dost thou wish to be rocked by green salsa
Updates from the Titter timeline
I made Ali Slagle’s Hainanese chicken and rice a few nights ago, and it actually turned out amazingly. I cannot emphasize to you what a bad, impatient cook I am, so this is a big deal. Like literally for the last six months I have been making the same one-pan orecchiette/sausage/broccoli dish each week because it’s the shortest distance between me and eating 3 somewhat healthy items at once. But this recipe is 1000% going in the rotation; I added some sliced leeks and next time am gonna experiment with shiitake mushrooms as an addition. Also I will warn you to store the broth & chicken separately from the rice because it just gets soupy in the Tupperware… but no less delicious…
Trying to limit how snarky I get about VF because this Hollywood Reporter job on the Oscars party lighting is definitely a buzzkill for their big week (but maybe, as someone pointed out to me, they were simply trying to do another Christopher Anderson job in order to make a statement about the literal cracks in celebrity, etc. etc. as the assignment?), and also this “XYZ has a cold” attempt doesn’t quiiiiite delight so much as it depresses, yet unfortunately Guiducci’s profile in the FT that was intended to tee up the night was 100000% worth keeping in my tabs for all week and then reading it on archive.is for this lede alone:
The quotes get boring from there, but one useful thing I learned, re: that Christopher Anderson photo essay, is that it was the biggest subscriber-driver in the magazine’s history. So the ‘Dooch is doing something right!
My friend Gabi sent me this truly amazing tourist goes to New York, things fall apart NYT story that expands a bit more on the German guy sues Los Tacos No. 1 because of salsa report that Gothamist initially gave unto us, with another perfect lede. (Side note is that Los Tacos is, in my opinion, responsible for the most reliable and tasty lunch in Manhattan right now: two chicken quesadillas with everything on ‘em + a jamaica agua fresca is my Fidi go-to; it’s an efficient anti-desk lunch, because you have to eat it there, but while standing, which feels somehow better than taking a bowl of leaves back to the office with you.)
Anyway if you want to deprive yourself the delight of reading both of those links, the tl;dr is that German tourist Faycal Manz had a really bad time after “a single bite of Los Tacos No. 1’s green salsa” on a trip to New York in 2024 and sued for damages (though here accounts differ slightly; NYT says he “poured” the salsa on); he also apparently went on to continue having a bad time in New York, experiencing horrors such as not being able to connect to a New Jersey Wal-Mart’s wifi, and having the NYPD be rude to him (admittedly, this was after witnessing two men assaulting a homeless person).
My question after reading both stories concerns what Manz’s life in his hometown of Schemmerhofen, “a town in southern Germany,” must be like if the inability to use his phone at a Walmart Supercenter wrought so much “emotional negative impact.” I suppose if you are from a country where things work, and that bedrock sense of function is like, an organizing aspect of life, New York/the U.S. will definitely do you for a shock. Are the European travel TikTokkers warning everyone appropriately? Attenzione! Le dysfonctionnement! (<- if this joke worked on you, thank you.)
The writer and author Lindy West, who was one of the pillars of Jezebel’s golden era and also one of the few women who genuinely seemed to have the fun, progressive Twitter persona / memoir-to-TV-show pipeline locked down in the 2010s, has a new memoir out called Adult Braces, and there’s been a huge kerfuffle about the way she writes about her marriage, namely about how she herself characterizes her experience with polyamory.
If you are dying for the juice and don’t want to read the actual book, Meg Keene did a pretty exhaustive annotated breakdown; if you want to sort of go to the source also without reading the book, West’s interview in for the NYT’s Modern Love section will likely raise the right hairs on your arm. Even without digging too deep into the discourse, I definitely had an outsized reaction to hearing West explain, “...at this point he had sort of come to the conclusion that we couldn’t resolve this, which is why he went ahead and started dating this person.” Oh! Oh. Oh!!! That’s not…
I thought Tyler Austin Harper’s analysis in The Atlantic got at the heart of what seems to be West’s project — and perhaps the (cursed?) liberal writer’s project in general, which is to square their personal lives with their politics, ideally with the exactitude of a national role model:
For all West’s apparent self-awareness, the facts in the book are hard to square with her insistence that this is the existence she desires. Her efforts to come to terms with polyamory are couched as a political project—part of being an open-minded liberal—as much as a romantic one. And although she describes her husband as a “genius” and her best friend, Aham appears manipulative and sleazy. She doesn’t seem enlightened. She seems to have been wheedled into buying a fantasy.
Personal projections aside, I think that analyzed as a cultural product, West’s memoir and the accompanying discourse raise some interesting questions. The thought I had about this is how American it must be to treat this kind of act of disclosure as both a commodity and public hearing at once, one that practically invites the reader to sink their teeth in (assuming West still knows a thing or two about how the internet works) and cast judgment. American formats of disclosure necessitate framing everything as a lesson learned, a triumph to be had, an obstacle surmounted; we the audience do not do well without that neatness, or proof of victory. So at the very least, it’s interesting how West’s memoir (or our impressions of its contents) seems to defy that um, expectation. If one is not sure the heroine learned the right lessons, does it still make for a worthy, or “successful” story for now? With the exception of like, Ryan Murphy, I just don’t think we Americans actually have much tolerance for tragedy…
Questions I still have about…
Playing one of the patients on The Pitt in terms of the corpse-acting, mainly: How do you not do the thing where you move your eyes around under your eyelids the whole time?
Journalism about journalism, particularly journalism’s losing game to educate the public on what industry standards are, the “seeking comment” edition: Does anyone who is not already a media nerd actually read these (asking seriously!)?
Whether we were too quick to write off Jeremy O. Harris post-Japan situation? Because actually this might be the best thing he’s ever done…
How un-normal were people being to cause Joshua Hunt to delete his earnest X thread (and…most of his tweets in general?) about his magazine writing rates (the posts I saw talked about his word rate being around $2-$3/word, which you and I should duly note for our own purposes WITHOUT ruining Joshua’s day) that went viral and got media people all riled up talking about money (again) / posting satirically? what a shame. There aren't actually that many places where young/new writers get to have some ball explained to them so clearly. Well, Let this be a new internet rule engrained into our psyches all: If you post about writing for money in an explicit way, you will NOT be thanked by the public … (but you can DM me and I will help launder The Knowledge!)