Hobonichi • 2025’S BEST cookbook • 2025’s BEST baking book • The artist as a writer • Crème brûlée for a group • Don’t sleep on Coffee Project NY 👆• Etc.

On goal setting vs. resolving

Let me be clear: despite my ice-cold devotion to its nearly subzero “feels like” temperatures, December was a doozy. I let go of productivity in those final seven days, failing to resolve much of anything. I was an A+ student, adopting Austin Kleon’s approach of waiting until the new year to make any life-changing resolutions1.

“I have no New Year’s Resolutions, because I believe that January is a hangover month for recovering and catching up from the holidays, and therefore ill-suited to new endeavors in self-improvement. I save making any resolutions, if any, for February, the shortest month.”

Outside, the weather hemmed and hawed, vacillating between snow, ice, and rain. Yellow birch tree branches paused in mid-sway, glass like-limbs holding position with graceful arced precision. The outside world stood in solidarity with my inner pause, standing still, holding space, simply being.

After a week of sleep | eat | move body | read | write | repeat, I, two days into the new year, felt ready to make a plan. And despite having long been averse to anything that hints at instructional self-help, I’ve softened recently, settling into a middle aged confidence that the world is full of things for me to learn. Here then, a handful of resources nudging a meaning shift in my approach to work + reading + family = life.

📝 Hobonichi Techno Cousin Planner | I’m a paper planner type of gal. The root of this practice stems from the grand study skills educators at the Columbus School for Girls and my mother who kept our dining room table well-protected with multi-colored Post-It notes and bulk buys of legal notepads. My most recent planners of choice = Notem and dotted Leuchtturm1917 journals. This January, I’m test driving the cult-favorite/legend status Hobinichi Techno Cousin A6 planner. So far, so good.

📚 How To Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking | Psychoanalysts/Enneagram experts, start your engines: what does it say about me that each evening, my heartbeat accelerates at the thought of consuming a few more pages of this notes-for-nerds instructional manual? I am low-key obsessed with this Sönke Ahrens text that should, I think, become mandatory for all AI-age educated students. Celine Nguyen, via an interview with Petya K. Grady, introduced me to the book, which focuses on the Zettelkasten method.

💻 Zotero | One of the electronic systems you might sub in for an analog card catalog approach to notetaking, I’ve been using the free tool for a couple of weeks. Let’s circle back in a couple of months and see if I can keep the practice up.

🎧 The Knowledge Project: The Multidisciplinary Approach to Thinking | An abundance of takeaways in this talk, originally delivered to the California Polytechnic State University Pomona Economics Club by Peter D. Kaufman. For those short on time, two big takeaways: 1) Mirrored Reciprocation (go positive and go first) and 2) Compound Interest (being constant).

📚 Slow Productivity | Panned mostly for repackaging already stated ideas, Cal Newport’s latest book exhorts the reader to take their time, focussing in on a singular big project rather than trying to simultaneously push more than one large boulder up the hill at once. It’s not a consistently practical approach but as someone who often flits about, spending one hour on a client project, two on a newsletter, another on interview prep, I’ve shifted to try to focus entire blocks on the same project allowing for deeper and more productive work. Also, I need to be wildly more accurate in estimating how long a project will take.

“A reality of personal productivity is that humans are not great at estimating the time for cognitive endeavors. We’re wired to understand the demands of tangible efforts, like crafting a hand ax, or gathering edible plants. When it comes to planning pursuits for which we lack physical intuition, however, we’re guessing more than we realize, leading us to gravitate toward best-case scenarios for how long things might take.”

📺 Great Callings: Brianna West in conversation with James Clear | This 92nd Street Y conversation surfaces all sorts of useful questions and confident statements destined for mirror sticky-note reminders. How do I know I am climbing the right mountain? What will I get to the end of my life feeling grateful that I did? How do we lean into ease? How do we lean into flow? How do we get over our own uncertainty? Everything worthwhile is going to have friction and challenge. What is worth being uncomfortable for? Many of your problems in life come from your brain overemphasizing things. Chew on that.

The final word on the best cookbooks of 2025

During the aforementioned sleep | eat | move body | read | write | repeat week, I spent a good amount of time with the best of the best 2025 cookbooks. I know, I know, I already awarded my prizes but guys, the cookbook scene is exploding right now; the below didn’t make previous dispatches because I didn’t yet have them on hand. The design(s)2 are on point and the stories rich, perfect for days with limited daylight that might welcome a project requiring a warm oven or slow stir over a hot stove.

🍰 Baking & the Meaning of Life | The recipes, alongside Goh’s firm yet gentle narrative, speak for themselves. Anzac Cake with coconut milk, butter, golden syrup, brown sugar, toasted coconut. Traveling Speckled Bread studded with golden raisins, cranberries, apricots, and prunes. One Penny Cake with spectacularly garish strawberry colored frosting topped with rainbow sprinkles. Favorite Orange Cake with “creamy frosting on top that gives the cake a lovely Creamsicle touch.”

🐑 The Irish Kitchen | A project book if there ever was one, both from the perspective of Andrew Montgomery (photographer), Cherie Denham (recipe developer), and Kitty Corrigan (writer) who created the inarguably visually stunning volume and from the reader who must, if they are to experience the book properly, give it a once over on the reading side before proceeding to any culinary projects.

The book’s oral history is exquisite, as evidenced below.

Margaret Gallagher lives out her days in Mullylusty3, Belcoo, County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland.

“I have no running water or electricity, so every day I walk down the hill to a spring and collect two buckets of water. I do all my washing by hand and hang bed linen and clothing to dry in front of the fire. A neighbor cuts turft for me and I store it next to the cottage. A log fire is no good for cooking — it’s too slow. And you can’t bake when there’s an east wind, as you’ll get no heat from the fire. My only form of lighting is oil lamps in the winter and candles in the summer.

[…]

I normally have my main meal around 4 p.m., then afterwards I’ll sit here neither living nor dead. I go to bed at 6:30 p.m. and am generally up at 5 a.m., then I set the fire and have breakfast at 6 a.m. — porridge with butter, brown sugar, honey, and cream. I put butter in everything. It used to come wrapped in a cabbage leaf. Around 10:30, I might have toast and scrambled eggs.

[…]

I don’t drink, but I’m partial to soaking fruit in brandy when I’m making scones or a boiled fruit cake. I make my own jam from redcurrents amd blackcurrents, and if I have visitors, I will also make gingerbread and, of course, wheaten bread.”

A wildly fantastical read for frigid January days

📖 The Hearing Trumpet | Leonora Carrington, a British-born surrealist, was a painter by trade with what the kids today would call a side hustle in writing. Once the partner of painter Max Ernst, she refused to play the role of muse,

“She became acquainted with the likes of Picasso, Dalí and Tanguy. With her striking looks and adventurous spirit, she seemed like the ideal muse, but the role did not suit. Miró once handed her a few coins and told her to run out and buy him a pack of cigarettes. “I gave it back and said if he wanted cigarettes, he could bloody well get them himself,” she told The Guardian. “I wasn’t daunted by any of them.”

We won’t spend time debating the merits of the autofiction theory in which all literature is rooted in some part of a person’s experience but I was struck, reading Carrington’s obituary, by the shared similarities between Carrington and her 92-year-old protagonist, Marian Leatherby. They weren’t women content to reside in the corner. When we meet Marian, she exists in parallel to her terrible family: a despicable son, his distasteful wife and their noxious son. A gifted hearing trumpet from her best friend, allows Marian to uncover a plot to ship her off to a retirement community. Marian agrees to the plan only to find herself dropped into a fairy-tale-like castle filled with Alice In Wonderland land like tricks and treats.

The Hearing Trumpet has, in its surrealist roots, an ethereal quality reminiscent of Olga Tokarczuk whom I recently revisited in the form of her latest triumph, House of Day, House of Night.

The 2020 New York Review of Books edition of The Hearing Trumpet, originally published in 1974, contains an afterword penned by Tokarczuk. Here — a brief bit that could serve as the basis for a semester’s worth of study — highlighting the importance of Carrington’s fiction and noting two qualities that I’ll be more carefully considering as I build my 2026 reading list.

“There are two qualities in fiction that I find particularly astonishing and moving: open-endedness and wild metaphysics.

The first quality is structural. Open-ended books intentionally leave themes and ideas unrestricted, rendering them a little blurred. They grant us wonderful space for making our own surmises, for seeking associations, for thinking and interpreting. This interpretive process is a source of great intellectual pleasure, and it also acts as a friendly nudge toward further prospecting. Books of this sort have no theses, but they arouse questions that would not have occured to us otherwise.

To my mind, the second quality, wild metaphysics, touches on a very serious question: Why do we read novels in the first place? Inevitably among the many true responses will be: We read novels to grain a broader perspective on everything that happens to people on Earth. Our own experience is too small, our beings too helpless. To make sense of the complexity and enormity of the universe; we desire to see life up close, to get a glimpse of the existence of others. Do we have anything in common with them? Are they anything like us? We are seeking a shared communal order, each of us stitched into a piece of knitted fabric. In short, we expect novels to put forward certain hypotheses that might tell us what’s what. And banal as it might sound, this is a metaphysical question: On what principles does the world operate?”

Be well. Be kind (this is beyond excellent for sharing). Do the work.

I’m not alone. In Olga Tokarczuk’s latest novel, a braided narrative of fairy-tale-like entries accompanied by richly depicted domestic scenes, the narrator details the trouble with memory,

“Many of the things Marta has told me have not stayed in my memory, but have just left a vague impression, like mustard on the edge of a plate after the food has been eaten. Odd scenes, funny or frightening, and odd images torn out of context have remained — children catching trout from a stream with their bare hands, for instance. I don’t know why I have stored this kind of detail while forgetting the rest of the story. It must have made some sort of sense—it was a story after all, with a beginning and an end—but I remember nothing but the pips, which my memory, quite rightly, has had to spit out later on.”

Tracking production or consumption is a practice suited not only to scientists interested in precise measurements or chefs looking to tweak recipes into perfection. Recording one's input and output helps us both reflect on where we’ve been and helps us plan for the future. Henry David Thoreau, who legend has painted in rosy hues as a simple wilderness hermit, wrote daily logs of phenological data, his emotional state, expenses, and labor, all in the pursuit of figuring out how to live more deliberately. Earlier this month, in her inaugural newsletter, R.O. Kwon detailed her process for putting one foot in front of the other while writing novels over the course of many years. Oliver Burkeman suggests penning a daily “done” list to fuel forward action.

My aforementioned monogamous relationship with a handwritten reading log persisted for several years, until this past summer, when I let things slide a bit. This was, as with most habits, not a conscious undoing of a decision but rather a gradual system failure.

Last week, as I reviewed the year’s library checkouts and scanned my bookshelves, the work of putting the list back in order sparked a basic AHA moment. The act of keeping a log reveals patterns useful in their own right. How did I spend my time? Did my choices fuel a more interesting life? Did I simply put one foot in front of the other, playing follow the leader, or blaze my own trail of literary, culinary, and cultural consumption glory? What sort of work makes me sit up straight and pay attention? What makes me want to do better work? Teaches me new things? Makes me want to be a better person? Connects me to both my community and places I’ve never been? Conversely, what sort of work leaves me feeling flat, cold, disconnected?

“[W]hen you clear away everything else, the highest purpose of a work of art is to move the viewer or reader from one place (stuck in habit, practical, “realistic,” nose to the grindstone, etc., say) to another place that is freer and more full of wonder, love, and possibility.”

-George Saunders

Patterns/Actionable Takeaways

• Booker is my prize of choice (for 2025, anyway).

• When engaging in the daily drudgery of life — cleaning and driving at the top of my list — audiobook thrillers and first-person memoirs help the minutes tick by. Literary fiction is a bit tougher to keep up with this way.

• For as many books as I read in 2025, there exists an equal stack of books checked out from the library or purchased and not yet opened. Or paged through enough to have given it the old college try, but not quite enough to actually form an opinion about the thing. This is FINE. Disagree? Read Umberto Eco’s “How to Justify a Private Library.”

• Despite the fact that independent and smaller presses often produce some of my favorite books, they weren’t as prevalent on my list as titles from the Big Five. Note to self: do a bit more legwork on the front end, stacking the TBR list with books from my favorite presses, including (but not limited to) the following:

  • Foundry Editions

  • Fitzcarraldo Editions

  • Europa

  • Tin House

  • Graywolf

  • Milkweed

  • Granta

  • Charco

  • And Other Stories

• While I’ve evolved in my ability to process multiple books at one time, they must fall into distinct camps — no doubling down on more than one work of literary fiction at a time.

• I bought a few new volumes of poetry1, revisited Jane Kenyon, and restarted my subscription to Poetry Magazine. I failed to record any of this.

• Despite introducing (at a minimum, still catching up on the record keeping here) more than 30 new and used cookbooks/food writing volumes to my personal library this year, I formally recorded zero. This will change in 2026.

• Chasing a specific number of books as a goal is an empty pursuit. It’s the substance that counts. I read a lot this year, but found myself racing through some texts and discarding others. My 2026 mantra: pay close attention. More notes, more noticing.

• A surefire holdover from my bookseller days, but also a desire to be a part of the ongoing literary conversation: the vast majority of my books were published in the last 24 months. History has a lot to teach us. I’ll be working on this.

The above is a start. I’m just now diving into my 2026 goal/resolutions (thank you Austin Kleon for pointing me to this 2021 article on Dead Week and recognizing we absolutely do not have to have it all figured out by January 1). I’ll be spending time here, indulging in my penchant for lists and record-keeping anew, while probing work that fuels productivity and creativity.

And so without further ado, the top ten eleven2 books I relished in 2025. And following, a nearly3 complete list of the 89-ish books4 I read this past year. Don’t sleep on “For the Rest of the Table” at the letter’s end.

Top Ten Eleven of 2025

The Safekeep, Yael van der Wouden

van der Wouden offers up a wonder of a post-Holocaust tale, written in taut yet lyrical sentences. A deeply felt (at times blushingly graphic) romance between two women that moves along at a thriller pace, it kept me reading well past my bedtime.

Lion, Sonya Walger

Written in the present tense, this autobiographical novel by actress Sonya Walger focuses on the protagonist’s father who does not have his shit together. He is a con man of sorts, going to extraordinary lengths to avoid one-on-one time with his daughter. A foreign businessman, a Formula One driver, a skydiver — this man seems to be everything and everywhere except with his family.

Stone Yard Devotional, Charlotte Wood

Meditative, soaring, contemplative, spare and yes, infused with sorrow, this gorgeous novel follows one woman’s voluntary retreat from the world and her struggle to reconcile her past with her current reality (living at a Catholic convent of sorts). Lest you think this is a novel of moral superiority, you won’t find much religious reflection here. Instead, a quiet yet profound meditation on the intersection of humans and the natural world and what it means to forgive.

Raising Hare, Chloe Dalton

A study of accidental attachment to the natural world from an unlikely source, this sort of writing is reminiscent of Margaret Renkl, Annie Dillard, Anne LaBastille. I want to read and write more like this.

Flesh, David Szalay

Follows the sex-fueled life of the emotionally damaged/detached István. Early chapters explore a deeply imbalanced relationship that one, with the gift of readerly distance, can clearly see is doomed. The relationship ends dramatically, but the reader remains side-by-side with István throughout the ebb and flow of the life left to live. Taut sentences unaffected by the coolly flawed protagonist create a surprisingly propulsive reading experience.

The Book of Records, Madeleine Thien

In a world seemingly on the verge of collapse, a young girl and her father make their way to a building that resembles a holding station. Past, present, and future collide resulting in a non-linear heady read that one only needs to submit to for a hugely satisfying, mind-blowing experience.

The Birthday Party, Laurent Mauvignier

My love for this book is so strong, I dedicated an entire lovenewsletter to it.

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, Kiran Desai

The same goes for Desai’s latest masterpiece, which earned a inspire long write-up last month.

The Land In Winter, Andrew Miller

A marvel of pastoral minutiae, I’ll be writing more about this come January. Hunger, both physical and emotional, looms large, haunting two couples, both expecting their first children. Communication is not a strong suit. Each of the four main characters is unquestionably tied to the other in the manner of rural folk who must depend on neighbors not simply for a cup of sugar but more consequential life/death situations.

House of Day, House of Night, Olga Tokarczuk

An unnamed narrator moves to a remote Polish village and finds herself the recipient of an enormously engaging download of all the comings and goings of her fellow community members. Reading this feels like what meditation teachers refer to as submitting to the collective consciousness, each story not a distinct narrative but a contribution to the greater whole.

The Correspondent, Virginia Evans

Does everyone see themselves in Sybil Van Antwerp? Just me? An epistolary novel of the highest caliber, I’m not sure I can separate my love for this book from its author who is beyond charming, smart, funny, and simply does the work. To be present with this book is to plumb the depths of what it means to be human: the good, the bad, the true.

January

Creation Lake, Rachel Kushner • The Note, Alafair Burke • Wedding People, Alison Espach • Rental House, Weike Wang • Aflame, Pico Iyer • Meditations for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman • Cold Kitchen, Caroline Eden • The Luminaries Eleanor Catton • The Safekeep, Yael van der Wouden • Shred Sisters, Betsy Lerner

February

Lion, Sonia Walger • Stone Yard Devotional, Charlotte Wood • Madwoman, Chelsea Bieker • The Dream Hotel, Laila Lalami • The Heart of Winter, Jonathan Evison •Good Dirt, Charmaine Wilkerson

March

Raising Hare, Chloe Dalton • Show Don’t Tell, Curtis Sittenfeld • Dream Count, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie • The Strange Case of Jane O., Karen Thompson Walker • When the Going Was Good, Graydon Carter • The Antidote, Karen Russell • Care and Feeding, Laurie Woolever

April

Flesh, David Szalay • Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age, Vauhini Vera • Tilt, Emma Pattee • • Perfection, Vincenzo Latronico • These Days, Lucy Caldwell • Audition, Katie Kitamura (shockingly DNF, don’t know why, going back in) • Remarkably Bright Creatures, Shelby Van Pelt

May

The Book of Records, Madeleine Thien • Little Bosses Everywhere: How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America, Bridget Read •The Names, Florence Knapp •Things in Nature Merely Grow, Yiyun Li • Road to Tender Hearts, Annie Hartnett • Famous Last Words, Gillian McAllister

June

On the Calculation of Volume I, Solvej Balle • A Family Matter, Claire Lynch •Set Piece, Lana Schwartz • Great, Big, Beautiful Life, Emily Henry (DNF) • The Boy From the Sea, Garrett Carr • Food Person, Adam Roberts (DNF) •Sleep, Honor Jones •Sky Daddy, Kate Folk • After the Parade, Lori Ostlund • Broken Country, Claire Leslie Hall

July

The Emperor of Gladness, Ocean Vuong • Culpability, Bruce Holsinger • The River is Waiting, Wally Lamb • So Far Gone, Jess Walter • The Compound, Aisling Rawle • The Stepdaughter, Caroline Blackwood • Next to Heaven, James Frey • The Satisfaction Cafe, Kathy Wang

August

Ruth, Kate Riley • Blessings and Disasters, Alexis Okeowo • Joyride, Susan Orlean • Maggie; or, A Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar, Katie Yee • Katabasis, R.F. Kuang • Among Friends, Hal Ebbott • The Cook, Maylis de Kerangal • The Sisters, Jonas Hassen Khemiri • I’ll Be Right Here, Amy Bloom

September

The Orchid Thief, Susan Orlean • The Library Book, Susan Orlean • The Woman Dies, Aoko Matsuda • Women, Seated, Zhang Yueran • A Truce That Is Not Peace, Miriam Toews • The Wilderness, Angela Flournoy • Art Work: On the Creative Life, Sally Mann •

October

Buckeye, Patrick Ryan • The Correspondent, Virginia Evans • Sympathy Tower Tokyo, Rie Qudan • All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now, Ruby Tandoh • Dark Renaissance, Stephen Greenblatt (DNF, WF) • We Survived the Night, Julian Brave NoiseCat (DNF) • Next of Kin, Gabrielle Hamilton

November

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, Kiran Desai • Heart the Lover, Lily King • Your Name Here, Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff (DNF, IDKWTF to do with this, need a support group PLEASE; LATE-BREAKING NEWS: a NYD gift from The Atlantic5 has saved me, stay tuned for updates) • Wreck, Catherine Newman • The Heart-Shaped Tin, Bee Wilson • The Birthday Party, Laurent Mauvignier • Last Night at the Lobster, Stewart O’Nan (not pictured)

December

The Land In Winter, Andrew Miller • The Giver, Lois Lowry • Gathering Blue, Lois Lowry • On the Calculation of Volume, II, Solej Balle • Don’t Let Him In, Lisa Jewell • House of Day, House of Night, Olga Tokarczuk • What We Can Know, Ian McEwan

Lei

Go for the wine list, chilled celtuce with kombu jelly, shallots and red vinegar, and insanely good silken tofu dip that I will be working to recreate at home this weekend.

Susan Orlean recommends The Secret Agent and Marty Supreme

That’s enough endorsement for me. I’m also not to proud to admit that I freaking loved The Hunting Wives which got me through many a December wrapping/dish-washing session. I needed something totally mindless and you have to hand it to this cast of ladies who gave of themselves entirely. Don’t watch it in a public space.

Early Bird Open Sesame Granola

I have no idea whether this is a new drop or has been lurking on shelves outside my grocery radius; either way it is, as the kids say, BUSSIN. Another weekend recreation project set, I’ll take down the sweetness a bit. Fennel seed, black and white sesame seeds, I bet we could throw some tahini in here and make it taste real nice.

A quick note to say hello, merry merry, cheers, and a hearty hang in there. Perhaps you too feel a bit squeezed by the abbreviated on-ramp to the holiday season? Thanksgiving was about as late as it can be, and as a result, I’m torn between:

1. Succumbing to the omnipresent flu drop, which, on the upside, could justify one sinking into couch cushions with festively sprinkled chocolate-covered pretzels whilst catching up on an impossibly long movie backlog OR

2. Lacing up my trainers in preparation for the mad dash to and fro, a motherly version of a headless reindeer gone wild.

No matter which camp you’re in, it’s a fair guess that you’ve little time for rabbit hole essays; good thing because I seem to be stuck in a start/stop cycle set in 1984 with an essay on pearl onions that is decidedly not about pearl onions and not about to see the light of day.

Here, then, a brief meditation on how we find the beauty amidst the slop. Because we must, of course, if any of us is to make it through.

The Decline of Deviance

At the end of October, Princeton | Harvard | Oxford-trained experimental/social psychologist Adam Mastroianni penned The Decline of Deviance, the subtitle asking the culturally relevant and artistically critical question: where has all the weirdness gone? The algorithm — rewarding the post’s 5,0001 likes, 483 comments, and 1.2K reposts — popped this 39-page dissertation weighing the biggest contributors to this development into my recent Substack scroll.

“People are less weird than they used to be. That might sound odd, but data from every sector of society is pointing strongly in the same direction: we’re in a recession of mischief, a crisis of conventionality, and an epidemic of the mundane.”

Mastroianni argues the major factors at play include “The Disappearing Miscreants,” “People Are Staying Put,” and “The Internet Ain’t Interesting Anymore.” It all makes good sense.

Shortly thereafter, I opened an inbox link whose print version cousin simultaneously landed in the mailbox at the end of my driveway, “The Stupiding of the American Mind: Thinking Hard About How We’re All Getting Dumber.” Also in that mailbox stack, the December 4 issue of The New York Review of Books featuring reviews for three books on “How the Web Was Lost” by James Gleick.

“The internet was a messy joint effort, but the web had a single inventor: Tim Berners-Lee, a computer programmer at the CERN particle physics laboratory in Geneva. His big idea boiled down to a single word: links. He thought he could organize a free-form world of information by prioritizing interconnections between documents—which could be text, pictures, sound, or anything at all. Suddenly, it seemed everyone was talking about webpages and web browsers; people turned away from their television sets and discovered the thrills of surfing the web.”

In the beginning, the web was clunky yet heady. Interrupted dial tones stalled, often requiring a second, third, or fourth try to connect. A successful attempt featured the AOL icons: a low-res mailbox image, a small door to enter a chat room, and a globe to go to places we didn’t even yet understand existed.

As the internet evolved, friction dissolved. It became easier to land on a site for one thing, and, countless minutes (or hours) later, exit a fugue-like state having zero memory of why you landed on that site in the first place. We are, then, understandably exhausted.

Conversations with friends (on tech, culture, criticism, and bait)

Thankfully, optimistic counterpoints exist, as is evidenced in this wickedly smart gabfest with literary queen Celine Nguyen and technologist Jasmine Sun. Celine and Jasmine cover everything from the importance of packaging your digital work so it finds an audience to building an online literary community worthy of our nation’s finest universities.

On the mark of a maker:

“The things we will begin to look for in art and design and craft is stuff where you can see the mark of the maker. In a lot of different crafts—in ceramics, in the Instagram-famous cakes and pastries, in textiles—you see people really gravitate towards things that feel kind of sloppy, where the textiles are a little bit lumpy or things that are dyed in a kind of uneven way instead of the perfect machine-dyed smoothness, or cakes that are deliberately asymmetric or the way the frosting is done where it seems naive and childish, but actually takes a very practiced aesthetic hand. I think people will definitely be drawn to that.”

And what LLMs can’t (yet!) do:

“You brought up that a friend of yours had mentioned writing in a more punk manner. And I do think something that still feels very distinctively human because it’s so hard for an LLM to do this, is this shift between registers. Having a paragraph that is very critical theory-heavy, art criticism, very professional, very polished and confident. And then a paragraph after that that’s more conversational, with abbreviations, the very casual tenor. The critic Elvia Wilk, critic and novelist, has a newsletter where she perfectly lands at constantly switching between registers. You’re very formal. You’re very serious. And the LLMs are not that stylistically nimble in attaining that sentence-by-sentence range but also being coherent. There are very few examples of doing it, so I think that will remain a very distinctive, human writing signature for a while.

Amidst the swamp of hastily cast-off detritus, Celine and Jasmine argue, there exists an embarrassment of brilliant, creative riches ready and waiting for the discerning curator to extract and revere. 10/10 worth a watch/listen.

Walter Martin Radio | One of the things I’ve come lately to on Substack is the wealth of A+ music content. Makes me want to break out my old Sony dual cassette deck and fire up some mixtapes for holiday gifting. Walter Martin and holiday playlists are worth the paid subscription alone, completely void of the saccharine sweetness that Sirius XM, in the form of the Holly channel, serves up. Every Friday, Martin releases his vinyl radio show WALTER MARTIN RADIO HOUR. Don’t sleep on Classical Club — think a book club-like model for classical music.

What Does It Actually Take to Make the Best Chocolate Cake in the World? | You already know that I’m low-key obsessed with everything Tamar Adler writes (her new book, Feast on Your Life, is my new favorite daily companion), so it’s no surprise that I delighted in her journey to test the claim of best chocolate cake in Madrid (if not the world). In today’s newsletter, Tamar includes photos and the recipe.

Childhoods of Exceptional People | In this compelling essay, Henrik Karlsson writes of kids who made more than something of their lives while detailing the environs of their youth.

“While writing his ten-volume History of British India, John Stuart Mill’s father allowed John Stuart, who was three years old, to interrupt him every time he encountered a Greek word he had not seen before (he was reading the classics). His father considered raising his children to be of equal importance as his intellectual work.”

The comment section is robust, full of doubters as well as believers.

PS: Kitchen Arts & Letters Bestsellers of 2025 | If you’re serious about cookbooks, bypass all the newspaper-based round-ups and go straight to the source. Don’t sleep on Managing Partner Matt Sartwell’s picks.

PPPS: Reporting in on the clam chowder recipe from Alison Roman’s Something From Nothing: every single family member slurped their servings and declared it the best chowder we’ve ever had. No notes.