Steve Dyer

nickimlnaj:

Last week, 27,165 people ran the Boston Marathon and 26,610 finished it. The majority of Boston Marathon runners were probably not in the race in the hopes of taking the $150,000 price for first place, but a handful of elite runners compete in these races as a way of earning a living. The New Yorker’s “Running for Money” shares some of their stories:

On Monday, Caroline Rotich, a thirty-year-old Kenyan, finished first at Boston, with a time of 2:24:55. Rotich has been running professionally for twelve years. The most she’d ever won at a race before this week was twenty-five thousand dollars, for first place at the smaller and less competitive Prague Marathon. The six-figure payday from Boston is more than she made in the past two years combined.

Rotich, as the New Yorker explains, lives in New Mexico on a fraction of her winnings while training for her next race:

About those winnings: thirty per cent of her Boston prize was immediately deducted for taxes. Another fifteen per cent went to her agent, Isaya Okwiya, a Maryland doctor and part-time athlete representative from Kenya. Okwiya shares a small portion of his allotment with Ryan Bolton, Rotich’s coach, who accepts a reduced fee from African runners. That leaves eighty-two thousand five hundred dollars. Rotich says she’ll send at least ten thousand back to Kenya to pay the tuition of five relatives. Another fifteen to twenty thousand will be set aside for her rent and expenses in Santa Fe. She wants to invest in some Kenyan ventures, such as an apartment complex that a brother will manage. So now there’s perhaps thirty or forty thousand dollars of the Boston purse remaining. Not bad.

The New Yorker piece profiles three elite runners, including Deena Kastor, who combined running with waitressing until a shoe sponsorship deal allowed her to quit the day job. These athletes live modest lives, running paycheck to paycheck like the rest of us, except their paychecks are both larger and farther apart—and they have to run 26 miles and beat 26,000 other people to get them. (You do not necessarily have to be first across the finish line to get paid; the Boston Marathon, for example, offers smaller cash prizes for runners who place but do not win.)

As a freelancer and musician, I know a bit about creative risk and commitment to developing a craft in the hope that a living will eventually follow—but this feels so very risky to me. Maybe it’s because we have a model, in our culture, for the actor who’s waitressing part time but no real model for the athlete who’s waitressing. It reminded me of the 2012 NYT profile of Olympic weightlifter Holley Mangold:

Last fall, [Mangold's agent Drew Dillon] and his two roommates cleaned out their laundry room. Now Mangold sleeps beneath an old drying rack hung with weight-lifting medals and her enormous brassieres in a twin bed that her mother bought her for Christmas.

So people keep sending me this Choire Sicha review of Jon Ronson’s recent book on public shaming, I guess because I’ve been something of a critic of those tactics. Several emailers have represented Sicha’s review to me as a kind of silver bullet argument against criticisms like mine, and in effect a strong argument for shaming politics. I find that very strange; it’s not at all clear to me that this is even Sicha’s intent. SIcha is a great writer, so his words are persuasive, and he radiates kindness, so he has credibility on this subject. But like many others, his point about the relative power of public shaming amounts to an argument for its toothlessness, and thus its abandonment by left-wing activists.

As Sicha points out, oftentimes the victims of public shaming end up just fine. And as I have done in the past, he also notes that women frequently bear the brunt of public shaming themselves. He loses me however when he digresses into a discussion of online harassment. His point that the harassment and threats women receive online are far worse than the consequences of public shaming is perfectly right and perfectly useless in context. What use is public shaming against the hordes of angry men who shame women online? In order for public shaming to be effective, two things must be true: those who deserve it must be public and they must have shame. Neither is true of the vast majority of people who threaten and harass women online. Indeed online harassment strikes me as the kind of problem that can and will never be solved by public shaming. So Choire’s review, which like most of his work is at heart a call for treating each other better, is not wrong to call harassment and threats the bigger problem with the internet. But it’s at best an accurate non sequitur.

When people point out that the victims of outrage politics and Twitter storms survive and rarely suffer too intensely or too long, they’re right. But that’s an argument against outrage politics. It’s a demonstration of their utter ineffectiveness. Yes, Justine Sacco has a job again. Whether you believe she should or not is between you and your own conscience. But the fact is that she does. So if you think her losing her job represented political progress, then public shaming has failed to give you what you want. And if you think that hurting her was besides the point, that there are deeper issues concerning racism and AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa, then I’m afraid the news is also bleak, because the great internet destruction of Justine Sacco did precisely nothing for people afflicted with HIV in South Africa. Likewise, if you point out that Adria Richards has suffered more than the men she publicly shamed at that conference, and that this says something about the nature of sexism and male privilege, I am inclined to agree. I also am inclined to point out that this is an argument against shaming as a tactic. In none of these prominent cases has it seemed to have given activists what they want.

I don’t know what an ally is. I know what solidarity is. I know what a bloc is. I know what recognizing congruent political purpose is. But this word “ally,” at this point, it seems irredeemable to  me. In my experience, it is associated with nothing so much as a kind of deeply insulting, head-patting condescension. What does it say when so many adults — so many of them white dudes posturing as “the good ones” — join your political project without seeming to care whether it’s true, good, or effective? The praise of allies is the participation ribbon of modern politics, substituting real political support for a brainless, aggressive associationism that seems to have more to do with ensuring that the ally in question appears to be on the right side than in actually achieving anything at all. Judgment is an indispensable quality in supportive human relationships.  It’s judgment that compels your friends to tell you, out of concern and support, that your current way of  doing things isn’t working. What use is a human relationship that has been drained of the willingness to judge and to disagree? Who wants that kind of “friendship?”

I grew up around activists; I was an activist; I have had a relationship to activists and activism for far longer than Twitter has existed. And the way that I show respect to activists is to give them my honest appraisal of how well their political tactics seem to be working. That’s not about enforcing a vision of which political ends are realistic; I won’t get most things that I want, politically, in my lifetime. It’s about noting what an activist wants and whether you think their current tactics can actually achieve it. That’s respect. Not “allyship.” Not the warm milk of people who start throwing hashtags around the second they’re trending. But respect. Respect isn’t the pop psychology bullshit emotional nourishment that we now so associate with left-wing politics in a world of microaggression theory. It’s an adult quality that requires actual critical review if it’s to have any meaning. So I respect activists by telling them if I think their tactics are effective and their analysis is right, just like I respect political writers by telling them if I think their arguments are sound, like I respect researchers by telling them if I think their conclusions are correct, like I respect artists by telling them if I think their work is any good.

How do you fucking show respect?

Included in Amazon's recently launched Home Services is a goat grazing service, currently in beta.

Q: If goat grazing is right for my property, what would the service entail?

A: Once a pro has met with you to determine if unleashing some friendly goats on your property will help you get rid of any unwanted vegetation, you'll receive a recommendation for how many goats will be loaned to you, how long those goats will keep you company, and how often a pro will come check on them to make sure they're not attempting any fancy tricks to break free from the temporary fencing that will be placed around them. As they graze, they will likely leave behind some droppings, too, and you'll get to keep this fertilizer as a friendly parting gift!

The goat grazing service isn't available in Manhattan, but Amazon really does want to sell everything in the world, don't they. Buy N Large, here we come. (via @mkonnikova)

A few months back, I went on a vacation to Oaxaca. While I was there, I took a cooking class, hoping to learn about some new ingredients, maybe have someone experienced walk me through a mole, the ridiculously complex and cherished sauce of Oaxaca. Instead I found out that I don’t know shit about cooking. Like, I didn’t even know how to heat up a pan.

Oaxacan recipes aren’t structured like ones indebted to the legacy of Western European cuisine. Sauces aren’t built the same way. Ingredients and equipment I hadn’t even realized were European—olive oil, enameled cast iron, chef’s knives, fresh rather than dried or preserved ingredients—were suddenly unimportant. Ingredient lists there seemed to include several barely distinguishable varieties of each individual item, like dozens of varieties of chiles, all used in slightly different ways. Precise, Frenchified knife cuts gave way to labored grinding in a molcajete, the Mexican version of a mortar and pestle.

One of the strangest techniques, I thought, was a thickening agent for a mole chichilo, an intensely savory version of the signature sauce: the seeds of a local variety of chile, along with a few corn tortillas, were placed on a dry, very hot griddle, and allowed to blacken—to burn. The burnt, bitter seeds and tortillas were ground and added back into the sauce.

This is unthinkable in most American food; if something is burnt, it means you fucked up. All I could think was, I don’t know anything about cooking. Over and over, as I ate grasshoppers and three or four other varieties of mole and tlayudas and chocolate and mezcal, I tasted smoke, which is a base flavor in Oaxacan food, as important as sweet and sour and umami. The burnt chile seeds and tortillas, blended with beef stock, tomatoes, tomatillos, allspice, toasted avocado leaves, and cumin, didn’t taste burnt. The sauce tasted dark and sinister, bitterness balancing richness and sweetness, all coming from a base level of smokiness.

I can’t teach anyone anything about real Mexican cuisine. But the idea of heating in a dry pan was something that was never really in my regular rotation, and now it is, and I think it’s very cool and maybe there are some other people reading this who also haven’t much messed around with it. For me it was the equivalent of getting, I don’t know, an immersion circulator, except way better, because I love what dry heat does to vegetables and the immersion circulator is sort of a pain and makes me feel like a real doof to use it. It’s a whole new way of heating up food, closer to indoor grilling than frying, sautéing, braising, or poaching.

Dry heating can be done with various traditional implements but one of the best tools for it is one you might have already: a regular cast iron pan. Nonstick won’t work for this. Enameled cast iron isn’t my favorite, either. Your Le Creuset won’t do a great job at most of these tasks, because it’s naturally non-stick, and we actually want some of this stuff to stick. And burn. Stainless steel is okay, but expensive, and I prefer the rough surface of a cast iron for this, which could well just be superstition. You also won’t be stirring things around the way you do when frying in oil, a habit which can be hard to break. Just gotta let it cook.

A warning: Dry heating in cast iron will set off your smoke alarm at least once during each of these recipes. Your house may very well fill with smoke. Make sure a window is open, a vent if you have one, or maybe point a fan out toward the window.

Basic Salsa
Shopping list: Dried chiles (guajillo, ancho, or de arbol), tomatoes (canned fire-roasted if not in season; we are currently not in season), lime, garlic, cilantro

Get out your cast iron pan and set it to medium heat. Take some chiles, break off the stems, and shake out the seeds inside. Discard stem and seeds. How many you use will depend on which variety you got as well as your taste. Ancho and guajillo are both good all-around chiles—not too spicy, a little fruity. Chiles de arbol are pretty spicy. Anyway, throw the chiles on the cast iron and watch very carefully. They’ll begin to soften and get fragrant really quickly; turn them after about a minute or two and cook for the same amount of time. Don’t let them burn; you don’t want these to be black. When pliable and smelling delicious, snag them off the pan with a pair of tongs and throw in a food processor (alternately, in a blender, or mortar and pestle, or molcajete).

Take five cloves of garlic, separated from the head but NOT peeled. Make sure the papery husk is still around each clove. Toss them into the pan and roast, turning every few minutes, until they’re all splotchy with black burn-marks. When a little soft, maybe fifteen or twenty minutes, take them out, allow to cool, then peel. Throw them in the food processor (or whatever).

If using canned tomatoes, make sure to get decent-quality fire-roasted tomatoes, because there’ll be no real way to burn the sugars in a canned tomato that’s already broken down a bit. Toss the whole can in the food processor along with a squeeze of lime and some salt and blend until smooth.

If using fresh tomatoes, slice in half width-wise and place them cut side down on the cast iron pan. Do not touch them! They will sizzle and begin to burn. Wait maybe five or ten minutes until they’re soft to the touch, then scrape them up with a spatula and throw in the food processor, and complete as before. Top with chopped cilantro.

Charred Fennel Salad With Tangerine Vinaigrette
Shopping list: Fennel, tangerines, hazelnuts, arugula, red onion, olive oil, rice wine vinegar, sugar, parmesan or pecorino cheese

First things first, let’s quick pickle. Take your red onion, cut it in quarters, then shave thinly, preferably with a mandolin so it doesn’t take like four years. Place in a glass tupperware. Set a saucepan over high heat and bring the vinegar and sugar, in a ration of about 2:1, to a boil. Just when it boils, take it off the heat and pour over the onions. Stir quickly and cover. Let it cool down while at room temperature.

Heat a cast iron pan to medium. Toss a handful of hazelnuts on there, tossing to make sure they’re evenly toasted. When fragrant and golden brown, take off the heat.

Then slice a bulb of fennel into slices, maybe a quarter-inch thick. Throw the fennel on the pan so recently vacated by the hazelnuts. Don’t stir. After a minute, flip gently; the bottom should be blotchy with a few black spots, but not totally black. Flip and cook the formerly uncooked side for the same amount of time.

Make the vinaigrette: Squeeze a tangerine into a glass. Drizzle in about half as much olive oil while mixing vigorously with a fork or whisk or immersion blender. Add a splash of rice wine vinegar and season with salt and vinegar.

Lay the charred fennel down on a plate. Toss some hazelnuts on top, then a handful of arugula, then some slices of pickled red onion, then shave some parmesan or pecorino on top. Good shaves, too; not little shreds, you want to be able to pick up the cheese with a fork. Pour vinaigrette over the top and serve.

Charred Corn Salad With Charred Lime
Shopping list: Can of corn, pumpkin seeds, lime, Greek yogurt, cotija (or feta) cheese, olive oil, cumin, cilantro, hot sauce

Take your can of corn and drain it, then spread it out on a few paper towels and lay a more paper towels on top and pat it dry. Get out your cast iron pan and put it on the stove over medium heat.

In a small bowl toss a handful of pumpkin seeds with a teaspoon or so of cumin. Then throw those all in the cast iron pan and toast until fragrant and non-raw-tasting. (You’ll know when they’re done, just keep eating them.) Remove and allow to cool. Throw in the corn, and let it sit for a minute, then toss and let char for another minute. There should be black bits. You want black bits. We are burning food, it should look a little burnt. When charred, remove from pan.

Slice a lime in half and jab it cut side down onto the pan. Let it sit there for a minute or two and then pry it off. It should look kind of caramelized and, well, kind of burnt.

In a big bowl, toss the corn, pumpkin seeds, a dash of hot sauce, a small spoonful of yogurt (mayonnaise is traditional, I just don’t like it much), a bunch of crumbled cheese, and a little bit of olive oil. Salt to taste. Top with cilantro and serve the charred lime on the side for squeezing.

I’m still experimenting with this whole charring on a dry pan thing; when the spring vegetables come, I’m going to smoke out my entire apartment building trying to figure out if I can apply that kind of heat to asparagus, spring onions, that kind of thing. It feels like one of those techniques that will add a totally new dimension to any variety of dishes, even though the neighbors will probably think they live next some kind of pyro.

Photo by Amy Stephenson

Ashkenazic Jewish cuisine has a real thing for foods so sweet you can feel your teeth crying, and raisins, by which I mean those little red boxes of Sun-Maid raisins, are exactly the right level of cloyingly sweet to tickle the sure-to-be-temporary teeth of American Jews. Noodle kugel often has raisins in it. Challah and rugalach do too, sometimes. After Shabbat services there’d always be a tray of painfully sweet and Negev-dry cakes and breads and cookies, many of which had raisins embedded within, for the kids. I loathed them.

I think a lot of Americans, Jewish or not, have a memory of digging fingernails into a congealed clump of sticky raisins deep within that red cardboard box, knowing that once you finally got the little fuckers out, you were only going to be disappointed, because they would still be raisins. When the choice was oatmeal raisin or chocolate chip cookie, we all know which one to grab. Why get a fruit cookie when there’s one with chocolate right next to it?

Raisins also suffer the curse of being healthy—crazily high in sugar, but sugar that can be broken down by the body into energy easily. Raisins are also high in fiber, vitamin K (good for blood clotting), vitamin B, vitamin C, vitamin E, and many more, plus a pretty decent amount of protein for a fruit. Basically anything a parent insists is healthy is going to taste like poison to a kid, even something that has more sugar, by weight, than a Hershey bar.

But raisins have a long history of use in savory dishes, everywhere from Cuba to India, and if you treat them right, they can be pretty spectacular, adding a kick of fruitiness and sugar to balance out acidic or umami flavors.

There are a bunch of different types of raisins. Your typical Sun-Maid raisin is made from, surprisingly, the Thompson seedless grape, which is your standard supermarket green grape. The drying process—not done in the sun, to avoid introduction of bacteria and other gross things—turns the grapes a dark red. This presents a weird question: what the hell is a golden raisin then? Golden raisins are made from, um, also Thompson seedless grapes. During the drying process, some sulfur dioxide, a preservative, is added to the grapes, which kind of bleaches the skins back to yellowish and also changes the flavor to be a bit drier and more tart.

There are two more main types of raisins you might see, both of which are misleadingly named. The easiest to explain is the dried currant, which is not, as you might think, the dried version of the small round fruits called currants, but is actually just a raisin made from a specific type of small grape called the Black Corinth (the name of the raisin is a corrupted form of the name of the grape, not any reference to the real currant). You might see the Black Corinth grape sold at farmers markets and fancy supermarkets as “champagne grapes,” though they’re not used for making champagne. (The naming of foods is a real mess of etymology and history!) Dried currants are tiny and very sweet, and are especially common in baked goods in the UK, like scones.

The other, even more misleading, type of raisin is the sultana. So, there is a pale green seedless grape that originally came from the Ottoman Empire—a very popular variety whose proper name is “Sultanina,” but which is commonly known throughout the raisin industry as either “sultana” or “sultana of commerce.” This is very confusing, because there is another variety of grape made into raisins that is called “sultana,” a mediocre grape that had a brief run of popularity in California in the mid-nineteenth century. This shittier raisin is sometimes called “inferior sultana of commerce.” And you might recall that the most popular variety of grape for American raisins is the Thompson seedless. The Thompson seedless was introduced to America in 1872 by William Thompson, a UK-born grower, in Yuba City, California. Thompson renamed this grape after himself, because why not, but he grew this from a vine he brought back from Asia. That vine has another name in the rest of the world, and that name is…Sultanina. The Thompson seedless grape, basically the only raisin Americans can easily find, is also known as the sultana. Which is not to be confused with the sultana. Good lord.

Anyway this is all to say, don’t pay more for something that brands itself a “sultana raisin.” All the raisins are sultana raisins. Your garbage Sun-Maid stuck-together clump of black grainy raisins are sultanas.

But you SHOULD spend whatever mild price hike is attached to golden raisins. It might seem like a dumb bit of color-based marketing, but golden raisins are no Crystal Pepsi: There is a definite difference in flavor and texture to golden raisins, even though they come from the same grape as dark raisins. Also, if you can get yourself to a good Indian or Middle Eastern market, there’s a pretty fair chance there’ll be a few different varieties, sold by the pound rather than in packages. Get these. They’ll have various names which probably aren’t standardized and might not mean much of anything, but try one and see what you like. I tend to like the biggest ones, which are less sweet and more acidic than the super small dense ones. And I like them to be as plump as possible: this indicates a higher water content and probably a less intensive drying process, which usually correlates to a tastier raisin.

A basic and yet EXTREMELY FANCY-SEEMING technique for increasing the tastiness of a raisin is rehydration. Put a bunch of raisins in a glass tupperware. Heat up some kind of liquid—water, maybe, or vinegar, or wine, or whiskey—until near-boiling, then pour the liquid over the raisins, enough to cover them. Put a lid on the tupperware and wait a few minutes. The raisins, being all dried and thirsty for the water so cruelly leached from them, will drink up the liquid and become plump and tender and flavored. No matter what I’m doing with raisins, I rehydrate them first; if I don’t want to add any flavor, I just use water, because the texture of a rehydrated raisin is so superior.

Roasted Broccoli With Raisins, Pistachios, and Fried Rosemary

Shopping list: Broccoli, golden raisins, pistachios, shallots, garlic, white wine vinegar, bulgur wheat, lemon, olive oil, sugar, goat cheese, rosemary, canola oil

This treatment of the raisins is basically a quick pickle. Place a handful of raisins in a glass tupperware. In a saucepan, heat white wine vinegar, water, and sugar in a 1:1:1 ratio, give or take. (Feel free to throw in some star anise, cloves, a cinnamon stick, peppercorns, or a bay leaf, but you don’t have to.) Bring to a boil, then turn off the heat, pour the liquid over the raisins, give a quick stir, and cover.

Pre-heat the oven to 400 degrees. Slice onion in half through the root, then place cut-side-down on the cutting board and slice width-wise into thin half-moons. Peel and cut about five garlic cloves into a few pieces each, and add to a big bowl. Chop about a head’s worth of broccoli florets, making sure each piece is at least an inch by an inch and has a sizeable flat side, where you cut it. (RESERVE THE BROCCOLI STALKS FOR LATER.) Throw them in the bowl too, along with maybe an eighth of a cup of olive oil. Toss thoroughly and spread on a baking sheet, making sure the cut side of the broccoli is down. Throw in oven.

Measure out a half cup of bulgur wheat, put in another glass tupperware. Boil a cup of water (I use an electric kettle for this). Pour the hot water over the bulgur, along with a pinch or two of salt. Quickly stir to mix and cover until the water is absorbed.

Put a small saucepan on the stove and fill it up maybe an inch high with canola oil. Pick a few sprigs of fresh rosemary, getting the leaves off the stems. When the oil is hot—test by throwing in a rosemary leaf, and if it sizzles a lot and makes frying sounds and smells it’s ready—throw in the rosemary. Fry for a minute or so until crispy, then strain out with a spider and put on a paper towel to drain.

When the broccoli is tender and the cut side is all nice and caramelized, take it out of the oven. In a bowl, put in some bulgur, then raisins, then some pistachios, then some crumbled goat cheese, then the broccoli/garlic/onion, and top with the fried rosemary. Squeeze a lemon over the top, along with some more olive oil if you want.

Sort Of Israeli Fried Rice Thing With Parsley Oil

Shopping list: Rice (or quinoa), golden raisins, almonds, walnuts, canola or vegetable oil, parsley, olive oil, cheesecloth, lemon, green beans, garlic, chili flakes, feta cheese

The night before you want to make this (I know, sorry), place like an entire bunch of parsley, stems and all, into a mason jar (I know, sorry). In a saucepan, heat up about a cup and a half of the olive oil until it’s very hot but not smoking. Pour the olive oil into the jar, covering the parsley, screw on the top of the jar, and let it sit out overnight. Also, cook about a cup’s worth of rice or quinoa in the regular way: two to one ratio of water to grain, bring to boil, cover and turn heat to low until done. Put the rice in the fridge.

The next day, unscrew the top of the herb oil jar, pop off the lid, place some cheesecloth over the top, and screw the ring back onto the jar. Invert to pour the oil through the cheesecloth into some other container, throw out the parsley, and keep the oil, which should be nice and green and fragrant.

Rehydrate golden raisins the usual way, but just in hot water. Chop some almonds.

Slice three or four cloves of garlic thinly. In a wok on low heat, pour in a tablespoon or so of vegetable oil, and when it’s hot, throw in the garlic and a pinch of chili flakes. When the garlic has turned golden-brown, turn the heat to high and throw in a handful of green beans (I usually chop them into inch-long pieces). Using a rubber spatula, toss the beans for about a minute, then throw in the rice you made last night. (Old rice is better for fried rice. I’m not sure why but it is.) Stir and toss rapidly to fry it.

When the rice looks like fried rice, turn the heat off. Toss in the drained raisins, the almonds, and a bunch of crumbled feta, and stir around. Squeeze in like half a lemon’s worth of lemon juice, at least, and add salt. Taste to make sure the seasoning is good, then serve. Drizzle some of the parsley oil on top and around.

Secret Fun Morning Oatmeal With Bourbon-Rehydrated Raisins

Shopping list: Rolled oats (sometimes called “traditional”), golden raisins, milk, brown sugar, bourbon, vanilla extract, pecans, cinnamon, allspice

Place golden raisins in a small glass tupperware. In a saucepan on the stove, heat maybe a half cup of bourbon and five drops or so of vanilla extract (more or less depending on how good your extract is). Just before boiling, pour the bourbon/vanilla mixture over the raisins, stir, and cover.

In the same saucepan (why do any more dishes than you have to?), heat up about a half cup of milk and a third cup of water, along with a pinch of salt. Just before it boils, throw in a third of a cup of rolled oats. (I prefer rolled oats to Irish/steel-cut, but if you like the latter better that’s fine, just cook according to package instructions.) Reduce heat to low and cook, stirring the whole time to avoid a horrible mess on the bottom of your saucepan, for maybe five minutes until the oatmeal is cooked and thickening. Stir in brown sugar to your liking. Turn off the heat and let sit for a minute.

Heat a dry cast iron pan to medium heat and toss in a handful of pecans. Watch them carefully while they toast, tossing every once in awhile. When fragrant, maybe two minutes, remove. Drain the raisins of their bourbon. I think you can probably still drink it although it might be gross, I’m not sure.

Plop the oatmeal in a bowl. Top with the raisins, the pecans, and a pinch of cinnamon and allspice. You can also add a little yogurt here, if you want.

Raisins, it turns out, are a formidable force, especially, I think, when paired with salty things (try them with anchovies!). And when rehydrated, they turn from a one-note gooey sweet ingredient to a plump and appealing hit of fruit and sugar. I haven’t tried tackling a raisin-filled noodle kugel since I learned to love raisins again, but I feel like it could totally be good, as long as the raisin is treated with the respect it deserves.

Photo by Christian Schnettelker, via

1. I am looking forward to 570 days of low-level irritation accompanied by a variety of outward demonstrations of disbelief and disgust that eventually fold into a deep and earnest concern for the optics of the actions of the world’s most powerful people. This period of engagement, which will produce no real effects outside of itself, will be followed by four days of pit-in-the-stomach fear that maybe all those stories about demographic inevitability were based in wishful thinking, and that those reassuring “projections” and “models” were concerned mostly with soothing their elite audiences, and that some ancient and latent political strain might suddenly activate, hurling the country, and possibly the world, into a new dark age, followed by the conclusion that none of this actually matters, because the global environmental and economic forces that will dictate the terms of the future are vastly underrated determinants, meaning that either candidate’s accomplishments will be remembered, eventually, as sad attempts to manage an accelerating entropy that will eventually dissolve and consolidate all nation-states that can only be understood, not managed, and which will be “governed” not with policy but according to theory, followed, finally, by the relief of the election of the candidate that we all knew was going to win way back in April of last year.

2. …

3. I am looking forward to the gaffes.

the Guardians of the Arendelle.

“‘Yaaaas’ and its fellow ‘yes’ variants are, at the most basic level, the unsurprising results of a long-standing linguistic shortcoming: The word ‘yes’ is an extremely dull way to express the varied sentiments of ‘yes.’ And the Internet, as it is wont to do, solved that problem by creating new ones. The disruption of ‘yes’ likely happened for the same reason that so many web-spurred language developments happen, which is that digital communication lacks the tonal nuances that spoken language does.”

requested by filkowski

29 Animals Adorably Licking Windows

From Jon Bois at SBNation, The Worst Internet Things bracket. Some of the worst things and their seedings include:

(16) Person who types "wow" in front of retweet
(9) Atheists who love to argue
(7) All internet discourse about bacon
(8) People who complain about BuzzFeed
(2) iTunes
(5) Kickstarters for weddings

requested by butt-town

requested by thellamasarestampeding

requested by  cars-hiss-by-my-window

• Google sends your search history to everyone in your address book
• Amazon stops taking orders but keeps sending products
• Slack turns every message into a tweet that @ mentions your boss
• Twitter employs a crude problematical algorithm to retweet 50 of your oldest tweets
• Facebook shows people how frequently you look at their profiles and for how long; the most-viewed profile gets a push notification
• Tumblr finds 100 people who most resemble a younger you, physically but especially professionally, and follows them
• Uber app locks the car doors until you make the driver cry (method yours)
• Apple shares your entire Camera Roll with your immediate and extended family
• Seamless emails you the total calorie count of everything you ordered every month last year and CCs your physician and spouse
• Instagram charges one dollar to like or comment on someone’s photo
• Snapchat sends you a link to a YouTube video. It is every message you’ve ever sent. 301+ views.
• Foursquare sends a full unbranded account of your whereabouts to your local police station with no explanation
• Reddit accounts switch to real names
• Periscope/Meerkat automatically activates when it senses your phone is in your pocket and stops when you take it out
• LinkedIn sends you a list of employers who looked at your profile but clicked away in under ten seconds. It sends each of those employers a message: “What was wrong?”
• WebMD searches read to parents over phone in a consoling voice
• Online banking app uses extremely simple math to determine your lifestyle is unsustainable and notifies you of this fact after every transaction
• Tinder replaces every tenth message with “you look like my mom/dad when he/she was young”
• The New York Times app listens for narrative nonfiction content and if possible tells you how it ends
• Every Google Maps route leads to the nearest jail where you are arrested and spend the next ten years incarcerated (spon)
• Venmo sends a request for $20 to every one of your exes
• Netflix inserts ads
• Mysterious app appears on your phone. It has a logo and a name but does not work; when you open it it displays a year. It is the company that will eventually replace your job with part-time contract labor.
• Coin glued to floor

via

In 1983, the BBC aired a six-part series called Fun to Imagine with a simple premise: put physicist Richard Feynman in front of a camera and have him explain everyday things. In this clip from one of the episodes, Feynman explains in very simple terms what fire is:

So good. Watch the whole thing...it seems like you get the gist about 2 minutes in, but that's only half the story. See also Feynman explaining rubber bands, how trains go around curves, and how magnets work.

Indiana's Republican-controlled legislature will amend its brand-new anti-LGBT "religious freedom" law to "clarify its intent." The intent, of course, was to legalize discrimination against LGBT people by religious bigots. That didn't play well locally, nationally, or internationally, and Indiana's governor is done defending the law. (Mike Pence's White House ambitions? Also done.) The Indianapolis Star, which issued a dramatic, front-page demand that the legislature "FIX THIS NOW" earlier this week, reports on the "fix" today...

Senate President Pro Tem David Long, R-Fort Wayne, and House Speaker Brian Bosma, R-Indianapolis said at a press conference at the Statehouse that leaders will present the proposal to lawmakers at 9:30 a.m. after speaking with corporate and civic leadership this week. "Hoosier hospitality had to be restored," Bosma said.... The leaders referenced the intense backlash that rained down on Indiana after Gov. Mike Pence signed the bill last week. "It was never intended to discriminate against anyone," Long said. "That perception led to the national protests we've seen." Former Indianapolis mayor and Democrat Bart Peterson said the words "gender identity" and "sexual orientation" will appear in state law in context of anti-discrimination for first time. "The healing needs to begin right now," said Peterson, an Eli Lilly and Co. executive.

It was never the intent to discriminate against anyone? Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit.

While the proposed fix will result in the words "gender identity" and "sexual orientation" appearing in Indiana law for the first time—and while that's a hilarious bit of poetic justice (and while the haters are hating it and that's always nice)—the proposed "fix" doesn't actually fix the problem. It was legal to discriminate against LGBT people in housing, employment, and public accommodation before Mike Pence signed SB 101 into law—which he did surrounded by antigay bigots—and it will remain legal to discriminate against LGBT people in almost all of Indiana after SB 101 is amended.

Think Progress:

LGBT people in Indiana gain no new rights from the fix: In the wake of the backlash against the original Indiana RFRA law, many LGBT rights groups hoped that the state would enact anti-discrimination provisions protecting gay and trans people in Indiana at the state level. The fix includes none of these protections. What that means is that LGBT people who live in cities like Indianapolis will regain the rights they already enjoyed before the state RFRA law took effect, but LGBT people who were unprotected before this law will remain unprotected.

Lambda Legal:

This bill reduces the threat but is far less than this situation requires. It recognizes there are problems, but does not fix it as LGBT Hoosiers and others urgently need. Now that there's broad public understanding that gay and transgender people in much of Indiana are terribly vulnerable to arbitrary discrimination by businesses, refusal of housing, and being fired just for being who they are—and even Gov. Pence has agreed that that is wrong—that unacceptable situation requires a full solution.

Frank Rich zooms out:

At least 20 anti-LGBT laws have been proposed in Texas this year alone, according to the Texas Observer. Hutchinson’s reversal is one small attempt to quell these flames before they do more damage to his state and his party. But much damage has already been done. Not a single Republican presidential contender came down against the Indiana law, and most have been vocal in their support of it and the Indiana governor, Mike Pence. That unanimity cannot now be written out of the record as the GOP faces 2016. For most younger voters—who tend to stay home during midterm elections but turn out in presidential years—equal rights for gay Americans has long been a settled issue. Most won’t give a political party’s candidates a serious look if the party endorses bigotry.

Remember how Jeb Bush was supposed to strike "a more welcoming tone" on LGBT civil equality? Ha-ha-ha. But Jeb, like Pence, is now furiously backpedaling.

UPDATE: The haters hate the fix so much that they're demanding a veto:

Shocking! @FRCdc urges Pence to veto the #RFRA fix. Another endorsement of anti-LGBT discrimination - http://t.co/r66LdFUPMG
— Zack Ford (@ZackFord) April 2, 2015

Again: The fix isn't a fix for LGBT people in Indiana who don't live in cities with anti-discrimination laws that cover LGBT people, aka "most LGBT people in Indiana." But it's nevertheless wonderful watching the push for the RFRA explode in the faces of evil little shits like Tony Perkins.

UPDATE: And... Angie's List isn't having it. Indiana's RFRA stunt drew attention to how shitty the status quo was before it passed and now some people aren't going to be happy about a return to the pre–SB 101 status quo. Congrats, haters!

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