ANNE: It’s late winter, I’m craving fresh vegetables and bright flavors, and my go-to cookbook is Yotam Ottolenghi’s “Plenty.” Is it weird to call a cookbook “joyful”? Every recipe I’ve tried feels steeped in sunshine — like this bittersweet salad of radicchio, blood orange, purple basil and pomegranate seeds; or this couscous with grilled cherry tomatoes and fresh herbs. Ottolenghi grew up in Jerusalem, one of the world’s great crossroads cities, and he draws from an atlas full of spice traditions — Israeli and Arabic, but also Sicilian, Turkish, North African, and even the chilly British Isles, where he’s built a restaurant empire. Want to know what inspires him? Here’s our conversation from a few years back.
STEVE: I’ve been reading John Kaag’s book “American Philosophy: A Love Story.” He’s a philosophy professor with a gift for taking big ideas — like free will and the value of life — and turning them into compelling stories. Part of it is his own story — hitting rock bottom at age 29 when his father died and his marriage fell apart, and then finding new love. It’s also an extended essay on the philosophers he admires, especially Emerson, Thoreau and William James. And it’s an argument for why philosophers need to re-examine the big questions — like, what makes life worth living?
CHARLES: My almost-11-year-old daughter recently cleaned out her room. It was filled with toys and stuffies and whatnots “not suitable” for a pre-teen. Children grow and toys change. I’m not too sentimental about such things and mostly I was fine with her purge. Mostly. However, there was a pile of books. “Where the Wild Things Are” and “Harold’s Purple Crayon” and even the Frog and Toad books were among the discarded. Then I saw a worn-out copy of “My Father’s Dragon” by Ruth Stiles Gannett. It’s a novel I read to both her and her older brother so many years ago. It is about a little boy (armed only with a knapsack of important supplies, like chewing gum and lollipops) named Elmer Elevator, who runs away to Wild Island to rescue a baby dragon. It is written as a true story with the narrator referring to the protagonist only as “my father.” A father I always hoped was me I guess. I reread it last night to myself as my family slept. I tucked it away next to my daughter’s bed. You know, just in case.
SHANNON: As a former Washington Post reporter, friends and readers often asked me how the paper chose obituary subjects. Some are written ahead of time about famous people, like mini-biographies, and updated at their death. For time and space, or editor opinion, many people with incredible life stories or those who changed their corner of the world ever so slightly, would be ignored in the newspaper. I’m reading the New York Times piece “Overlooked” which notices that most obituaries in the paper since 1851 have been about white men. The story gives us 15 belated obituaries, chronicling the lives of Sylvia Plath, Ida B. Wells, and Diane Arbus, among other women who are receiving their New York Times obituary now, for the first time. It brings up the question: How would you want to be remembered?
MARK: When things get stressful, I tend to turn to horror films for a reprieve. And since I've been sorely in need of that this week (::shakes fist at DIY home remodeling YouTube videos::) I've been catching up on SyFy's horror anthology series "Channel Zero." Each season of the show has been based off a piece of internet folklore called a "creepypasta," which read sort of like multimedia novels sprawled out over internet forums and copy-pasted ad nauseum, like ghost stories whispered around the CAT-5 campfire. The creative source material — this latest series is based off a series of short stories written on Reddit — combined with creator Nick Antosca's embrace of artful, unknown directors and actors—has made for a far more artful, visually-rich series than the pitch of "American Horror Story, but from the internet" might inspire in your imagination.