Self-consistent Field Theory

Hi and thanks for subscribing to my newsletter! Winter break is over, I have returned from Europe and am hoping to resume the letters on a fairly regular schedule, likely biweekly, from now on. One of the best things I did while away from work was to only turn on my computer twice and ignore emails and various other buzzings of my phone, but I am grateful for all of you that hung in there and are still reading.

The breakdown is as follows: a personal essay on top of the letter and some more concrete life updates, current media favorites and a recipe at its bottom so feel free to skip to whatever interests you. (Please feel free to hit the Reply button at any time, for any purpose.)

SELF-CONSISTENT FIELD THEORY*

It was 3am on January 1st and we were in a sketchy karaoke joint in Vienna. My boyfriend tried to order a beer and the odd medley of employees hanging out on the other side of the bar openly laughed at his German (mis)pronunciation while a group of kids, in an even mix of suits and crop tops, looking like they might have just become old enough to celebrate the new year in an establishment that serves alcohol, launched into a pretty painful rendition of Uptown Funk. The friend that brought us there, a short blond German offspring of academics who mostly grew up in New York and you can tell, who happens to be classically trained in music offered a pretty negative review of this current musical endeavor then leaned in closer and announced they were about to get ‘very deep’. I can’t remember their exact wording but the gist of the deep insight, the first to be shared in the new year, is that when you grow up abroad coming back to what is, usually quite forcefully, designated as your capital-H Home can make you feel like someone completely different than who you think you really are. We briefly compared notes on our respective familial geography situations then got distracted by what seemed to be the beginning of a physical conflict among the crew of overly rich, young, possibly blue-blooded, Austrians whose party we were technically a part of. Our friend’s brother, and he had really been responsible for us getting surreptitiously invited to this outing, managed to diffuse the situation and in anticipation of a long day of sightseeing and travel the next day we cut our conversation short afterwards and headed towards the shockingly clean Austrian subway, ready for a few hours of quiet in our extremely minimalist, ‘budget’ hotel room.

I have an uncle in Croatia who likes to explain things. If you were to watch a long-distance running race, a half-marathon maybe, on TV with him, he would try and explain to you what it must feel like even though he has only ever run a few slow laps around a soccer field near his apartment. If you were to bring up prices of sushi in a landlocked part of a foreign country, he would launch into a discussion of the fish trade abroad even though he has certainly never bought fish outside of his local supermarket which is quite close to the sea. If you were to admit to taking allergy medicine for half of the year because dust, pollen and cat hair wreak havoc on your respiratory system, he would launch into a diatribe about how all drugs are poison even if you were at that moment sitting in a coffee shop and he was enjoying a cigarette.

A few days after Christmas, this uncle, me, my boyfriend, my brother, my mother and my maternal grandparents were finishing up a meal and half-arguing about something simple yet infuriating like saltiness of the salad or temperature of the soup we had just eaten when the TV channel quietly murmuring in the background came alive with a trivia game show. Someone turned up the volume and as a well-known Croatian game show host (no one even remembers that he used to be an actor anymore) started rattling off questions everyone tuned in and I scrambled to try and translate at least some of the prompts to my boyfriend in real time. A music question led us into a rabbit hole of discussing famous singers that had died somewhat recently and at some point the uncle turned to me and asked, quite sincerely, whether it was true that Whitney Houston really took that much drugs. Having always been subtly criticized for being a metal fan, I was confused as to why I was suddenly treated as a Whitney Houston expert until my uncle explained that because I live in the United States I must have more accurate information on American celebrities. I tried to argye that I don’t really read the papers and that I have literally never owned a TV so anyone at the table who did was way more likely to be tapped into celebrity gossip, but the uncle insisted that just by virtue of spending time in very rough geographic proximity to American stars I have to have heard something. I jokingly told him that what I mostly hear about is ultracold atoms and topological invariants, but I think he interpreted that as me being difficult and got mildly offended. Luckily the game show was still on and gave me an excuse to get distracted by trying to explain the host’s joke about a much more local celebrity to my very American boyfriend who also had no profound insight into Whitney Houston’s drug habits.

For the first few years that I spent living the United States I went back to Croatia fairly often. I was in high school, not chased by financial debts or the specter of academic research and the uncertain future that couples to it, and skipping a holiday or a break seemed nothing short of inappropriate. In those years, almost up to the time when I was half-way through college, I have to imagine I seemed like a fairly continuous person to my parents and the mirror effect – where everything looks the same and you probably also mostly look the same, but everything has also somehow inexplicably flipped – should have been less prominent. However, the pain of recognizing that I was often not who I was expected to, or maybe more simply just remembered, to be or that I could not get all that much recognition for the pseudo-deep and definitely volatile changes I had perceived myself undergoing was never minor or negligible. Some of those trips home left me resentful, confused and nervous about returning in a few months and having to work out, once again, who I should really be going as. I thought about this again in December as we were marathoning the new Twin Peaks in my boyfriend’s parents’ house in Brooklyn instead of weighing our suitcases or double-checking our passports or whatever it is responsible people do the night before a long trip abroad. I’ve become more self-confident than I was in college, or at least learned to give the appearance of someone who has figured out what their schtick is without being too emotional, which made me wonder just how many old patterns will reemerge and old flows sweep me up once I return to the sights of my childhood.

Last summer, Lauren of the Keats Free Zone** wrote to me, in response to some scattered thoughts I had about authenticity and vulnerability

“what does it mean to know someone? Is it enough to know their persona (which is my preferred term for the layer of fakeness or performativity that surrounds any person)? Do you have to know multiple personas? I have friends where I know a lot about their philosophies and the way they think about life, does that count? Or do I have to know where they were born and what they want to accomplish before they die and their first pet's name?”

One’s family is uniquely positioned to know the latter but under no obligation to inquire after the former. Of course, they could but such inquiry is risky as it might reveal not only disagreement but also a level of foreign-ness to someone who biology dictates to be close and familiar. What if you are a parent and you discover your child’s life philosophy is the exact opposite of what you tried to pass onto them? It happens, and we’ve all seen that holiday movie.

While spending time at my father’s house during this latest visit to Croatia I was actually reminded about just how many cookie-cutter scripted, poorly produced, holiday movies there are on your disposal once you have access to real TV channels and not just the two streaming services you and your partner are willing to alternatingly pay for and share. My boyfriend joked about how watching a couple should give us enough information to write a heart-warming holiday-centric screenplay of our own. However, when reflecting on our trip a few days after returning to work we both admitted that there is a grain of truth, or maybe utility, to the way families are depicted in these films. Most people can predict what their family reunion will look like because every family has stock characters and archetypes, often contentious or ripe for being joked about, that act in predictable ways or are goaded into being that way. In a way, this is nothing new, human brains rely on stereotypes as energy-saving mental shortcuts and we strive on pattern recognition even when the pattern is not really there. Yet, in the context of a family predictability of behavior, no matter how cartoonish, is also strongly tied to comfort.

Writing from the position of privilege in the sense of not having dealt with family abuse and being almost completely independent from my family with respect to finances, education and where I live, I have to admit that there is something like steadiness and safety that comes together with frustration of always getting into the same petty fights with the same petty people. If we are yelling at each other about how warm the soup is just like we did every Sunday for years and years, then we have at least not fallen out to the point where this soup conflict would destroy us, nor do we have more serious fights that would distract us from such an inconsequential point of disagreement. Some of these recurrences become family lore and annoyances are locally mythologized which imbues them with more normalcy and takes away some of the edge. My boyfriend’s oldest brother brings his own brand of coffee whenever we visit their sister’s house despite her being incredibly accomplished in the food department; even I have learned to not only expect this but to watch out for the moment when some other family member brings it up and pushes the joke to the edge of a real fight. (And don’t even get him started on proper coffee pot washing technique.) Luckily the language barrier somewhat shields my boyfriend from the fact that, in my family, there definitely must be disagreements in matters of taste but at this point he also most certainly knows that the loud dinnertime argumentation is just what we do.

Many people originating from the island my family is partly from, and where my father currently lives, moved to the United States in two big waves. One took place in the second half of the 19th century and the other in the 1960s. Most of these migrants settled in New York and some estimates suggest that somewhere between four and six thousand New Yorkers have roots on this same Croatian island. The county in which I grew up even designates a special day in the summer when these expats can visit and be celebrated. My grandfather had relatives that moved to New York when he was young and remembers being sent green dollars and orange cheese. My family has lost touch with these relatives but the islander-turned-expat-in-America is a very familiar figure, and something of a stock character in the local folklore. Often, they speak in a very thick accent, using dialect words that others may have forgotten, due to having missed out on how the language changed while they were abroad. I think about this every time I catch myself slipping a dialect word into a conversation otherwise full of phrases I have borrowed from English. Since I moved out of Croatia quite young and it is very often pointed out to me just how unusual that is whenever I go back, the mild sense (moving due to economic distress is after all very different than chasing miraculous scholarships) of family continuity that could be attached to that move lends it a sense of precedent and maybe even normalcy that I appreciate.

When our friend brought up feeling like a different person at home in that Austrian bar, possibly contemplating their quite formal attire leftover from the New Year’s Eve dinner with their brother’s friends that was so fancy we could not be invited to it (a girl from the party was still rocking what can be most accurately described as an evening gown), a part of me strongly empathized but a part of me also wanted to meet his observation with something like a very polite ‘duh’. It is not so much that I want to dismiss the concern as much as it seems that the phenomenon at hand here is almost unavoidable. There’s an inertia to how we update our ideas of who people are and only being around for special occasions and special days just makes it easier to mythologize someone’s character and therefore make it into a very rigid personality model. And families seem to thrive on patterns, half-true yet often repeated stories and somewhat reductive stock characters. In writing about returning to her childhood home as an adult and following her parents’ separation, writer Durga Chew-Bose brings up the notion of home being an idea that needs tending to. So does family – to keep it tangible and coherent across time and space it needs to be talked about until there’s a jargon built up around it and only those belonging to it are fluent in its tropes and recurring bits. Of course, everything changes all the time but to combat the fear and uncertainty of that change, the family myths remain mostly static.

I stopped asking for birthday parties when I turned eleven but since this winter had me at home during all the right dates for the first time in years, my father insisted on throwing one. He was quite transparent with me: the party was for my relatives much more than it was for me. Later, he remarked that I had been unexpectedly jumpy while trying to cut the one vegan cake I’d baked for myself. I felt slightly overwhelmed by the implication that part of throwing this party for my family’s enjoyment was supposed to include me performing enjoying it even when three different people gave me unsolicited advice while I had a very sharp knife in my hands but ultimately decided a cake-cutting incident was not worth an actual fight. Since the party happened a few days after Christmas we all exchanged gifts with relatives who we did not manage to see on Christmas day. As always happens, most got socks, shower gel or candy deemed just a little too expensive for everyday snacking. Someone had also gifted me a tube of eyeliner (something that became a pretty fixed feature of my face right around the time when I moved) and then caught me off guard with a copy of Bruce Dickinson’s autobiography wrapped in thick gold paper as one of my ‘bigger’ gifts. The aunt that handed it to me preemptively apologized as she was sure I must have one already.

While it is true that Iron Maiden has been incredibly important to me as a music fan and really a huge influence on who I was as a teenager, I doubt that any of my friends from recent years would have settled on that particular gift. A neatly packaged story about a white, male rockstar just is not something that is on my radar anymore no matter how much of an emotional impact their music still has on me; there’s something like a loss of innocence to becoming a more conscious ,and a more critical, fan. But I get it – I’m the niece that got a Derek Riggs tattoo at sixteen with her dad, the niece that moved across the world in heavy eyeliner and an Iron Maiden t-shirt and the niece that just two years ago saw Iron Maiden in between two sessions of a physics conference – this is all a part of my character in the family lore and only a painful, tacky disruption would free me of it. A few days later, as we were driving somewhere in perfect agreement with my family’s inability to stay in one place for any extended period of time, I tried to explain to my mom that I want to change the face I associate with my media consumption by leaning into writing, music, film and television produced by those other than straight, white, cisgender men so much until presence of everyone else in that space becomes not just normal but expected. I was disappointed by a comment a female faculty member had made to me in casual conversation about not being bothered by all ‘classics’ that ever get recommended as far as books go being penned by dead white men because that was the literature she was used to. I wanted her to be angry about not being used to more diverse voices instead and discussing movies with my mom on this drive brought back some of my frustration. But I didn’t say any of this as Bruce Dickinson’s grimacing face was revealed to me beneath the shiny paper. Despite my rather strong belief that we do not own things, or discomfort, to those that happen to be our blood and other relations, I am starting to understand that my family needs a sense of continuity they can cling onto every time I just re-appear with another year having gone by and all these invisible changes having transpired. And if I have to be cast as someone in this micro-myth, my vanity suggests that it may be better to act like someone who really does pick and choose their fights.

A week after we returned from Croatia, I was back in Illinois hiding from a snowstorm while my boyfriend made another trip to his parents’ house for his mom’s birthday party. We texted about his serving some of the Croatian food we had stuffed our suitcases with on our way back to the States, but then the family decided to give a game of Cranium a go and the phone went silent. I was putting a fresh loaf of sourdough in the fridge for its overnight rise probably an hour later when he sent a video of a bunch of familiar faces yelling about whether or not a team has to say ‘final answer’ to earn points in a certain kind of task. In the video, his mom is as red as she gets, his very young niece has her fingers stuffed in her ears and towards the end the camera pans to his older brother who most certainly started the whole thing. I chuckled out loud to myself with the fridge door still open because I have played Cranium with them before and could have absolutely predicted this outcome, down to the resigned look on the third brother’s face peeking over his phone; their family myth was reinforcing itself with gusto.

Best,

Karmela

* In physics, a mean field theory or a self-consistent field theory refers to a type of approximation where some complicated effect or interaction due to a process involving many particles or atoms is replaced by its average. Mean field theories are fairly common in condensed matter physics where systems being studies are many-body i.e. there are many atoms or particles and they all ‘talk to each other’. The many-body nature of real materials such as superconductors or magnets makes most related problems analytically intractable as any problem involving more than two interacting bodies is notoriously difficult to solve exactly. A good example of using a self-consistent field theory in a condensed matter system comes about when considering a model for a magnet in which each atom experiences some magnetic force due to all other atoms. Instead of accounting for each interaction separately, one can introduce some averaged magnetization (this is now the mean field) which will produce the same effect on a given atom. This essentially reduces the many-body problem to a single-body problem that is more likely to be solvable. This approach has been very successful for studying metal-superconductor transitions in conventional superconductors and systems such as liquid crystals. In all of these cases, some self-consistency condition is always present as the mean field cannot produce effects that deviate from the actual behavior of the system (for instance picking out one atomic spin among many as ‘special’ and giving it other than average value) or contradict any assumptions that were made in order to justify introducing it. In the case of the Ising magnet model, for example, magnetization can be exactly determined from the self-consistency equations.

** Full disclosure: Lauren and I briefly went to high school together. However, I cannot recall us ever having a conversation until I started reading the KFZ newsletter. Her writing is insightful, quick witted, funny, elegant and most of the time you feel like she is yelling at you but extremely lovingly and with lots of references. Needless to say, I would recommend it.

***

ABOUT ME LATELY:

LISTENING: For the first few days of being back in the States, my podcast consumption was mostly catching up on the news and, quite expectedly, this slightly burned me out so I ended up leaning into two very different audio binges.

The first, The End of the World with Josh Clark, has been on my radar for a while as I am as much of a fan of Stuff You Should Know as anyone who discovered podcasts more than a few years ago, but the preachy trailers and the mention of micro-black holes as an existential threat put me off (I feel a possibly misplaced sense of kinship for my high energy colleagues that have to entertain the possibility of particle accelerators destroying the world over drinks and at dinner parties). This show is interesting beyond just its subject matter since it is very different than what Clark does as a part of the SYSK duo. It is also another part of the puzzle that is the manic expansion of How Stuff Works under the iHeartRadio umbrella. The fact that this show exists feels a bit like a member of a boy band being allowed to make ‘real music’ once the record company acquires some less mainstream imprint. However, I do not want to sound too cynical as the show is quite good. It’s themes have clearly been extensively researched and Clark quite evidently cares about the subject matter very much. Despite his occasional uncharacteristically stilted delivery, the writing is near great and I repeatedly found myself thinking that a great book could come out of this production. At the same time, this is not Radiolab nor is Clark Nate DiMeo, so the whole thing does also feel like it could be just a bit more vibrant and a bit more compelling if produced with less of a sense of delivering a manifesto. The soundtrack, for instance, is not necessarily poor but the best accolade I feel like I can give to it is ‘inoffensive’. In light of some other new or newer How Stuff Works shows, this strikes me as odd since there do seem to be production teams at the company able to make much more compelling music for shows that are less enlightened and grandiose in their choice of focus. Clark also does get preachy. At times his proselytizing comes off as slightly haughty but reasonable and justified, but in other instances his conviction that listening to this show will make one both believe in the marvel that is the human race and radically commit to saving it borders on condescending and cold. I was also surprised by how little room the scientists interviewed for the show were actually given and how much of the hour-long episodes comes down to Clark talking. Again, I was left thinking that a medium other than a podcast may have served his vision (and his mission) better. This is certainly a show worth binging (and pretty obviously it was recorded in a way that encourages this mode of listening) and I pretty much have to at least admit this – the story about small scales, the quantum world and ‘energy vibrations’ which is Clark’s preferred stand-in for ‘wavefunction’ in the first ten or so minutes of Episode 7 is actually very good.

The other podcast I found myself being captivated by for most of the last two weeks is an Australian true crime show that follows an investigation of a cold case that was ongoing at the time of its publishing, called The Teacher’s Pet. I am not quite sure what it is about true crime that gets to me, and often I feel somewhat icky about enjoying true crime stories blown up into salacious audio narrative, but as with my recent discovery of In the Dark’s second season what makes The Teacher’s Pet avoid some of that ickiness is how methodical and calm it is in its presentation. The host, journalist Headly Thomas, does not editorialize much beyond some expected outrage at police incompetence and some truly terrible behavior of the story’s protagonists, and throughout the episodes there is a strong sense that he knows where the show is going and that he will remain collected, respectful and organized even if something unexpected occurs. To the listener, he sounds as if he is not interested in making any grand, overarching statements about human behavior but rather simply does want justice for the victim in the case. Even as rather scandalizing details* emerge and there is potential for the show to veer into very uncomfortable territory, Thomas does not dwell on any adult content or gore any more than he needs to. The simplicity of this motivation, coupled with the complexity of the story, imbues the whole show with a sense of earnestness and honesty that is hard to ignore. As the podcast develops, it itself becomes a part of the story and witnesses start coming forward with accusations and evidence the police had not previously known about despite the crime taking place in the 1980s and having been investigated more than once since then. Some episodes feature tape of Thomas on TV talk shows and Australian pundits chime in, but the tone of the investigation does not change, and importance continues to be ascribed primarily to the crime’s victim and the rather obvious perpetrator. The crime itself, a disappearance of a young mother, is seemingly unremarkable yet terrifying. As is sadly often the case, it tells a story particularly cruel to girls and women, some at its center as some on its periphery but suffering nevertheless. In this snippet of what life was like in a coastal suburb of Sydney in the 1980s, daughters, mothers, their neighbors and their girlfriends all seem to suffer. I only have about two episodes left in this series, but that still leaves room for the possibility that there will be some justice served at its end. I very much hope that that will be the final twist in this rather painfully long narrative.

*If you have a hard time with themes of domestic violence and child sexual abuse, I would very much skip this show.

More related to this letter, I want to mention two podcasts that mostly focus on first-person narration and storytelling and in such a way serve as something of an opposite of what I had written about above – some of these episodes provide a perfect setting for the narrator to create a myth of themselves for the audience independent of anyone else’s version of them and their story. They are Snap Judgement from WNYC and Love + Radio from Radiotopia. The latter is definitely produced in a more cinematic way but be warned that it often contains adult themes. However, it brings out such incredibly private stories out of people that that may be somewhat unavoidable. The former is shorter and snappier, but Glynn Washington is tremendous at selling any story and his storytellers are diverse in every sense of the word.

Finally, unrelated to anything other than my interest, this episode of Inquiring Minds where a prominent researcher discusses the psychology and neuroscience of prejudice is a really good listen. I particularly appreciated all of the reminders that we do not have to be victims of our own brains as we can control so much of the content our brains need to process before developing automatic responses and instincts. In other words, even scientists suggest that to change your biases it might be beneficial to just be more cognizant of what you expose yourself to.

On the music side of things, I have been in a mood for something slightly haunting or maybe sultry with a hint of menace, and female fronted which really means I have been listening to LA Witch a lot. I’m having a hard time pin-pointing a good genre description for this band, but it makes me think of a more millennial Faster Pussycat Kill! Kill! and an alternate version of Lynch’s Wild at Heart in which Laura Dern would terrorize Willem Defoe instead of the other way around but with all the Dorothy imagery, red shoes and all, unchanged. There is plenty of reverb and hazy vocals in LA Witch’s music, and there’s a smidgeon of Johnny Cash in the lyrics, mixed in with all the witchcraft made glossy by black always being in fashion. I spent money I don’t have on a vinyl copy of their latest record because it only seemed fit to have it as a physical artifact.

LEARNING: One day after the Spring semester officially started, my advisor wrote all of her students an email full of half-baked plans and ellipses, including the line ‘plunging into the semester immediately after travels, like Karmela’. And she was right. In these past two weeks, I saw three talks (one about machine learning and quantum Monte Carlo methods, one about new searches for dark matter under the cleverly named umbrella of Dark Matter Radio experiments, and another about a new type of topological materials in part discovered by someone who used to come to the same yoga class as me and how one might realize them in surprisingly classical systems), participated in two research meetings (which reminded me of just how many projects I have somehow been roped into in the past year), started teaching and had teaching meetings in my new role as a mentor teaching assistant. I could likely recite the class I am teaching in my sleep as it is one I have taught many times before, but I am still slightly nervous about advising others on their teaching. Hopefully I will be able to handle that little extra piece of responsibility well.

Getting back to my research after a mostly physics-free couple of weeks (someone made the mistake of asking about my work at the dinner table one night), I spent a couple of days re-thinking spinning ultracold shells and scrutinizing old notes. Somewhat reassuringly, I found that I had already calculated some of the things that came up in one of the research meetings, albeit sloppily. Revisiting that particular calculation made it clear that doing it more precisely, and probably more correctly, is quite difficult but at least a collaborator shared some exciting numerical results concerning the same subject matter. Moreover, another experimental collaboration seems to be picking up and the work of that particular set of collaborators has definitely wowed me in the past, so these few weeks at the opening of the year may have actually been a net positive. I have also been pushing myself to divide my time more efficiently, opposed to obsessing over one system for weeks at a time, and regularly shift focus to yet another project that has been seriously haunting me for the past year and that I will be presenting on at a large conference in March. Do you know how many mathematics papers from twenty years ago that look like they might be absolutely crucial for all of your work are out there? I’m still working through last Friday night’s pile.

WATCHING: As happens every time we go on break, my boyfriend and I went on a couple museum dates and pretended to be cultured, but really mostly we watched a lot of TV.

I have been trying to think of how to write something intelligent about the latest run of Twin Peaks, subtitled ‘The Return’, but even a few weeks later I am coming up with nothing more than a strong statement of ‘this was not at all what I expected or asked for’. David Lynch has certainly made the show he wanted to make and signatures of his other works are everywhere in it – from Eraserhead-like sequences taking up large parts of some episodes to an appearance by Harry Dean Stanton and so many female characters wearing red shoes. A part of me is delighted to know that a network like Showtime is willing to spend money on such weirdness, and so much of it, but I also somewhat squarely wish for more editing or oversight. A part of the appeal of the original show has always been that it was like a soap gone if not wrong then at least compellingly odd, like it was just given to someone who didn’t understand it was a soap and read too much into it instead. The second half of the second season has always been the show’s weakest exactly because it had become too much of a soap, and the genre-defying instances became just scarce garnish. This latest run of Twin Peaks is almost the inverse, it’s so aware of all of its moving parts and all the worldbuilding the original plot only hinted at, that little room is left for anything as simple as a complete story with a beginning, a middle and an end or anything more than caricatured character development. Beloved characters are given less space to be real characters because the story has gotten so large and some reappear in ways that are too confusing for the nostalgia factor to work its magic. Of course, the visuals tend to be amazing, the special effects choices are bizarre and singularly Lynchian, and the star-studded cast really delivers, even when it feels like they’re parodying an idea of a Lynch movie (or maybe Lynch is actually asking them to do exactly that). We watched it all in two days and were pretty captivated by it but in the end still had to Google around to get a better grasp on what was supposedly being resolved on the screen, and ultimately we admitted to each other that it’s hard to claim with conviction that we actually liked it.

On the completely other side of the spectrum, while at my dad’s house we caught two recent movies that got some commercial buzz but that I would have probably not opted to see on my own: Netflix’s Bird Box and Tom Hardy’s foray into superheroes (instead of supervillains) with Venom. There is not much to say about Bird Box other than that it is amazing that Netflix managed to get Sandra Bullock, John Malkovich and BD Wong into the same room to bring about a story that basically comes down to ‘how horrible and hard would it be to be blind’. In addition to the film’s premise (and related resolution) having me think about ableism much more than existential horror, its plot is also quite thin and underdeveloped with many characters played by striking personalities that then don’t actually get to do much. Even Bullock’s character, the heroine I imagine was supposed to read as tough but secretly likeable, only gets to grow towards the very end of the film and she has to undergo her emotional turnaround extremely quickly, as if giving her an utterly predictable moment of revelation was nothing more than a consequence of rushing to finish up the movie. As for the more horror aspects of the story I found them to be flat as well. The potentially most interesting detail, about cults that want to face and embrace whatever horror is driving the tragedy portion of the plot, was confusing and mishandled (in 2018 someone still relied on patients escaping a mental health institution as a scary threat?) and the main storyline was neither as suspenseful nor as scary as I imagine it might have sounded in a pitch meeting. But hey, I was happy to see Trevante Rhodes again because it reminded me of how heartbreakingly beautiful Moonlight was.

As for Venom, I was not disappointed by it simply because my expectations were not particularly high. Tom Hardy has fun with it (probably as much as he had as Bane when he was in a comic book movie last) and the sophomoric criticism of tech giants and Musk-like figures shows at least some awareness of the real world. Venom is not as self-aware and heavy as Logan (probably the best superhero movie in a while) was but it is certainly easier to tune into than a sequel of a sequel of some other Marvel movie. To be quite clear, this is not a film with a strong plot or compelling twists, but it reminded me slightly of 90s Spiderman cartoons and it had some lighthearted charm to it that did not dissolve completely once action scenes and CGI kicked in. Venom is entertainment done right (even though comic books probably deserve a more nuanced treatment than that) and I imagine that if I am home when the sequel comes out, I won’t even grumble that much when my dad undoubtedly suggests we watch it.

Finally, I wanted to shout-out the James-Baldwin-centric documentary I Am Not Your Negro which we stumbled upon one night while channel surfing in anticipation of Chopped. I have seen this movie before when a local art cinema showed it as a feature, and found it very impactful and important, so I was happy to watch it again. Baldwin’s remarkably expressive face, his voice that I can’t imagine being ignored and, most importantly, the very raw and urgent way in which he discusses race in America only struck me as even more crucial upon this second viewing. Bundled up on my mom’s pullout couch, geographically shielded and removed from his subject matter, I still felt his sense of urgency.

READING: I read embarrassingly few things that were not academic papers in 2018 and I already have a tangible, physical backlog for 2019 (it doesn’t help that one of the books I put in that pile is legendarily thick) which may not be the best omen. However, I have to hope that I will have something to write under this heading more often than I previously have and I did finish a book, Durga Chew-Bose’s Too Much And Not the Mood, in the past week to help with that. Chew-Bose is a few years older than me and I have in the past primarily known her to write about movies I had not seen but always meant too. I bought her book at New York’s Strand bookstore the year my mom visited for the holidays mostly to attempt balancing out the fact that I was also picking up Annihilation and didn’t realize that the latter won’t be as action packed or as hard-science-y as I thought. The first essay in the book, and it is all just very loosely connected essays of lengths that vary wildly and mostly address the reader through Chew-Bose’s first person, is the longest and the rambliest and took me the most time to get through. It is full of lists, long sentences cataloguing various things Chew-Bose likes or has at one or other time been stricken by, and contains full paragraphs referring to yet more movies I’ve never seen. It feels like a ninety page crash course in what the author is about, or at least to the extent in which one can define themselves by the means of collecting words. The rest of the book flows more easily and possibly provides and insight into Chew-Bose that is more organic and less, to borrow Lauren’s language again, about outlining all of her personas. She writes about being a daughter of immigrants and a daughter of divorced parents, she writes an awful lot about family history and carrying it within her, and she writes about being a woman in the world and all the trials and tribulations that entitles. At times, the book feels a bit like a self-indulgent memoir, but she cleverly inserts pop culture references (there is a whole page outlining her love of young Al Pacino in the middle of an essay about having a high pitched voice) in order to diffuse some of the pretense. More importantly, the more lofty, self-indulgent paragraphs concerning her herself still feel very genuine; that honesty then makes them seem more justified and necessary. I enjoyed the book beyond just feeling some level of kinship with Chew-Bose and it has definitely been thought-provoking thanks to her ability to formulate some of the staple (millennial) coming-of-age issues in ways more elegant and more succinct than I have thought them before. In some sense this was very much the right book to finish on a long commute following a family vacation, well suited for the haze of jet lag and the post-break emotional hangover. I’m grateful that there is writing out there that can be paired with such a feeling, and coming from someone who is not a dead white man nonetheless.

EATING: We ate a ton in Croatia (most of my family pleasantly surprised me by being on board with the whole vegan thing this year) and in addition to giving into holiday abundance a little too much I also contributed to it by cooking and baking more than I have in previous years when we visited. I made this apple pie for my dad and a riff on this walnut cake for my birthday then rounded off my baking by working out another way to adapt these buns (I shared my take on this recipe in the November 30th letter) to being rolled and knotted around dollops of jam or toasted nuts ground into a paste. I made enchiladas from scratch to introduce a part of my family to (veganized) Mexican food and regrettably did not write the recipe. I dislike enchilada sauces that contain more roux than tomatoes but the best I can offer in terms of recommendations is this filling (I used black beans and a butternut squash) and the sauce from these otherwise also excellent bowls. On a different night, I employed my boyfriend and brother to help put together a choose-your-own-adventure type ramen dinner and this recipe heavily inspired the broth. We bought a bunch of root vegetables at the Zagreb farmer's market, in between chasing paperwork, and that made me very happy. Some ended up in a curry and some we ate as pickles and chips.

Once I returned to Illinois I leaned into some lemony lentil soup and took a stab at stuffing some peppers but since the soup was from a cookbook (and those are copyrighted) and the peppers need just a bit more work (do you ever try to recreate something your mom or grandma used to always make and realize they have been geniuses all along?) so I am not sharing any original recipes this week.

Since it is still January, though, and many are in the mood for resolutions I would like to gently suggest that eating fewer animal products in 2019 may not be the worst idea. If you’re in the mood for it, pick a day or a meal and make it either meatless or vegan as a habit and see how that feels – it’s a small way to help the planet, animals, and possibly your health. If this sounds particularly dreadful you can always start with that pie (and let me know if you'd like some tips).