Articles
MY YEAR IN READING CHILDREN’S BOOKS
DECEMBER 6, 2023
It was the first of November, and forecast to dip below freezing overnight. Before school pickup, I went out to twist the last zucchini off the vine, and snap chard leaves off their stalks. It had snuck up on me, this hinge point of the year, it always does; the garden growing so fast, and my kids, too. It was time to put things to bed, to tuck in the corners of the year and ask, what have we made of the time, and what has it made of us?…..
JENN SHAPLAND ON THE NEED FOR “THIN SKIN”
AUGUST 12, 2023
The writer Jenn Shapland has long been interested in troubling boundaries, definitions, and structures. In her 2021 debut, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, which won the Publishing Triangle Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction, the Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award, and a Lambda Literary Award, and was a finalist for the National …
CAMILLE DUNGY ON THE BEWILDERING WONDER OF REWILDING
MAY 2, 2023
In Camille Dungy’s new book, Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden (Simon & Schuster), she chronicles the years she and her family spent transforming their home in Fort Collins, Colo., into “rewilded” prairie. She draws connections between the process of fostering indigenous flora and fauna, and broader cultural strains around notions of unruliness …
JENNY ODELL WANTS YOU TO RECLAIM YOUR TIME
MARCH 6, 2023
In 2019, Oakland-based artist and writer Jenny Odell published her first book, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. In that work of dazzling hybridity, Odell drew together scholarship and artistic practice to argue that our attention is our most vital personal asset, and also the most difficult to protect. This March, Odell is …
SEASONS OF CHANGE: THE CHILDREN’S BOOKS THAT HELPED US GET THROUGH THE YEAR
DECEMBER 7, 2022
It was near the end of winter’s long tail—that time after the thaw but before blossom and bud, when it’s tough to believe that the buoyant lift of spring will ever come—when I began to perceive that something was different. Began noticing how, after two especially exhausting years, we seemed to be holding our hurt …
ROSS GAY ON THE LABOR OF “INCITING JOY”
OCTOBER 25, 2022
Ross Gay is a poet, essayist, professor, and avid gardener and orchardist based in Bloomington, Ind. His 2015 Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. The Book of Delights (2019) became a New York Times Best Seller. His latest book, Inciting Joy (Algonquin), is …
ANGELA GARBES ON MOTHERING FOR THE WORLD WE WANT
MAY 3, 2022
Angela Garbes’s new book, Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change (Harper Wave), weaves together scholarly research and astute political insights with the particularities of her own experience as a Filipina American woman, mother, and daughter to examine the history, the pandemic-wrought present, and the possible future of care work in the United States. I …
“TO LEARN FROM THE NATURAL WORLD.” ON ADA LIMÓN’S BRILLIANT POETIC PROJECT
MAY 10, 2022
In most of the world’s mythologies, spring symbolizes renewal, relief, and reprieve, a generative upswell of energy after the long, dark freeze of winter. But to rise, like sap, to meet the season requires reserves and hinges upon a period of rest and replenishment in the fallow, dark months. This year, though, spring has blown …
WHAT JULIA—HBO’S NEW JULIA CHILD SERIES—GETS TERRIBLY WRONG ABOUT LEGENDARY EDITOR JUDITH JONES
APRIL 27, 2022
The texts and emails started right away. Earlier this spring, when Julia, an HBO Max original series “inspired by Julia Child’s extraordinary life and her long-running television series, The French Chef,” premiered, I began getting questions from writers, editors, colleagues and friends. Did that actually happen? No one was writing to ask me about Julia …
HOW MUCH SHOULD WE LIE TO OUR KIDS ABOUT EVERYTHING BEING OKAY?
JANUARY 13, 2022
Sometimes, when I shovel snow or pull weeds from the mulched paths in my garden, unearthing a collection of squiggling red earthworms, everything seems OK. “Normal,” even. As if this earth we inhabit is the same as it was more than three decades ago, when I was the age my twins are now, watching snow …
FIGHTING FOR MY MARRIAGE CAME AT TOO HIGH A COST
DECEMBER 9, 2021
It’s Friday, two days since I told my husband our marriage is over. I wake to find that the dishwasher, the washing machine, and the basement humidifier have all broken. I am incredulous, and I rage around the house, unhinged and wild-haired. I report to my almost-ex-husband on the appliance misfortune. He calls it an …
THE BEST CHILDREN’S BOOKS IN OUR LONG YEAR OF PANDEMIC READING
DECEMBER 1, 2021
Has it really only been a year? This is what I found myself thinking as I revisited a piece I wrote on reading with my twin children in 2020. Did I really write that before the Capitol was stormed? Before the beautiful, relentless snows of February? Before any of us had signed up for vaccines? …
ROSS GAY DEMANDS OUR ATTENTION (IN A PANDEMIC OR OTHERWISE)
OCTOBER 21, 2021
Ross Gay is asking for our attention. Wielding luscious everyday words—Ashmead’s kernel, feverfew, rudbeckia—and filling the mouth with linguistic play—thank you what in us rackets glad / what gladrackets us—to the plumage of his own purple scarf, his salmon-colored button down shirt, he beckons us in, points, demands: Come with me. Look here. Feel this. …
VIRGINIA SOLE-SMITH WANTS US TO DROP THE GUILT OVER FAMILY DINNER
AUGUST 18, 2021
At my house, these days, we eat ice cream every day. By we, I mean my nearly 5-year-old twins and me. You heard me right: ice cream. Every day. Sometimes even twice. My kids and I have also been eating dinner in front of the TV together a couple nights a week. I recently admitted …
A HUNDRED YEARS AND A HALF A BLOCK APART
JUNE 2, 2021
“She wanted a home, and that was how it began.” So opens an essay by Annie Eliza Pidgeon Searing, published 100 years ago in House Beautiful. In her 1921 essay, Searing recounted her journey—scrappy, drawn-out, and often carried by little more than a hope and a prayer—about the old stone cottage at 142 Pearl Street …
UNIVERSAL BASE INCOME CAME TO MY COUNTY– IT’S NOT ENOUGH, BUT IT’S A START
APRIL 2, 2021
Anniversaries have a way of stirring up feelings so dormant and subconscious we aren’t even aware we harbor them, and this month, I’ve been overcome. By grief, yes, and agitation, too. Not the acute anxiety that gripped me for the first months of the pandemic, nor the exhaustion and resignation that set in over the …
WHAT 2020 CHILDREN’S BOOK ROUNDUPS ARE MISSING: SARA B. FRANKLIN ON THE BEST FAMILY READS OF A VERY HARD YEAR
DECEMBER 21, 2020
I knew things were going to get hard when the library closed. I am, by profession, a writer and a professor of storytelling. I’ve read to my twin children—now four—since their infancy. But as avid readers as we already were, 2020 upped our reading quotient, and markedly. Without the library to turn to, mid-March found …
KINGSTON: A CITY REMADE BY THE CORONAVIRUS
AUGUST 14, 2020
Kingston, a small city in upstate New York, became my home four and a half years ago. Seeking space, affordability, green, and quiet, my husband and I traded Brooklyn for this city of 23,000. Unwittingly, we joined a slow-drip migration north. Since the arrival of coronavirus, though, what had been a steadily paced increase in …
THIS TINY MAINE ISLAND IS 12 SQUARE MILES OF SOLITUDE
AUGUST 7, 2020
The first thing you see is the church steeple. It appears almost like an apparition, a slender point of white rising up from the rolling mound of dark, dark green, mile upon mile of spruce forest. You rub your eyes, look again, squinting through the salty spray of the Gulf of Maine. Yes, it’s there, …
DELIGHT IS ESSENTIAL: ON READING ROSS GAY IN TERRIBLE TIMES
JUNE 18, 2020
As the reality of the coronavirus outbreak settled upon us in mid-March, I felt many things: anxious, privileged, uncertain, enraged, lucky, frightened and exhausted. But I did not feel grateful. The word has long rankled me, though never have I found it as grating as in the first couple weeks of lockdown, and again as …
SEEDING A DARK WORLD WITH NEW LIFE
MARCH 20, 2020
Seeding a Dark World with New Life On Saturday, March 14, the day after public schools and our twin three years olds’ daycare closed in our Hudson Valley town, I sent the kids to their sitter one final time, frantic for a couple hours to get a few things done before I turned myself over to …
HOW JUDITH JONES RADICALLY TRANSFORMED AMERICAN FOOD WRITING
MARCH 10, 2020
In May of 1948, a young woman named Judith Bailey embarked upon what was meant to be a three-week vacation in Italy and France. Nearly a year later, she posted a letter to her parents, who were baffled as to why their daughter—who had been given all the opportunities of a privileged New York City …
VIEQUES, THE RUGGED ISLAND OFF PUERTO RICO, IS MAKING A COMEBACK AFTER HURRICANE MARIA — AND NOW IS THE TIME TO VISIT
FEBRUARY 6, 2020
The Alentejo region is Portugal‘s largest, covering much of the southern third of the country, and its least densely populated. The terrain varies wildly — from vineyards and rolling farmland dotted with cattle to sprawling, shadowy groves of cork trees — and the culture is rooted deeply in land and sea. Nearly everyone in Portugal …
PORTUGAL IS BOOMING — BUT IN THIS TINY SEASIDE TOWN, LIFE MOVES AS SLOWLY AS EVER
OCTOBER 29, 2019
The Alentejo region is Portugal‘s largest, covering much of the southern third of the country, and its least densely populated. The terrain varies wildly — from vineyards and rolling farmland dotted with cattle to sprawling, shadowy groves of cork trees — and the culture is rooted deeply in land and sea. Nearly everyone in Portugal …
HOW DAUGHTERING PREPARED ME FOR MOTHERING: I SPENT MY EARLY 20S NURSING MY PARENTS THROUGH THEIR FINAL DAYS. IT PREPARED ME TO PARENT NEWBORN TWINS IN WAYS I NEVER COULD HAVE ANTICIPATED.
AUGUST 8, 2019
I hadn’t bathed in days. I’d finally managed to squeeze in a little exercise — between trips to the grocery store and the pharmacy and to buy dog food, and a return to the pharmacy for the prescription I had to call the doctor to remind him to refill — but not a shower. My …
SHE BROUGHT US FRANCE WITH JULIA CHILD, BUT JUDITH JONES’S CULINARY LEGACY ALSO TELLS AN AMERICAN STORY
MAY 22, 2019
Judith Jones, the legendary Knopf editor who died in 2017, is considered by many to be one of the forebears of modern American food culture. After publishing Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” in 1961, she spent the next 50-plus years nurturing the likes of Marcella Hazan, Irene Kuo, James Beard, Claudia Roden, …
A 164-YEAR-OLD MARKET IS THE EPICENTER OF CINCINNATI’S CULINARY REVIVAL
APRIL 16, 2019
Findlay Market, in Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine neighborhood, is the longest-operating public market in the state of Ohio, and one of the oldest in the nation. The market has gone through moments of both prominence and near-demise since it began operation in 1855, but today, its main market hall — as well as the storefronts immediately bordering it, …
OVERNIGHT CHICKEN IN A POT HAS BECOME THE SAVIOR OF OUR WEEKNIGHT COOKING
JANUARY 18, 2019
It’s been a couple years now since at-home sous-vide has come into vogue. And for good reason: Who doesn’t want perfectly cooked food that you needn’t watch over every moment? You too can now emulate your favorite restaurant chef! But as soon as the news of those “affordable” circulators and, more recently, sous-vide sticks hit …
ON THE MENU AT THE EDNA LEWIS FAMILY REUNION: DEVILED EGGS, PEACH COBBLER AND PRIDE
AUGUST 27, 2018
GALESBURG, Ill. — It was a mild July afternoon, and Ruth Lewis Smith was stuffing deviled eggs at the kitchen counter. She wore a red and white polka-dot apron, and her hair set in curlers under a scarf fashioned from pantyhose. A trio of women stood around her, assisting. “Tomorrow we’ll be dressed!” she remarked …
NO COURSES, NO ASSIGNED SEATS, NO HASSLES: HOW I THROW A DINNER PARTY
JUNE 4, 2018
Capital D-Dinner Parties, the sort where a group of the host’s friends or colleagues sit around a prettily laid table and are expected to sustain interesting conversation across the span of several courses, always feel to me like an awkward first date that just won’t end. It took upheaval for me to reconsider my approach.
THE GREAT AMERICAN COOKBOOK?
NOVEMBER 22, 2017
For almost as long as America has existed, cookbook authors have been using food to capture its identity.
THE SIDE OF JUDITH JONES YOU DIDN’T SEE
COMING OF AGE IN UNSTEADY TIMES
AMERICAN TREASURE: JUDITH JONES
JUDITH AND EDNA: HOW TWO WOMEN MADE CULINARY HISTORY
MOVING, TOGETHER
NOVEMBER 27, 2012
It was the weekend before Christmas, 2010. I was sitting on the 4 or 5 train, one of those on the green line, making the trip from Cornell Weill Hospital on the Upper East Side back to my Crown Heights apartment. I’d spent the previous two nights sleeping at my dad and stepmom’s apartment on …