Search Results for: DNA

Cheese and Macaroni Do Not a Mac and Cheese Make

Photo by Steven Guzzardi (CC BY-ND 2.0)

People of a certain age might remember a distinctly late-nineties and early-aughts culinary fad: the fancy mac and cheese. It involved taking a cheap, slightly embarrassing, nostalgia-laced standby of industrialized 20th-century food, and mixing in a couple of common-denominator markers of luxury, like lobster meat or truffle oil. (Yes — the truffled-lobster mac and cheese was a thing. I lived to tell the tale.)

As veteran cheesemonger and food writer Gordon Edgar shows in his Zocalo essay, macaroni and cheese is an American staple with a history that stretches back to colonial times. As such, it repeatedly finds itself in contested territory. Who does it belong to? How (and through whose labor) did it become, well, mac and cheese? And how far can you stretch and — Food-Network-speak alert — “elevate” it before it stops being itself?

Being a judge at a macaroni and cheese competition in San Francisco taught me a lot about American food. The competitors were mostly chefs, and the audience—the online tickets sold out in minutes—was soaking up the chance to be at a “Top Chef” kind of event, but more urban and cool. The judges included a food writer, an award-winning grilled-cheese-maker, and me, a cheesemonger.

We awarded the win to a chef who made mac and cheese with an aged Vermont cheddar. The audience, however, chose another contestant. When he arrived at the winner’s circle, he made a stunning announcement: His main ingredient was Velveeta.

Amazement! Shock! Betrayal! The audience clutched their ironic canned beer but didn’t quite know how to react. Was it a hoax? A working-class prank against elitism in food? Was this contest somehow rigged by Kraft? In the end it turned out to just be a financial decision by the chef: In great American tradition, he bought the cheapest protein possible.

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We Are Scientists

(AP Photo/Saurabh Das)

Kirtan NautiyalBoulevard | Spring 2018 | 25 minutes (6,903 words)

In 1969, my father traveled alone from India to Boston so that he could enroll in the master’s program in geophysics at MIT.

I don’t know whether he flew or came by boat, so when I try to picture him setting foot in America for the first time, I don’t know what to imagine. I’ve tried to find the photographic evidence, but there aren’t any pictures of the fifteen years he spent in this country before he married my mother. Maybe he just threw out the tattered albums when we were moving between houses, but it’s more likely that he never took any photos at all. He’s never been a sentimental man.

I also don’t know why he chose to come in the first place. He has never had any great fascination with money; despite his making a good living, we lived in shabby rentals for most of my childhood, and my mother shopped for us from department store discount racks. I never felt that professional success was what he was after either. He never advanced past middle management, and except for one late-night discussion in which he made clear that he felt there was a glass ceiling for people with our skin color, I never heard one word of frustration from him about work. Maybe it was to help his family – along with his brother who came to Kansas State University earlier in the 1960s, he supported his parents in India for years with the money he earned. When trying to make us feel guilty about our second-generation lassitude, which is often, he tells us of how at MIT he had to work all hours of the night in the cafeteria and library while keeping up a full courseload, so maybe we need to be a little more appreciative that he helped with the room and board during our own time in college. Read more…

Exodus in the Ozarks

Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Pam Mandel | Longreads | June 2018 | 10 minutes (2,441 words)

 

“Well, what are you doing all the way out…here? How’d you find this place?”

The question wasn’t fair. Billygail’s Cafe is only ten miles outside Branson, Missouri. Sure, it’s on a country road, and sure, it feels like you’ve found something special, but it’s listed on Trip Advisor and USA Today and showed up on an episode Man vs. Food on the Travel Channel. Use Yelp to find breakfast while you’re in Branson and you’ll get Billygail’s.

The real question was not what I was doing at Billygail’s. The answer to that was easy: I was there to muscle my way through a gorgeous 14-inch plate-obscuring sourdough pancake. The bigger question was, what was I doing in Branson?

The short answer is I was in Branson for a conference and to see a place I’d never been before. There’s little I like more than going somewhere new and finding out I’m wrong about it — and for a writer, no surer way to find a great story. My previous exposure to Branson was limited to a 1996 episode of The Simpsons. Bart, Milhouse, Nelson, and Martin take a road trip, detouring through Branson to catch a performance by Nelson’s unlikely hero, Andy Williams. I didn’t buy the Simpson’s vision wholesale. I looked at Google, too, and found plenty of references to the show scene — and to country music. I’d baked extra time in my trip to explore — and to catch at least one country music show.

“Yeah, you could do that,” said the conference organizer who helped me plan my travel. “And yeah, there’s music here, but there’s this… other thing.” She pointed me to the website for Sight and Sound, a 2000 seat theater that stages multimedia spectacles based in the Bible. The current production? Moses.

A bad West coast Jew, I know little of my inherited theology. But like many of my Jewish friends and family, I know three or four things about the story of Moses — kind of the cornerstone story of the Jewish faith. Plus, Passover — the holiday where we eat matzoh ball soup and recount how Moses led “the chosen people” out of Egypt into the Promised Land — happens to be my favorite holiday. So, while Dolly’s Stampede is the most popular attraction in Branson, and there’s plenty of wholesome country western cabaret, I couldn’t resist this opulent retelling of the history of the Jewish people.

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A Vor Never Sleeps

Garrett M. Graff | Longreads | June 2018 | 20 minutes (5,086 words)

Razhden Shulaya maintained a diverse business empire, like a Warren Buffet of crime. By age 40, from his base in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, he had a cigarette smuggling operation, a drug ring, a counterfeit credit card scheme, an extortion racket, an illegal gambling establishment, and teams devoted to hacking slot machines. According to prosecutors who have been building a case against him, Shulaya’s associates provided gun-running, kidnap-for-hire, and the fencing of stolen jewelry. Plans were in place for what authorities came to call the “romance scam”: use an attractive woman to lure a target down to Atlantic City, knock him out with chloroform, and steal his money. They’d take his Rolex, too.

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England Is a Giant Russian Money Washing Machine

Andrew Matthews/PA Wire

When the parliament’s foreign affairs committee asked British journalist Oliver Bullough about how much Russian money, both dirty and clean, gets laundered through London and parked in certain assets, he realized how little he or the government actually knew. For the Guardian, Bullough seeks answers to these important questions, separating the corrupt Russian money from the honest money, and addresses why it even matters. And why justice is elusive: Prosecution is even harder in the U.K., especially when key witnesses keep getting poisoned.

So whose money is this? How is it getting here? The bank’s analysts didn’t look into that question. However, had they wanted to, they could have walked down the hall and asked their colleagues, since it turned out that Deutsche Bank itself was a significant culprit in spiriting money out of Russia without informing the authorities. Less than two years after the report – called Dark Matter – was published, Deutsche Bank traders in Moscow were caught secretly moving $10bn (£7.5bn) of their clients’ money out of Russia by illegally exploiting the stock market. (As a result, the bank had to pay fines of $425m (£317m) in the US and £163m in the UK.)

With institutions as sophisticated as Deutsche Bank working to hide Russian money, it is unsurprising that the total amount in the UK remains vague. So there is no real answer to the foreign affairs committee’s first question, except to say that the volume of Russian money in Britain is far larger than the official statistics would have us think.

There are two reasons why we should be worried about this. The first is the low-probability but high-impact chance that Putin is hiding money here in the financial equivalent of sleeper cells, ready to slip out and buy influence when a crisis comes. The second is more significant: no one steals money if they can’t keep it. By letting Putin’s allies launder their stolen fortunes, and hide them in our country, we are drawing a line under their crimes, and rewarding them for actions we should not be condoning. Do we really want Britain to be the Kremlin’s fence?

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The Hole in My Soul

Good Salt / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Sara Eckel | Longreads | June 2018 | 17 minutes (4,267 words)

Sometimes, while out with a friend I’ve known for 10 or 20 years, I’ll pivot on my barstool and ask, “Did I ever mention that I’m a born-again Christian?” The question rarely computes. My close friends know I grew up in an agnostic household, and they’re pretty sure the only Sunday morning activities I leave the house for are yoga and brunch. Some have even heard me casually describe myself as an atheist. Nevertheless, on a bookshelf in my parents’ house, there’s a Bible with an inscription in my loopy 10-year-old handwriting: “Today, I am a born-again Christian.” Below that, the words “Hallelujah!” in a woman’s elegant, slanted script.

***

The ceremony took place at that woman’s house — in my memory, her name is Mrs. Hannah — in the suburb of Cincinnati where my family lived during my grade school years. For my parents, southern Ohio was a six-year tour of duty — just a place where my dad got a job. For my younger brother, it’s barely a memory. But for me, it was where I first encountered the world and where I was repeatedly told I lacked something essential.

“You have a black hole in your soul,” a little boy told me on the way out of kindergarten one day. I walked home and promptly burst into tears in front of my mother.

A 21st-century reader might pause at the idea that I walked home alone from kindergarten, but in 1970s Ohio, there was nothing strange about a free-range 5-year-old. However, our neighbors were appalled that my family didn’t go to church. On the playground one day, I tried to explain it to a group of baffled classmates gathered around me in a semicircle, but it was like saying that we didn’t brush our teeth or eat dinner each night. The kids weren’t mean; they simply didn’t know how to reconcile a classmate who spent her Sunday mornings lounging in her pajamas and reading the funnies.

Once, while walking to school with my two best friends, both named Debbie, the girls had a jokey debate about what would happen after I died. I had obviously not cleared the prerequisite for heaven. On the other hand, I was their friend — eternal hellfire didn’t seem quite right, either. They imagined a fight between God and the devil, with me floating up and down through the ether.

“She’s too good for hell,” the devil would say.

“She’s too bad for heaven,” God would reply.

I think they were trying to work out how God could be so cruel as to reject their friend. On the other hand, they had to go to church. They had clocked in hundreds of Sunday mornings wearing rayon dresses in the too-warm air while I was kicked back on the couch eating cinnamon doughnuts. There should be some consequences.

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Vacating Convictions from Crooked Chicago Cops

David Mirzoeff/PA Wire

A group of corrupt police officers on Chicago’s South Side had been framing and extorting residents for years. Then they planted drugs on the wrong people: Ben Baker and his girlfriend Clarissa Glenn.

In The New Yorker, Jennifer Gonnerman describes how Glenn’s determination to exonerate her husband helped build a case against police sergeant Ronald Watts and his brazenly crooked cronies. Glenn’s campaign consumed her, and Baker’s absence left their children without a father for too many years. Not only was Baker eventually freed, the state attorney overturned many of Watts’ other tainted convictions. One difficult question remains: how many more innocent people still wallow in prison?

No one knows how many men Watts and his officers framed, in part because so many of them pleaded guilty. Watts’s officers at times planted such large quantities of drugs on Wells residents that they were charged with a Class X felony, the highest-level felony after first-degree murder. If the defendant went to trial and lost, he faced up to thirty years in prison. Phillip Thomas, who sold candy from a cart in the Wells, recalled that when he told his public defender that Watts’s officers had planted drugs on him, “she made it quite clear that she didn’t believe me and that my best bet was to plead guilty.” Ignoring her advice, he represented himself at trial. He lost, and was sentenced to six years. Shaun James told his public defender a similar story, and, he said, “She’s looking at me like I’m crazy. She said, ‘Ain’t no judge is ever going to believe that.’ ” James and his co-defendant, Taurus Smith, both pleaded guilty and were sentenced to two years’ probation.

Clarissa and Ben decided to fight the cases against them: Ben’s, from when he was arrested alone, and Ben and Clarissa’s, from when they were arrested together. They assumed that, because the state’s attorney’s office was aware of Watts’s corruption, it would eventually drop the charges against them. David Navarro, the prosecutor who met with Clarissa and Ben in the spring of 2005, told me that he believed them, and spent months investigating their claims about Watts, but he couldn’t prove the allegations. “It’s very difficult to prove a case when your only witness is the guy who has a pending case against him, and that guy has a criminal background,” he said.

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Somewhere Under My Left Ribs: A Nurse’s Story

Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Christie Watson | Excerpt from The Language of Kindness: A Nurse’s Story | Tim Duggan Books | May 2018 | 17 minutes (4,508 words)

I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.
— Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

The landscape of theaters must be terrifying for patients, but it’s becoming normal for me. It’s amazing what you can get used to. Life wasn’t always like this.

The first operation that I watch is a heart-lung transplant. I am nineteen years old and still a student nurse. The operation takes so long: over twelve hours. It requires a team of surgeons to behave like a relay team; but instead of a baton, they pass between them a human heart and lungs. I’ve been looking after the patient waiting for the new set of lungs that day: a fourteen-year-old boy named Aaron suffering from cystic fibrosis, who is confined to bed, oxygen tubes inserted into his nose, with a tired, wet cough and sallow gray skin. I help him get ready for the operation. I rub cocoa butter onto his dry knees, take away his Game Boy and swear to guard it with my life. I wet his lips with a small salmon-pink sponge that I dip in sterile water, not wanting to risk the tiniest possibility of him being exposed to any germs.

Aaron’s room glows with lights in the shape of stars and moons surrounding his hospital bed and a journal is hidden under his pillow. There is a small corkboard next to his bed that his stepdad has Blu-tacked to the wall, covered in a mosaic of photographs of him with his friends, every single one of them smiling. It is a common thing for a child’s hospital room to be personalized. Aside from the oxygen piped through the wall and the suction canister with its thick transparent tubing, it could be a typical teenage bedroom. Read more…

The ‘Treasonous’ Teens Living in One Nation Under Guns

A prayer vigil for the victims of Marshall County High School. (Alan Warren/The Messenger-Inquirer via AP)

Teens seem somehow wired for disagreement in their adolescent years. Sometimes this is simply a product of exercising one’s personhood, other times it seems connected to a sort of magic of youth that lies, in part, in their relative newness to the culture. They are old enough to know how to communicate and observe and think critically, but young enough to question the status quo.

This is evidenced beautifully in a recent Washington Post profile by Eli Saslow of Wyoming teen Moriah Engdahl, who seeks out every possible way to be the opposite of her father, Alan. Moriah is a student journalist, her father is a media-hating Trump supporter; she supports gay rights, he thinks “that stuff is better off staying hidden.” Moriah is the youngest and most headstrong of  Alan’s four daughters, and he calls her “the mouthy, hard-headed one” with pride, even though they butt heads— most recently over the issue of gun regulations.

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Farming a Warming Planet

AP Photo/Lenny Ignelzi

California produces the bulk of America’s nuts, avocados, and citrus. Unfortunately, as the climate changes, no one’s sure how long those crops can grow. At Grist, Nathanael Johnson paints an unsettling portrait of California farmers struggling to balance their immediate need for annual income with the changing climate’s ability to support their trees in the future. California’s weather is increasingly erratic and it’s already confusing crops, ripening some fruits out of season and frying others in the sun. But as an experienced University of California extension agent put it: climate is only one of farmers’ many concerns.

“If you decide what to plant based on climate, but then can’t make the lease payment, that’s not sustainable,” Jarvis-Shean said.

If you are worried about water running out in 15 years, you might think it’s a good idea to cut down half the state’s almond groves — but if those almond trees are still putting money in your pockets, that wouldn’t make sense until the killer drought hits. That’s the crux of the matter for Sayer, and other farmers I interviewed. They’re concerned about the changing climate, but they always come up with ingenious plans to adapt to bad weather. It’s much harder for them to adapt to an overdrawn bank account.

Sayer grows mostly lemons right now, but they’re not long for this world. “You can see these lemon trees are getting a little rangy looking,” Sayer said, gesturing toward a leafless branch. “This is going to be their last harvest, then they’ve got a date with the chipper.”

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