The maxim in politics is that “it’s not personal, it’s just business.” Maybe that’s the psychological armor every politician wears against insults and indignities. Someone’s going to run against you, lie about you, spend millions of dollars vilifying you — but it’s not personal. If angry voters spew, it’s not about you, it’s about that unpopular vote that you cast, or the tough political environment for your party or because they’re uninformed. Writing a book, on the other hand, is deeply personal. Politicians put on protective gear, fiction writers take it off — fully exposing their creativity, emotions, fantasies. It’s like unburdening oneself on a therapist’s couch, only every reader on earth is your therapist.
You’re on a plane. You’re on a train. You’re wheeling through American space, and you’re feeling it: the hum of the void, the up-for-grabs-ness of it all. Out here there’s no protection. Good customer service, if you’re lucky, but no protection. Out here there is only the crackling feral mind: dominance, appetite, predation, pitiless allegiance to the pack. Who are you going to read, in this condition? Henry James? No. You’re going to read Lee Child.
Music, even when you are barely aware of it, can be surprisingly powerful. Over recent decades, researchers have found that it can affect how much time we think has passed while waiting in a queue, how co-operative shoppers are with sales staff, and even how sweet or bitter food tastes. One study found that shoppers’ preference for French or German wine shifted according to which of the respective countries’ traditional music was playing from a nearby set of speakers.
The background music industry – also known as music design, music consultancy or something offered as part of a broader package of “experiential design” or “sensory marketing” – is constantly deciding what we hear as we go about our everyday business. The biggest player in the industry, Mood Media, was founded in 2004 and now supplies music to 560,000 locations across the world, from Sainsbury’s to KFC.
On warm evenings in the affluent Karachi neighborhood of Defence, there’s often a steady stream of SUVs pulling off the main drag, Khayaban-e-Bukhari, onto tucked-away side streets. Arriving at a wall painted in the style of either South Asian truck art or kitschy Pakistani film, the occupants get out and hand their keys to a valet. There’s no nightclub or luxurious restaurant on the other side of a velvet rope, though, just a handful of plastic tables and chairs planted on sandy, open-air plots of land. By nightfall, the tables are packed with people ordering chai — the local term for tea, usually prepared with milk — and parathas, and documenting it all on Instagram.
Over the last few years, upscale roadside cafes serving tea mixed with elaborate ingredients like coffee or Cadbury chocolate, along with novelties like pizza parathas, have proliferated throughout Karachi’s wealthier districts. The spaces often resemble beer gardens, lit up by the bright signage of neighboring businesses and imbued with the mood of late nights, caffeine-fueled conversations, and board games. The crowds range from 20-somethings in skinny jeans and T-shirts to families in chauffeured cars. One Friday in January, Humaida Sabir, a 22-year-old student at Baqai Medical University, was having a girls’ night out. “If you just want to have a cup of tea in the open air,” she told me, there’s no place quite like one of these new roadside cafes.
Roadside cafes are hardly unusual in Pakistan; they have long sustained the country’s working class. What’s innovative about this new wave is the packaging: High-end cafes are taking the tea culture of the proletariat, wrapping it in a glossy coating, and using rhetoric about families, modernity, and cleanliness to sell it to the city’s elites and upwardly mobile for sizable profits. Saad Afridi, an airline pilot, ran the upscale, now-closed Season of Smiles, which was known by customers as SOS Tea Bar. “People don’t want to go to restaurants all the time,” he said. “They want to sit outside in the open air.”
But obviously, in my pursuit of a better body, McMuffins are now completely off-the-menu. And while I could cheat and make the case that the McMuffin contains more than enough fat to easily qualify as “dirty keto,” I don’t get down with that kind of dirt as my keto is as pure as an apple is filled with carbs. That doesn’t mean the longing stops, though — especially in the first few hours of the morning after my two designated drinking nights. On such mornings, I’m aching for that Mickey D’s grease. Its healing powers greater than Advil, Gatorade and sleep combined. But alas, I’m forced to seek out protein that might actually be a better cureall — i.e., not a hockey-puck like egg and shriveled slice of ham. Yet it never feels as though it’s doing the lord’s work of sopping up the copious amount of rum roiling amongst my innards, and certainly not even remotely with the same kind of efficacy as a McMuffin.
All of which is to say, when I heard that McDonald’s was releasing its latest version of the McMuffin, the Triple Breakfast Stacks, on Thursday, I couldn’t deprive myself of it — ketosis and my physical well-being be damned. It is, without a doubt, remarkably decadent, with not one, but two sausage patties as well as two slices of cheese and two slices of bacon. (Strangely, they stop at just a single egg, though; personally, for symmetrical purposes alone, I would have continued the doubles motif throughout.) Further decadence includes an option where you can forego the English muffin for a McGriddle. Essentially then, if you so choose, you can wrap all that sausage, cheese, bacon and egg within a pancake.