Flashing Palely in the Margins
Fruit crisp
Over the past few months, I have indulged myself by eating various fruit crisps that L has made.
She has made a lot of crisp, using in-season fruits like peaches and blueberries and strawberries and apricots and rhubarb and a variety of other local produce we have been able to get from the farms around us. Her topping is perfect: just the right mix of oats and butter and sugar, and when well suited for the crisp, even almonds or cinnamon. The mix of the topping with the baked fruit creates a harmony of sensations on your tastebuds; it is, in many ways, the perfect dessert.
I didn’t grow up eating dessert often. When I was a child, it wasn’t something my family prepared except on special, celebratory occasions. Even as a young adult, I focused my eating on the savory parts of a meal, and did not leave room for any sweet treats at the end.
I eat, and thoroughly enjoy, dessert now. It is an indulgence that reminds me that every day is worth celebrating in some small way. A bite of crisp with some vanilla ice cream — most recently, peach and blueberry — is a perfect way to end a day, when Zoya is asleep and I’m taking stock of all I’ve done and all that’s left to do.
Now, unlike before, I relish in this small celebration of the day. Lucky for me, L makes the best crips, the best desserts, so I can celebrate each day with delight and deliciousness—and love.
A poem
Unpacking a Globe
Arthur Sze
I gaze at the Pacific and don’t expect
to ever see the heads on Easter Island,
though I guess at sunlight rippling
the yellow grasses sloping to shore;
yesterday a doe ate grass in the orchard:
it lifted its ears and stopped eating
when it sensed us watching from
a glass hallway–in his sleep, a veteran
sweats, defusing a land mine.
On the globe, I mark the Battle of
the Coral Sea–no one frets at that now.
A poem can never be too dark,
I nod and, staring at the Kenai, hear
ice breaking up along an inlet;
yesterday a coyote trotted across
my headlights and turned his head
but didn’t break stride; that’s how
I want to live on this planet:
alive to a rabbit at a glass door–
and flower where there is no flower
Arthur Sze has recently been named the US Poet Laureate by the Library of Congress.
Some links
Gina Trapani is blogging again. Gina is one of those people that has always influenced me and the stuff I do on the web, so I’m ecstatic to see her blogging again.
Anil Dash turned fifty years old and shared some thoughts on the milestone day. This one, in particular, resonated with me:
This one is a thing people say all the time, but I can’t emphasize enough how much it’s true: Do not wait until someone is gone to praise them, or thank them, or acknowledge them, or to tell them what you’re grateful for or how they’ve impacted your life.
I’ve been lucky to interact with Anil a bit over the past twenty-five years, and I’ve told him many times that he’s a big influence on me. Who can you reach out to today to tell them you appreciate them?
Ethan Marcotte has an excellent post on the new National Design Studio in the US — worth a read even if you don’t work in design. As someone who co-founded and worked in one of the “make government services better for everyone” shops (the Ontario Digital Service), I know how hard real civil servant technologists and designers work to make services accessible and usable by every person. This new “America By Design” initiative feels like a direct rebuke to the amazing work people have put in over the years.
Ruby Tandoh, a former contestant on The Great British Bake-Off, gives an inside look into the show—from auditioning to taping to the aftermath—and ruminates on its past and future:
Know-how from the bakers themselves, tapped from internet sourdough forums and untranslated pâtisserie books, has been seeping into prime-time television for the past fifteen years, presenting “Bake Off” with the same paradox that plagues “RuPaul’s Drag Race”: there are no real amateurs anymore.
The summers are getting hotter, smokier, harder to navigate. Denise Balkissoon Gets it right: I have seasonal depression in the summer now.
Your zodiac sign is likely out of date. I guess that makes me an Aquarius instead of a Pisces, now? Not that a zodiac sign matters at all, but the science of how the night sky changes over time is fascinating.
This passage in this piece about the emotional resonance of kitchen objects—really, the significance we imbue into so many things we own, really struck me:
So many of us spend our whole lives denying ourselves the best things because the time is not right or we feel we haven’t earned them yet, or we fear that someone — probably our parents — will disapprove of us if we drop them.
I know it makes me someone who is behind the times, but I don’t fully get LLMs just yet. I don’t use them and can’t really see how they fit into my life. I was fascinated to see this piece in the New York Times highlighting 21 ways people are using AI at work. At my job, we are being encouraged to use Copilot, but I haven’t jumped in just yet.
Relatedly, this post — on being an AI hater — captures a lot of my visceral thinking about LLMs. I don’t think I’d go as far as saying I’m a hater, but I definitely don’t have any positive thoughts towards it.
Also relatedly: a high school student expounds on how AI changing their high school experience, not for the better:
Many of us are so accustomed to outsourcing that we’re dulling the very instincts that we need to prevail in life: grit, critical thinking, and the ability to function smoothly under stress.
One more about AI: this piece from May does an incredible job of outlining just how AI is eroding the foundation of scholarship in our post-secondary institutions.
“Do you want to read? Or do you just want to have read — or even to be able to say, online and relatively convincingly, that you have read?“ If you’re looking to really read, you can’t go wrong by starting with the advice in this post by Alan Jacobs.
“Loneliness is so challenging to understand because it combines the subjective and the objective, the structural and the personal.” A book review of So Lonely that looks at much of the discourse around loneliness through a critical lens—and makes me want to read the book.
Related: what’s happening to arts and culture criticism these days? Why does it seem to be disappearing, especially from major publications? I believe a well-written piece of criticism can be as valuable as the piece of culture itself; some of my favorite things to read are essay-type reviews.
This review of Arundhati Roy’s new memoir, doubling as a retrospective on her life and work, is a good example of the kind of criticism I really enjoy — particularly when the subject, Roy, is someone I have great respect for.
Loved this short history of the business card and how it evolved to be what it is now. I’m particularly fond of my business cards, but haven’t had a chance to give one out in ages (because I do all my work from home, mostly) and I’m a little sad about that.
In sad news: Robert Munsch has dementia. I loved his books growing up, and have been re-enjoying them recently as we’ve introduced them to Zoya.
You need to be bored. Put down your phone after going through these links—heck, put it down now, these links will still be here later—and be bored for a while.
Fascinated by the idea of “traveling” third spaces: “The traveling third space recognizes that public spaces are not a guarantor of belonging, they are merely a base upon which people form connections and bond over shared interests.”
No one has ever seen an Anguilla eel spawn. That’s fascinating. Turns out they have a dramatic and elaborate reproduction ritual that we’ve only recently been able to deduce.
So the next time you order unagi and salmon rolls, think about how the paths of their lives mirror one another: salmon spawn in rivers, live in the ocean, then fight their way back upstream to lay eggs, while eels do the reverse–born in the ocean, mature in rivers, and return to die in the deep. Upstream versus downstream, knowable and visible versus hidden, lost, and dark.
Oysters are making people sick, and if you read this article on why it’s happening, you likely won’t want to eat oysters again. (But I will, because they are so delicious.)
This a ridiculous, mostly inconsequential story about a mystery of French fries left on a porch—and it’s completely entrancing and worth reading.
Tolstoy learned to ride a bike at the age of 67. I still have hope to learn, I guess.
To end, this wonderful Mastodon post by henry, about creating your home on the web:
you ought to make a website. you ought to make it a canvas, a great irrigated field, a confessional booth. make it an amphitheatre, a private tea service with friends, a graveyard, a bedroom, the sunset light through shutters. you ought to make a personal website, make it carefully, make it home
Get weekend reading posts in your inbox: subscribe to the mostly-monthly newsletter.