“Menus provide a window into history, a vital connection to our foodways,” writes Adam Reiner in this fun read about restaurant menus throughout history. Reiner explores the Buttolph Collection at the New York Public Library, which has a massive archive of over 40,000 menus dating back to 1843. These menus are sources of inspiration for today’s chefs and researchers, and the piece itself has opened my eyes up to the value of a physical, printed menu in our era of apps and QR codes. The scanned menus in the story — some from the 1930s and ’40s — are lovely to look at, and make you want to visit the library yourself to get lost in these delicate pages.
Even as QR code technology threatens to render printed menus obsolete, it occurred to me that nothing can replace the texture and poetry of a physical menu. No matter how much restaurants have changed in the century since Miss Buttolph lived, the humble menu has endured—as the diner’s first impression, a statement of the chef’s intentions, and a love letter to the appetite.
You’ve read countless essays about why the internet loves animals. But chances are you haven’t read one as smart, surprising, and memorable as this one. A fascinating exploration of what lurks within the emotional bonds we foist on our pets.
The invention of photography helped establish the pet as a kind of ready-made anthropomorphism. But pets are still animals. A large part of the appeal of adopting a pet is the thrill of interspecies contact, the everyday encounters with what Berger calls the “abyss of non-comprehension”: the joy of making contact across this abyss and approaching a nonverbal intimacy that feels ancient and transformative. A pet is a little walking tornado of mysteries. What does she dream about? What is she trying to tell me? What does the world look like through her eyes? Who am I to her? These are not trivial questions.
No one else who has come along in the past 15 years can touch Kendrick Lamar’s imprint on hip-hop. Other people have sold more records, had more hits, but from the standpoint of pure creativity, Lamar stands alone among his generation. Now he stands at the brink of something new: a self-founded label, an auteurial mind-meld with his creative partner, and what looks like an endless runway. In other words, it’s the perfect time for a writer like Mitchell S. Jackson to try to get inside his (and his partner’s) head. Sure, at some point that’s a fruitless endeavor — to paraphrase Jackson, if Kung Fu Kenny speaks it’s in his music — but that doesn’t mean the results aren’t breathtaking.
Later, we sit at a corner table in the dim dining room of Novikov, an Asian and Italian restaurant. The restaurant is packed and at a decibel level that requires us to lean in. This close, I notice Kendrick’s eyes. How they seem to be both present and distant; both focused on the moment at hand and processing it. Ain’t none of this eyes-are-windows-into-the-soul business with Kendrick. In fact, they might be paragons of the opposite: eyes wide open with revelations few to nil. They strike me as a kind of shield, as well as a way to foster the mystique that keeps people wanting more of him than he will ever share.
This week, we recommend pieces about homelessness, mountaineering, geological memory and amnesia, critical health care in a post-COVID world, and fathers and stepfathers.
Ethan Ward | Capital & Main | December 27-28, 2022 | 7,714 words
Last month, Karen Bass, the newly elected mayor of Los Angeles, declared a state of emergency with regard to homelessness in the city. In a matter of days, teams began moving unhoused people from outdoor encampments into hotel and motel rooms as part of a new government program called “Inside Safe.” But as this poignant three-part series shows, street homelessness accounts for only a fraction of LA’s housing crisis. People like Sarah Fay, the 28-year-old subject of the series, live on the precipice of homelessness, a position that requires a daily hustle to find a safe place to sleep. The reasons for this kind of housing insecurity are complex, going well beyond low incomes and soaring rents. Fay’s story, told so well by reporter Ethan Ward, is shaped by generational trauma, the burden of debt, maddening bureaucracy, and cultural stereotypes about what it means to be a person in need. Read this story, and send it to your elected officials, in Los Angeles and elsewhere. —SD
Xenia Minder | Financial Times | December 21, 2022 | 4,475 words
At the end of this essay, there is a note stating that Xenia Minder told this story to her brother, Raphael Minder, the Financial Times’ central Europe correspondent. I imagine the support from her sibling enabled Minder to tell her extraordinary story with such honesty and thoughtfulness. Formerly a Swiss judge, a series of catastrophic falls in the mountains leads her to reevaluate her life and realize that while we may think we are choosing our direction, “the key events in our lives are unknown to us.” In the three falls detailed in this essay, she loses — for a time — her ability to move from her neck to her waist and two partners who she loved very much. It is an incredible amount of loss. Yet, Minder does not look for sympathy in this piece, instead telling her story with acceptance rather than complaint, displaying an inspiring resilience and ability to look within herself. It is a beautifully written personal essay that gripped me with every word. —CW
Summer Praetorius | Nautilus | December 19, 2022 | 3,975 words
“It takes time to build memory, but it can be erased in a geological instant.” I didn’t read much the past few weeks, but paleoclimatologist Summer Praetorius on geological and human memory at Nautilus cut through the holiday noise and held my attention. Praetorius writes about what Earth knows and records over time by way of tree rings, ocean sediments, and other physical markers of time. (“Ice sheets themselves are some of the best memory banks,” she writes, and “mile-high mountains” are the “great brains of our planet.”) She also writes about geological amnesia, “resilience debt” and the planet’s inability to recover when its ecosystems have been pushed over the edge, and what’s been lost. Praetorius weaves this research with poignant personal insights about her late brother, whose health and memory deteriorated after a snowboarding accident, and by doing so, creates a beautiful piece on loss and resilience. —CLR
Adam Gaffney | The Baffler | December 13, 2022 | 5,282 words
Having a loved one in the ICU is both hopeful and excruciating. You hold out hope that the most highly trained people and the most advanced technology must somehow tip the balance in their favor, buying crucial time their body needs to heal. But what happens when the most tragic outcome is almost certain? How do families and hospitals cope when hopes are slim and the costs of keeping a patient alive mount, perhaps even prolonging certain death? At The Baffler, Boston physician Adam Gaffney suggests that having all the training and technology at your disposal doesn’t mean that it’s always the most ethical and compassionate choice to use it. At what point does care become a horrific ordeal for the patient and their nurses? To what end? “I have seen family members overwhelmed by the magnitude of the decision: letting go might make sense (and they may realize it and even say so), but making the decision feels impossible because it threatens a lifetime of guilt over having been the one to say: ‘Stop the machines.’” —KS
Davon Loeb | The Sun | January 2, 2023 | 2,678 words
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been mired in home repairs that rank somewhere south of Serious DIY but somewhere north of I Can Do This Without YouTube. Every time I cut a machine screw so that a new switchplate would fit, or replaced a toilet’s fill valve, I thought about my dad. Specifically, I thought about being 8 or 9 years old and standing with my dad while he embarked on those same types of repairs — me holding a handful of screws or tools, just trying to be helpful while he worked on whatever it was he was working on. I lost him a decade ago this year, but those memories have retained the same poignancy they had when my grief was fresh, and they came roaring back all over again when I read Davon Loeb’s essay in the latest issue of The Sun. Fathers aren’t easy, and neither are sons; when the two are constitutionally different, it only compounds the difficulty. “Give Dad a pencil, a piece of paper, and a ruler, and he could design a house,” Loeb writes. “Give me a pencil, a piece of paper, and a ruler, and I could draw our family.” This misalignment sets the stage for an episode that embodies nearly every competing facet of the father-son dynamic: pride and shame, validation and disappointment, love and fear. Yet, Loeb doesn’t write this to twang some hidden heartstring in the reader. Instead, he sinks back into that moment from his own childhood in order to square the circle of fraught kinship: No matter how much we may clash, it’s the moments of peace that stay with us. —PR
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Age, race, personality; “opposites attract” can refer to any number of traits. But as Desiree Browne’s sly and self-aware essay illustrates all too well, sometimes it’s a different kind of disconnect that drives people apart.
He told me he was a bus driver for the city; I told him I was between jobs but was mostly a writer. As we talked, away from the roar of the party, I watched his desire over the top of my champagne glass, and I started drinking that in, too. He matched the pace of my quips and my laughter was real. I gave him my number because it was another night when it seemed like anything could happen.
Sarah Fay is 28 years old. She has a job at a non-profit, a dog, a car, and family close by. Too close, in fact, on the nights when Fay has nowhere to sleep but her grandmother’s garage, where her own mother has been living for the last 13 years. This three-part series examines the complexities of housing insecurity in Los Angeles, defying stereotypes about what it means to be vulnerable to the pressures of meager wages and rising rents:
Ideally, Sarah would not be looking for a place for the night; she wants a place to call home. She just can’t seem to convince landlords to give her a chance.
Her latest full-time job, as an executive assistant for a nonprofit focused on homelessness in West Los Angeles, pays her $24 per hour. She grosses around $4,000 per month. To people unaware of the surge in rental prices, that might seem like enough. But the median rent for a studio in Los Angeles on December 10 was $1,825 — a $275 increase over a year earlier. After taxes, the market-rate rent would consume most of what she earns.
But in Los Angeles and other housing-squeezed cities, having the resources to pay the local median rent is a far cry from actually getting an apartment. There are, however, supports in place to help people like Sarah.
In 2019, when she earned about $2 per hour less, she qualified for a Rapid Rehousing subsidy from the L.A. Homeless Services Agency, but that did not guarantee that she would receive it. The process struck her as complex. It involves working with a Rapid Rehousing case manager to find an apartment in the right price range, then connecting the case manager to the landlord and hoping that they could work it out. In theory, they agree to allow the subsidized tenant to rent the place based on various criteria, and then the tenant starts out paying a percentage of their rent that will grow in subsequent months and years. The exact amount of the subsidy depends on a variety of factors, including the tenant’s income and the rent, and the process involves the input of the case manager.
The problem for Sarah has been that she has needed to convince a landlord to choose a low-income tenant with mandatory bureaucratic processes over plenty of people in simpler circumstances with larger incomes and better credit applying. Nothing requires landlords to take on tenants like her, and the shortage of affordable lodging means that market forces have been blowing the other way.
This is a powerful and upsetting read on the NHS — the free healthcare service provided by the United Kingdom. Increasingly underfunded, the staff is facing incredible pressure. Reading this essay from a healthcare assistant, you realize what heroic personal efforts are now being called upon to provide patient care.
The family have been called in to say goodbye, but there’s no telling if they will arrive in time. The student nurse and I give him a wash and reposition him to make him more comfortable. I decide to give him a wet shave as well, which he seems to enjoy. Things appear to be under control for now, so I tell the student nurse I’m going to catch up on paperwork. She nods and tells me she will stay with the man who is passing away. She removes her gloves and holds his hand.
