I think about murder a lot.
No big surprise, since I write murder mysteries for a living.
But I’ve been thinking about murder for a lot longer than I’ve been writing it. Since I was old enough to pull a well-thumbed paperback off my grandmother’s bookshelf.
The son of communist parents, Michéa saw the party as an extension of a more primary social unit. Friendship patterns have always served as a useful indicator for broader social trends, and writers at Vox were quick to apply the data to political analysis. The researchers invoked Hannah Arendt’s dictum that friendship was the best antidote for authoritarianism. At the end of 1951’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt postulated that a new form of loneliness had overtaken Westerners in the twentieth century, leading them to join new secular cults to remedy their perdition. “What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world,” she claimed, “is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience.” The conclusions were clear. As Americans become lonelier and more isolated in the new century, the same totalitarian temptation now lurks.
All across Italy, as Parasecoli tells me, food is used to identify who is Italian and who is not. But dig a little deeper into the history of Italian cuisine and you will discover that many of today’s iconic delicacies have their origins elsewhere. The corn used for polenta, unfortunately for Pezzutti, is not Italian. Neither is the jujube. In fact, none of the foods mentioned above are. All of them are immigrants, in their own way — lifted from distant shores and brought to this tiny peninsula to be transformed into a cornerstone of an ever-changing Italian cuisine.
thing I do, but it’s the thing I’ve done the most,
and now that I can glide through a supermarket