The popularity of penny dreadfuls had another side: They helped to promote literacy, especially among younger readers, at a time when, for many children, formal education was nonexistent or, well, Dickensian. The proliferation of such cheap reading material created “an incentive to require literacy,” says professor Jonathan Rose, author of The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. People were invested in the stories of Jack Harkaway and Sweeney Todd, and there was only one good way to keep up—learn to read.
The muted colors, large glass windows, and overall boxy appearance of a modern McDonald’s are forgettable, and a far cry from the garish red-and-yellow buildings that many recall from their childhood. Slowly but surely, fast food restaurants are giving up their once brand-defining facades to follow in the path of “fast casual” eateries like Chipotle, which have become much more popular over the years.
While this standardization might make good business sense for a style of dining that is sometimes seen as out of fashion or simply outmoded, some in the industry wonder if the company has lost something in the process of turning its back on its McDonaldland origins. As enthusiasts like Max Krieger attest, characters such as Ronald McDonald and Grimace might seem dated now, but they at least provided an identity for the brand that was original and appealing — even if only to its target audience of children and parents.
Not long after 9/11, Don DeLillo wrote: “Language is inseparable from the world that provokes it.” To write now is to write in the wake of 2020, whether one engages it or not. Some readers may want to escape the present, but there are those of us who want to see a writer find the language for what is unfolding, to give us the slanted, intimate clarity that can’t be achieved in other ways. After months of epidemiology Twitter, after the reportage about the dying and the dead, I turned to writers: Zadie Smith’s lyrical writing about the moral implications of the privileged stay-at-home class, Patricia Lockwood’s hilarious piece about getting Covid, and Lorrie Moore’s unstinting story “Face Time,” in which the description of isolation from a father as he died made me feel less isolated in my own grief. Gary Shteyngart brings his version of the above to his reflective, earthy, humane new novel, “Our Country Friends,” which is rife with the problem of privilege, the profoundly leveling experience of the virus, and an ever-present sense of absurdity and humor.
Over the course of her 50-year career, Ms. Roden, 85, has helped revolutionize the way the British cook and eat. She taught them how to blend cucumbers with yogurt and garlic into a creamy salad, how to simmer lentils with cumin to make a warming soup, and how to fold phyllo stuffed with cheese and herbs into flaky bite-size pastries.
As if that wasn’t legacy enough, she also helped shift the way writing about cuisine, particularly by women, was perceived.