Thanks for reading my newsletter! The breakdown: first a personal essay, a round up of my writing, then some thoughts on my recent work experience, media I am consuming and finally some vegan food and recipe recommendations. All opinions expressed here are strictly my own.
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If you are here because you like my writing about science or my Instagrams about cooking and outfits, you may not be interested in every essay in this space, but please do stick around until I loop back to whatever it is that we have in common. There is exactly one curse word in this letter.
FLUORESCENCE SPECTROSCOPY*
“Aesthetics as I have understood them in my several decades of working in the arts, are the way we observe and understand information through the senses. If we’re lucky we’ll find beauty. If we’re smart, we’ll find ways to convince others of said beauty and sell them a membership to an institution.”
“The accuracies are what we lose in the constant, unrelenting discourse anchored in perception and optics.”
It’s June and I’m sort of mad at H&M and I’m probably mad at Levi’s and I’m definitely mad at Walmart.
It’s 2022 so it’s become de rigueur for states to pass laws that make lives of queer people harder simultaneously with big companies advertising their Pride collections. A promotional email featuring shirts that say “love is love” lands in my inbox while all of my social media feeds are full of memes that read “not gay as in cheerful, but queer as in fuck the police.”
Because commercializing pride and commodifying queerness is not that new anymore, some companie have caught on to the insufficiency of just slapping a rainbow flag onto everything and calling that inclusivity or representation. They’ve become smarter, or hired savvier consultants and sensitivity readers, so now their campaigns are about featuring the life stories of queer creatives or some other brand of quirky-but-acceptable queer person.The products you can buy are one click further away or get smaller thumbnails on the Pride edition of the website now, though they are still very much there.
As a queer consumer I am not just being sold a product that can act as a signifier of my queerness to the uninitiated, but also a story that is either supposed to soften me into trusting a corporation or help me see some of myself in the person that presumably trusts that corporation enough to work with them.
Some of these businesses are doing a good job with serving up more and more diverse stories and lives and covering a broader and broader spectrum of queerness. This also makes me mad because I know that at the end of it all, I have been summoned to this corner of cyberspace to worship at the altar of buying things and very little else.
Yet, the more I think about it, the more dull my rage becomes, and I move closer to just feeling tired and exasperated. How can I really be mad if a queer kid from a conservative community or a state looking to punish them for who they are could get even an ounce of hope for their future by seeing one of these campaigns? If they can buy a binder in the same store that memes about suburban women make fun of or learn what it means to be non-binary while shopping for nail polish? Queer kids die or get forced into houselessness at remarkable rates, so how can I be mad at a company whose well-curated ad campaign may inspire them or their family to let go of even a little bit of pain or fear?
I can never forget that I get to make hot-takes about consumerism and late stage capitalism and then just carry on as usual once I calm down some because I am white and educated, because I get a regular paycheck, because I live in New York with my straight man husband. It is safe for me to be angry at promotional emails because of where I’ve landed in society. Moral purity and righteousness mean little when you are barely surviving.
Even from my position of privilege, I still observe myself quiet down and shrink in front of some people, police myself just a little - or a lot. I’ve attempted to come out as bisexual a few times, including writing about it extensively here, but it somehow never stuck, once again rendering visible the fact that the ritual or the institution of coming out as codified in some facets of our culture only works for a certain kind of person in a certain kind of body and living in a certain kind of place. Whether it be my mother-in-law and concluding that I must have chosen to be heterosexual after all because I had married her son or my own mom assuming that being bisexual must mean that on top of my male partner I must also be fucking at least one female friend, little room is left for nuance or a type of existence that does not need to be rationalized away or over thought to an extreme.
In school, I witnessed too many other teachers commiserating about how hard, confusing or even nonsensical “kids having pronouns” is to even attempt bringing up that sometimes I’d really feel so much better if people called me “they” instead of “she”. I knew some of them must have seen the “they” in my email signature and chose to ignore it. They also chose to have those conversations in front of me, the conversations that were dismissive of kids needing space and kindness while they are trying to figure themselves out, or maybe just needing a bit of affirmation after they have actually worked it all out.
A former colleague once stopped me in the hallway to say that they noticed a mutual acquaintance referred to me as “they” and just sort of… what’s up with that? Later, the same person offered an extended apology for putting me in such a vulnerable conversation on my way to class, in a hallway teeming with kids. I comforted them, I said it was fine, and that just made me tired. I never really came out as non-binary, maybe because it feels shameful to still be working through who I am at thirty, maybe because I am preemptively exhausted by conversations that would entitle.
These are all small slights compared to enduring violence or being denied housing or medical care. But what I’m saying is, I have it really good and I am still weary of June, of Pride month that is an excuse for so many entities that don’t actually care for queer people to dabble in a bit of jargon, donate a bit of money to some very sanitized organization, and then forget about it all, and especially legal threats to folks they say they’re celebrating, for the rest of the year.
Count how many times you’ll see the word “community” bandied about in ads this month. I know corporations are treated like people, when it suits them, here in America, but certainly those people are not in-community with most of us.
***
“Our butchness was so ingrained in our queer bodies that we read as ladies only to a world that didn’t really matter to us, that couldn’t read the magic in the code we spoke with flesh and blood. We were ladies when our food arrived and guys when the check came”
***
Market researchers would probably rejoice in knowing that I check off every box for my demographic as all my impulse purchases are workout clothes, vegan food from the HMart freezer isle, and books by queer authors. I preordered Raquel Gutierrez’s Brown Neon on a whim and almost forgot about it. When it showed up at my door, I re-read the back and remembered why I had hit “buy” so quickly that I find it appropriate to call the action impulsive. The first sentence of the blurb reads:
“Part butch memoir, part ekphrastic travel diary, part queer family tree, Raquel Gutierrez’s debut essay collection Brown Neon gleans insight from the sediment of land and relationships.”
This is what gets me to pick the book up and the first essay within it, the one about the desert, love, and inheriting butch clothes as means of building a queer family, is what gets me to read it in a span of two weekends, a bit of a feat for someone like me that usually has to stretch books out over months.
At a hundred pages in, I tell my friend Alex that this book was engineered for me: Gutierrez constantly references their lazy pompadour short hair, wears lots of denim-on-denim, cannot resist a detailed side note about a meal some important conversation happened over, throws in a little astrology here and there and uses she/they pronouns without making every mention of it a manifesto or an explanation. She also has a complicated relationship with upward mobility, with coming from a family of immigrants, with having gone to graduate school and finding that a degree does not automatically fully fling you into adulthood and prosperity. They are an elder Los Angeles punk who’s learned to dabble in dance and techno. The writing style of Brown Neon betrays both the convoluted sentences of an academic and a yearning for imagery and ellipsis of a poet. Brown Neon is not perfect, and some of the more academic art criticism certainly went over my physicist’s head and my lived experience is different from Gutierrez’s in so many ways. Still, reading this book felt like being allowed to meet a version of myself, maybe even engage them in conversation.
Though Brown Neon covers a broad range of topics and engages with very complex issues there is a steady, cohesive undercurrent of an uneasiness all throughout it. Gutierrez is not exactly constantly plagued by an unease, but they powerfully convey that living, surviving even, in the world we have been handed requires sitting with unease and observing unease at almost all times.
There is lots of beauty in this book, in the desert terrain and photography and performance art that Gutierrez skillfully analyzes, in their descriptions of dancing in gay clubs or sharing heartbreak with friends, in the red of their ex-lovers fingernails and their own tailored suit for a friend’s wedding. There is also lots of care for mothers, fathers and children, chosen or given. Gutierrez still never loses perspective, never fails to add a metaphorical asterisk or a footnote to remind us that under capitalism elevating some means displacing others, that moving upwards may mean surrendering your history, that living out a movie-like star-crossed romance may require upholding a gender binary that, in general, hurts you.
There is a moment in one essay where Gutierrez makes a passing reference to a clean floor of a gallery being more friendly to a butch’s shoes than a dusty Southwest outdoors. This book is not a gallery, it’s a place where the writer has clearly made a home for herself which has inevitably meant dealing with some of the dirt you track in with your shoes, and just living with some of it that never gets fully cleaned.
June sorta snuck up on me and hit me pretty hard when my partner tested positive for COVID and went into quarantine within our Brooklyn-sized apartment at its very beginning. I found myself feeling dimmed and exhausted just as all the Pride content started rolling into my inbox, as my social media feeds became saturated and with the familiar bright colors. I respected the hustle of one social media friend who took it upon themselves to solicit romantic advances as a means of celebration, but almost all that felt like a well-produced capital-M Message either bored or bothered me. Reading Brown Neon shook me out of that a bit, and challenged me to think more and to be more, as a white person, as a person with a PhD and a secure income, as a person that still has the option of passing whenever I need to, and I do live in a city where almost anything goes.
This book also reminded me that it is possible to sit with contradiction, with uneasiness, with complicity that is sometimes forced upon us, with mistakes that we sometimes maybe coils have avoided, with a texture of life that probably doesn’t always have to be smoothed away, and to not fully crumble, to still keep moving towards where you need to, or want to, be. There is a kindness in Gutierrez writing for everyone in their sprawling queer family, but also for their imperfect self. It’s not a blind, all-forgiving kindness, but that only makes it seem more possible, maybe even aspirational. Really, Gutierrez will not give you a roadmap to absolution or promise that the future will be better if we just say the right words over and over, they will not let you off the hook for figuring your stuff out, but they will also not demand perfection, starting with themselves and their often tried and burdened yet expansive heart and mind.
While I was bored and alienated from so much Pride content, Brown Neon reminded me that there is so much that I haven’t experienced, so much I take for granted, and so much I can love even if some days feel like the world has been engineered to make us all fail.
***
***
Whenever I have a good day, whenever I feel like my queerness is a source of strength, whenever I feel like I can imagine a better future, I converge on the same sentiment - it’s almost never just about me.
In 2002, filmmaker Adam Curtis made a four-part documentary series that focused on Sigmund Freud, his nephew Edward Bernays and the rest of their family for BBC. It was called “The Century of the Self” and the style of it is exactly what you would expect from a twenty-year-old network TV show. There is voiceover, talking heads and archival footage, and a fair amount of generic video that fills the screen as Curtis works towards his big punchline. At times, the whole thing borders on boring, even though a lot of history it uncovers would likely still be considered controversial by small-c and capital-C conservatives alike.
Curtis is not the first person to suggest that Freud was wildly influential and that his ideas have been overused and abused over time. The connection between individualism and consumerism is also not that severely hidden even if we don’t always think about it explicitly. However, having four hours of historical context before you fully let it sink in that every time you forget the world is bigger and more interesting than you a corporation is likely to make money, and this is how American culture is set up on purpose, does intensify that revelation’s impact.
“The Century of the Self” traces out how Freud’s idea that people are not perfectly rational changed the way products are marketed, not for utility but to appeal to the fetishized, untamed, unconscious. Public relations experts, psychoanalysts and politicians, Curtis explains, threw themselves into finding better and better ways to determine how they may be able to manipulate these unconscious, hidden desires which lead to a boom in the use of focus groups and massive consumer surveys. Ultimately, all that data let them classify people based on something they called lifestyle and sell them items that seemed to reinforce that lifestyle (and its righteousness). When protest movements and hippies started to take over, everyone from market specialists to Ronald Reagan gave up on appealing to similarities between people living the same lifestyle and started celebrating individualism as a lifestyle of its own. You spent too much time at the job that didn’t pay you enough because that said something about your personality and individuality, you bought things you didn’t mean because they said something about your personality and individuality, and you voted for politicians that promised to pass laws that would allow you to stop doing things, like paying taxes, that could benefit anyone who is not a tool in the overall project of growing and cementing your personality and individuality.
In Brown Neon, Gutierrez writes about how we can mistake representation for inclusivity because we crave to be consumable characters as a marker of normalcy instead of dreaming of overturning the status quo. They also write about how we often feel like the only way to build up our own authenticity is to consume a version of ourselves that, again, is only made palatable to us by those that actually want us to be smaller than we are. So many queer kids dye their hair, get odd haircuts and piercings and tattoos before they find a way to reclaim their body through language and emotional work instead of turning themselves into an exotic commodity.
There is a tension between trying to authentically live your truth and buy your way into looking like it in a way that is unambiguous. If there even is a way to conceptualize an authentic self that does not rely on, more or less, buying it. Queerness is bright and ever expansive and queer people have pioneered so much of contemporary culture, but queerness also still gets packaged as a pair of Docs, Dickies and that one Girlfriend sports bra.
Yet, I am fond of the countless TikTok and Instagram memes that turn the fact that we all buy the same things into a loving joke, a reminder that even if we want to believe that we are all unique, our tastes do seem to be uncannily similar. Capitalism cannot be ameliorated with more capitalism, but maybe it can help a little to recognize that the identity we are trying to buy is not exclusive, that it’s not something only we came up with and therefore have to build walls around. It’s naive to think that we can start by laughing about how we wear the same shoes and pants and end by restructuring society. It is also naive to think that anything can ever get better if we always only follow individualism as our North star.
There is a special type of care that people can provide to each other when they are consciously and intentionally practicing being in community, a type of care that can empower them to undertake discomforts that may actually lead to a better future. I think about this with respect to food often as I am typically surrounded by people who understand the harmful implications of eating meat and animal products, but cannot quite explain to themselves why they haven’t quit them. They’re rarely people that hate vegetables or believe in untrue claims about protein or antinutrients, and they’re fluent in the language of climate change and factory farming. Almost always, the barrier to changing their way of eating to one that would be more kind to animals, workers, and the planet is in the lack of care and support that would get them through the initial discomfort of having given something up. They would feel isolated from their family, friends and culture or feel like a burden during social occasions or just plainly be awkward in conversations.
I am not unsympathetic; in my five or so years of veganism I have had plenty of these experiences. I am mostly saddened by the realization that because we cannot help each other prioritize a less destructive future for the global community, we let our individual discomfort become most important. Our individual needs get set in stone, and our connection with the world we are a part of is damned to be only surface deep. I see people’s trouble with using others’ preferred pronouns similarly, as a lack of care and a prioritization of the comfort that comes with not having to rethink your worldview.
The last essay in Gutierrez's book starts out as a scholarly critique of the performance artist Sebastian Hernandez, but that is a decoy. Gutierrez is really writing about being in community and letting community change you. Hernandez is a non-binary working class femme artists and Gutierrez is a butch with a degree that sometimes gets (under)paid to curate art. There is a gendered divide between them and an age gap, but the essay cannot hide the fact that they find family in each other in the way queer people have always found family between themselves after making their biological relatives too uncomfortable. When Gutierrez writes
“We see each other’s psychic excess which, to put it plainly, is just us being ourselves. No code-switching to appease the spatial contexts that hold us, We are in mutual appreciation of each other’s trauma and our demystification of that trauma.”
I think of beach days with college-era acquaintances turned dear friends, of a former colleague who came to my classroom on my last day and in hushed tones told me it was always a shame when we lost another queer colleague, of being invited to a birthday bash full of gorgeous, brilliant theys purely on the power of Instagram messages about making ajvar and marinating tofu, of a friend who emerged from the isolation of COVID recovery and immediately wanted to take a trip to the farmers market to talk pesto, peonies and the latest dreadful season of the pandemic in the sun, together.
None of my friends are perfectly healthy or perfectly productive. None of them are perfectly defined as some sort of individual that could be sold wrapped in shrink wrap like an eerie late capitalism doll. But I think I can see a future full of care and love and eroding boundaries whenever we laugh together, or even when we commiserate about our often overlapping emotional baggage. And it is a queer future, one in which rigid categories like gender give way to just caring for each other on a more fundamental level, to supporting each other in being expansive.
In the essay, Gutierrez further writes about their friendship:
“I have rediscovered reinvention and have made it a new rite of passage back into my softer parts. Sebastian channels those passages with aplomb and without apology. I have received those blessings from Sebastian. What I have given them in return - well, that verdict is still out. All I know is that I have been making space in my wings for them, a young, queer, femme-identified gender renegade who models the finer points of extending ourselves out to one another, may softness be our code.”
Gutierrez and Hernandez are strangers and I am not familiar with their work past this one essay, an essay that I really came into with no prior emotional investment, but the sentiment this paragraph drips with felt both familiar and aspirational.
A few days after I finished Brown Neon, I noticed a good friend’s partner followed me on social media and was liking some of my attempts to, probably unnecessarily, document what I am about. My friend said they had noticed it too and that their partner just wanted to be supportive of all of my friend’s friends. And when I said that that was so sweet, my friend replied with
“I feel like they are such an amazing example of someone who has this level of care and attention and self awareness without even, like, trying that hard,”
And then shared a snippet of a conversation the two of them had had about it
“I was like, man, you really do have this inner light that no one has been able to dim, and I feel like that is the gayest thing you know?”
I think I do know.
I hope this Pride month that care and that light can be what sticks with you too - and that’s something that cannot be bought.
Best,
Karmela
*Fluorescence refers to materials absorbing one type of light then emitting a different kind of light, for instance a material may absorb invisible X-rays then emit visible light. When light is absorbed, its energy is transferred to electrons inside the material so they briefly become very energetic. However, energetic electrons are unstable, they cannot hold on to all the energy for very long, so they let some of that energy go in the form of a different kind of light. This is the light that gets emitted or the way the material glows after first being illuminated. Fluorescence spectroscopy is then a method for “seeing” inside a material by illuminating it, analyzing the emitted light then reverse engineering what the electrons must have been doing throughout the process.
ABOUT ME LATELY
WRITING
Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, when NYC went into lockdown, artist Luca Buvoli found himself reimagining Albert Einstein’s ideas about time. I had the privilege of talking to Luca about this process and the exhibit at Cristin Tierney gallery it eventually led to and a part of that conversation has been captured in this long-in-the-making piece for Symmetry magazine that was published earlier in the week. The place where science, art, humor and the over abundance of dread that has marked our lives for the past few years come together is a complex one, but also one that invites creation and allows for new connections to emerge - or so I learned while turning my experience with Luca’s art and thoughts into words on the page.
A few days ago, my twentieth article for New Scientist since I started working there as a staffer got published, so I think it is fair to say that I have been as busy with writing as, probably, ever since my last letter. I was happy that this twentieth piece was a news story about an experiment with ultracold atoms and the quantum boomerang effect, something I would have been interested in studying in a different life. As I am covering a very broad swath of physics, I have also had a chance to engage with some fairly out there stories like this one on how the best way for extraterrestrial civilizations to reach us may be with quantized X-rays, but also possibly groundbreaking work like this proposal for studying black holes on Earth with fast-flying mirrors made of plasma.
All of my stories get automatically collected here, and I imagine they’ll keep coming at the same relentless rate.
LEARNING
About a month and a half into the new job, I am mostly learning how to be, across the board, less anxious. Less anxious when scientists don’t email me back, when they email me with negative comments or odd requests, when I have to work more quickly than ever before, when my editors don’t think science that is interesting to me is actually interesting, when I get a particularly brutal edit, when I talk too much in an editorial meeting, and also when I just have free time after work and should not be anxious about anything at all. Having spent my twenties in a constant state of worrying about work, I am now, somewhat unexpectedly, faced with a giant task of being a person that is not fully defined by all of their time being pre-assigned to work and more work after that. I am both unsettled and excited by this.
I do hope that my craft as a writer is advancing and that I am becoming a more self-assured professional in the journalism world. I am very lucky to have support at work and at home as I grapple with finding and writing news every day as opposed to marinating in one longer piece once or twice a month. Though fairly in the weeds, this shift has been meaningful and certainly put me in the sort of uncomfortable yet exciting place where you can’t do anything but grow.
It’s still a little wild to me that being a full-time writer is my life now - and convincing myself that I deserve it and can be good at it is part of what I am learning too.
READING
This edition of John Paul Brammer’s advice newsletter Hola Papi where he addresses a readers concern about feeling like a “fake gay”. Brammer is often really incisive while also being kind and funny, and these last few lines of his advice really hit home for me
“In the end, though, I think you should worry less about whether you’re “gay enough” and more about doing gay stuff you enjoy. Cogito ergo gay, as prominent flamer René Descartes once said. No one here has the power to take your gay card away, and even if they did, honestly doing unlicensed gay stuff is kind of chic. Very classical. Very Sappho.
Community isn’t something you are, it’s something you engage in. It’s like a house where you find people you like and people you don’t, people who are similar to you and people who are different, where you have certain obligations to each other in good times and bad, where you will be frustrated and delighted, helped and hurt.”
Haley Nahman writes about Ask cultures and Guess cultures for Maybe Baby. This is not the first place where I’ve seen this distinction drawn, basically discussing how different communities navigate the choppy waters of asking for what you want but risking coming off as rude as opposed to waiting for someone to guess your needs but risking them never quite getting it, but Nahman does a good job laying it all out and connecting with the infuriatingly accurate “no worries if not” meme. I’m still thinking about her punchline and how it may be an act of service and kindness to offer someone honesty instead of a more gated vagueness that invites guesswork:
“I still think there’s merit to Guess culture. My sister’s affinity for it is part of why I see her as an incredibly thoughtful person. Some conflicts actually are worth avoiding, and some feelings are worth tending to. But I think it’s also useful to understand how guessing can be a buffer against vulnerability, infringing on human connection and understanding, infantilizing us. As self-awareness and social performance become supercharged by mass media, the risk of keeping the peace this way is that we become detached from our own fates. It’s easy to rebrand these complicated social dances as consideration or even politeness, but probably more honest to recognize how often they concern the self: perception, protection.
It makes sense to me that “no worries if not” is largely a millennial refrain. It’s a cowed expression. In many ways, we’ve been cowed by orthodoxy, by decorum, by the way things have always been done, even if they don’t actually work for anyone anymore. This is the darker comedy of the meme, and possibly the optimism of it.”
WATCHING
We watched the Indian action thriller Bellbottom and were entertained, but also somewhat confused, possibly because we were two mildly clueless white viewers. There is probably a great Three Days of the Condor type movie hidden deeply within Bellbottom and some of its aesthetic choices are great, but the whole thing is too long, the plot is too diluted, and it for sure suffers from occasionally feeling like propaganda (the film deals with conflict between India and Pakistan in the 1980s and the Pakistani politicians are depicted as rather cartoonish villains).
Sidney Lumet’s Serpico surprised me by being rather different than Dog Day Afternoon, the famed director’s other collaboration with Al Pacino, which may be one of the best movies I have ever seen (gender politics of its plot aside). Serpico is messier and delivers its punches less effectively. Part of what didn’t work for me, I think, is that Pacino cycles through too many versions of his character too quickly so they all feel one-dimensional (despite some absolutely berserk fashion choices). I appreciated the slow-mounting frustration of having to watch Pacino’s good-cop-trying-to-do-good go through the same motions over and over with little success, but I would have cared for him more if there had been more of a chance to get invested in his supposed goodness and fewer instances of him taking his anger out on the almost nameless women in his life. Lumet does make the whole thing look great and shows us a New York that is shady and muted, and a city that feels more and more empty as the film goes on and Serpico gets more isolated, which is rather effective in making the viewer feel unsettled.
Under the Banner of Heaven on FX had me pretty invested, but I was ultimately let down by its last half hour or so. Based on a Jon Krakauer book, the show deals with Mormonism and its checkered history through the point of view of a detective trying to solve a murder committed by a fundamentalist faction of a large and powerful family in his community. The detective, surprisingly masterfully played by Andrew Garfield, becomes more and more aware of the violence his faith has been historically responsible for as the case goes on. He goes through his own crisis as a believer while investigating because church officials repeatedly try to get him to cover up a crime as awful as beheading a toddler. Under the Banner of Heaven works better as a psychological drama then a crime procedural. The pacing of it is at times odd, with always disruptive and awkward flashbacks to the times of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, but it is very engaging and most of the acting is excellent (I think I just a priori don’t like Daisy Edgar-Jones, but everyone else really does the most). At the end of the show, however, the criminal case gets tied up somewhat neatly, but the emotional turmoil of Garfield’s character and his family seems to mostly get swept under the rug. This diminishes so much of the dramatic impact the series manages to build up to that point and makes it all more simple than seems realistic. With the caveat that rise of fundamentalist religion, racism and rationalizations for subjugation of women ring uncomfortably familiar in 2022, I would recommend this show. However, I cannot shake the feeling that it got close to being excellent and then fell to being just very compelling instead.
LISTENING
I really liked the latest episode of 30 for 30 podcasts called A Streetball Mixtape. I overheard its beginning when my partner put it on in the other room and tuned in for the rest as it had the just right kind of lightheartedness and flow to come off as authentic and not just a flat attempt at doing something that sort of “sounds Black” with regards to basketball culture.
I may have recommended Temple of Void before, but their new record Summoning the Slayer is just really good. It feels like doom metal without being unbearably slow and has just enough of a sinister note to it to make me think of old school death metal acts. The sound of it is pretty crushing, but in a decidedly good way.
Since Kate Bush is having a resurgence (no, I am not mad about it, and no, I will not be watching Stranger Things) I was reminded of the Supercontext Hounds of Love episode which is a beloved example of great podcasting about a great record.
EATING
Oranges with salt and olive oil and whatever accouterments (avocados, quick pickled shallots, seeds and spices) come to mind on the recommendation of one Bettina Makalintal.
Capellini with garlic scape pesto, sort of following this recipe but with almonds and miso instead of walnuts and nutritional yeast, and marinated beans following one of my old write-ups. Anything pesto, anything marinated, and any riff on tomato garlic confit will probably constitute the vast majority of the meals I cook this summer.
Plum cake inspired by my grandmas that I have shared before but cannot seem to stop fidgeting with and a carrot cake I made for a friend that won my very modest Instagram giveaway. The layers were based on this recipe with golden raisins folded into the batter as per my friend’s request, the filling and topping were a very simple canned pineapple cooked down with sugar and cornstarch to a curd-like consistency, and for the frosting I improvised the kind of cream-cheese adjacent vegan buttercream with some tang and a nice amount of lemon. I dusted it all in some shredded coconut just for extra crunch. Everyone involved with eating this cake, and I did grab a few slices too, was pretty pleased.