Hello, good evening, happy Friday. I cannot believe we survived 2020. I still haven’t figured out the final list for the best-of post, but again I will save most of the reminiscing for that whole situation.
Anyway, I hope you all had a good New Year’s Eve! I went up on the roof with some Deth By Cherries and watched fireworks all across the city for a good 45 minutes or so. It was great! I also rewatched Logan Lucky, because I watched Tenet last week. Tenet sucked and made me want to watch a good heist movie. Logan Lucky is a tremendous heist movie.
Also this week I finished the first ending of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, and it was incredible. I loved the game the whole way through, but the plot twists they packed in for the climax were especially great. Gene Park and I chatted about our mutual fondness for the game’s storytelling, and he wrote an article about it! Very cool.
Using your noodle
Rachel Handler noticed that bucatini has been decidedly difficult to find on store shelves during the pandemic. Classic pandemic supply chain issue, or… giant noodle conspiracy? You decide:
Things first began to feel off in March. While this sentiment applies to everything in the known and unknown universe, I mean it specifically in regard to America’s supply of dry, store-bought bucatini. At first, the evidence was purely anecdotal. My boyfriend and I would bravely venture to both our local Italian grocer and our local chain groceries, masked beyond recognition, searching in vain for the bucatini that, in my opinion, not to be dramatic, is the only noodle worth eating; all other dry pastas might as well be firewood. But where there had once been abundance, there was now only lack. Being educated noodle consumers, we knew that there was, more generally, a pasta shortage due to the pandemic, but we were still able to find spaghetti and penne and orecchiette — shapes which, again, insult me even in concept. The missing bucatini felt different. It was specific. Frightening. Why bucatini? Why now? Why us?
No good comes of Republican recipes
I don’t know what the fuck it is about Republicans and their weird-ass, shitty food taste, but they absolutely must stop subjecting the rest of us to that bullshit. The latest offender is John Cornyn, the senior senator from Texas, and his terrible, awful brisket. It looks like garbage, but he insisted that it tastes great, so an investigation followed:
A few days ago, I publicly sought out Senator John Cornyn’s brisket recipe—or, more accurately, that of his wife, Sandy Cornyn. “Don’t do this Daniel,” implored Twitter user @NTenney, who had seen Cornyn’s now infamous brisket photo from Christmas Eve night.
Cornyn has since been roasted pretty mercilessly during the past week. The image was lit as harshly as the reactions—his Tweet has elicited almost 13,000 comments so far, most of them negative. A Pyrex dish filled with a presliced brisket was coated in a thick red sauce that made it look like a cross between a meat loaf and a McRib without the bun. Outlets from the Austin-American Statesman to Sputnik News covered the reaction from Texans wondering if they’d ever seen brisket in such a light. The Houston Chronicle carried two stories, including a more supportive one Wednesday from Erica Grieder—I’m quoted in her article as saying that I was relieved Cornyn never used barbecue’s name in vain in relation to the dish, which he called a brisket family tradition. “I’m glad that he didn’t call it barbecue,” I told Grieder.
Jail for mother!
A joke in a group chat this week reminded me of Patricia Lockwood’s remarkable cat, Miette, and the article that followed the viral tweet about her. Please enjoy:
We got her in October 2015, from the Lawrence, Kansas, SPCA. She was a kitten and she had escaped — we think maybe from a Ragdoll breeder, because it’s sort of unusual to have that breed just running around in the wilderness. They’re not really cut out for it. So we think she escaped, and had been attacked by coyotes, or a coyote. She had multiple fractures in her back right leg, and terrible wounds all over her body that were full of maggots and stuff. I think the person who found her just brought her in to have her put down, because it was like, Oh my gosh, this poor little garbage creature. But the vet at the SPCA took an interest in her and she nursed her back to health. They shaved her and fixed her up, and they gave her to a foster family for a little while. Her foster mom called her Marge, because she makes little Marge Simpson noises. She runs around being like — GRRRMM! Then they brought her back, and we adopted her.
She was very scared when we first met her. We had gone in to the SPCA to see another cat, actually, and my husband was like, No, let’s look at this garbage cat. So we went into the little room with her and she was totally shaking, but you could tell that she was a little sweetheart. So we brought her home.
New game+
We are entering year two of the covid-19 pandemic. Vaccines are entering distribution, but they won’t be widely available for another six months or so. Ed Yong, for his last article of 2020 (and last covid article for a while, as he’s going on book leave), wrote a good piece about what to expect in year two:
The influenza pandemic that began in 1918 killed as many as 100 million people over two years. It was one of the deadliest disasters in history, and the one all subsequent pandemics are now compared with.
At the time, The Atlantic did not cover it. In the immediate aftermath, “it really disappeared from the public consciousness,” says Scott Knowles, a disaster historian at Drexel University. “It was swamped by World War I and then the Great Depression. All of that got crushed into one era.” An immense crisis can be lost amid the rush of history, and Knowles wonders if the fracturing of democratic norms or the economic woes that COVID-19 set off might not subsume the current pandemic. “I think we’re in this liminal moment of collectively deciding what we’re going to remember and what we’re going to forget,” says Martha Lincoln, a medical anthropologist at San Francisco State University.
The coronavirus pandemic ignited at the end of 2019 and blazed across 2020. Many countries repeatedly contained it. The United States did not. At least 19 million Americans have been infected. At least 326,000 have died. The first two surges, in the spring and summer, plateaued but never significantly subsided. The third and worst is still ongoing. In December, an average of 2,379 Americans have died every day of COVID-19—comparable to the 2,403 who died in Pearl Harbor and the 2,977 who died in the 9/11 attacks. The virus now has so much momentum that more infection and death are inevitable as the second full year of the pandemic begins. “There will be a whole lot of pain in the first quarter” of 2021, Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told me.
Among us
Over in Germany, a soldier posing as a refugee almost got away with a terrorist plot to cause massive murder and destruction in an attempt to further stoke reactionary tendencies. I’ve tried to highlight, over the last year, how violent right-wing terrorists like this guy often live among us. There are huge issues with infiltration of the military and police in many countries, and these organizations aren’t just limited to the United States. It can happen anywhere:
OFFENBACH, Germany — At the height of Europe’s migrant crisis, a bearded man in sweatpants walked into a police station. His pockets were empty except for an old cellphone and a few foreign coins.
In broken English, he presented himself as a Syrian refugee. He said he had crossed half the continent by foot and lost his papers along the way. The officers photographed and fingerprinted him. Over the next year, he would get shelter and an asylum hearing, and would qualify for monthly benefits.
His name, he offered, was David Benjamin.
In reality, he was a lieutenant in the German Army. He had darkened his face and hands with his mother’s makeup and applied shoe shine to his beard. Instead of walking across Europe, he had walked 10 minutes from his childhood home in the western city of Offenbach.
Home-grown
What can I say? Bullying your mayor for being shitty at handling the pandemic is extremely fun and well-deserved:
A few days after Thanksgiving, as the number of coronavirus cases surged to alarming new levels in Los Angeles, Mayor Eric Garcetti tweeted out an advisory that, on its face, should have been fairly innocuous: Limit non-essential activities, wear a mask, and keep physical distance. But after months of missteps surrounding a raging pandemic and a police force that turned peaceful events into violent showdowns, Garcetti’s tweet had become—like so much of his messaging—unintentionally incendiary. It didn’t help that, just hours earlier, a local homeless outreach organization discovered the city had approved a filming permit that resulted in the cancellation of hundreds of Covid-19 testing appointments at one of the city’s few transit-accessible locations. (The appointments were reinstated the following day, a decision fueled in part by national backlash to the news that a TikTok star-fronted reboot of She’s All That had left more than 500 people without access to Covid-19 testing.)
“God you’re a useless trash suck up,” Jamie Patterson, a local barista, replied to Garcetti after asking him whether he’d been given a speaking role in the movie. (The mayor’s roster of film and TV cameos is not insignificant: He’s credited on IMDB for playing such close-to-home roles as “Wildly Unpopular Mayor” and “Guy Who Will Never Ascend Above Local Politics.”) Other replies, like the one from the indie rock band Best Coast, went with a more classic sentiment: “God I hate you so much.”
The specifics of Garcetti’s biography make him a particularly ripe target, but the phenomenon of tweeting mean things at your mayor isn’t unique to Los Angeles. In New York, Mayor Bill de Blasio’s puzzlingly slow, insufficient response to Covid-19 all but certainly cost some people their livelihoods and others their lives. When de Blasio defended the police after officers drove a car through a crowd of protesters last summer, it only inflamed the anger and frustration, spurring sit-ins in front of his home and headlines such as “Everybody Hates Bill” and “Bill de Blasio Has Failed.” The disgust at their respective mayors has inspired camaraderie—and a series of Twitter memes—not just among Angelenos and New Yorkers but also those who have marched to their mayors’ homes or initiated recall efforts in Cleveland, Seattle, D.C., Portland, St. Louis, and Chicago. Through a mess of overlapping crises this year, it seemed small moments of joy, or at least something like catharsis, could be found in the simple act of bullying your mayor.
Democratized delicacies
Something about foods that exist as status symbols has always bothered me. Food and flavors should be accessible to everyone, and it should be worth eating because it tastes good, not just because it’s expensive and inaccessible. Caviar is among the worst offenders - it’s good, it’s fine, but it’s not going to blow your mind. It’s mostly just lighting money on fire for the sake of it. China figured that out, and a lot of rich Americans are very mad about it:
It was a 1980s Wall Street cliche. Tiny pancakes, huge egos and gobs of glossy black fish eggs from the Caspian Sea hoovered up on little mother-of-pearl spoons. Beluga, osetra and sevruga — most Americans had no idea these were species of sturgeon, but it was clear eating a whole lot of salted, unfertilized roe was a signal that you had arrived.
Fast-forward to 2019, and caviar’s image is muddier. Cheap Chinese caviar is flooding the U.S. market, causing prices to plummet, and with it, the product’s cachet. Wholesale prices have fallen more than 50 percent since 2012, down 13 percent just in the past year. According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, the import price has gone from $850,000 per ton in January 2012 to $350,000 per ton in November 2018.
There is an angle missing from this article about class analysis and food as identity, but it’s still worth reading.
Last call
What’s really happened to all those restaurants that haven’t been able to survive on take-out during the pandemic? Well, here’s one story from a chef-owner herself:
On the night before I laid off all 30 of my employees, I dreamed that my two children had perished, buried alive in dirt, while I dug in the wrong place, just five feet away from where they were actually smothered. I turned and spotted the royal blue heel of my youngest’s socked foot poking out of the black soil only after it was too late.
For 10 days, everyone in my orbit had been tilting one way one hour, the other the next. Ten days of being waterboarded by the news, by tweets, by friends, by my waiters. Of being inundated by texts from fellow chefs and managers — former employees, now at the helm of their own restaurants but still eager for guidance. Of gentle but nervous pleas from my operations manager to consider signing up with a third-party delivery service like Caviar. Of being rattled even by my own wife, Ashley, and her anxious compulsion to act, to reduce our restaurant’s operating hours, to close at 9 p.m., cut shifts.
With no clear directive from any authority — public schools were still open — I spent those 10 days sorting through the conflicting chatter, trying to decide what to do. And now I understood abruptly: I would lay everybody off, even my wife. Prune, my Manhattan restaurant, would close at 11:59 p.m. on March 15. I had only one piece of unemotional data to work with: the checking-account balance. If I triaged the collected sales tax that was sitting in its own dedicated savings account and left unpaid the stack of vendor invoices, I could fully cover this one last week of payroll.
Falling flat
First comes tragedy, then comes farce, here’s a story about it:
Nearly two months after the election, President Donald Trump still has not conceded his loss, even as members of his own party dismiss his voter fraud conspiracy theories. “You’re headed into the cliffs that guard the flat Earth at that time, brother,” Republican Rep. Denver Riggleman recently told Yahoo News, likening Trump’s claims to those of the flat-Earth movement.
That is exactly where Trump is headed. While no modern president has refused to concede an election,his tactics are not without precedent in American politics. Along with an 1873 Texas governor who barricaded himself in office after losing re-election, Trump enjoys some remarkably fringe company—specifically, people who believe Earth is not an oblate spheroid, but a flat disc.
In 1909, a notorious flat Earth preacher led a ballot-box putsch to maintain his stranglehold over an Illinois town. With declarations of “war,” two competing governments that claimed to be legitimate, and an armed siege between the two factions’ police chiefs at the county jail, the forgotten saga of Zion, Illinois, is evidence that America’s political situation could still be a whole lot stupider.
You deserve some good animal content
Have a good weekend.