Isomerization

On boxing class, cyborgs and being in community

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.

Find me on Twitter and Instagram. I’d also love it if you shared this letter with a friend.

If you are here because you like my writing about science or my Tweets about teaching or my Instagrams about cooking, 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.

ISOMERIZATION*

My boxing gym is very bright and very dark at the same time. The front room, where you sign in, show your vaccination card and check out your gloves, drowns you in bright light. One white wall is lined with racks of workout clothes and branded hoodies. The rest are punctuated by images of celebrities with boxing gloves photoshopped onto their hands in something of a pop art facsimile. This is a practical decor choice that doubles as an easily Instagram-able aesthetic. It makes the space feel like it was engineered for someone who is cultivating both a vibe and some muscle. 

Locker rooms are downstairs and they are also bright and white. When you open a locker, a black-and-white photo of a 90s Beyonce or some movie star from the same decade may be looking back at you from its inside. Everything in the women’s locker room is fully stocked – dry shampoo, menstrual products, mouthwash, lotion, facewash, hair ties, combs. It’s a real abundance of products that could help hide signs of having used your body during class. You can come in sweaty and spent and emerge covered in that nonchalant cool-girl glam that already includes seemingly messy hair and glowy, almost greasy no-makeup makeup, the kind of look that magazines and blogs attribute to New York’s street-fashion savvy without a second thought. If you’re white and skinny, leggings and an oversized sweater will be identified as a fashion choice anyway, so might as well have put some real sweat into them first.

For the actual class, you enter a dark room. It is filled with punching bags on one side and benches with built-in dumbbell racks on the other. The instructor walks you through the six basic punches, then the room gets darker. You do your jumping jacks and high knees and hot feet under so little light that you can’t really pick out the details of the bodies of the people working out next to you. That comparison that often drives insecurity which in turns drives people to spend even more time at the gym is dimmed and diminished. 

Throughout the class, the music is loud and heavy on beats you could easily dance to. It’s a little like being in a club, but more sweaty in a less sexy way. The instructor’s voice booms over it, providing instructions alongside somewhat personalized inspirational phrases, the kind that trainers sell so well even when it is really corny. (You can lie to yourself about it, but you know you want someone to tell you to forget about your day, focus on your body, and let your feelings flow into your hands.) Towards the end of the forty-five minute session, during round eight, a blacklight comes on so if you chose the right workout outfit you quite literally start to glow. It caught me by surprise the first time, seeing my shorts light up as I was pushing through just a few more seconds of burpees, flinging myself onto the ground to the beat of a dance song I had only previously heard in half-minute snippets on TikTok. My body already felt like it was in overdrive, like I’m seconds away from losing control of its jerky jumping and not-so-controlled falling, and then I lit up, like a robot whose oil change or mandatory maintenance lights have finally come on. Or maybe like a generator that works well enough to power up something massive. Something in my mind briefly snapped and I could feel the edges of that power in my taut tendons, in my straining muscles, perhaps even in my bones. Stepping back into the light after time was up, I saw that I was also glistening with sweat - a much more visceral way to shine.

***

In Trick Mirror, Jia Tolentino writes about Instagram influencers, barre classes and athleisure as parts of a single complex. The essay that delves deep into it is titled “Always Be Optimizing”. It connects the three to the very real experience of women that indulge in these activities never quite getting to take a break, be it a physical break from the gym or a mental break from their social media feeds. There is always a new trend, a new sleek and polished look, a new level of endurance, a new level of looking rich that can stay top of mind for the optimization-minded modern woman. 

“The ideal woman has always been generic,” Tolentino writes somewhat ruthlessly. “She looks like an Instagram which is to say, an ordinary woman reproducing lessons of the marketplace, which is how an ordinary woman evolves into an ideal.” And then, later, “The ideal woman, in other words, is always optimizing. She takes advantage of technology, both in the way she broadcasts her self image and in the meticulous improvement of that image itself.” 

Tolentino goes on to trace her own history with exercising, from a forceful rejection of any societally imposed health and beauty standard to a graduate school dalliance with unsophisticated Midwestern yoga studios to a full on affair with sleek New York City barre. The way she describes here barre classes is particularly striking - she makes them sound militaristic and sexual at once, like she is being groomed to become some sort of a fembot. Barre is also expensive which makes it a must for women of a certain class and a seemingly reachable signifier of upward mobility for those in classes slightly below it. It is at its roots connected to ballet which puts it in a lineage of activities that center female bodies in pain and female bodies being reshaped. In Tolentino’s telling, nothing seems to optimize a woman living under capitalism and under patriarchy and all their cousins more than barre class. 

As with the ever-expanding market for self-care, wellness, spiritual healing, pop psychology and shadow work - all concepts that are mostly marketed to women and mostly on social media - exercise classes like barre are deemed valuable because they count as “doing the work”. If a woman convinces herself that she is doing that work for herself and that she came up with the idea of doing it by herself, Tolentino argues, she may even get a sense of power and emancipation from it. Of course, most exercise geared towards women is intimately tied to a white, thin beauty ideal which takes the empowerment argument into the murky waters. Is it more empowering to reclaim something you have been told you have to like or to spend remarkable amounts of energy rejecting that thing and dealing with the consequences? 

“The beauty ideal asks you to understand your physical body as a source of potential and control. It provides a tangible way to exert power,” Tolentino writes in response. Not surprisingly, many people that have suffered from eating disorders report turning to calorie counting and severe restriction - essentially means of body control and body shaping - in moments where everything else about their lives felt deeply chaotic and unpredictable. (Personally, I have only ever successfully eaten at a calorie deficit for more than a few weeks at a time during the most stressful and uncertain parts of my doctoral work. I still have that instinct within me, it tempts me with how easy it would be to skip a meal when a day goes off the rails and I can’t do anything about it.)

Control and optimization is where athleisure enters the argument as well. Wearing workout clothes signals that you work out, that you’re ready to work out, that you want to work out. It also tucks you in, keeps you tight, wicks your sweat away. The really expensive stuff can make you look almost a little alien, a little too smooth, often a bit shiny. You can tell cheap athleisure from the more elite iterations because it is more likely to have nearly-sexy ladder or mesh details, or garrish designs or overly bright accents. As with make-up a la Glossier (a brand that made a huge splash in part by being optimized for Instagram-ability), good athleisure hides the effort of reshaping your body, and if you actually exercised in it, it would hide the ugly, messy parts of that too. Artificial effortlessness is part of what money can always buy in fashion. It’s why there are so many maximalist leaning Gen-Z rebels on fashion TikTok and why adhering to trends is always a bit “cheugy”. Minimalism never really goes out of style if you can finance the most optimal version of it or the one that makes you look almost to simple and sleek, pure even, to be just a dirty human. 

With all the talk of optimization and technology, whether it be fabrics or social media posts, it is not surprising that Tolentino ends her essay with Donna Haraway and the A A Cyborg Manifesto. This is a complex and difficult text that used to be a darling of early 2000s Tumblr, a piece that, when I was in college, many Internet feminists could reference, but not actually explain. Tolentino’s take is among the best I’ve read. It centers the idea that not only is the parallel between the modern woman - the woman as the modern society wants her to be - and the cyborg in how artificially constructed they are, but also that awareness of this artificiality is where the potential for rebellion comes from. 

If the cyborg knows she is artificial then she will not think that those artificial traits are her one, true, pure essence that she cannot possibly betray. The cyborg, in this reading, does not fall into the trap of equating her moral goodness with her beauty or her work ethic with her ability to work on her body. It’s never been clear to me, however, whether the cyborg has desires other than to rebel against those that have attempted constructing her, if her purpose goes beyond what Harraway calls “infidel heteroglossia” or a source of conflicting voices within a system. Tolentino ends her essay with the same question: “What would you want - what desires, what forms of insubordination, would you be able to access - if you had succeeded in becoming an ideal woman, gratified and beloved, proof of the efficiency of a system that magnifies and diminishes you every day?”

One answer may be to simply complicate the way we do or do not slot people into categories like “woman”.

*** 

I am a sweaty person. I sweat when I work out at home and leave full-body imprints on my unreasonably thin yoga mat. I used to sweat profusely in yoga classes, often seeing little droplets make their way from the tip of my nose an onto the studio floor whenever I went into downward dog. I still sweat a ton on boxing class. Afterwards, when I have to change back into my work uniform, my slacks and button downs and neckerchiefs and cardigans, it feels inappropriate to let those clothes touch my body no matter how many towels and how much dry shampoo comes into play. During the winter, not only am I sweaty, but my legs are also rarely shaved perfectly. The sight of me in the locker room is quite disgustingly human. Though I wear matching outfits and have not been a stranger to mirror selfies, there is not that much finessing or optimizing evident in my overall design. Most nights, however, I am not the only person that has slipped up and shown some humannes. Often there’s a sighting or two of belly rolls peaking between leggings and sports bras, not being hidden by oversized shirts. The majority of students in these classes are women and though some can be overheard talking about stocks (we are in Manhattan after all) or their sorority “littles”, the lack of uniformity among them always pleasantly surprises me. They are not all Lululemon fembots and that makes me feel more at home. 

Whenever I can, I box with a tall friend who out-sweats and out-hairs me easily. I have always been self-conscious about being taller than many of my female friends, but when I am the shorter one and have to look up at my friend, most of what I see is their strength and power. At some point early in the pandemic they introduced me to a YouTube workout channel that helped me grow the little bit of back and shoulder muscle I now have. In turn, I brought them to boxing class. The satisfaction of these activities and setting stems from a similar place for both of us - a rejection of a feminized fragility we were socialized with. Hitting the bags and lifting the dumbbells is also an investment in the reshaping of a seemingly female body away from a heteronormative, cisgendered standard. Being sweaty in boxing class turns the perfectly sleek fembot that straight men can fantasize about into a queer mess where we are in on the joke of artificiality - and we are trying to upgrade ourselves as only we see fit and proper.

There have long been queer readings of Haraway and I was surprised to not see much discussion of queerness in the Tolentino essay that did so strongly resonated with me on many other points. It misses the point of A Cyborg’s Manifesto to ask why the cyborg has to have gender because Haraway seems to have purposely started her argument with a cyborg and a woman in particular. Thirty plus years after Haraway’s original essay, however, it is the people that play with gender, that question gender and that let their gender be fluid and inconsequential to who they are as a person that are the closest to not turning something inherently artificial into the moral essence of their personhood. 

To be more crude, if you know gender is made up, you can just let yourself be a full person instead. Being genderqueer or non-binary could be that “infidel heteroglossia”, the rejection of equating a woman with her genitals could be the ultimate act of rebellion, the use of overly clean workout spaces to change your body into something that’s hard to categorize could be an act of transcending and embracing the artificial at once. On those same Tumblr pages that I first learned about Haraway from, people joked that there is no bodyhack more powerful than changing your body chemistry in order to change your gender.

***

For a month or so at the beginning of the school year, I ran with my school’s cross-country team. Their coach, another queer teacher, had always been very friendly and after so much remote teaching and so much we’re-back-in-school-now awkwardness of early September, I was really intent on finding a space to connect with students in a more human way than what I could do as their instructor in the classroom. The team ran in East River Park, right by the water, soaking in some of Manhattan's best views, surrounded by all groups of teenagers from all other school’s in the area aiming to use the park, and the late summer sun, in the exact same way. When I was in high school, we ran “hill repeats” on actual hills, these kids got to do them on the Williamsburg bridge. 

The first time I showed up to cross-country practice, student athletes were running a timed trial. Though I could have just warmed up with them then hung out with their coach at the finish line, I chose to get my time measured as well. I assumed I’d be slower than all the teenage boys at the peak of their bodily power and I was right about that. But I also ran my best three-mile time in years. When I did cross the makeshift finish line and got a few “you go Dr.C”s my heart was pounding and my body teeming with endorphins. I’m sure I was awkward throughout the practice and part of me was relieved that only a few of the students that saw me in my matching sports bra and bike shorts soaked in sweat that day would see me in room 302 or 202 the next. I came back to practice once a week until the cross-country season ended and with every consequent similar moment, the deep feeling of being content with my body and its movement fully overshadowed those more prideful concerns.

I think I grew on the kids a little as time went on. A few flattered me by asking for not only college advice or calculus hacks, but also small running tips. During one practice, I got to show off my fairly shaky upside down wheel (Urdhva Dhanurasana) and either the blood rushing to my head just really got to me that day or I was genuinely quite happy to be testing my strength in the sun in good company. In a year where teaching has been so stressful and overwhelmingly complex, where I am by default constantly seen and observed, where physical tiredness is constant and relentless - all perfect conditions for the latent hate I have for my body to bubble up and become more pointed and tangible - feeling so good in cross-country practice was something I needed more than I knew at the time. 

Yet, I did keep thinking about Tolentino and her indictment of athleisure and the female urge to keep optimizing. Changing from my work clothes into my running gear always felt like becoming a different, more powerful and less sad person. But I also buy my running gear from a company founded by a washed up actress, on sale, in matching colors and prints, in cuts that hide how much my stomach wages war on all food groups some days. I shared many of the practices on Instagram, just like I always share the splits and the pace from my weekend runs. A casual follower may know my ‘calories burned’ for each run much sooner than they’d know how right and at home in my skin running makes me feel. 

Maybe I’ve been conditioned to choose to present myself this way, to seek validation for the optimization work I am doing on my body instead of highlighting the pride in it that the traditional power structure will not praise me for. Maybe I still feel the need to justify the somewhat un-feminine features working out has given me by presenting my stats as proof that I am doing the feminine work of spending myself, making myself physically less expansive. I am not soft and smooth anymore as I have always been taught I should be, but I can still be very efficient.

***

Certainly, being part of a sports team or paying 33$ a week to use a boxing gym will never be revolutionary by itself. It is not a radical art of queerness or gender defiance to want to be fit and then feel conflicted about it. The revolution does not come in stretchy fabric and nice locker room face-wash. But there is a seed of power in these ways of being in our bodies if we can divorce them from the idea that they are just about us - about just my optimization and just my presentation of just myself.

Before a very important race, the cross-country coach invited me to say a few words to the team, right after all the captains and high school seniors doled out their rather emotional advice. I’m not sure that it matters what I said, but being asked to share and being earnestly listened to really moved me. More recently, when I had remarkably bad laryngitis, a boxing instructor messaged me on social media to recommend a herbal syrup that had helped them in the past. We had only really briefly interacted once or twice so the message was surprising, and it made me feel cared for that much more. (And the syrup did really help.) I’ve had some of the most genuine and raw conversations with the friend I box with in that very white locker room. I felt like I really made a valuable work-friend on the track, in-between telling kids to lower their shoulders or pick up their knees. It was easier for my body to feel mine and mine in a way I could be thankful for and appreciative off if the activity that was reshaping it to my liking was shared with someone. It all always comes down to the same revelation, and maybe that’s one that’s somewhat missing from Tolentino’s essay - community care can often neutralize so many of the harms embedded in structures of our lives that would have us forget that we don’t lose power when we share with others. Not surprisingly, most of the people I am crediting with making me feel in-community here are also queer, and queer people have always known that banking on the power of community is the only way forward.

***

On Monday and Thursday nights, it often happens that I am trying to complete a workout in the living room while my husband is watching football in the room nearby. In ten or twenty second breaks in between sets of the kinds of compound moves you can really go hard with even with just a small set of dumbbells and a resistance band, I will overhear TV announcers list the weights and heights of players or comment on their physical abilities, their raw strength and speed, in a way that doesn’t leave all that much space for personhood. Sometimes, my husband and I joke about me training to become a quarterback some day, purely based on these conveniently-timed late night sweat sessions and not at all on my understanding of the game. “Could you do that?” he will say while pointing at a slow-motion replay of a player leaping over another or running in a quick zig-zag. It’s funny because clearly I could not. At the same time, what I am trying to do, what I am wanting to do, is so much more.

Best,

Karmela 

*In molecular physics and chemistry, isomerization is the process in which a molecule rearranges itself. In other words, the atoms that make it up move relative to each other which changes the molecule’s structure and how it can function in some reaction, but not its chemical composition.

Do you like Ultracold? Help me grow this newsletter by recommending it to a friend or sharing this letter on social media.

ABOUT ME LATELY

Photo by @bigbabyintoyland

WRITING

For Scientific American, I reported on a fascinating semiconductor experiment that helps connect the very abstract formalism of quantum theory and its focus on mathematical objects called wavefunctions and the very tangible reality of shooting lasers at materials. A quantum mechanical wavefunction is a complex number and complex numbers can include square roots of negative numbers which, as far as we know, do not have counterparts in nature. Reconstructing a wavefunction from measurements of light that a semiconductor re-emits after being hit with a laser is then quite notable. It could also have real consequences for the way quantum devices, which are always mathematically modeled with wavefunctions, are constructed and tested in the future.  It was really great to take a deep dive into this work as it both uses state-of-the-art tools of quantum and materials physics and speaks to how the mathematical structure of quantum mechanics - something theorists like me enjoy, but people like my editors lovingly refer to as gnarly - does in fact reflect the real world. 

Additionally, I was beyond flattered to have my old opinion essay on ultracold atoms featured in a new collector’s edition of Scientific American that focuses on the quantum world. I audibly gasped when I saw the names of some of the other scientists and writers that also contributed to this issue. I had written this essay from the standpoint of a researcher rather than a reporter and much has changed about my writing and my ambition as a writer since. I do, however, still stand by the enthusiasm I had for the ultracold atomic research and the firm belief that it needs to be talked about more outside of the physics community and in the popular science media. I’ve been working really hard to build myself up as a science writer ever since this piece originally ran, and I am still really doing so by telling and, more importantly, because I want to tell stories from the realms of condensed matter and ultracold physics. Holding the paper magazine in my hands really felt like it validates that quest.

For WIRED, I wrote about a study that involved ultrashort bursts of X-rays, proteins that react to light, quantum mechanics and artificial intelligence all working in unison to pinpoint details of a process that takes only a quadrillionth of a second. Proteins rearrange themselves when exposed to light and that change of shape changes their function in the cell. This important shape-shift, however, has so far been too fast to observe or capture through any sort of detailed imagining technique. Now, researchers have shown that AI can be of huge help with this task and produce unprecedentedly detailed “movies” of the protein shape change. This sort of interdisciplinary work is always really fascinating, and since it seems like machine learning is suddenly everywhere it’s great to see it give a boost to fundamental research as well.

I also reported an article for Physics World, focusing on an all-in-one standalone quantum cryptography system that uses light-based chips. In a future where quantum computers help advance our research and technology, quantum hackers would be a real concern so bringing this sort of cryptography closer to mass production capabilities and real commercial markets is of great interest to scientists and technologists alike. The system I reported on is small, could be manufactured by techniques that are already used in the semiconductor industry and can run autonomously (without a person having to operate it), securely transmitting quantum encrypted information over tens of kilometers for days or weeks at a time. 

Since my last letter, I also did a lot of writing at my teaching job, all of it revolving around letters of recommendation and college application essays. I have felt a lot of gratitude for the trust my students and advisees put into me when they asked me to write recommendations for them or to edit their own writing. I have also been feeling a fair amount of pressure to put whatever writing chops I have in service of their future and it has been a bit of a learning experience to write with such high stakes in mind. Notably, when a student I have never taught randomly showed up in my office to ask for help with their essay because they had heard I was a “really good writer” I teared up a bit around the edges of my mask. So far, two of the students I advised and wrote for received really great admissions news, and I hope you can hold your fingers crossed for the rest of them as well.

LEARNING

As you can probably infer from the long break in the publishing of this newsletter, learning and re-learning how to balance my teaching obligations and my writing work has been an ongoing challenge. 

I could probably use this space to comment on how different it is to teach 9th grade this fall than it was last year because of the academic and social-emotional knowledge that many of our students are lacking after a year-and-a-half of on-and-off Zoom school. I could also use it to comment on what I have learned about the work of my colleagues and about the limits of their patience and empathy. Or I could comment on learning about just how impactful changes in school leadership can be on everyone in the building, even if you think your interactions with “higher-up’s” are minimal. Instead, I would much rather take the time to acknowledge that despite that backdrop of negativity, there has still been a lot of learning happening in my classrooms, by both me and my students. 

It is true that everything does feel more chaotic this semester, but that is not all there is to it. Accordingly, the biggest lesson for me has been to be flexible in my planning and vigilant about checking in on students’ progress so that I can slow down or deepen classes as necessary. I have always been very fond of planning ahead, and now I am learning to make plans that allow for quick adjustments instead of being overly determined by my mapping out every single detail of every single class ahead of time. I am still trying to practice much of what I learned from reading Grading for Equity and I am finding myself grateful for everyone who gave me advice on making classes dynamic and interactive last year while teaching was partly remote because some of those tricks are really useful in my current in-person classroom. 

My students this fall may not have the stamina for sitting still and “sponging in” knowledge - likely a false premise to begin with - that some of their peers had in the past and some are re-learning how to make friends after quarantine, just like I still sometimes feel like I am learning how to integrate myself into the community of teachers in my school. Regardless, I feel lots of genuine love and care for them and that connection is motivating me to find whatever grit I have left to learn more about teaching them and helping them learn. The danger of diving deep into a disillusionment concerning how challenging some classes are and staying stuck in that dark place seems to be rather real and seems to have claimed a few other teachers I rub elbows with and I am trying to be mindful of it. The whole thing truly is very hard very often, but I tell myself that learning resilience has always been a long-term project for me.

LISTENING

On the podcast front, I have been really enjoying Some of My Best Friends Are from Pushkin Industries, hosted by Harvard history professor Khalil Gibran Muhammad and journalist Ben Austen. The two are best friends, one Black and one white, who grew up together on the South Side of Chicago in the 1980s. The show revolves around their conversations about topics that range from buddy cop movies to tennis, but ultimately always refer back to race. It is a really compelling take on the two-friends-talking podcast format where Muhammad and Austen offer many intellectually stimulating discussions brimming with complex facts and informed insights while also, simultaneously, presenting a rather heartwarming reflection on a long and rich friendship. 

Looking back on my podcast-listening habits this past year, I have mostly been listening to The Ringer’s Big Picture (movie talk), Longform (writing talk)  and a whole lot of news shows on NPR. It has not been one of those years when podcasts felt like my best friends’ voices (I really miss Supercontext, still) nor one of those years when they made me tear up and reconsider the power of storytelling as the one big animating force behind our world. I consumed a lot more content on the Supreme Court (mostly thanks to Strict Scrutiny, but Vox’s the Weeds made it into my rotation often as well) than ever before out of pure dread about how little I actually understand about the law, and that sort of listening often took precedent over more unadulterated enjoyment of shows like Radiolab and 99PI. Both of these classics continue to be exemplars of fantastic science and technology reporting and letting this sort of journalism under my skin instead of allowing politicians to haunt my thoughts will be more of a priority for me in the coming year. It would be great to feel like I can leverage good podcasting as inspiration and motivation again for thinking, writing and just being again.

Cult of Luna put out a new single called Cold Burn and I liked it enough to have it on loop for a few days. Along the same genre lines, I have been enjoying Year of No Light’s record titled Consolamentum. Though I prefer my post-metal with harsh, scratchy vocals most of the time, this fully instrumental take does not lack any of the careful, deliberate noisiness that makes the genre so enjoyable. 

In late September, some of my husband’s friends treated him to a short trip to Las Vegas for his birthday. I could not go because of work, but I have been listening to the Vegas themed playlist that he put together for the trip ever since.

WATCHING

We have watched quite a few TV shows since my last letter and for the most part they have been quite good. 

The most recent season of Rick and Morty delivered on all the promises of insight, humor, care and occasional grossness that the show previously set. 

The third season of Sex Education did not wow me, and I do think it is becoming a more and more over-the-top version of its original premise as it keeps going, but it has not yet reached a point where I would want to actively avoid it. In short, the writing just seems more rushed and lazy than in the past with grosser gags, soapier plotlines, and didactic bits of actually useful sex education presented with less finesse. I did appreciate the introduction of non-binary characters, but did not necessarily love their ultimately sad story arcs nor the fact that being non-binary was once more flattened to a person assigned female at birth who binds and hides their body to appear more masculine. I hope the next season will give us a bit more complexity, on this front and all others.

FX’s Reservation Dogs was fantastic, harnessing big Atlanta vibes, but with fewer forays into unnecessary controversy and lots of really poignant, emotionally resonant moments delivered by a really impressive cast of young Indigenous actors. I’m looking forward to seeing more of this show and would very much recommend it.

After what has felt like a very long time to be hanging out in early 2000s New Jersey, we finished watching the Sopranos. The show had certainly become more and more dark and more and more ugly in its last two seasons, taking fewer artistic chances and casting death as one of its main characters in so many of the show’s late episodes. Maybe this was a natural progression for the series and I don’t hold it against it - taking in the inner lives of its characters was never going to leave me feeling refreshed or clean. I know the ending is controversial, and I guess I fall into the school of people that liked it in the same way I liked, from the very beginning, that nothing in this show ever really changes or follows a plot that actually matters. The content of the five or even ten episodes before the finale baffled me more than the ending because they packed in a lot of new developments that were then left not so much unresolved as much as unremarked upon. Maybe that too is part of what the quiet ambiguity of the last few minutes was really about. Somewhat oddly, Sopranos often reminded me of Seinfeld - a show about bad people that rarely learn any lessons - and, for what that’s worth, I thought it had the better ending.

On the note of shows about bad people that continue to be bad, we are watching Succession together with what seems to be every TV pundit on the Internet. Together with those critics and commentators, I am simultaneously marveling at the show’s biting jokes and snappy dialogue and despairing over how real its depravity feels. I would argue that this is another series that barely has a plot and alternates between being a character study and a comedy-room writer’s acidic wittiness competition in a way that is at times borderline meaningless, but I also can’t stop watching it or consuming content about it which may speak to its value more than any half-baked attempt at criticism I could muster.

Finally, we have been watching Brand New Cherry Flavor on Netflix and though we have not finished it yet, I have been a big fan of it. This is an uncomfortable, gross show about 90s Hollywood, witches, art, possessiveness, confronting the past and puking up cats. At times it reminds me of aspects of Too Old To Die Young that I really liked, at times it is just really campy in how it explores black magic, at times it is just really tense and uncomfortable because that’s what it is meant to be. Most of the time, I am also quite in love with Rosa Salazar who puts in an incredibly intense performance as the series lead. I hope this will become a new horror classic as more and more people discover it.

We saw two movies in an actual movie theater: Jane Campion’s Power of the Dog during the New York Film Festival and our fancy second wedding anniversary date night and Licorice Pizza by Paul Thomas Anderson during a more regular date night a week or so ago. These are two very different movies and two movies that would have probably been way less enjoyable to watch at home. Campion’s film is something of an anti-western that unspools slowly, that builds both dread and beauty through cold shots of natural landscapes and warm shots of actor’s bodies that begin to resemble those landscapes. The ending of the film felt like a genuinely unexpected twist and effectively rendered what I thought was an artsy period piece into an exploration of what could be characterized as a case of psychopathy. It was a really masterful bait-and-switch that really reminded me of why movies are still worth seeing on the big screen, away from my couch and my phone. I expected Licorice Pizza to hide some similarly dark twist but the surprise of this film is that it begins as a slightly deranged fairytale and it also ends as one. This is a gorgeously shot film jam-packed with great acting performances and vignettes about child actors, young love, building identity and scheming for money that are both hilarious and just on the right edge of absurd. Licorice Pizza is almost orthogonal to all other Anderson movies, yet a strong argument in favor of his greatness as a director. 

Finally, we caught up on some classics I had somehow never seen before: Michael Mann’s Heat which was just outrageous in every way, Martin Scorceses’ Goodfellas which generally really impressed me and certainly felt like a solid foundation for the behemoth that Sopranos later became, and the seasonal Tim Burton production The Nightmare Before Christmas which was so much more artful and interesting than I would have ever guessed based on all the merch it sold in 2010s Hot Topic.

READING

Embarrassingly, I have still not finished Tolentino’s Trick Mirror, but I am still really enjoying it. 

Related to the essay in this latter, this issue of the Small Bow on aging, addiction and fitness. I found this paragraph to be very effective:

“Like: I want to be strong enough to scoop up my three kids and the dog and run a mile with them if/when there's a big earthquake or other natural disaster. I want to carry 60 bags of groceries in one trip. I want to open Progresso vegetable soup cans with one squeeze, Popeye-style so I can better multi-task in the kitchen. I want to do a handstand push-up, but also wouldn’t mind landing on my nose several times trying to perfect it so it breaks in half and I’m forced to get rhinoplasty. I’d like to be able to tear apart cardboard boxes like they’re tissue paper so they all fit in the blue recycle bin. I also want to be able to carry the black garbage bin and the blue recycling bin up from the curb high over my head like I’m Hercules. I want to learn how to change a tire. Wait. Wrong list. However, it would be cool to change a tire without tools, to pick up the family SUV with one hand while I unscrew the lug nuts with two fingers that are strong enough to puncture the solar plexuses of all my sworn enemies. I’d like to have a stronger neck so I’m not sore after I fall asleep on the couch. I want to build up the muscles in my middle toes, so I no longer yelp when I step on a six-inch plastic velociraptor left on the living room floor. I want to have enough confidence on the inside that I don’t care what I look like with my shirt off anymore. (Although I’d prefer not to look like an ape that’s in the middle of radiation treatment.)

That’s it. Those are my fitness goals. So do you know anyone who can help me achieve them?”

This piece on physics and music by Katie McCormick for Aeon magazine.

This issue of Vittles on cookbook aspirationalism, no-recipe recipes, idolizing TikTokers and where desire, for food and identity, comes from.

EATING

A fair amount pastries, whether they be croissants or all-out treat boxes by local vegan bakers, because I am still quite caught up in the New York of it all. As I have reflected on Instagram, I am trying to more consciously appreciate how many moments of my life now look like snippets from other folks’ social media feeds I would have been jealous of a few years ago. Sharing a weekend special croissant with a friend or trying a slice of gingerbread cake from a limited bake are, in the grand scheme of things, minor indulgences, but I could only imagine partaking in them while I lived in small-town Illinois and was so broke that spending a few cents less by buying green peppers instead of red seemed like a necessary grocery store strategy. Buying myself pastries, or even a regularly schedules Saturday morning bagel with vegan cream cheese, always tastes at least a bit like wish fulfillment.

Cakes of my own making: a pumpkin spice cake with chocolate ganache filling and a coconut caramel buttercream frosting for a friend’s birthday and a more traditional birthday cake with funfetti, cocoa frosting and a layer of ganache for my brother in law’s birthday. For a pasta-making and Goodfellas-watching party we had with friends, I attempted a baked New York style vegan cheesecake. It had a chocolate wafer crust and I topped it with homemade dark cherry compote. Overall it was really quite successful as far as eggless, dairy-free “cheesecakes” go and I’m hoping to make another one soon because I really got very close to being exactly right. 

Seitan experiments, mostly “ribs” studded with jackfruit following this recipe, but calling wild audibles when it comes to sauces and glazes. I have not perfected them yet, but it’s been fun to explore a dish that is both somewhat new to me and quite versatile.

Dishes that show off form as much as they show of flavor: a fully improvised pumpkin chili served out of a pair of whole baked small pumpkins and onigiri and inari sushi stuffed with ume plums. I’m a little bit of a sucker for a self-contained presentation, but all of these also tasted really good.