PicoBlog

A few raw thoughts on my way to a private family viewing for my mom. Today is the last Thursday of the month, so it’s time to send this newsletter. But my mom just died unexpectedly, and Simon and I are on our way to gather with family. So I won’t share my usual facts, feelings, and action to tackle the climate crisis today. Just a quick note from the heart, that I hope can help some of you when you need it, either for yourselves or to support others in loss.

In an earlier Substack newsletter I wrote about how the change in kitchen technologies made an impact on women in mid-twentieth century America. If you haven’t read it yet, you should probably read that first. When my mother was young, she visited the 1939 World’s Fair, where, along with memorable chocolate milkshakes from the Borden Pavillion, she got a glimpse of the glamorous, automated world she might grow up in.

Sending this week’s newsletter a day early so that you can make egg salad for your Easter feasts! It makes a great appetizer: Pile it onto a piece of toasted baguette and top with a sprig of dill! (Click here for the WTC recipe index and check the bottom of this post for a printer-friendly PDF of this egg salad recipe.) Here’s the thing: This is a newsletter about dinner.

My mom took me to Star Wars and fell asleep. I couldn’t believe it. How could anyone fall asleep watching Star Wars? And during the best part, too, the trash compactor scene where the film’s heroes end up swimming in a bunch of Death Star refuse and are almost flattened by the collapsing walls! And yet, there she was, eyes closed. I’d seen it two or three times at this point and I was rapt.

I’ll be in Phoenix for Fan Fusion this weekend, talking middle-grade storytelling and Star Wars cartography and other geeky things dear to my heart. A little Minecraft, a little Jupiter Pirates, a little we’ll see what’s what. Plus sneaking off to a Diamondbacks game, because it’s what I do. I’ll also have a table in the Lower Level’s Hall 4, B917N. I’ll have some books for sale — basically whatever I can drag from Brooklyn in a suitcase — and am also happy to sign anything you bring yourself.

Today I’m publishing a lookbook of 15 repeat-worthy outfits that I plan to have on mental retainer this summer. Most of them are either variations on — or exact replicas of — outfits I’ve worn multiple times in the past. As someone who shares photos of what I’m wearing on the internet as part of my job, I’ve become increasingly conscious of how easy it is to fall into the trap of conflating newness with inspiration, so this exercise was as much for me as it is for the readers of this newsletter: an invitation to embrace “tried and true” over the relentless pursuit of reinventing the wheel.

I have resigned as poetry editor of The New York Times Magazine.   The Israeli state's U.S-backed war against the people of Gaza is not a war for anyone. There is no safety in it or from it, not for Israel, not for the United States or Europe, and especially not for the many Jewish people slandered by those who claim falsely to fight in their names. Its only profit is the deadly profit of oil interests and weapon manufacturers.

The Washington Post invited me to review Alan Philps’s The Red Hotel, a good book about wartime censorship in Stalin’s Soviet Union during the Second World War. The journalist in wartime enjoys an enviable image: a hard-bitten idealist filing pages from the front lines, interpreting the chaos of battle for the audience at home. During the Second World War, expectations of thrill and reward attracted ambitious Western journalists to the Soviet Union.

“I am convinced we’re on the cusp of the most important transformation of our lifetimes.” “The coming wave is going to change the world. Ultimately, human beings may no longer be the primary planetary drivers, as we have become accustomed to being. We are going to live in an epoch when the majority of our daily interactions are not with other people but with AIs. This might sound intriguing or horrifying or absurd, but it is happening.