The always brilliant (and currently being interviewed by Nikki, btw!) Alexander Chee on the future of gay culture (lol i love the new TNR so muchhh):
I’ve lived through several of these moments. In 1995, for example, when highly active antiretroviral therapy, or what became known as the “AIDS cocktail,” was approved by the Food and Drug Administration, and then later entered the lives of my friends with HIV or AIDS, I went from worrying if they were going to live, to worrying that they still smoked too much now that they were going to live. Or in 2007, when my sister, who’s a teacher, invited me to speak to her high school’s Gay-Straight Alliance, and the students there asked me why I didn’t come out in high school. I had to explain that such an act was unimaginable for a boy from Maine in 1984—as was anything like a student Gay-Straight Alliance—and I could tell my past was as unimaginable to them as their present was to me.
AN INTERVIEW WITH CHRIS KIMBALL:
The next thing you have to do is figure out which things will destroy the recipe. So if someone used all-purpose flour instead of cake flour, or natural process cocoa versus Dutch process, or a sirloin roast instead of a top round roast or vice versa—if one of those things is really going to make the recipe not work, you need to say that explicitly: “Only make this recipe with sirloin steak tips, and by the way, most sirloin steak tips are really not the right cut at the supermarket, and here’s what it’s supposed to look like.” So we go through a process of trying to blow up the recipe to figure out the most lethal mistake you can make.
And I think the last thing is—to get more to your point—just the clarity of writing, which means trying not to use too many adjectives: less is more. Be very clear and not overly descriptive. Include just as much information as you need.
Lawrence Wright has a massive genius thing in The New Yorker about the families of ISIS hostages, which is hugely topical now that the US has decided they will no longer prosecute families who want to try to pay ransoms to get their loved ones back. I support the US’s decision not to pay ransoms to terrorists, it ultimately saves lives, but if my loved one was being held, there is no power on earth that could keep me from doing everything I could as a civilian, and I would cheerfully sit in federal custody for the rest of my life filing my nails if it brought my child (or my Mallory) back alive:
At the time, U.S. government policy was to keep information about hostages strictly secret, for privacy reasons; and yet Diane and Nancy were immensely relieved to learn of another family searching for a son in Syria. They traded information about avenues they had explored and people they had approached—N.G.O. workers, State Department officials, F.B.I. agents—and they rebuked themselves for not having set up emergency contacts for their sons, and for not getting their digital passwords. As each learned more about the other’s son, they saw how much the men had in common. What good friends they’ll be when this is all over, they often said.
the comments on Mallory and Carvell’s conversation about black forgiveness were priceless, I shall share just a mild sprinkling of the ensuing whitemansplaining fest:
(middle of comment not shared, then he ends strong by telling them what their discussion was supposed to be about)
fuck you, boromir can always get it:
this dude i can’t even:
so you’ve written a great article of
eloquence and grace
and among the cognoscenti you have
garnered so much face
but of one thing will I warn you of that
time will not erase
If you read the comments you will learn of
your disgrace
Your essay on the stoics has gained you
much renown
And your colleagues will salute you as you
stroll about the town
But one thing to remember as you’re dusting
off your gown
if you read the comments they will surely
bring you down
So if you are a writer and you ply
the internet
beware the trolls that prey upon such
prose as you will set
they only live to feast upon the spice
of your upset
Do not read the comments and you’ll never
know regret.
Awesome.
Trying to figure out which Gilbert & Sullivan melody to set this to.
Yes, this needs to be a song that I can sing to myself when I’m tempted to read the comments.
I’m thinking the Modern Major General from Pirates of Penzance. But then, that is the one that I’m best at singing, so I might be biased.
By meter, I suggest King Gama’s introductory patter song from “Princess Ida”:
“If you give me your attention I will tell you what I am/ I’m a genuine philanthropist, all other kinds are sham…” (youtube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O50Nh2MepU4)
If this makes it into a musical, I want a piece of the action.
This…is genius.
Can I please share this with every human being I know?
Be my guest.
This is brilliant.
I wanted to share two Toast-worthy links I found at Book Forum:
A film is being made of Djuna Barnes’ book Ladies Almanack: http://www.theladiesalmanack.com/#%21about/c2414
And, the novel Thérèse and Isabelle is being published by The Feminist Press. It’s the first time this novel about lesbian French schoolgirls has been available in English completely uncensored. “Simone de Beauvoir admired it hugely but apparently told Nelson Algren it wouldn’t get published—it was “a story of lesbian sexuality as crude as anything by Genet.””: http://www.feministpress.org/books/violette-leduc…
Also, Park Chan-Wook (the director of Oldboy, Lady Vengeance, et al) is directing a new adaptation of Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith, with the action transposed to the Japanese-occupied Korea in the 1930s. CANNOT WAIT TO SEE THIS.
Christ, you can *hear* the condescending pat on the head in the words, “you’re quite good”.
Wait, that last wall-of-text comment was in response to what? The forgiveness interview? I don’t understand…
It was in response to an older piece that I skipped naming. (The comment still doesn’t make any sense even if you know the piece, and this way the author of the piece doesn’t have to associate it with hers!)
Awww I knew it wasn’t but I wanted it to have been to the forgiveness article because the idea of him writing that whole wall of text because he just CAN’T STAND the movie Poltergeist almost made up for all the, you know, content of it.
“Sorry,* I am white** and admittedly only skimmed this article and comments.”
* No, you’re not.
** THE HELL YOU SAY.
Hello that one dude from freshman seminar! I was hoping that I would never run into you again but here you are on the internet.
Could also be the guy from my children’s lit class who said he didn’t like a Judy Blume book because he “couldn’t relate to female characters.”
Of all the gin joints…
I love how the worst white people feel the need to announce it. Like, we could all tell, MacAshtonsonman, your entitlement precedes you.
“I would cheerfully sit in federal custody for the rest of my life filing my nails if it brought my child (or my Mallory) back alive”
Do you think they’d let us all sit together filing our nails in this hypothetical? Because somehow I doubt you’d be alone.
This is a really good, if hard, conversation to read.
https://medium.com/the-response/if-james-baldwin-…
“…and if anything, being a grown man…”
To proceed with your comment, please verify your identity with this captcha question:
“Misogyny is:
1) real
2) not real
3) made up by the secret feminist matriarchy in order to provide cover for their continued abuse and domination of men.”
If you enjoyed this comment, other excellent captcha questions can be found, predictably, in yesterday’s link roundup.
In retrospect, I regret using “secret” there, because the hallmark of MRA anti-feminists is that they always try to make it sound like they aren’t conspiracy theorists despite being completely delusional conspiracy theorists, and otherwise that answer is almost exactly in line with their language.
Easy fix- the captcha somehow turns on the computer’s microphone, and if you start nitpicking #3 because it’s almost but not quite right, it doesn’t just prevent that one comment, it also auto-blocks your IP.
dang, soon we’re hardly going to need moderators at all
But what if the Menz get a woman to help them comment? surely we will always need moderators, they will just have an easier time.
(she says, thinking longingly about the forum where she is a moderator and wishes she could permaban a couple men who argue that street harassment is a “first world problem” and then get grumpy when I call them on it. Also, the head mod got complaints when I declared that we’d be deleting any comment that misgendered a trans athlete. siiiiiiigh.)
Once, many years ago, I was briefly offered the opportunity to be a comment moderator at Comics Alliance, but the offer was rescinded when, I think, I made it clear that my prosecution of the task would be both gleeful and ruthless.
I got invited seemingly *because* I’d be out in front in terms of setting community standards for sexism and LGBT+ stuff— that I would be happy to be the one who was unpopular on those topics, because I don’t really need to care about being unpopular in that particular national/international community, unlike most of the people there. (Fencing. Most people are coaching or reffing or competing, and it’s small, so some people are afraid to do things like talk opening about the sexism in the reffing community because they don’t want to be retaliated against– but I don’t care.)
But I’m still not allowed to permaban certain individuals. GrumpGrump.
Whaaaaaat hello fellow fencing enthusiast!
Man, it’s a weird business — I got into fencing in college, where I went to an extremely liberal (debatably — the liberalest) school, and our coach was also the coach at a ladies-only college, so we had a pretty shockingly feminist / pro-LGBT group, I tend to forget that it’s a sport that leans pretty conservative in a lot of other places.
(Though, in fact, my coach was…not very feminist. And the tides of enrollment had shifted so that there were almost only men on my team, which means we were more LGBT friendly than we were women-friendly, sorry everyone.)
So, based on that, I’m going to *guess* you were coached by ST. There are a couple other people it could be (TY, KT, CS)…. But I’m guessing ST.
No, we were a very small school that did not do a lot of competing at the national level, probably you’ve never heard of our coach.
It’s actually a lot more to do with when you were in college— I was, at one time, REALLY involved in collegiate fencing, and very involved in ladies-college fencing. This is the area of fencing where I’m *more* likely to know people, or at least know OF people.
Hrm… maybe MD? He’d fit under “not very feminist” iirc.
(If you’d like me to stop guessing to preserve your anonymity, i will. you can also email me at this sn at gmail if you’d prefer.)
No, I went to Hampshire College, a small liberal arts college in western Massachussetts, that is in the same complex with Smith college — my coach had actually just finished doing double-duty at my school and at Smith, having been replaced by one of his former students there — in the early 2000s.
His name was Jeff Lord; I feel pretty confident writing that down, on the grounds that I’m not sure he’s even figured out how to use his facebook page yet.
OH OH OH.
I was thinking WAY too recently, but I was right about guessing that you’re a Hampshire alum.
ST is the person who replaced Jeff at Smith, and then the HC program died for a while, and then ST resurrected it. Jeff is now a marginal (at best) creature in that world, and only coaches at Amherst, and even then avoids the hell out of the rest of the fencing world, who doesn’t like him all that much.
I have some personal disagreements with ST, he and I used to be close and we are now Very Not, but even for all that, he is a dramatic improvement for the Smith and Hampshire teams, and does his best for feminism in meaningful ways. (also, I’m pretty sure Hampshire’s overall M/F %s are better these days, but the fencing team did tend male in the 06-08 timeframe).
*sips whisky from tea cup*
*nods head and smiles slightly in appreciation of the breadth and quality of Toast Party conversations*
*wanders off to find cheese platter*
RICH TAPESTRY. etc etc.
; )
Ohhh okay, I know who ST is. I did not know him particularly well (he and Jeff had had some kind of falling out, and there was a lot of tension) at that time. And truthfully, Jeff has always been pretty marginal; he’s got one of those personalities that’s very charismatic, but also terrible once you get to know him, so he tends to have a lot of fallings-out.
Hampshire’s maleness on the fencing team is probably a little our fault; when I joined, there as only one woman on the team left, and she graduated the next year. We ended up with an all-male team that, regretfully, really gave the impression that fencing was a sport for dudes, which I think kept a lot of potential women away.
C’est la vie, I guess, but I’m glad to hear it’s at least a little better now. Did you go to Smith though?
Smith08!
The ST/JL falling out has reached a sort of creation myth status in Pioneer Valley Fencing Lore, along with the tale of the First Belle, Kate Thomas (whose name is so common I feel comfortable posting it), and the mishmash of terrible facilities and club names the varying factions have used (including that one time the local club had to very suddenly close down because the building wasn’t actually legal for the owners to rent because it wasn’t up to fire code).
Early 00s. Hrm, maybe you were too early to overlap, but did Pat flirt with you? (if you don’t know who I’m asking about immediately, the answer is no).
ETA- sorry, hit save too early, meant to ask if either Pat OR KYLE flirted with you, which if i recall the stories/dynamics correctly would have covered most humans in that area/time.
I don’t think so, but I got to be honest, not only was that a pretty long time ago, but I was drinking very heavily at that point in my life, it’s a minor miracle I remember any part of college at all.
(Also, it is super weird — though good! — to talk to someone who has any idea what the Pioneer Valley is.)
Man, I was at Hampshire for 4 years and it’s such a small place, you think you know all the drama. I had no idea such fencing drams had ensued. The internet is fascinating!
What! Hello fellow Hampshire grad! When were you there!?!?
’05-’09, so later but there’s probably some overlap. Overlap seems to happen much more with Hampshireites, we come and go over a longer period of time 😉
Aw, yeah, I was 99-03 (I missed Lupita Nyong’o by a year! I would have met her, I did stuff with the theater! WE WOULD HAVE BEEN FRIENDS), but we probably know a couple of the same people.
Aww! Oh man, yeah, I overlapped Lupita by a year and actually, like, saw her in the mailroom and things. When all the Five Years a Slave stuff started coming out and she started getting her mad dues, my first instinct was to tell everybody “I kinda sorta know her!” but realized fairly quickly that if questioned further I’d have to admit the only reason I remembered her is that she is really, really, really attractive in person. Like, ridiculously good looking. So no, I did not know Lupita, I just ogled her in person a few times. So I only bring it up occasionally, like on the internet.
Hah!! I also guessed one of the five colleges, and my daughters were fencing when one of the dads called the fire department on the space on the top floor of one of the mill buildings in Easthampton because it felt unsafe (and it WAS!!! OMG was it evar)
Northampton, represent!
Going to the bathroom on the fourth(?) floor was THE WORST. (Like the time I got dressed for the UMass end-of-year banquet in that bathroom, because something like I was running a tournament and then going right to UMass??)
Whoa whoa whoa small world, these were the coaches at my fencing club in high school, circa 2003-2005.
I also used to hang out on that forum! Though a looong, looong time ago. Then I realized that I could get my fill of overhearing slightly offensive old white man discussions at my fencing club and didn’t need to bring it home. (Otherwise, the forums are great and full of useful knowledge, though!)
Any other theater nerds know about this/share my wild excitement?? Prince of Egypt is being adapted for the stage!!!! Plus, NORM LEWIS! If only tickets weren’t literally hundreds of dollars.
That’s really exciting, although my excitement is tempered by what looks like only 2 POC so far in what is an incredible POC story. I love that Steven Schwartz is involved in this as well…holding out hope??
Yes, definitely true and that struck me as really crappy as well. Hopefully because it’s just a concert reading and Broadway/theater is not as horrible about whitewashing casting as Hollywood … it could get better if the adaptation progresses?
Steven Schwatrz, like, Godspell, Pippin, Wicked…. THAT Steven Schwartz?
cool.
NORM LEWIS!!! omg how exciting. here’s where I admit that I have never actually seen the Prince of Egypt, but the soundtrack is my total jam. I wrote so many final papers to that music in college.
Anyone else sitting here refreshing http://www.scotusblog.com/ ?
I am now!
18 minutes and I will be. 🙂
Well, Eric Citron just suggested someone write fanfic about the justices having a happy hour at the Chief’s house, so Rule 34 has now gone into effect…
^this is why i hang out here. Because we can multitask well enough to talk about SCOTUS decisions important enough that I know I may need to hide ugly crying at my desk AND discuss fanfic at the same time. Because, in some sense, they are the same conversation, obviously.
AND IT’S A VICTORY FOR THE ACA!!!
Tomorrow’s gonna be the WORST though.
Wow. Wow. With the ACA winning, I’m just sitting here trying to avoid triumphant yelling.
Gay Marriage is going to make me cry no matter how they rule, but I have tomorrow off, so I should be able to do that without my coworkers noticing and asking me awkward questions (… I’m not out at work).
SCOTUS blog is saying the ruling on SSM will come on Monday
nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.
*sigh*.
(tiny voice) thank you. I will make preparations.
to be fair, it *could* come tomorrow, it’s just highly unlikely.
here’s what they said:
“We have gotten a HUGE number of questions about whether the Court is planning to release gay marriage tomorrow because it is a historic day for gay rights already. That is enormously unlikely, in my view. The main determinant of when a case comes out is when it is ready; the Court barely considers other factors at all. And these matters are largely under the control of the Chief’s office, and I think it would be genuinely surprising, given all the things the Court is working on right now, if this kind of coincidence was in mind. The intervening third cause of days in late June being a big day for gay rights is that days in late June are when big SCOTUS decisions come down. The coincidence could hold tomorrow, or maybe not.”
That’s good news! Because I heard recently that organizations (including, I guess, SCOTUS) tend to release popular decisions at the beginning of a week, and unpopular decisions right before the weekend. So I think that is an INCREDIBLY reliable signal for the SSM verdict. 🙂
Holycrapholycrapholycrap.
Relief so intense I feel a little high.
Short, nonlawyer version of what just happened:
Disparate impact still exists (my shortest most simplistic probably wrong understanding, seriously, if you want more you shouldn’t be reading this comment– basically, if a policy screws over black people 80% of the time but white people only 5% of the time, it’s still a problem even if the policy doesn’t explicitly look like it’s trying to fuck over black people at a quick glance)— there’s some bits that are more complicated here, so I’m going to need to wait for someone else smart to write a plain-english version of this one before i feel super confident, but lots of people thought it was going away completely, so, amazing.
but, best-
SUBSIDIES CONTINUE, THE ACA CONTINUES, THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION WINS, WE GET TO KEEP HEALTHCARE.
That is an amazing sigh of relief I just had.
Oh thank god.
HIGH FIVING A MILLION ANGELS
OMG I just caught Chris Kimball in a mistake, a verbal typo!!!!
“The Mediterranean and the Middle East is about keeping your ingredients distinct and contrasting. So you would have sweet and salty and sour together. You might have persimmon seeds and you might have some crunchy celery and you might have lentils and some very strong cheese and caramelized onions. ”
He doesn’t mean PERSIMMON SEEDS. He means POMEGRANATE SEEDS. They don’t use persimmon seeds in cooking. No one does. He misspoke. Or was edited badly.
I feel like I just won the fact checking Nobel Prize.
I just made a mistake in an email– used reticent when I meant reluctant– and now feel way better because if Chris Kimball can make the occasional vocab mistake, so too can I, and still gather around the fire for a fistful of johnnycakes.
(I typo’d– but corrected– Christ Kimball.)
I am also confused by: “Michael Pollan’s ‘Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants’ is pretty much a twelve-word summary of what to eat.” But this is seven words? What are the other five words???????
“I am the walrus, kookookachoo”
This is a pretty interesting interview with a guy who wrote a book on something called the Christian Identity movement, which is a kind of radical white supremacy:
http://www.salon.com/2015/06/24/behind_dylann_roo…
It’s weird, because it sounds on the surface exactly like the conspiracy ideas that white supremacists always say about Jewish people (i.e., they’re manipulating organizations for their own ends, using people who aren’t aware of their true agenda, “if you dig deeper you can see how they’re connected to the Jewish conspiracy”, and so forth), though I am very interested in the spread of pernicious ideas.
Evangelical Christianity in this country has yet to come to grips with its white supremacist roots (though some are starting to get the picture in a most uneasy fashion). So I am doubtful they will be willing to acknowledge there is a violent splinter group within Christianity based around racism. Their rhetoric surrounding the GLBT community, Islam, and liberalism correlates so much with the concept of ‘purity’. This is not an accident. They just aren’t allowed to talk about racial purity anymore.
Yeah, nothing but nothing sets my hackles on edge like someone talking about “purity” in any context but drinking water or metallurgy.
UM ACTUALLY it is “raises my hackles” or “sets my teeth on edge”, you mumbling dope.
look – just … don’t talk to my friends like that, ok? it’s mean.
(after rereading it) even if you are talking to yourself.
I promise to be nice to your friends, but I cannot promise I will ever be nice to myself.
If it helps, I read “um actually” in the voice of Hermione Granger, so if you’re going to have a critical voice in your head, at least it’s a badass wizard one?
Holy shit Chris Kimball is a “Deadhead from way back.”
I think my head just asploded.
Somehow this doesn’t surprise me?
“… I would have felt worse about this story if it HAD been a girl, because my instincts run to that of a father to a daughter.”
Everyone! Everyone. Relax; the struggle is won. Protectiveness toward women and girls = the patriarchy is dead. We can all go home now.
NOW THAT HE IS A FATHER OF DAUGHTERS.. .http://the-toast.net/2014/09/11/father-daughters-think-treat-women-like-daughters/
Hi Mallory, I can’t make that link work… having sat at a table with 3 fathers-of-daughters the other night and had an interesting part-encouraging and part-unsettling conversation I’d like to read it!
remove the . before http and it should work
Ok, this line creeps me out more and more every time I read it. My ex-boss also liked to talk about how protective he feels towards women, and how men who commit rape should be locked alone in small rooms with the fathers of their victims. He is now in jail for solicitation of a minor on the internet. Men who get weirdly paternalistic about young women who are not their daughters give me the heebie jeebies.
Re: Christopher Kimball
From this week’s Letter From Vermont: “Our neighbor Jean has a one-legged heritage turkey—his name is Heri—who is rather friendly, although turkeys can do quite a lot of damage up close. (When he walks up to me I am ready to jump back into my truck at a moment’s notice.) Jean’s barn is right next to the road, so Heri had an unfortunate vehicular accident. There was some attempt to repair his leg, but it just fell off over time. He now hops around the yard and is a local attraction/mascot.”
“it just fell off over time”
D: D: D:
I know! I have so many questions! How much time passed between the attempt(s??) to save the leg and when it fell off?! You can’t just drop stuff like that, Christopher!
So is it just me or is Chris Kimball saying that ordinary schmoes who are not professional chefs can only hope to cook well by following carefully crafted recipes to the letter? And if you make any substitutions, that’s not creativity–it’s taking away from the perfection of the recipe?
Because that’s why I gave up on America’s Test Kitchen. The more episodes I watched, the more it seemed to be about creating endless complexity in the search for the One True Way to make The Very Best Pork Tenderloin or something. At a certain point, that kind of “this is the best hot sauce, don’t buy anything else” and “everything you know about mushrooms is wrong” and “we tried 87 different ratios of coriander to mustard in this recipe and here is the only thing that worked” or whatnot becomes a barrier to cooking good food.
Get people in the kitchen. Show them simple ways of preparing the ingredients they have (and oh, by the way, don’t assume they all have access to the finest and best of everything). Because for a lot of us, the choice isn’t between the very best barbecue tofu and “hey this is pretty good, maybe next time I’ll see what a little chipotle does for it” barbecue tofu. It’s between barbecue tofu at all and heating up a frozen burrito from the convenience store.
And speaking of tofu, I really hate the way he whiiiiiiiiines on that show whenever someone tries to show him how to make a vegetarian dish. “But how can it be lasagna if there’s NO SAUSAGE?!” Dude, Kimball, people like you are why I became a vegetarian.
tl;dr: I have Strong Feelings about ATK and that interview only reinforced them.
The reasons you name are exactly why the boy loves ATK! He loves having clear instructions (I quickly learned to answer “half a teaspoon” or something like that instead of “I dunno, a little?” whenever he asked me how much of a certain spice to add to a recipe), and he’s still raving about an episode wherein Julia (I think?) actually measured something with a ruler to cut it into exact 1 inch pieces.
That’s a fair point. Thank you for reminding me that the extreme specificity is helpful for some people. Heck, I tease my husband gently for measuring spices, but that’s where he is comfortable. Me, I’m all about eyeballing it.
Same. I’m fairly precise when it comes to baking (and I really do not get American-style volume measurements for things without a constant density – I want to weight things!) but I don’t think I’ve ever made the exact same pasta sauce twice.
A lot of US recipes written for folks who are Serious About Baking do use weights, never fear 🙂
“You add enough, and then you stop.”
One reason you may hate ATK is it is the highest level of mansplaining ever before filmed for an audience. It’s proof that when some men cook, they get out of control. Like that guy who took his dot com money and made the $700 cookbook showing the one true way to cook.
They make it a religion.
Oh, I think you’re on to something. It’s probably also relevant that the moments I have enjoyed from the show involve one of the female chefs being supremely unimpressed by CK’s manfeels.
Honestly, I noticed the same thing happening in Good Eats too. Yes, AB, you are adorably wacky, but rein yourself in, man. I am not going to make an apple pie with three different kinds of apples.
Every time I watched an Alton Brown show with all the foods and spices he’s memorized, I think, “wow Alton, you’re the spelling bee winner of chefs”. But an actual chef, no.
AB is really good at explaining food science, which helps if you want to change recipes (like knowing why he picked those apples, do you want soft or crisp? pick the apple he chose for that reason, etc). I used GE segments in most of my Foods lesson plans because they explain the why of the recipe, rather than just the how, and in a way that middle school students can understand.
ATK takes more of a “do it this way or you’re wrong” approach, and a lot of their recipes use too many ingredients or steps, which might be helpful for people that are afraid of baking, but less helpful to people who love to bake. And he comes off as smug.
Alton Brown also often sort of grudgingly admits that people may not go quite as far as he does in recipes. There are plenty of notes about “or, I suppose, you could….” and then he makes a suggestion for how to adapt it if you don’t have every gadget or ingredient. Some of it is still pretty annoying, but I definitely place him as LESS annoying than many, especially ATK.
I had a subscription for a short while but eventually gave it up because EVERY recipe was just so convoluted. What really did it for me was the recipe for “quick” pho stock which involved ground beef (?!) and maybe a pressure cooking when really, to make pho stock easily, you can just put it in a slow cooker. That’s all. You can make any type of pho broth by just following the recipe up to “simmer for 6 hours on the stove” and switch it to “simmer all day in a slow cooker.” But I suppose slow cookers are *not* approved tools for Cook’s Illustrated staff and such a solution would be far too easy. At that point I decided to not bother renewing and instead got Saveur for a time where I delighted in the pages of full-color photography.
I assume the difference is between “easy” and “quick”.
I tend to substitute a lot, or skip steps that I’m too lazy for, so I do appreciate it when a recipe tells me if something I might do is going to be a disaster. But that doesn’t work if it doesn’t let you substitute anything.
Smitten Kitchen is really good at that balance — saying either “you can use whatever grain you have on hand” or “I know this is a super long process, and you don’t have to do it, but it will really make the dish so much better.”
Smitten Kitchen is THE BEST. I don’t even both with other brownie recipes other than hers (both cocoa powder and the kind where you melt chocolate) and her strawberry shortcake is pretty much the platonic ideal of shortcake.
I have never made a smitten kitchen recipe (blog or book) that has not been great and easy to follow. I’ll be preordering her new cookbook as soon as I can.
Yeah, SK is really good at that balance. “Yes, you can sub here. No, you can’t sub that. Yes, you can skip this, but add more of this other thing to compensate”.
Every Smitten Kitchen recipe I’ve made has turned out wonderfully, and I’ve made quite a few. It’s also worth skimming through the comments after the recipes (especially ones you intend to make), because Deb often answers questions about substitutions or small tweaks to the recipe.
Yes, I love Smitten Kitchen as she is really good at simplifying recipes to what is really necessary.
In paper space, I really like Fine Cooking magazine- they have what I like to call a “choose your own adventure” recipe every month that’s basically “here’s how you make quiche!” (or stew, or what have you) and then a bunch of options of things to put in and three to five examples of combinations if you’re not feeling like coming up with your own. (Also, their quick weeknight meal recipes are actually genuinely reasonable to make on weeknights, and delicious).
I’ve been reading the interview slowly (interspersed with work) and yeah, you hit the nail on the head. But it’s not just ATK and Chris Kimball– substitute those for “Serious Eats” and “Kenji/Max” and you have the reason I gave up on SE. (I’ve def discussed this at length in Link Roundup comments before, hope I don’t get branded as “that one commenter who hates SE”– I don’t hate SE, but I do love discussing classism, sexism, and the rise of absolutist “clickbait” in food media!)
I really prefer Mallory’s Chris Kimball. He scares me a little, but I respect him from a distance.
Yeah, I find myself clicking through to SE sometimes and I’m always vaguely dissatisfied with myself afterwards.
My absolute favorite recipe blog ever is budgetbytes.com. I have never been disappointed with any of Beth’s recipes, and she is refreshingly undogmatic. I mean, I tried this hummus (http://greatist.com/eat/make-perfect-hummus) and it was pretty divine, but if you think I’m going to peel every last chickpea, you are not living my overworked, penny-pinching life.
In contrast, this Budget Bytes SNAP Challenge hummus (http://www.budgetbytes.com/2014/09/snap-challenge-peanut-butter-hummus/) is probably not going to be the most transcendently delicious and authentic hummus you ever ate, but you know what? It works. It’s cheap. It’s tasty. It’s made with accessible ingredients. (She has tahini hummus recipes too, but dude, I don’t always have tahini around the house.)
Thanks for the links! I haven’t read budget bytes in the past, but it looks pretty good, and I appreciate any recipe that appreciates pantry items and things you can get at the corner store rather than having to go to Whole Foods.
I particularly like Food52’s non-recipe recipes. They take a lot of (what I consider) unusual or upscale dishes, but explain how to make it in the most bare-bones manner. I’m trying their enchiladas this weekend, it’s the first enchilada recipe I’ve found that looks good but doesn’t require like 8 different chile varieties for the sauce and a queso fresco/queso blanco/cotija blend for the filling, and shame you about not making your own tortillas.
Budget Bytes is my FAVOURITE! So many simple and tasty recipes. Many of which make lots of leftovers so that I don’t have to cook every day.
Peeling every chickpea? Yeah. No. Plus, I make a pretty tasty handwavy hummus (from canned chickpeas, even!) that I can get done in three minutes. Can’t compete with that, no matter how tasty.
I must admit to being a chickpea peeler. I HATE THOSE SKINS YUCK EW GET OUT OF THERE GRODY ASS SKINS.
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly why, but the SE writers’ Strong Opinions About Techniques do not annoy me the way Kimball’s do. I think it might be that their pedantry reads (to me, at least, and YMMV) as coming from a place of nerdy enthusiasm (look at this thing I learned, I NEED TO TELL EVERYONE whether they are interested or not) whereas Kimball seems like he’s just speaking out of irritated condescension. Just in the one interview, he says “I hate ____” at least two or three times and pretty much says he thinks of cooking as Serious Business and god forbid anyone should have fun with it.
I do think SE is shifting more towards clickbait-y nonsense, though. It seems like every other post lately is a slideshow of recipes they’ve already published.
Yeah, I think Kenji is just a super-food-nerd who is excited to show what he’s been up to, and often changes his opinion on what works best when he’s tried something new. His articles are the only ones I read over there anymore (I miss Talk) Kimball just seems smug and to insistent on his recipes and not about helping people cook in a way that makes sense for them. Kenji knows his stuff is OTT, Kimball doesn’t.
The only recipe of Kenji’s I use regularly is the immersion blender mayo. Mostly because the process looks awesome – and that’s a really fast recipe.
I almost never use any of the recipes. I’m just a bit of a food science nerd, so I like reading about his “experiments.”
I have never understood why ATK takes recipes from Italians or Greeks or Swedes and without talking to the Italian or Greek or Swedish woman or man who makes the recipes, ATK tries to make the recipe without the knowledge of the people who make the recipe.
Like, I have a 1948 Lutheran church cookbook (from Minneapolis, Minnesota) and I read through the recipes and think, “that’s the basic recipe, but it’s not how you make it or spice it up”: there’s a lot of technique involved and usually the recipes omit spices because, as the recipe directions say “season and spice to your family’s tastes.” If I sent that Lutheran cookbook to ATK I imagine they’d have a field day saying how bland the recipes are and that the directions just don’t work … I mean, I watched my grandmother make recipes and there is actual technique involved even in something like au gratin potatoes (potatoes, white sauce, cheese, layers per Lutheran church cookbook). If you don’t do it right, the white sauce breaks, and they really don’t tell you what kind of cheese to use, they recommend pepper as a spice but that’s about it. It’s why there are family recipes though.
And I think ATK destroys that concept, and their conceit is that Greeks and Swedes and Italians don’t know what they’re doing, the recipes don’t work, and I hope this explains what I wanted to say, but geez … ATK ruins cooking and experimentation and ignores the fact that people really do know what they’re doing, I think.
Rule number one of cooking: you don’t tell grandma she’s doing it wrong.
Yeah I have a recipe card from my grandmother that is truly a list of ingredients and a note that says “do not boil.” I’ve heard this is also a reason why most people think “traditional” Midwest foods are bland, because the recipe is supposed to just be the base and you’re supposed to add seasonings on top of it.
As for ATK, I love reading Cooks Illustrated because I love learning about food science. I have been a subscriber for many, many years, for I am An Old, and I’ve noticed in the past, oh, three to five years, a change in focus. It used to be all about “let’s fix this common problem using science” (e.g., soggy blueberry pie crust, a multigrain bread that isn’t a brick, pasta carbonara that actually works), but now there’s two things it does, and it’s getting a little annoying. The first is, as someone said above, “the most perfect way to cook this one thing,” and it gets convoluted. There was a recipe this month for grilled steak that included lighting a chimney full of coals, waiting for them to burn down, an hour long pre-cook of the steak in a 250 degree oven, followed by literally five minutes over those coals on skewers. It was RIDICULOUS.
The other thing it does is try to “bring home” interesting ethnic foods. I am a fan of this, but like EllaAstor says, they don’t tend to do any research with people who actually cook those foods. Sometimes they do, but more often than not it’s “I had this in a restaurant and am going off what I remember,” or at least that’s the way the article is written.
I disregard their food tasting recommendations ever since they rated Heinz as not their favorite ketchup. Sorry, but nothing else tastes like ketchup (says this Pittsburgh native).
Another reason those Lutheran cookbooks seem bland is because lots of Swedish cooking relies on preserving and pickling. Well, at least Northern Swedish cooking, which is where my family is from. When you pickle, can, ferment or preserve things in lye, you add a lot of spices initially so that the food takes on the flavour and doesn’t go bad. In February, everything tastes really strongly of vinegar or salt, plus your family’s pickling spices, so adding more spice doesn’t make much sense – you’re mostly just trying to mitigate the brine. Meat that’s been frozen needs *more* salt to taste right, and you might use more dairy to calm down the acidity of preserved fish, but you’re gonna be tasting your particular spice mix all winter. In the summer, when everything is fresh and ripe, you are goddamn tired of tasting those spices, so you just let the food taste like itself. Every household has it’s own particular pickling mix too, so a recipe with prescriptive flavours might or might not work with your version of pickled carrots or lutefish.
ETA: I forgot there are also German Lutherans. Their cooking methods might be different, I don’t know. I *do* know that the climate of the prairies lends itself particularly well to Scandinavian preservation methods. When the west was being colonized by white settlers, a lot of Scandinavian and Icelandic families shared their knowledge and style of cooking with their southern european neighbours, who were struggling with severe winters for the first time. It kind of explains the homogeneity of Mid-west/Prairie cooking.
I think that that is one of the best descriptions of Scandinavian cooking … I’ve tried to tell people about the canning, food preservation and general … and it’s hard to explain to someone from other cultures why I think the food is good. Anyway, I sometimes think having pickles for lunch is completely valid, and I’m not going to explain why, lol.
My favourite 3am snack is beet pickles straight out of the jar. I feel you on this.
I also deeply hated that anecdote about his kid’s birthday party and the children who “didn’t know what it was” and only ate a bite or two when he served them a cake baked from scratch. Bro, they knew it was a cake, they just thought it was a shitty cake. (Actually I will bet $5 that they thought it wasn’t sweet enough and didn’t have enough frosting, because he probably made it from a recipe that was tailored to his own tastes and I get the impression from the show that he doesn’t have much of a sweet tooth.)
Haha, as a child I would have been ALL OVER that cake. I have always hated frosting. I was also the kid who got birthday pizzas, though, so there’s that.
Please tell me you stuck candles in the pizza!
I absolutely did! The photos are back at my mom’s but they exist!
I often had birthday apple pie, complete with candles!
We always had birthday pie in my family–at least, for the dinner on our actual birthday itself (we stooped to cake for kid parties where non-Joneses were present). Plus, highlight of the year: picking what pies to make for Thanksgiving. My mom is a pie maker, and not particularly good at, or interested in, cake. Long live birthday pie!
Do you guys celebrate pi(e) day on March 14? That is when we have ALL THE PIES, including home made, boughten from the best places and experimental. there is generally almost one pie per person attending, and plenty of leftovers. It is excellent, and our favorite family holiday.
Yeah, I am sure that his recipes are great, but his personality irritates me. Like, dude, I know your way of doing this will probably produce better results, but also I don’t have the hours upon hours to spend on all the teensy little steps or the cash to drop on fancy cookware. I just don’t! I like recipes that take into account the fact that most people cooking themselves dinner are time-limited and budget-limited and might need to make substitutions or tailor the recipes to family members’ picky tastes. Someone mentioned Smitten Kitchen below, but I would also say Mark Bittman is great at this–pretty much every recipe in How to Cook Everything has a list of possible tweaks/variations at the end of it, so it’s really like there are 10x the number of recipes he actually takes the time to write out.
That said, I kind of get a kick out of how annoyed Kimball seems to be with everyone else in the world: I cracked up at “Basil-flecked” just makes me want to kill somebody.
I think he comes off as an anal-compulsive bore and am unsurprised to learn that he thinks that the key to writing clearly is to remove all the adjectives.
I mean, I think I see what he’s getting at with not wanting to overuse swoony descriptions of how delicious a given recipe is–I also kind of hate this because honestly it’s just meaningless after a point. But he seems so damn determined to suck the fun from everything.
I agree that the finger-sucking appreciation genre of food writing is annoying, but you can still employ adjectives functionally in recipes. And I have a hate-on in general for the idea that Strunk, White, and Hemingway are the final authorities on Letters. Minimalism is not the only effective style in the world!
Dear Toastrons,
Thank you for joining my “mansplaining cooks ruin everything” party. If you haven’t already been there, I love budgetbytes.com for recipes that regularly manage to be tasty, cost-conscious, simply prepared, and unpretentious ALL AT THE SAME TIME. It’s like magic. Special shoutout to the sweet potato black bean chipotle patties, possibly the apotheosis of veggie burgers: http://www.budgetbytes.com/2013/05/chipotle-sweet…
Dude, I made the BudgetBytes chicken fajitas last week after being a Cooks Illustrated devotee for too long, and I was like, “cooking can BE like this? What am I even going to DO for the next two hours?” Bye bye, CI!
I kind of agree with this, but I also really like Good Eats, which is kind of the same way? Only I feel like it’s a lot better, because Alton Brown seems like he leaves more room for variations.
Also because he is a nerdy Dad.
Also, I think in part his excitement about the chemical properties of food helps to make him seem less condescending.
And it makes it easier to do substitutions later. “Ah, the important thing about this ingredient is that it’s an acid, and thus acts upon the rest of the ingredients suchwise. So if I substitute a similar acid, it will have much the same effect.”
I think part of the reason I loved Good Eats was that it was entertaining even if I had no intention of ever making the recipe. I liked learning about the food science bits even though I’m a vegetarian watching a show about how to make some kind of meat dish. I also think that Alton Brown comes off as less prescriptive/condescending and more “this is how I do this thing and here is why.”
Cosigned. AB comes across as curious, while CK is competitive.
This is why I always think ATK should have had a limited run, it’s not material that supports a show that goes on forever. One thing it does really, really well is explain the reasons behind CK’s compulsive YOUR SUPERMARKET BUTCHER IS DOING IT WRONG mansplaining so that you learn why certain techniques and ingredients work in recipes and others don’t. And for me and I suspect a lot of other beginning-intermediate level home cooks, it is incredibly useful to master the techniques and ingredients before trying to improvise because it makes your improvisations so much more successful.
BUT. I totally agree with you that they are past the point of diminishing returns now. It’s like late Mythbusters — they’ve done everything at this point, so they either have to plumb the depths of esoterica or pander to fanboys.
I love Cook’s but I make substitutions ALL THE TIME and it turns out fine. Mostly cutting out overly complicated procedures or unnecessary (or unwanted) ingredients. So yeah I think he is wrong there, but they do provide really nice recipes you can work from, and many of them I do follow to the letter too.
Yeah, that article confirmed that everything I feel about Chris Kimball and America’s Test Kitchen has valid grounding in real causes. My feelings are pretty negative.
I feel like everyone in this thread needs to read Perfection Salad, which is a brilliant book about how women created a domestic science movement that empowered them as kitchen experts and rescued cooking from the “old wives” ghetto of allegedly unsanitary and non-rigorous methods to make it a respectable career (only man-chefs could do it well before then, because women were primitive and undisciplined as cooks), and then when the worm turned around WW II, became reviled for taking all the imagination and color out of cooking. (Only man-chefs could do it after that because women are routine-bound and lack inspiration or experimental zeal.)
I have no idea who Chris Kimball is (am English) but do enjoy Mallory’s letter features. Am reading the interview and got to this sentence:
“The second thing was that color photography, which we do not use in Cook’s except on the inside back cover, is detrimental to the expression of information.”
I have read that bit over and over again. This man is amazing. Am going to forward it to my work’s photo library and tell them all to go home.
He’s the Editor in Chief of “Cook’s Illustrated” magazine, which is sort of the epitome of what a cooking magazine ought to be. It’s kind of in that space between what you’d write for a professional chef and what you’d write for a home cook, and so is a bit aspirational for people who want to be very serious about their cooking. Most of their articles follow a formula of starting with “here is the general philosophical ideal of this dish, and what we want it to be like,” and then they DO SCIENCE to it and many rounds of experiments with various variations and so forth, and eventually figure out what the key factors are to getting it Just Right. And then they print the actual recipe they ended up with. So you get a recipe and a good amount of information about what the critical factors are.
He also always wears a bow tie, and is apparently very the sort of person who always wears a bow tie.
I am so glad The Toast is open for business for today, and once again thank you, thank you, thank you for the moderation of comments here to make this a safe place and for publishing black voices and perspectives. I am in a closed facebook group and it often functions as a sort-of safe space (it doesn’t hold a candle to this site though) and someone posted a picture about the confederate flag not being a symbol of hate and it’s a show of southern pride, blah blah. Well, I wasn’t having that and said so, and the majority of people in the group also strongly disagreed, but cripes, my head hurts now, and the debate on the page is largely unresolved.As someone who is not in the U.S. and has a sort of spotty interaction with U.S. media and one-on-one viewpoints, that post, along with the good old deleted comments on Carvell and Mallory’s piece, served as a good, if discouraging reminder to me of the wilful, deliberate shift away from the work that needs to be done on systemic racism and mourning of the lives lost, over and back to white supremacist and confederacy apologists.
+1
Reading those curated, edited deleted comments made me feel a bit sick. I’m obviously not cut out for the job of comment moderation but I’m thankful every day that someone is, so we can have this safe space on the internet.
I’m sorry about your experience with the FB group. Hope you can get a little self-care in, and hang around people who don’t perpetuate hate.
Speaking as a white guy, may I second the “thank you”?
The fact that I could post a link to that piece, and say “read the comments, they are very good and worth reading” is a rare pearl and I treasure it.
Unrelated: Anyone else see Far From the Madding Crowd yet? I went last night, and it was all kinds of awesome Independent Lady until she went and made some poor choices (because Thomas Hardy can’t stand a happy woman). But otherwise, attractive leading man, Carey Mulligan being much better than she was in Great Gatsby, and lots of sheep-related mishaps.
I feverishly read the book in January as soon as I saw the trailer and I would highly recommend reading the book. It’s stunning.
That being said, there are three things that I particularly loved about the movie.
1. Matthias Schoenharts (or whatever) is a damned god.
2. She has that perfect line at one point, “It is very difficult for women to describe their feelings in a language chiefly crafted by men to describe their feelings.” (horribly paraphrased)
3. “Let No Man Steal Your Thyme” which I have largely memorized and absolutely lip-synced while watching the movie in theaters.
I would have liked to see this here in the UK (love Carey Mulligan and Michael Sheen) but the review comments about Matthias Schoenharts put me off. It seems that to British ears he just comes across as too foreign, whereas part of the point of Gabriel Oak is that he embodies Wessex. I saw a clip that seemed to back this up. Sadface as Mr S is indeed fab in all other ways.
I’d be interested what you thought about that – you might be a Brit too and able to reassure me!
Alas, I am not British, just fond of British things. I can understand that reticence, though, and could occasionally hear his accent slipping through. But that being said, I would push back on the idea that somebody can be quintessentially anything from the 19th century. Although it’s not so far away in terms of historical connection, Schoenharts is as much a shepherd laborer as Sheen is a disturbed gentleman farmer.
Sure, he’s not a Wessex man (or even an Englishman), but I felt that he embodied the character of Gabriel Oak very well, as well as Michael Sheen did with Mr. Boldwood and far, far better than Tom Sturridge did with Frank Troy. Plus, I like his cheekbones.
Oh, god, I had a conversation with a sweetie a couple weekends ago about the old version of Far From the Madding Crowd and the weird sheep-stabbing scene, and the people who were with us looked like we were OUT OF OUR MINDS, so I had to go find a clip on youtube of the sheep stabbing to prove we weren’t involved in some sort of shared delusion.
Is there another SUPER awkward sheep stabbing scene in this one? Because if there is, I might have to check it out.
It’s actually kind of a touching sheep-stabbing scene, with an “aww, silly sheep” ending to it. But yeah, sheep-stabbing out of nowhere.
Sheep stabbing as a result of sheep being so very loveable, yet so very stupid.
“Sheep-friend! Let us eat this thing that will give us gas so bad that we will die!”
“Yes, other sheep-friend, for we have no built in mechanisms for self-preservation!”
You know the sheep are just a metaphor for the people, right?
i saw it and i loved carey mulligan as usual but i thought there were some weird direction choices. like, arrested development-style zoom-ins that were super distracting.
also thomas hardy is always so much soapy melodrama, but that was to be expected.
Tess of the d’Urbervilles: “I’ve made a huge mistake”.
LOL. Love the comparison to painting a masterpiece and then slinging shit all over it. I can’t believe somebody in the art world hasn’t actually done this already, even if it is a little on-the-nose. To be fair, I also haven’t done any internet research.
Commenter seems confused on who is slinging the shit, though. Good luck with that.
The Vienna Actionists probably threw shit at a painting at least once. (The Vienna Actionists were gross and creepy).
Didn’t Basquiat pee on paintings? That’s pretty close, right?
Whoops! Supreme Court just rejected King v Burwell!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/25/obamacar…
*eternal muppet arms*
INFINITE AIR-KICKS FOREVER
I just finished reading that entire New Yorker piece, and it’s maybe one of the most emotionally draining things I’ve ever read. I blame The West Wing for giving me unrealistic expectations about these kinds of situations.
Yeah that was rough. I am sitting here with tears streaming down my face. Happy endings are really only for TV and the movies, aren’t they?
“…your feminist overtones make me sick.”
How is this dudebro unfamiliar with THE MOST FOUNDATIONAL AND VITAL CHARACTERISTIC OF THE TOAST AND ITS BRILLIANT WRITERS?! #yesallmen
I can only imagine that they got linked to a specific piece and are not familiar with the Toast or its world-view (or comment moderation policy). Because a LOT of the deleted comments that we see are like that.
It’s one of their strongest uniting features. “I really like your writing, but then you keep getting all feminist. You’d be a pretty neat writer, if you could just stop doing that. Then your writing would be truly genderless, the greatest compliment of all (?)”
Epigram on Antonin Scalia
Antonin Scalia
has no idea
of normal sympathy
if you’re in need
he’ll let you bleed
from constitutional apathy
If you are sick
he’ll be a dick
with judicial lethargy
Nice!
If you’re not well
you can go to hell.
What’s empathy?
Library_Mole I love your writing, marry me!
I can only think that the best way to handle the hostage/ransom problem is to publicize far and wide how income inequality works here in the US so that potential hostage takers will be aware that most Americans have access to approx. $0 in ransom money. I mean, the hostage takers might win the lottery and steal themselves a wealthy American, but the odds are about the same as winning the actual lottery.
Or just make it clear that Americans often don’t have any money, but we do have a very particular set of skills.
In my case, making health care more confusing and bureaucratic.
Oh no, a man who might have read more of your writing decided not to! I love when they say that as a threat, much like when terrible customers threaten to never again grace you with their presence.
“You’ll be sorry when I leave you in peace from here on out!”
“See if I offer you my unsolicited opinions in future!”
I know, I’ll tell her that I was about to Google her! That’ll have her crying herself to sleep for a week!
“Don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out!”
“Alas, the heartbreak. Oh, the pain, the anguish, the despair.”
The victory for the Affordable Care Act and THE HEALTH OF OUR NATION’S PEOPLE is awesome and wonderful (and Scalia’s petulant dissent is delicious) but the other decision which came down today is SO IMPORTANT.
Disparate impact claims can be used in fair-housing cases. This means that a city or state government can’t just say, “Well huh, golly gee willikers, looks like all the colored folks ended up on the shitty side of town! But that wasn’t what we INTENDED when we wrote these housing codes (we didn’t come out and SAY they had to live there), so no harm no foul!”
Had this decision come down the other way (which a lot of court watchers were predicting it would) it would have eviscerated the guts of the Fair Housing Act. This is SUCH a relief.
DOUBLE GOOD NEWS.
“You can’t just have words mean whatever you want them to mean! Words have to mean whatever I want them to mean!” — A. Scalia
It is Up North Pride here in our little ‘ville, and we have a full week of stuff going on. Monday night was a really nifty Moth-style storytelling event, and one of the storytellers was a man in his 50s talking about his Boystown softball team in the mid 1980s. Four of the twelve of them are still alive; the rest all died of AIDS. The room was primarily filled with twentysomethings who were just boggled at the idea of people dying so young, and in such numbers (he mentioned that by the time he was 25 he’d lost more friends than his parents had). It was incredibly powerful and so important to be reminded of that history. So I guess what I’m trying to say is that Alexander Chee’s piece seemed to fit this week, and thank you.
I’m younger than that, and didn’t lose any friends (I was in high school and college in the 90s), but I remember the AIDS crisis well, and I guess sometimes I forget that today’s young people don’t have that context for the whole LGBT rights movement.
Exactly. The first gay man I ever knew was a co-worker of my mother’s and he lost his partner to AIDS in 1990. My third-grade class talked about Ryan White for weeks. Even Pedro from The Real World! I mean, we ALL were exposed to the crisis in one way or another in the 80s and 90s and then it just kind of wasn’t part of the conversation anymore. It is so weird to me that a whole generation lacks that kind of exposure.
It’s also weird for younger generations to imagine the world before the fear of AIDS made unprotected sex between men synonymous with death. When older gay men tell me about 70s bathhouse culture it’s like they’re describing life on a different planet.
Hey bro, let me remove this here little comma and fix that for you:
“Sorry I am white and admittedly only skimmed this article and comments.”
Here’s what I took away from the last deleted comment:
‘Blah blah blah I’m a man. Be grateful for the scraps of semi-personhood we deign to throw you. It’s very magnanimous of us to not have murdered you blah de blah’
Boromir always forever and ever.
Boromir CAN always get it. Yes.
i constantly feel gratitude to my white male overlords for not leaving me dead/disfigured in a river. thank you #notallmen!!! how lucky i am just to not be killed amirite
The NotAllMen will soon be a Marvel comics super-team.
I promise to be nice to your friends, but I cannot promise I will ever be nice to myself.
Do you guys celebrate pi(e) day on March 14? That is when we have ALL THE PIES, including home made, boughten from the best places and experimental. there is generally almost one pie per person attending, and plenty of leftovers. It is excellent, and our favorite family holiday.
Library_Mole I love your writing, marry me!
No, but there's a couple of other stuffed breads that maybe you could use the technique for!
Aww! Oh man, yeah, I overlapped Lupita by a year and actually, like, saw her in the mailroom and things. When all the Five Years a Slave stuff started coming out and she started getting her mad dues, my first instinct was to tell everybody "I kinda sorta know her!" but realized fairly quickly that if questioned further I'd have to admit the only reason I remembered her is that she is really, really, really attractive in person. Like, ridiculously good looking. So no, I did not know Lupita, I just ogled her in person a few times. So I only bring it up occasionally, like on the internet.
Does elephant shit count? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holy_Virgin_Mar…