The latest crop of Christie homages is a testament to the writer’s enduring appeal, but also to the flexibility of the format she perfected. The whodunit has its tropes—the eccentric investigator, the isolated country estate—while acting as a vehicle for whatever social commentary, colorful characters, or cultural references its current steward wants to infuse it with. “With the whodunit, I’m always looking for the genre to place inside that genre to actually make the car go,” Glass Onion director Rian Johnson told The Ringer in a conversation last month. “And the whodunit element is almost laid on top of it as an extra layer.” The whodunit can accommodate anything from a takedown of tech billionaires to a theatrical farce to an allegory of romance gone wrong, all while its most classic example remains beloved enough to inspire a box office hit. And while the genre has never gone out of style, the whodunit’s latest peak is an opportunity to appreciate both the form and its undisputed master.
She boiled a batch on the stove in her Northern California kitchen, ladled it into clean jars, and then put the jars in her pressure canner, a device with a locking lid similar to an Instant Pot. While they were processing (it takes about 75 minutes), she made a second batch to can. Eventually, she had eight pint jars of soup ready to eat, at a cost of only about $3 a jar — less than the price of a Big Mac.
Gomes, 39, is a longtime canning expert who teaches food preservation classes and co-hosts a podcast called Perfectly Preserved. But her strategy for getting dinner on the table (and tomorrow’s dinner in the cupboard) is becoming an increasingly common one. A growing number of Americans have taken up home canning in recent years, in what’s become a trend, a hobby, a political movement, and a response to the various bleak and bewildering conditions of life in the early 21st century.
Fried cheese was the last thing I thought I'd see going into a traditional West African dish, but especially into an okra stew. It was just one of several ingredients that surprised me as a Louisiana-born Cajun who cut his teeth on gumbo, a pillar of southern Louisiana cuisine that's made up of seafood or meat cooked in a roux – but never with cheese.
The origins of Louisiana gumbo can be traced to West Africa, during a time when enslaved Africans brought okra (or gombo as it is known in regional tongues) with them to the Caribbean and the US South, including where I'm from, the port city of New Orleans.
Makkai, as a fiction writer, draws on a long tradition of open-endedness. For her, suspending judgment is a creative act, inviting the novel’s last and most important thrall, in which imagination fills the gaps left by knowledge. By the final page, all options remain alive. “You” hold the knife. It’s the perfect crime.
The highest highs and the lowest lows of life often lead us down the path of memory. The destination? The single decision that set us on the road to our current reality. Sometimes, we are baffled by our own good fortune at forming incredible friendships, dwelling in a town or city where we thrive, or having a career that completely fulfills us. Other times, as in Tomihiko Morimi’s novel The Tatami Galaxy, we stew over the inexplicable bad luck that seems to drag us down endlessly like quicksand, and try to identify the moment when life took such an irredeemable turn. While those around us might offer up extreme optimism in the face of adversity as the answer, Morimi’s novel proposes a far more reasonable middle ground between that and drowning in self-pity.
Even when it does not literally rhyme, great poetry rhymes. The best poems are both of their own epoch and transferable to others, their themes and thoughts, emotions and meanings signifying whatever the poet initially meant and whatever future readers (all readers are temporally in the future) may need the poem to mean.