Reading, Writing, and Sourdough

Lebanese Man'oushe Bread classes are now taught on-line, and Susan, Leah, and I signed up to learn how to make flatbreads from Andrew Janjigian,  pizza professional, former bread expert at America’s Test Kitchen, and current bread blogger ( https://wordloaf.substack.com/ ). Before he started mixing his first dough, an Armenian Lahmajun, Janjigian explained how early emigrants from Armenia and Turkey settled in Greece bringing their flatbreads with them. Greek explorers later moved to Italy with their variant of Lahmajun, developing, in turn, one of the world’s most prominent flatbreads in the city of Naples: pizza. That is one theory for the origin of pizza. At the very least, according to Janjigian, Levantine flatbreads pre-date pizza. Probably by several thousand years. Cheese bread, an antecedent of pizza. Lahmajun, a kind of Armenian pizza, was first up. A ten-inch round was topped with a thin film of ground lamb spun in a food processor with onions, red bell pepper, red pepper...

  The Volunteer  was one of the last sailing whalers to take off from Hull, England for the icy seas around Greenland. So many whales had already been killed that paraffin and coal were already less expensive than whale oil and though Captain Brownlee had already lost one ship to ice floes, he commanded another, and secured insurance for it. The kind of men that sign up to sail ships between icebergs and sheet ice, face north Atlantic storms and blizzards vicious enough to coat rigging with enough ice to topple a boat are hardened to the point of violent indifference.  As the ship drives north, Mcguire's descriptions of the inexorable, silent encroachment of towering icebergs, the squeal and roar of gales, the grinding of ice floes driven by wind into pancakes of shattering and exploding shelves, and the smell of unshowered men that have spent two days and two sunlit nights flensing blubber from the inside of a whale are so realistic that when violence erupts the smell of...

As much as it sounds like a contradiction in terms, Tolentino is a millennial intellectual. As an heir to the now deceased Christopher Hitchens, Tolentino possesses an unerring eye for the strengths and foibles, mostly the foibles, of her generation, and by extension anyone else alive in our era.  Trick Mirror  consists of nine essays written in the first two years of the Trump administration and yet in so many ways predicted the isolation of a post-Covid world and the depth to which Trumpism would drive a wedge between right and left America. Much of her distress lies in the rise of the internet and the degree to which social media - Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and now TikTok - have commodified our lives. Put simply, the internet has impelled us to sell ourselves with carefully curated photos and stories of our perfected lives, pushing upon others an image of ourselves that is just one step below reality TV. Have we all become Real Housewives? Compounding matters we are in f...