PicoBlog

Some conflict reporters go to Harvard and earn Masters Degrees in International Relations. Others work for UNICEF and branch out. And then there are those of us who score a dream journalism job at twenty, under the barrage of glitter bombs that is Hollywood. I wouldn’t change this training ground for the world and I wanted to share a few recollections from those old journals… The fondest memories I have are of seeing newcomers, genuinely lovely people, rise through the ranks into superstardom.

I can’t make a single Facebook post about household inequality without someone telling me to read Fair Play, the supposed Bible of household equality. I see and hear about it everywhere. Just read Fair Play, and somehow centuries of patriarchy and abuse will magically disappear. It makes sense. It’s a Reese Witherspoon pick. It’s now a documentary, and consultants can train in the method and then charge people to master it.

Traversing the United States in search of pie, writer Pascale Le Draoulec was struck by the vastness of a country where an immigrant group can set up home and continue the traditions brought with them from the Old Country -yet remain relatively unknown outside of their immediate region. When she arrived in Algoma in Wisconsin after an evening spent at a fish boil on the banks of Lake Michigan, Le Draoulec encountered one of Door County’s most popular-and mysterious to outsiders- food traditions, the Belgian pie: “We found a roadside motel in Algoma.

I don’t know the best word for Jacob L. Wright’s new book, Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and Its Origins. Here are some expressions for this book: A history of Israel (along with a lot of history about more than Israel) An exposition of salient ideas in the Bible A sketch of important figures in the Bible An introduction to the historical-critical method The historical-critical method in a new key

Welcome to Pen and Spoon, my weekly newsletter. This week I have an absolute treat for you. As well as my thoughts about chicken, I’m including three recipes from three amazing food writers from their new books. Each one celebrates brown chicken meat - not the most popular cut, but vastly superior in my view to breast meat. Usually I alternate free newsletters with paid-only - this’s week’s should be for paid subscribers only.

Working for $14,000 a year or less. Getting stuck in entry-level jobs. Breastfeeding in porta potties. Working for head coaches who behave unprofessionally or unethically. And dealing with athletic directors who are skeptical that women can successfully coach male athletes.  These are just some of the reasons why so few women hold collegiate cross country and track & field coaching jobs.  Across all NCAA women’s sports, the number of female head coaches is increasing, but slowly.

Much has been said of, written about, and invested in the “Metaverse.” For the uninitiated, the Metaverse is a conceptual version of the future in which we’re all interacting—for work, play, and everything in between—in an alternate version of reality that’s powered by VR, AR, BCI (brain computer interfaces) or a combination of all of the above. This promised future requires step changes to the behavior of how we all interact with both hardware and software on the internet.

Today we are launching SaaSGrid, the data and analysis platform for SaaS metrics, and announcing a $3.3M seed round led by Craft Ventures. SaaSGrid is the first dashboarding product built specifically for SaaS companies: users simply connect their data sources and get perfect, real-time charts displaying the metrics every SaaS business should be tracking. The need for a tool like SaaSGrid has never been more critical as companies strive for efficient growth amidst a difficult fundraising environment.

A month ago, I explained the thinking that informs my akiya activism, so here I will try to lay out the motivations behind my sento work. — Last November I joined together with five colleagues in Tokyo to establish Sento & Neighborhood, a non-profit organization committed to saving some of Japan’s rapidly vanishing public baths, known as sento, and the neighborhoods to which they belong. We incorporated the organization after receiving a grant through New York-based World Monuments Fund to restore and revitalize Inari-yu, a historic bathhouse built in 1930 in the northern Tokyo neighborhood of Takinogawa.