Now, though celebrated as the city’s sentinel, it may yet stand as a monument to the inexorable nature of climate change and the futility of man’s efforts to stop it. MOSE’s walls, costing 5 billion euros, about $5.3 billion, took so long to come together that the pace of climate change is already outstripping the projections they were built to withstand.
After all of the effort to get the barriers up, the future challenge will be finding ways to keep them down. Venice is already using MOSE more than expected, and faces the prospect of needing it much more than it had ever imagined against rising seas, so often that it would threaten to seal the city from the waters that are its lifeblood.
You can buy little snacky hand pies around the world—pasties, dumplings, empanadas, samosas; the genre is a recurring theme of this newsletter—but while most are available in a frozen version, the one you’re usually thinking of comes from a little storefront, a roadside stand, or hot out of a simmering pot in grandma’s kitchen. They’re crafted with love and attention to detail. They tell a story of a place.
Pizza rolls come in a bag from Walmart.
Since my sense of smell returned, however, I'm definitely more cognizant of the ways in which it informs and enhances my appreciation of food, both as an eater and as a cook. If you speak with anyone whose livelihood depends, at least in part, on their abilities to smell and taste — sommeliers, spirits professionals, flavor developers, chefs — they'll all offer one piece of advice with regards to improving either sense: Practice.
Why are we here? What is our purpose? How can we appreciate the lives we live and their mix of good and evil? These questions are no better answered than through Holland’s exploration of the life of a vampire and her journey through the shadows of history.
Schoenberger, the author of books on the novelist-socialite Lady Caroline Blackwood and the Johns Wayne and Ford, has now written a lean but graceful character study of DuBois, giving Williams’s most indelible but also frequently misunderstood character her due.
Why Writing Matters plunges us into all aspects of the writing life, describing the many experiences Delbanco has had, the lessons learned, and the writers befriended in the course of a distinguished career. His oeuvre doesn’t include a memoir—not yet—but he says he is working on something now, and much of what you find in this book feels like a first test run of incidents and experiences that will surely appear in that other work.
“I’ve just completed a text called ‘On Turning Eighty.’ It’s not a full-fledged memoir or, as a friend of mine calls it, me-moir,” he said. “But at a certain stage of age (and particularly if you’ve not indulged in the first person earlier), the desire to look back upon a life well- or ill-lived is almost unavoidable. And so, I’ve used my own little life as a template here.”