Maida Heatter carried brownies with her wherever she went. They were always wrapped, for hygienic purposes, and also so her purse wouldn’t be filled with crumbs. She would distribute them to people she met during the day, the way other old ladies in Miami would give out hard candies. But this was not simple generosity. It was blatant self-promotion. If you were in the restaurant business or trying to sell cookbooks, especially in the pre-social media age, you had to prove over and over again that you had the goods. Heatter did — and she decided that the simplest way to make sure everyone knew that was to taste for themselves.
So I suppose it made perfect sense for Heatter to bring brownies with her to the 1998 James Beard Awards where her first cookbook, Maida Heatter’s Book of Great Desserts, was to be inducted into the Cookbook Hall of Fame. She carried them in a Versace shopping bag because she had style. Barbara Lazaroff, who was Wolfgang Puck’s then-wife and business partner, made an introductory speech. Heatter handed her a brownie. Then she reached into her bag again... and started chucking brownies into the audience.
We need a strategy to deal with a hydra.
It’s Sunday, January 14, 2024, more than 50 hours since the annual MIT Mystery Hunt kicked off at noon on Friday, and Setec Astronomy is one of more than 200 teams racing to solve hundreds of puzzles over three days. The 60-some members of Setec, many of whom are joining remotely from as far away as Australia, are making good progress, even though many of us are running on limited sleep and questionable nutritional decisions. Several of the chalkboards in the Building 2 classroom we’ve been assigned for our team headquarters are covered in lists of puzzle solutions or messy diagrams charting out theories about how to crack the various challenges—all of them constructed, as Mystery Hunt tradition dictates, by the most recent winner, in this case The Team Formerly Known as the Team to Be Named Later.
The “hydra” we’re dealing with is a metapuzzle: We have to find a way to use the solutions from other puzzles that we’ve already solved to extract one more answer. If we solve this one, we’ll be rewarded with more puzzles.
“The Close-Up” checks many boxes: steamy, suspenseful, surprising, meta. But it’s Drysdale’s momentous writing and underlying musings that really drive this novel home.
Poet and teacher Paisley Rekdal provides in this ambitious book an intricate grammar for reading and analyzing poetry in the conviction that it can make us better at both, if we try. Author of six collections and former poet laureate of Utah, Rekdal is distinguished professor of English at the University of Utah. Here in effect she admits us to her classroom or workshops.
The photo of the author on the jacket of Stranger Than Fiction tells you something. Edwin Frank sits at a small desk, entirely hemmed in by overflowing bookshelves and teetering stacks of books. His reading glasses have been pushed back on his head, so that he can meet your gaze; you have interrupted him in the engrossing business of reading, reading, reading. Stranger Than Fiction is testimony to its author’s sheer appetite for books, and especially for 20th-century fiction at its most testing and ambitious. His article of faith is that the most demanding novels are often the most satisfying.
“Dear Boys” — a collection of letters to his grandsons, along with quotable snippets from literature, history and sermons — was originally intended as a kind of family album, but along the way Henderson says that friends urged him to go public with the musings and advice because they might be “useful” to others.