Notes On The Exotic

“Sometimes one can recapture that fleeting sensation with names – place-names. If I am hiking up a familiar path near my house in Turin and I think, ‘I am climbing a hill in Italy,’ there is a brief whiff of foreign glamour. And, when I arrived in Uzbekistan and was disappointed to find that city people took buses and trams as they do everywhere else, I could revive a touch of fantasy by silently repeating, ‘Streetcars in Samarkand’.”

Tom Magliozzi, Clack Of “Car Talk”, Dead At 77

Producer Doug Berman: “He and his brother changed public broadcasting forever. Before Car Talk, NPR was formal, polite, cautious … even stiff. By being entirely themselves, without pretense, Tom and Ray single-handedly changed that, and showed that real people are far more interesting than canned radio announcers. And every interesting show that has come after them owes them a debt of gratitude.”

Letting Go Of The Foodie Life

“If shopping and cooking really are the most consequential, most political acts in my life, perhaps what that means is that our sense of the political has shrunk too far—shrunk so much that it fits into our recycled-hemp shopping bags. If these tiny acts of consumer choice are the most meaningful actions in our lives, perhaps we aren’t thinking and acting on a sufficiently big scale.”

Adam Gopnik Contemplates Mutant Pastry

“Let us look, then, at these case studies of how stale bread becomes fresh and familiar sweets take mutant forms, and ask why people line up at an ungodly hour to eat sweets that taste odd and look new. Is the pretzel croissant the forerunner of the Cronut or merely its parallel creature? Is the Cronut a craze that, like the designer cupcake, is doomed to walk the avenues briefly and then die in shame and embarrassment, or is it a true contribution – as the croissant and the doughnut and the pretzel all were in their day – and likely to become part of the common cupboard?”

“The Protest Failed Because It Relied On Falsehoods”: Alex Ross On “The Death Of Klinghoffer”

“The opera is not anti-Semitic, nor does it glorify terrorism. … The most specious arguments against Klinghoffer elide the terrorists’ bigotry with the attitudes of the creators. By the same logic, one could call Steven Spielberg an anti-Semite because the commandant in Schindler’s List compares Jewish women to a virus.”