It’s as if vegans collectively realized that you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, or at least that you spread the message more easily when you don’t start preaching about how eating honey represents an exploitation of bees. Vegans like Mr. Ronnen, Ms. Piatt and Mr. Roll remain highly fluent in the political […]
Aaron Gilbreath
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Critiquing the Foodie
In our era of Whole Foods, slow foods and meal worship, many Americans have become fixated on both the pleasures and ethics of eating. As chefs became celebrities and food writing earned its own anthology series, simple eaters transformed into locavores who write Yelp reviews and buy into the marketing idea that we can somehow […]
Posted inNonfiction
How Women Are Taking the Legal Weed Industry into the Future
How a plant might smash the patriarchy.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Hard Life and High Times of Independent Musicians
The band Dead Moon is a rock and roll institution and legend around their native Pacific Northwest. Formed in 1987 by husband and wife team Fred (guitarist) Cole and Toody (bassist) Cole, their do-it-yourself approach to making music and managing their affairs has influenced musicians around the world. This September, Fred collapsed on stage during their set […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Eulogizing America’s Old School Watering Holes
Keeping a place that serves drinks open is a difficult task no matter where you do it. As the bartender at my current favorite local bar, Sharlene’s on Flatbush in Brooklyn, told me, “You need to get at least half a million to open a bar in New York anymore. You need investors and shit,” […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Grimes and the Changing Face of the Music Industry
In the newest issue of The New Yorker, Kelefa Sanneh wrote about Grimes, real name Claire Boucher, whose history in underground experimental music led her to making homemade electronic bedroom pop. Last year, Pitchfork named her song “Oblivion” the best song of the decade to date, and as she’s preparing to release her second proper album, […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
You’ve Been Singing It All Wrong
A common cause of mondegreens, in particular, is the oronym: word strings in which the sounds can be logically divided multiple ways. One version that Pinker describes goes like this: Eugene O’Neill won a Pullet Surprise. The string of phonetic sounds can be plausibly broken up in multiple ways—and if you’re not familiar with the […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
How Okinawans Eat
I have long taken an interest in how I might eat myself to old age. I visited the southern Japanese Okinawa islands whose population is said to include the largest proportion of centenarians in the country and met with some of them in what is supposedly the village with the oldest demographic in the world, […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Reality TV and the Rise of Celebrity-CEOs
Sometimes it seems like everyone’s selling something. They’re selling their jewelry. They’re selling their book, selling their snack line, their natural cosmetics, their Etsy shop and blog and, ultimately, themselves. In The New Yorker‘s 2015 Style Issue, Lizzie Widdicombe writes about Bethenny Frankel, who turned her slot on The Real Housewives of New York City into […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Savoring the Quintessential New York Hot Dog Experience
A much better example came on Central Park West in the lower Sixties, where a second Mohammad operated a stand. He told me that he’s from Alexandria and has been in New York for four years. (“Some people are good. Others, not so much,” he said of his customers.) Every winter, when the hot-dog business […]