Reading, Writing, and Sourdough

What makes me and white supremacy  so effective is it ample accessibility. The book's origin was originally a 28-day instagram challenge. Layla Saad followed with a workbook and then finally this book. There are, with a few bracketing sections, still 28 short chapters. Each chapter is followed with questions designed to stimulate journaling and deep self-reflection. The center of each chapter contains clearly explained bullet points on topics such as white saviorism, white fragility, tone policing, white privelege, and well, another 24 topics we all must address. Saad says at the beginning, and repeats: white supremacy is ubiquitous, systemic, pervasive, largely invisible to white people, and terribly difficult to acknowledge and do something about. She also makes clear that failure to do so, i.e., business as usual, is profoundly denigrating and deadly to BIPOC (Black and Indigenous People of Color.) It is no small feat to get people to read a book that promises to make them feel ...

Juliet Armstrong, orphaned at the age of 17 just as Hitler's Germany is rolling across Europe, is scooped up by MI5. Her job is to serve as a typist, a role, of course, only a girl can fill. MI5 occupies two adjoining rooms in a small apartment complex in London. In one, Godfried Toby, an MI5 agent meets British citizens sympathetic, and perhaps outright allies, of the Third Reich. Listening devices are implanted in the walls and voices are recorded  in the adjacent apartment for Juliet to transcribe.  With time Juliet is asked to infiltrate the Fifth Column of British fascists under disguise and with additional time, actually five years after the war ends, Juliet is still enmeshed in spy work, only now ferrying eastern bloc scientists to the west and plying communist sympathizers with false information. Or maybe it is top secret information. Or maybe her handlers were always communist sympathizers. Or maybe Godfried Toby works for no one. Or anyone.  Being employed ...

Homemade croutons, like homemade bread, is a thousand times better than storebought. They are also  ito make.  What you need. Sourdough bread that is too old to still want to use in a sandwich, but not too dried out that it cannot be cut. Soft is good. Olive oil. Garlic. Fresh herbs such as thyme, oregano, chives, and parsley. Salt. Cut the bread into cubes.   Fry them in a heavy pan over medium heat using a couple of tablespoons of olive oil. Stir and turn from time to time so the cubes toast on several sides. You do not want to overload the pan because the bread cubes need to touch the pan in order to toast properly Periodically, add more olive oil as the bread will soak up what you have added previously. When the cubes have toasted sufficiently, just before you are done, add pressed garlic, chopped herbs, and plenty of salt. Turn off the heat and let the residual heat of the pan gently roast the garlic and herbs. I always hope to add croutons to my salads, but the...

Weaver Street Miche It is not unusual to find a bread recipe that mixes multiple types of flour. In fact, most of my loaves involve at least some combination of white and whole wheat, and often spelt flour. Adjusting ratios of flour, and even when they get mixed with a sourdough starter can make a big difference in the final result. A miche is a hefty loaf with a substantial crust, open crumb, rich earthy colors, rye and wheat flour, and a deep strong range of flavors. I came across this recipe from the Weaver Street Market .  What is unique about Weaver Street's formulation is is its use of both rye starter and wheat starter in the same loaf. Both sourdough cultures are launched the evening before baking and given 16 hours to mature before being kneaded with an additional complement of water, salt, and flour. After a final fermentation, what begins as a rather sticky dough, comes from the oven with boundless character and volume. My miche weighed four pounds. This miche served fiv...

Steinbeck uses Cannery Row to tell a long yarn about a community of hobos, prostitutes, semi-homeless, store owners, and an amateur marine biologist living adjacent to some Pacific sardine-canning factories. The era is the Great Depression, the ocean and its tide pools are described in minute detail, and Cannery Row's inhabitants receive the same respect, dignity, and more than a little love. Lee Chong runs an all-purpose store where patrons can purchase everything from eggs and butter to firecrackers and hardware. Most people buy beer or whiskey they use to become pleasantly drunk. They pay with scrip or credit, and on one significant occasion, with several hundred recently captured frogs. Doc, the biologist, collects sea creatures for scientific labs, has an open-door, and takes a troubled youth, too slow to learn in school, under his wing.  Mack and his four work-avoiding buddies reside in an abandoned warehouse, affectionately known as the Palace Flophouse, where they spend nea...

At its best, Curious Toys  captures Chicago in 1915. It's a city of Polish, Italian, German, and Irish immigrants alongside a handful of African Americans. The characters in this carefully researched murder mystery are largely from the wrong side of the tracks. The story's chief protagonist, Pin Mafucci is a 14-year-old girl, whose single mother dresses Pin as a boy for her protection. Together they live in a shack on the edge of the Riverview Amusement park where Gina Mafucci tells gypsy fortunes and Pin runs the grounds with a pack of boys. The shouts of carnival barkers, squeals of roller coasters, shrieks of haunted houses, blaring signs for freak shows, and syrupy smell of cotton candy mixed with spilt beer are all fused amongst crowds of families wilting beneath a Chicago summer. Inside Hellgate -- a frightening river ride with cobwebbed skeletons illuminated by unpredictable flashpots -- Pin discovers a young girl who has been murdered and left to float among the passing...

Chernyobyl has entered the global lexicon as a stand-in for the planet's most devastating public nuclear disaster. The USSR was deep in the throes of a Cold War competition for global supremacy in science, technology, politics, power, and armaments, but built upon an impossible economic model. Compounding its economic failures to produce what Soviets actually needed in the quantities they needed them was a historical system of politics that relied upon sycophancy, falsification, and placation of superiors. The result was the construction of a nuclear power plant with serious design flaws because underlings were loathe to report errors to superiors. Combine a faulty power plant, a government hellbent on proving its nuclear mettle on the global stage, and the inevitability of a combination of tiny, impossible to imagine human errors and the suspense of Chernobyl is laid bare. When the explosion of Reactor 4 finally occurred in October 1986, the scale of the explosion was so unpredict...