Clark, whose New York Times column is called "A Good Appetite," has written dozens of cookbooks. In her latest — Dinner in One — Clark offers 100 recipes that can be made in a single container, be it pot, bowl, skillet or slow cooker.
"Imagine like writing a haiku," Clark says. "You want to express the biggest thought with the fewest amount of words. ... The end goal was when I'm finished cooking, there's like three things in the sink."
We’re in our forties now. Maybe it’s no surprise that we’ve grown up to have grim obsessions: Debbie spent her high school years studying serial killers — John Joubert, a.k.a. the Nebraska Boy Snatcher, was a favorite because of his close proximity to us — and now works as a clinical psychologist. I’ve written a book about the violence and fear afflicting women and mothers. Reenacted true-crime stories, like the ones airing on Dateline and 20/20 and especially those about somebody murdering a member of their own family, fascinate us. Perhaps we find comfort in the clear delineation of evil and the safe distance from which to witness aberrant behavior in a relationship that is not ours.
For anybody who got through the pandemic’s early days, it doesn’t matter how much logic and sense there was to our lives. What mattered is that we lived to tell the tale. And it’s a funny story — sometimes.
In the early 17th century, there was a room in a house in Copenhagen bursting with hundreds of objects: bones and shells and taxidermised birds, not to mention weapons and rocks and a stuffed polar bear cub hanging from the ceiling. This was the Museum Wormianum, collected and curated by the Danish physician and philosopher Olaus Wormius, or Ole Worm to most. Four hundred years later, this quintessential cabinet of curiosities still inspires philosophy professor Perry Zurn and bioengineering professor Dani S Bassett, identical twins. What provoked Worm to collect? Which electrical signals were firing in his brain? How would the Enlightenment eccentric have behaved given access to Wikipedia?
These are questions asked in Zurn and Bassett’s latest work, Curious Minds: The Power of Connection, in which they investigate the neurological, historical, philosophical, and linguistic foundations of curiosity. What exactly is curiosity? Where does it come from and how does it work? In a manuscript peppered with questions, the academics explore everything from Plutarch to Google algorithms, to argue that curiosity is networked. “It works by linking ideas, facts, perceptions, sensations and data points together,” they write in the book, “Yet it also works within human grids of friendship, society and culture.”
Porter Fox, a journalist who’s written a great deal about snow, skiing and the ski industry, has in his latest book adventured more completely into the world of ice and snow to consider its future. “The Last Winter” is a beautifully written and intriguing combination of travel adventure, history, scientific reportage and personal response to the climate changes that are affecting the cryosphere — the frozen water part of the Earth system.
Think of the word "contain." Consider how it means two things: to hold, as well as to hold back. This is what we're talking about when we talk about great personal essays, how they express the inexpressible, how they take us inside the writer's life and, in usually fewer than 20 pages, return us to a piece of ourselves. This is what Jami Attenberg does in her 2022 memoir-in-essays, "I Came All This Way To Meet You: Writing Myself Home." Here, the best-selling novelist cracks open the image of a successful writer to reveal what it requires and what's happened along her way.
because I faithfully reply to every email from the absurd
gods of urgency who punish my good deeds by leaving me
empty when I empty my inbox … because I praise hating