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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 eat with abandon and sustainably. But are culinary passion and compassion diametrically opposed? In The Atlantic, B. R. Myers analyzes America’s vocal modern taste-makers’ books, values and influence on our culture of consumption. The piece appeared in March 2011 and remains timely.

If nothing else, Bourdain at least gives the lie to the Pollan-Severson cant about foodie-ism being an integral part of the whole, truly sociable, human being. In Bourdain’s world, diners are as likely to sit solo or at a countertop while chewing their way through “a fucking Everest of shellfish.” Contributors to the Best Food Writing anthologies celebrate the same mindless, sweating gluttony. “You eat and eat and eat,” Todd Kliman writes, “long after you’re full. Being overstuffed, for the food lover, is not a moral problem.” But then, what is? In the same anthology, Michael Steinberger extols the pleasure of “joyfully gorging yourself … on a bird bearing the liver of another bird.” He also talks of “whimpering with ecstasy” in a French restaurant, then allowing the chef to hit on his wife, because “I was in too much of a stupor … [He] had just served me one of the finest dishes I’d ever eaten.” Hyperbole, the reader will have noticed, remains the central comic weapon in the food writer’s arsenal. It gets old fast. Nor is there much sign of wit in the table talk recorded. Aquinas said gluttony leads to “loutishness, uncleanness, talkativeness, and an uncomprehending dullness of mind,” and if you don’t believe him, here’s Kliman again:

I watched tears streak down a friend’s face as he popped expertly cleavered bites of chicken into his mouth … He was red-eyed and breathing fast. “It hurts, it hurts, but it’s so good, but it hurts, and I can’t stop eating!” He slammed a fist down on the table. The beer in his glass sloshed over the sides. “Jesus Christ, I’ve got to stop!”

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Can a Company Really Disrupt Itself? Roger Hodge on Zappos and Holacracy

zappos
From a Zappos office tour. Photo by techcocktail, Flickr

Roger Hodge went inside Zappos for his October 2015 in the The New Republic, investigating CEO Tony Hsieh’s radical decision to eliminate management and fully embrace the concept of Holacracy at the online shoe retailer.  Read more…

The Politics of Poetry

David Orr | Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry | HarperCollins | 2011 | 18 minutes (4,527 words)

The essay below is excerpted from David Orr’s 2011 book Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry. Orr writes the On Poetry column for The New York Times, and an earlier version of this essay appeared in Poetry Magazine. Read more…

Appropriate for a Seven-Year-Old Child

Photo: Marlo Mack

Marlo Mack’s podcast How To Be a Girl is a sensitive and honest exploration of the joys, fears, and struggles of raising of a transgender child. Earlier this year, Marlo and her seven-year-old daughter M (both pseudonyms) met transgender actress Laverne Cox (“Orange Is the New Black”). The story and photos of that meeting had a brief flare of online virality. In a recent episode of the podcast, Marlo (who also blogs at gendermom) talked about what happened after that meeting, as M began to understand that the world can be a difficult, even dangerous, place for transgender people like her. Below is a transcribed excerpt of that podcast. Read more…

The Crossroads of Secular and Spiritual: A Reading List

The line between faith and, well, everything else, is not as stark as I was taught. The “secular” world is not any more evil than the religious world. Sometimes, they aren’t even that different, despite what my Focus on the Family teen magazines would have me think.

I studied American literature as a freshman at my conservative Christian college. My best friend and I walked, bleary-eyed, to our 8 a.m. survey course, and made fun of the sloppily-dressed upperclassmen as a way to stay awake. We dressed up, sometimes in matching outfits, to endure a torturous semester fraught with angry Puritans. By second semester, my friend lost interest. I stuck around, and I’m glad I did.

Re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem…” 

The Transcendentalists—especially Ralph Waldo Emerson and the above-quoted Walt Whitman—caught me by surprise. I had not known these people created their own modern theology. Evangelical Christians sometimes deride “Cafeteria Christians”—Christians who pick and choose the parts of tradition that gel and leave the rest. Though my professor and classmates gently disagreed and discarded Transcendentalism, I read and reread our assigned readings. This was the first time I witnessed humanist tendencies colliding with traditional religion, and the result was captivating.

I’m drawn to this intersection, this give-and-take: A borrowing, or an appropriation. Eternal life/immortality, fate/(pre)destiny, passion/”calling”—these concepts are two sides of the same coin, a coin placed in the offering plate or handed to the homeless woman on the corner. The following four essays take on saints, proselytization, prayer and coincidence: abstractions that may have great impact on our everyday lives, regardless of faith tradition. Read more…

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 at Seattle’s annual Bumbershoot festival and was taken to the hospital. He’s 67 years old. In February, 2014, Callie Danger spoke with bassist Toody in She Shreds magazine about making music for a living, keeping control of their art, and keeping motivated.

She Shreds: And what are the advantages of running everything independently?

Toody Cole: It’s that you’ve got free range to do what you want with it. That’s always been a big thing. That’s why we got into having our own business. Fred used to have to work for temp labor, putting his hair up in a hat just to get hired. You guys forget how difficult it used to be, just to be weird! You have the freedom as a musician to not have to go, “Gee, would it be okay if I take off next Friday?” Because you’d just get fired. At some point, we said, “We should just create our own thing.” We’re both control freaks, so just to have the control is number one. It’s also a cost-saving thing as well, to have your own label. To just be able to go direct to the source for the mastering and the pressing. To not have to go through somebody else who would charge you for the time and labor to do it for you. We’ve always been hands-on.

She Shreds: How long do you think it took to conjure up the commanding stage presence that you have today?

Toody Cole: There used to be a big thing on the West Coast called Garage Shock that Dave Crider from Estrus Records used to have every year in Bellingham, Washington. People used to come from all over the United States, all over the world. When we went up there, it might have been one of the first times Dead Moon played. There were a bunch of these other bands—naturally, all guy bands—sitting around. We were one of the headliners. And, of course, they hadn’t heard of us. At that point, nobody really had. When I walked by, one of these guys goes, “Oh, we’re so gonna blow these guys. They’ve got a girl in the band!” I don’t get mad that easily, but man, I was so fucking pissed. “Yeah, we’ll see, dudes. We’ll see who blows who off the stage, asshole.” It wound up being one of the best gigs we ever did! [laughs] It’s a great motivator, when people underestimate you.

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The Genius of Marie Kondo and the Evolution of Decluttering

Marie Kondo

In 1881, Eunice White Bullard published All Around the House, Or, How to Make Homes Happy, a 468-page manual on everything a head of household needed to know to keep things in order. Bullard, the wife of Henry Ward Beecher, dedicated chapters to everything from managing laundry to pickling, washing flannel, and cooking a goose. Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Photo: Caroline Whiting

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
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Writing Without Access: The Craft of the Write-Around

Mary H.K. Choi notes in her profile of Rihanna for Fader that Pulitzer-prize winner Margo Jefferson wrote a “killer write-around” of Beyoncé without the participation of Beyoncé’s camp. As we read along, we come to the realization that Choi’s Rihanna profile is also a write-around, and it’s expertly done. Read more…

My Unsentimental Education

Debra Monroe | My Unsentimental Education, The University of Georgia Press | Oct. 2015 | 14 minutes (3,487 words)

A misfit in Spooner, Wisconsin, with its farms, bars, and strip joints, Debra Monroe left to earn a degree, then another, and another, vaulting into academia but never completely leaving her past behind. Her memoir My Unsentimental Education was published today, and our thanks to the University of Georgia Press for allowing us to reprint the chapter below. Two previous excerpts from the book have been long-listed for The Best American Essays (2011 and 2015), and an early excerpt also appeared on Longreads in 2013.  

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