The sky was still dark that morning in October, 1961, when a Frenchwoman named Simone “Simca” Beck and her American friend Julia Child headed over to the NBC studio sets in Midtown Manhattan, ready to make their television debut. They were to conduct a cooking demonstration for the Today show to promote Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961), the 732-page tome both women had co-authored with the writer Louisette Bertholle. It had been released a few days before in America by the publishing house Knopf to rapturous reviews. Sales, though, could’ve been better. Appearing on Today, which pulled in around four million viewers a day back then, certainly couldn’t hurt.
Though the book had three authors, Bertholle’s involvement became minimal as the book neared publication, which is to say it was really a two-hander between Beck and Child. And it was Beck, in particular, who contributed the majority of the recipes to early versions of the book, many of them family heirlooms from her upbringing in Normandy. Child, meanwhile, gave the text its American soul, making the recipes legible to readers in the United States.
This is the centenary year of “Babbitt,” Sinclair Lewis’s best — and most misunderstood — novel. He had written five inconsequential books that had received respectable if not excited attention. And in 1920 — at the age of 35 — he had written “Main Street,” the most sensationally successful novel of the century to date: hundreds of thousands of copies sold, and a title that came to stand for the values, both narrow-minded and wholesome, of what we now call Middle America.
The Pulitzer Prize jury chose it as the year’s best novel, but in a scandalous reversal of their decision, the prize’s trustees refused to approve the award and presented it instead to Edith Wharton’s “The Age of Innocence.” A few years later, when the judges chose Lewis’s “Arrowsmith,” he refused to accept the prize — Sinclair Lewis had a thin skin.
“Fiona and Jane” is a refreshingly honest treatment of long-term friendships — particularly their inexorable ebb and flow. Story by story, the book captures the way friendships negotiate their own boundaries, at times dissolving unexpectedly and at others flourishing into something more, even if just fleetingly.
While Ho admits her adult friendships flavor the book, she is hesitant to draw any direct parallels. She did say she felt compelled to write about friendship between Asian American women, partly as the result of her own upbringing in a predominantly Asian L.A. suburb — the kind of place that complicates simplistic media definitions of diversity as “an element of difference to the white majority.”
“The last star will slowly cool and fade away. With its passing, the universe will become once more a void, without light or life or meaning.” So warned the physicist Brian Cox in the recent BBC series Universe. The fading of that last star will only be the beginning of an infinitely long, dark epoch. All matter will eventually be consumed by monstrous black holes, which in their turn will evaporate away into the dimmest glimmers of light. Space will expand ever outwards until even that dim light becomes too spread out to interact. Activity will cease.
Or will it? Strangely enough, some cosmologists believe a previous, cold dark empty universe like the one which lies in our far future could have been the source of our very own Big Bang.
I’d say Mr. Matsuki knows too much about the fish, but it’s not actually possible to know too much about a fish when your job is to prepare it for sushi. On a wee cushion of rice, shaped as it tumbled gently through his hands, seasoned with a dark, grain-staining vinegar, the fish is sweet and sumptuous, unreasonably delicate, verging on fragile, a marvel of a bite.
Recent meals at Ginza Onodera, and at so many other counters across the city, affirmed that despite the continuing effects of the pandemic, Los Angeles remains this country’s glorious sushi capital. It has one of the most robust sushi scenes outside of Japan, with a thrilling diversity of styles for every taste, budget and neighborhood.
You might dismiss the World’s Best Rice as a marketing stunt; Toyo Rice only produces a few hundred boxes a year. But the concept that a person’s palate can be trusted to rate and rank batches of plain white rice, like single-origin coffee or grower Champagne, has a mainstream following in Japan. National newspapers, lifestyle magazines, food websites, radio shows, daytime TV programs—there’s no shortage of printed pages and broadcast airtime filled with in-depth commentary from “rice sommeliers” about what types are better for a light breakfast of fermented soybeans and seaweed or as fried rice for dinner. In addition, shopkeepers certified as “five-star rice meisters” demonstrate their expertise with their special in-house blends and taste charts.
How do we bring children up in today’s increasingly dangerous and divided world? Will they rise? Or will they fall? With the recent rash of articles about the fragility of adolescent mental health and America’s uptick in teenage suicide rates, these questions are urgent. In his sixth novel, “Anthem,” Noah Hawley taps into our existential anxiety — and transforms it into a hefty page-turner that’s equal parts horrific, catastrophic and, at times, strangely entertaining.
Coming a century after the Swedish actress' film debut, Robert Gottlieb's biography of Greta Garbo is a classic movie lover's dream. Enriching his insightful reconsideration of Garbo's life and career are wonderful photos, a selection of essays from the past, and anecdotes from those who encountered the enigmatic star.