I know - these usually go out on Fridays and it’s only Tuesday, but there’s so much on my radar at the moment that the posts just become gigantically unwieldy if I save everything up. If I weren’t writing my book I would break them up into individual smaller posts, but that’s not going to happen for a few weeks more. So here is a big dump - unlovely phrase - of good things you might want to know about. There are things to read, things to eat, things to maybe buy, and uncategorisable things that you might like to be aware of.
This post eventually becomes paywalled.
Richard Dawkins and ChatGPT discuss whether the latter is conscious.
Hermione Hoby on novels about divorced women, which are now their own genre: Years ago, not long after ending a marriage, I was having coffee with two women, new acquaintances, when we discovered that we were all divorced. “Yay!” one cried. “Hot Divorcées Club!” Something shrank and recoiled in me. Why must we be hot? Couldn’t we just be divorced? Plus, what in divorce, a thing about as common as marriage, made it worthy of a club?
Bee Wilson reviews Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet and Ourselves by Nicola Twilley: […] modern refrigeration has driven us to eat and behave in ways we wouldn’t have chosen if we could design the system from scratch. To take just one example, she explains that refrigeration is the main reason that so many commercial tomatoes are flavourless. […] Tomatoes, she writes, are bred for ‘the sturdiness to be shipped and stored under refrigeration’.
Also in the LRB: Katherine Rundell on writing for children (I linked to her outstanding Radio 4 series on this topic back in October): Children have not yet built wide hinterlands: to them, the world is still opaque and full of necessary bewilderment. Those who write for children have the chance to point them towards beauty that they do not yet know exists: towards versions of joy that they have not yet imagined possible.
Lisa Kholostenko on cultural diets and how what you consume shapes you: Some things hit instantly—a sugar rush of pleasure or catharsis. Others sit in the gut, slow-burning, quietly reshaping the way we see the world. And neither is inherently better—it’s about knowing what you need and when.
This conversation between Vittles and Chitra Ramaswamy, who is The Times’s restaurant critic in Scotland, in its Alba supplement. It is interesting a) about the Scottish food scene, b) about being a middle-aged woman of colour in this particular milieu - she says there is no need for anonymity because people tend not to notice her in the first place - and c) about the rigours of serious restaurant reviewing, which is a dying art. You’ll need a paid sub to read the whole thing, but it’s not a purchase I think you’d regret if you were interested in eating.
Katy Kelleher on the colour orange, Paul Klee, WB Yeats and apricots.
The word ‘apricot’ reminds me of this by Compton MacKenzie (as in Whisky Galore and Monarch of the Glen), who had been asked for his favourite words and turned them into blank verse:
Carnation, azure, peril, moon, forlorn,
Heart, silence, shadow, April, apricot.
He had a B-team too:
Damask and damson, doom and harlequin and fire,
Autumn, vanity, flame, nectarine, desire.
Tins of duck confit are such a handy thing to keep. Here’s what to do with one.
There’s also low-effort recipe for a confit duck and mashed potato pie with tiny bits of apple in it in Skye McAlpine’s A Table for Friends, one of those cookbooks I’ve used so much that I practically know it by heart.
If you want to make duck confit from scratch, you need Patricia Wells (gift link).
If you are a person who wants to learn about home cooking in a chilled sort of way, you could do a lot worse - and not much better - than Carla Lalli Music’s first book, Where Cooking Begins. It has a whole chapter on confit-ing various things, e.g. tomatoes, which is what reminded me.
Très cool quilted French totes from Call It By Your Name. You could personalise yours and then take it to the Ile de Ré, known as the 21st arrondissement of Paris, this summer - it would feel right at home. I also like their silk bandanas, which come in two sizes.