This Should Be My Bible

Katie from Boston at Struggling Single Twentysomething linked to me. Yay! And she led me to an excellent site: Smart, Pretty and Awkward.

Change is one day at a time, right?

Really? Glamour?

Glamour was recently named magazine of the year.

I'm not quite sure why.

I've subscribed to Glamour for the last year. I only did so because of their 75th anniversary promotion, where I could get a year's worth for 75 cents. Yep, 12 issues for less than a dollar. What the hell? As far as women's magazines go, I actually like Glamour, detesting their nearest rival, Cosmopolitan. Glamour was more real, and I liked that they incorporated recipes and real advice, at least in the back. They had the obligatory "serious story", addiction or do-gooders, now with Katie Couric interviewing some notable female. All well and good.

But after a few months, it was wearying. The topics were the same, of course: men, relationships, food, eating, exercise, fashion, beauty. I wondered how those working at the magazine didn't get bored of the repetition. The advice was usually sound, but repetitive, and occasionally contradictory. I waded through the "girl with the belly bulge" and the Crystal Renn spreads; meh. Crystal Renn is beautiful and not plus sized in the least, as I've noted before. I no longer felt that the magazine was the exception to others in its category; maybe I just got used to it, maybe the novelty wore off. But I also wasn't looking at other young-women magazines, either, so it became just another Glamour. I knew I wasn't going to renew my subscription when I subscribed, but now I didn't care.

But besides the sameness, I was saddened to see that women's magazines "cleaned up" certain celebrities:



































Lady Gaga and Rihanna are known for dressing explicitly, in wild getups, but they are stripped of their individuality; whitewashed, you could say. There's no crazy makeup, no funky fashion choices, nothing that should be exposed covered up and nothing covered up that should be exposed. They're not even in fun colors: Lady Gaga is uncharacteristically in all white, or off-white, as if to appear pure, but she looks out of place and strangely bland, since she blends in with the background. It's the text that speaks, not her. Rihanna at least looks happy, if girlish, a woman full of spunk and personality. This might be to offset the serious interview inside, promoting her album Rated R, both which explore her dark and volatile year. But her hair is gelled back; we are not to notice her funky, unconventional style choices, just like we aren't meant to view Lady Gaga as she wants to be seen. Maybe that explains her detached look.

I see this as suppressing both women's natural personalities and style to favor a more acceptable form of female expression, both in beauty and personality. I can understand why a cover picture of Lady Gaga wouldn't have her face covered, but I don't see why she has to appear in such an awful getup, one she would never wear anywhere else. I don't see how prettifying Rihanna makes her ordeal any better, except take away her right to express herself as she chooses.

So Glamour, magazine of the year? You might talk the talk of inclusion of expression, proudly showing off your Crystal Renn glamour shots, but until you really show how real women are, capturing their life as they live it (not as you wish them to see it), you don't deserve this title.

Cross-posted on Notes on Popular Culture.

RIP: The AIM Away Message

A blogger I follow, Katie from Boston, recently wrote an ode to AIM away messages. Both of us spent overlapping years at college, in that space where social media was growing, but hadn’t hit the wider world yet. Status messages were only in the province of AIM, and the unique college environment meant that everyone was on all the time, through one medium. We all had angsty things to say, and we did so by the most elegant and articulate way we could—song lyrics:

One thing that’s been lost in the translation from away messages to Facebook statuses and Twitter, though, is the art of the song lyric message. Most song lyrics are too long to sum up our deepest feelings in 140 characters, but that wasn’t a problem with the AIM away message! No, we didn’t have to come right out and say what we were feeling because an artist we liked had done it for us, leaving us with cryptic lyrics to provide our friends, hoping that they’d decipher our mood. And there were truly lyrics for every emotion.

I too have lamented this loss. Song lyrics just don’t work on Facebook, just another post on a feed. With AIM, we got the added bonus of fonts and colors, all designs to prove how precious or earnest we were through what we listened to.

Katie nails down many of the categories the songs fell in, although her personal references do not mesh with mine (or my friends), since that is based partly upon taste. But no one who went to college in 2004 will forget the ubiquity of Garden State (I’m pretty sure everyone on my buddy list used “There’s beauty in the breakdown” from “Let Go”). She misses the overused “We’re so in love” lyrics from “Such Great Heights”—to this day I groan when seeing “I am thinking it's a sign that the freckles/In our eyes are mirror images and when/We kiss they're perfectly aligned”. It’s not original or cute anymore, it’s hackneyed and trite.

Away messages were a code. Not always, and obviously, sometimes they were perfectly explicit, even when in song lyrics. I knew what certain lyrics “meant”: trouble, or heartbreak, even if I didn’t know specifics or if the specifics didn’t line up exactly with the song. I just knew it was bad news.

Of course, away messages were also misinterpreted, sometimes causing lots of offense and drama. That was all part of college, as was the timing of certain remarks (whether intentional or not), or the inability to update the away messages either out of sheer laziness or because people were plumb not there to do so.

I suspect AIM is not held in the same regard now among this demographic, not with Twitter and Facebook and cell phones and text messaging all overtaking the importance of the away message. Plus everything can be integrated, so there really is no excuse for not updating. But I do miss crafting my away messages, thinking of the audience to read them. Now, out of college, most of my buddies have gravitated away, and like most social services, the fun is in who you know and how many people in your network are in, so the reason for going on has diminished, and with that the motivation to put up an away message. Now, the same people are on, usually at the same time—the evening.

Instant Messages have gravitated toward the workplace, as a way of connecting to far-flung colleagues, or to those in a big organization where picking up the phone is pure avoidance or laziness. Katie does nail some of the problems inherent with talking via this means: the inability to detect tone (sarcasm often falls flat), causing confusion; and how to squeeze in this activity while doing other things (also a mainstay in college). It always seemed dishonest to ghost in order to talk to only one or two people, or to put up an away message in order to avoid those you don’t want to talk to while engaging others. AIM also foreshadowed the “digital autism” of today, the inability to have a conversation or pay attention to those you’re physically with, preferring to spend energy through technological means.

I still go on AIM, but it’s a different experience; it’s to talk to specific people. I rarely have away messages up now—what’s the point? Who’s going to see? And with all the new features, it’s no longer the service of yore, but an entirely new beast, one that’s trying to still be as old-school but playing catch-up with the new kids on the block. AIM’s heyday was rooted very much in its time, a benefit of a confluence of factors that was victim to technology and time: growing up.

How I Became Who I Am: My Most Influential Reading List

The blogosphere has been playing another one of those memes that hit every so often, and this time it’s My Most Influential books. These things are hard to quantify, of course, and I may very well change my thinking in the future. Like Ezra, I feel that many of the things I’ve read that’s influenced me the most have been non-books, especially in the past several years. My friends and their writing has influenced me greatly; I see vocabulary words and think of them, because those are words they use; I hear arguments, I think of them; I have adopted their thinking patterns because of them. But publications I have read for years, continuously, have also shaped my worldview: RollingStone (though I’ve gotten away from their political coverage the last several years), The New York Times (I think of high school and cringe), the blogosphere, the many, many, many magazine articles I’ve read.

And yet, if I’m going with my gut, I’m not sure if I can reach ten books.

• The first is obviously The Plug-In Drug: Television, Computers, and Family Life. I read it at the end of high school, and its contrarian outlook (especially on violence) and complete focus on media effects steered me into what I wanted to study. It blew my mind.


• The Corrections: I want to write like this, a story so stuffed full of everything, with so much to say! These are the kinds of stories I deeply admire, the “social novels” that make me love Jonathan Franzen, for they take the personal and the political, and reflect how a person really is affected by every little thing.


• The works of E.L. Konigsburg. Also a writer I very much want(ed?) to emulate. Her books were nothing like the rest of novels I consumed as a kid. There were no romantic hijinks, and the characters were not interested nor happened to fall in love and get significant others. Boys and girls were actually friends! The characters all had interesting lives, all had passions and hobbies they wanted to explore, and had problems that were neither commonplace nor depressing. Konigsburg got her ideas from newspaper features, and created stories from that jumping off point. I thought it was ingenious. She’s so good she’s won the Newbery medal twice, for From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and The View from Saturday.


• Bobos in Paradise. I remember seeing the book in the featured section in my library back in 2000, and was very intrigued. I probably took it out a few times, but I didn’t get around to reading it until four years later. My god! So dense yet so wonderful, every chapter just needed to be absorbed.


• The works of Malcolm Gladwell (minus Outliers, as I haven’t read it yet): The kind of pop-social commentary I love, one that draws from multiple disciplines. Academically, I am very much an interdisciplinary thinker, and I love how he poses interesting questions and the ways he goes about to find the answers. His technique has been widely copied.

I think back on my childhood and adolescence, where I went through periods of reading authors—Ann Rinaldi, Katharine Patterson, Judy Blume. I read a lot of historical fiction as a kid, a genre I sadly barely touch now. But I know that I like my setting and place to be very specific in my stories, and most of the fiction I’ve attempted to write has always had this quality. I also am a stickler for this, and I find that many people don’t bother to research the “recent past” as much as they should, as in a movie. In watching Julie & Julia, for example, I wanted to see if the computer Julie uses in 2002 was actually available at the time, and disliked how cavalier they were regarding Julia’s timeline.

I had another epiphany fall of my senior year. I was making paper dolls as a project on "As You Like It" for my Shakespeare class, and wandered downstairs to look at my bookshelf, mainly filled with my childhood favorites, for inspiration. The vast majority were about young, smart women who wanted to become writers. Of course! How had I missed this? No wonder I became who I am!

Some Thoughts on Blogging, Technology and Gender, and What We Choose to Reveal About Ourselves

I had a very bloggy week, between watching Julie & Julia and Monday’s episode of House, which both revolved around women whose blogs got the better of them.

Julie & Julia received a lot of press for its portrayal of supportive husbands, on both women’s side. The Times gleefully wrote of Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci’s portrayal of middle-aged passion, but Julie’s husband was a “saint”, so much so that he objected to the label. Much is made of the Childs’ marriage, how passionate they were, but I found Paul Child to be supportive, but distant; in fact, both husbands in the movie were quite bland. Maybe that’s the point—they both were supportive characters, meant to prop up the leads, so they usually are less developed than the protagonists.

But other than that observation, it was Julie’s bloggy passion that stood out, in comparison to this week’s House episode, concentrated on a blogger who goes a little too personal with her diagnosis. Both women get caught up in blogging about their lives, neglecting their significant others, who come to resent their girlfriend’s hobby. (Tip: Get a boyfriend who blogs, or who at least likes the medium as much as you do.) This is reminiscent of Emily Gould’s fantastic bloggy piece in the New York Times nearly two years ago, where she recounts how blogging about her personal life wrecked her relationship and her life. All three women had successful blogs, the real-life ones turning into successful writers. All three were transformed by their hobby, sharing their love with others and eventually having their own audience. Both Julie and Laura Prepon’s Frankie worry too much about their audience; Julie, about actually having one, and Frankie, about what they think. She uses her blog as a crowdsource of opinion, on both the large and small decisions of her life, including the many major medical ones she faces in the episode. Their blogs become their lives, their reason for getting up in the morning. Julie’s Julia Child obsession is fueled by her blogging, and without it the structure of her project would fall apart, as she is documenting her progress. Frankie, too, is obsessed with documenting her life, and despite protestations from her boyfriend, feels she would be lying if she did not faithfully record or retell everything. Julie does not feel this way, though she does consent to not publicizing a fight she has with her husband (though by it being in the movie we presume that it is retold in her book).

The issue here, of course, becomes privacy. Sure, on the surface, Julie Powell’s project sounds fun, if daunting, and not particularly invasive; she is in charge of how much she chooses to reveal, and on the surface a cooking blog would not be one to draw readers.

But of course, that’s too simplistic. One of the women mentioned in the film who actually makes an appearance is Amanda Hesser, a New York Times food writer who made a name for herself (at least to this writer) by writing a column in the Times Magazine in the early part of the ‘00s, “Cooking for Mr. Latte”, about her meals and dates with a certain Mr. Latte, later revealed to be the New Yorker writer Tad Friend. “Cooking for Mr. Latte”, a kind of Sex and the City meets food, certainly had enough dish and romantic intrigue to make it more than just another food column, and, though it was on paper, had a bloggy feel to it, as it chronicled their burgeoning relationship. (The column also became a book.)

So why are all these bloggers women? Why is it that women feel the need to emotionally reveal themselves online, to chronicle their lives? Men seem to go about it in a much more analytical, data-driven fashion; Nicholas Felton has designed a number of what he calls “Personal Annual Reports”, yearly compilations of the minutia that makes up his life, and it’s fascinating: all the restaurants he ate at, the countries he visited, his most played songs on iTunes. Every year, the charts and graphs, not to mention what he actually records, get increasingly complex. (The MIT Media Lab has done similar projects, recording and analyzing personal, daily data of students.) Sure, I already know all the comments, the criticism: even a friend of mine, when I showed him Feltron, responded, “I know the irony of what I'm about to say as a man that Tweets but that's kind of self absorbed.”

Sure, it’s self-absorbed. But it’s a whole other form of diary, a multimedia one, life writ large. The data aspects makes it so much cooler, because it’s objective, and it’s a form that you can’t argue with; maybe that’s why men like it. There are so many ways to tell a story, and neither is completely right, for each time it’s told, it’s done a little differently, and they all give different sides to the same one.

The Internet, in all its lovely possibilities, has also given us a way to be anonymous and solicit anonymous opinions. That comes across in blogging—again with the choosing to reveal what we want. But there’s also the new ChatRoulette and Formspring.me, services that flip anonymity on its head.

ChatRoulette, memorably introduced to many (including me) via this New York article, is a basic service that automatically turns on a user’s webcam and randomly beams you into someone else’s browser, and they you. The only options are to engage, move on, or turn off. Most outlets have connected it back to the days of the “wild, wild Internet”, before it became safe for minors, where everything and everyone was searchable. Here, it doesn’t matter if your name or your face or your home really belongs to you, as you are only known by your face, and there is no tag—there’s not even a record of who you’ve been connected with. There’s no way to track, no searching, no user names, no login information, no password. Glorious freedom. And yet it’s scary and incredibly intimidating, a party game to play.

Formspring.me is a site, a meme if you like, that lets people ask questions of a particular user. The person can use his or her real name, or a version of it, if the person desires, and those asking the questions can also identify themselves, though they usually stay anonymous. People asking the questions are strangers and friends; maybe you’ll get something good. It’s a version of a Facebook application known as the honesty box, which always got someone in trouble; that’s what honesty tends to do. And yet it’s addicting, in a way, to say too much; God knows in this era of TMI that it’s hard to put a lid on. Lying is contagious too, but it’s confusing as hell; being openly honest, too openly honest, can be about connecting or prolonging the awkward, having something to say, maybe just making a funny.

So we have two sides of a coin here: a site where we are expected to divulge secrets to those asking, and another an interface where we are personally faced with random strangers, no accountability. The first is implicitly about accountability, though we aren’t supposed to be pegged; the second, an escape route if we wish it to be.

But of course, we often occupy on the assumption that more information is better, and that notion led to ChatRoulette map, where users’ IP addresses are tracked to see who is using the service at any time. You do not need to be engaged on ChatRoulette to use ChatRoulette map, as I discovered this afternoon. There’s an option to turn this off, for it ruins the fun for some people. Exposing IP addresses always has a whiff of creepiness, as it feels like Big Brother is coming down to watch.

There are plenty of people who say that both will be a fad, but in Internet world, there are few things that have escaped this designation, one being Facebook. The Internet is both a blessing and a curse, causing us both to escape and feel trapped by our past, and we eagerly take up the call whenever we need to do so.

P.S. I have a formspring.me account. Ask questions, readers!

Also cross-posted on Notes on Popular Culture.

Getting My Geek On

LOVE this:

JESS3 / The State of The Internet from JESS3 on Vimeo.

And what's crazy is that more information than you think is outdated here. Favorite statistic: Facebook needs more than 30,000 servers to run, and they're still growing. Holy shit.

Reviewing Ruth Reichl's Trio of Food Memoirs

…We all become actors, to some extent, when we go out to eat. Every restaurant is a theater, and the truly great ones allow us to indulge in the fantasy that we are rich and powerful. When restaurants hold up their end of the bargain, they give us the illusion of being surrounded by servants intent on ensuring our happiness and offering extraordinary food.

But even modest restaurants offer the opportunity to become someone else, at least for a little while. Restaurants free us from mundane reality; that is part of their charm. When you walk through the door, you are entering neutral territory where you are free to be whoever you choose for the duration of the meal.

--Ruth Reichl, Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise

Ruth Reichl has made a name for herself reviewing restaurants, most notably as the New York Times’ chief restaurant critic in the ‘90s. While there, she made reviewing a literary art form, weaving stories into her reviews, adding quotes from patrons and staff, incorporating history and sensory fun. Looking back, her reviews do not seem controversial, but she was up against a lot of history, even enduring a smear campaign from her bitter predecessor, Bryan Miller, which ended up on Page Six.

In an job interview with the paper, she condemns their food coverage, telling top editors that their reviews are “useful guides for the people who actually eat in the restaurants you review. You shouldn’t be writing reviews for the people who dine in fancy restaurants, but for all the ones who wish they could.” The Times, for many years, focused only those fancy French restaurants that defined class and culinary sophistication in this country, but these were the types of restaurants, like Lutece, that were patronized by the rich and powerful; most people would rarely, if ever, get the chance to try it. As eating out became more like going to the movies instead of the opera, restaurant criticism should reflect that trend, Reichl notes, and become just as much a democratizing force.

Already well-known in the food world in the early ‘90s, Reichl was warned on a flight to New York City that “Every restaurant in town has your picture pinned to the bulletin board, next to the specials of the day.” Panicked, Reichl realized that there was only one way to do her job: go in disguise. So she became Molly, a retired high school teacher from Birmingham, Michigan. The New York Times’ restaurant critic was the most powerful position in restaurant criticism, and her word could make or break an establishment. Critics were expected to dine out no less than three times, often more, with companions, sampling a range of food at different times, testing for consistency and quality. Being discovered was ruinous, because it often lead to extraordinary service, comped dishes, freebies, and extras, like plumper strawberries.

Reichl’s infamous Le Cirque experience is recounted in the third volume of her memoirs, Garlic and Sapphires. As Molly, she and her middle-aged companion endured rude service, waiting at the bar, watching the waiters hope that they would leave, before being seated in a tight corner in the back of the restaurant, near an alcove where the menus were kept. As herself, she was treated to this gem: “The King of Spain is waiting at the bar, but your table is ready.”

Garlic and Sapphires traces her years at the New York Times, where she subjects herself to a number of wigs and odd outfits, transforming herself into all sorts of women, all with backstories and unique personalities. Unlike her two previous memoirs, Tender at the Bone and Comfort Me With Apples, this one is focused exclusively on restaurants and her career. Columns from her tenure are reprinted here—most are just labeled “Restaurants”, a little too simple; not all have titles. She inherited a star system that is no longer in place, and readers relive many of the meals behind the review.

Reading through the books, you really get a sense of how much the world has changed in the last fifty years. In Tender at the Bone, all the included recipes seem very unhealthy. There’s lots of eggs and butter and cream, and the recipes, many complicated, use lots of hard-to-find ingredients. They also scream French and fatty; lots of meat and dessert. The recipes in Garlic and Sapphires are familiar, easy, and as such, much likelier to be made (I tried the first one, New York Style Cheesecake, as a birthday gift).

What Americans actually ate has also changed considerably. Reichl was lucky to grow up in New York City, with Jewish roots, and so was exposed to a lot of food that didn’t become mainstream until decades later. Outside of such cities, Americans ate a lot of steak, a lot of bland, nutritionally-deficient food. The horrors of midcentury Midwestern cooking—chicken, steak, Rice-a-Roni—are reinforced when she meets her future husband’s parents for the first time. They cook her a “fancy” meal: cottage cheese-filled canned peaches on iceberg lettuce, and “chow mein”: canned beans sprouts, canned mushrooms, bouillon cubes, and molasses. Ugh.

But her life, too, encapsulates this change: brought up in Greenwich Village in the ‘50s, she was surrounded by butchers, bakeries, and other “specialty” shops; many of those have disappeared by the time she returns thirty years later. Her mother, educated in Europe, ships her off to a Montreal boarding school to learn French when she is a preteen, and she spends her high school years in Connecticut, skipping class, drinking and cooking while her parents stay in New York. Rebelling, she goes to school in Michigan, where she becomes a hippie, majoring in sociology and attending sit-ins and teach-ins, learning about Moroccan and Guyanese cooking. Upon graduating, with nothing else to do, she gets a master’s degree in art history at the same university. Who does that now without a lot of foresight and planning?

But these are only some of the ways in which we see how far the world has changed. Nowadays food is its own genre, and there are millions of foodies, professional and amateur, who follow the field. With movies like Food, Inc, what we eat has become politicized. “Food porn” is its own subgenre, and pictures both disgusting and beautiful can be found anywhere on the web. Chefs are superstars, and professional eating is a job, one that can lead to fame. The Food Network and the Travel Channel bring cuisines, styles, and food as entertainment to the masses. Midwestern suburbia has access to heretofore ethnic and specialty ingredients. No longer is eating out a province of the rich. Even the act of reviewing restaurants, thanks to the Internet, has changed, since it’s virtually impossible to stay incognito, as Columbia Journalism Review’s recent history on food writing recounts.

Ruth Reichl is incredibly blessed. Her story reads like nothing more than that she happened to be the recipient of a lot of luck—she was always at the right place at the right time. As one friend puts it, she was born to be a restaurant critic, and that is certainly evident in her background. She was cooking at an early age, more as self-preservation than anything else. Her mother, Miriam, quite a character, is “taste-blind and unafraid of rot” and Ruth grew up warning all guests—and there were a lot—which food was unsafe to eat. Her mother, in a story memorable recounted in Tender at the Bone and in the recent published Not Becoming My Mother, poisoned twenty-six people at an engagement party she threw for her son (which she also turned into a benefit for Unicef.) She would buy anything exotic, throw random stuff together, and call it a meal. It didn’t matter if the sour cream was green.

Reichl spent a summer as a camp counselor in a small island off the coast of France. Unlike American health camps, which are highly structured and are strongly linked to losing weight, French camps had few rules, among them that campers would shower once a week and that everyone had to eat everything on the plate. Campers were expected to gain weight. Reichl was free to explore the island.

She meets her first husband living in Ann Arbor when he comes looking for her friend, the previous occupant. They move in the next day, marry young, and after a short stint in New York City, they move to Berkeley, where they are part of the burgeoning local and organic food movement. There they live in a commune with ten other people for ten years, their bedroom smaller than most dorm rooms. They stick out because they are married, but they live the life of a poor hippie. They have no credit cards, very little to their name, and they disdain bourgeois trappings like dishwashers (energy inefficient) and meat (too high on the food chain and “an egregious example of the vertical integration of agribusiness”). They dumpster dive and recycle fanatically, living on grain, millet and bland vegan products. She moves up the ranks, working in a number of restaurants, notably The Swallow, before becoming a food critic for New West (later renamed California) magazine, then moving to the Los Angeles Times. In Berkeley, San Francisco and Los Angeles, she meets and becomes friends with some big names: Alice Waters, Wolfgang Puck.

Her second memoir, Comfort Me with Apples, describes her “tumultuous years” in California, the dissolution of her first marriage, and her subsequent affairs and battle with infertility. Here is where most of her traveling is done: whenever her life is a mess, she takes a trip, and so readers are exposed to a storybook affair in Paris, feastiaries in Thailand, and an international mystery in China. In Tender, it’s a whirlwind honeymoon in Europe, with an extended lag in Crete; a Tunisian tour with local men before jet-setting to Algiers; and of course, Paris. Obviously, the books are filled with long ago beautiful meals, lovely wine, and interesting concoctions.

One criticism of the books, especially in the first two, is that Reichl is not very specific with time. I consistently overestimate her age, partly because milestones in her life happen earlier than expected (she is finished with her undergrad degree by the time she is twenty, for example). It is hard, at times, to figure out if it’s the late ‘60s or early ‘70s in her book, how long she has been in a particular setting or situation. This matters less in Garlic and Sapphires, mostly because her life is settled then, and the entirety of that book revolves around one job and setting. Many readers might not care about the specificity of dates; indeed, Reichl comes from a long line of embellishers, and her books, being memoirs, are not factual recitations of events.

At times Reichl can be amazingly open—as when she reveals that she took a pay cut to work at the New York Times, starting out at $82,000, in Garlic and Sapphires, or when describing her sex life in Comfort Me With Apples. Her parents figure prominently in the first two, but her son, Nick, now twenty-one, appears often in the last. He is sweet, and adores his mom. It is her family that prompts her decision to leave the New York Times for Gourmet magazine, which she helmed until the magazine’s departure a few months ago.

What’s also fun, besides the meals and her amazing experiences, is seeing how the Times ran, especially in the ‘90s, where it was considered a snake pit, a completely different and unfriendly beast to the Los Angeles Times, where Reichl worked for nine years in the eighties. I was delighted to discover that Reichl dislikes Tavern on the Green (which recently closed) as much as I do, even though we ate there a good thirteen years apart.

Reichl has her own website, Twitter feed, and currently works on Gourmet’s television show. Her books are fun and tasty, and the recipes certainly are mouth-watering. I still have no idea what foie gras is, though.