PicoBlog

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One of the biggest misconceptions about Thai food is that it's alllll spicy! 🌶🌶🌶🌶 But, in reality, there are many Thai dishes that aren’t spicy at all. Thai kids need to eat too, you know! The dishes I’m sharing with you today are great for kids AND for adults who are still training your tolerance (and yes, tolerance can be trained)! So, if you or your kids don’t have a high tolerance for heat in your food (yet), these are great recipes that still give you an authentic Thai food experience.

Welcome back to Notable Sandwiches, the series in which I, alongside my editor David Swanson, stumble through the strange and ever-shifting document that is Wikipedia’s List of Notable Sandwiches, in alphabetical order. This week: David on the Cuban sandwich. — Talia Lavin “Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?

Welcome to the latest installment of Notable Sandwiches, where I, alongside my editor David Swanson, trip merrily through the bizarre document that is Wikipedia’s List of Notable Sandwiches in alphabetical order. This week: a northern Chinese delicacy—the donkey burger. First things first: the donkey burger is not a creation of Guy Fieri, notable as he is for slathering everything with his signature donkey sauce. For what it’s worth, I’m fully on board with the Guy Fieri renaissance: initially reviled for his flame-festooned bowling shirts, spike-gelled frosted tips, and general un-ironic enthusiasm, he’s since been embraced by the very culturati that once scorned him, being seen as, all things considered, a generally decent guy in a bitter world.

Welcome back to Notable Sandwiches, the feature where we trip merrily through the bizarre and mutable document that is Wikipedia’s List of Notable Sandwiches, in alphabetical order. This week, the iconic Taiwanese pork bun: gua bao. During the first decade of the 21st century, few dishes captured the imaginations and appetites of New Yorkers quite like Momofuku’s pork buns. As owner and chef David Chang’s culinary empire and celebrity grew—more and more restaurants, TV shows, books, magazines, podcasts—the pork buns were there every step of the way.

I have been souring on Twitter for a while now. At first my main complaint was how nasty everyone seemed to be — and how the service seemed to reward those people. Since Elon Musk bought Twitter, however, my issue is the utter capriciousness that governs the site. It appears to operate almost entirely based on one man’s whims. The latest of those whims was to limit Substack content — and put messages suggesting the content might have been harmful — in response to the news that Substack was rolling out a new feature called Notes.

We had a party last night. A gathering of the every-inch-of-the-first-floor-is-taken variety. It’s a first in this row house, in this town that, four years later, still feels like the moon. It’s the first time since Seattle we’ve hosted an evening expressly for merriment. Boy did it feel good. The reason: winter solstice. My favorite day of the December calendar. The day that marks the return of the light — in the sky, and maybe even in our hearts.

Darklings, These last couple of days have been an absolute whirlwind. I turned forty on Sunday, and my husband threw me the surprise party of a lifetime. One day later, I flew to Nashville to hit the road for the Pretend It’s a Boat Poetry Tour, with my dear friend, writer Derrick C. Brown. We picked up our motorcycle—our mode of transportation for the next two weeks—and packed all our gear and books in its pockets before heading to the venue.

I want to write about my time in Armenia and show you some of my snaps simply because I keep thinking about it. This is prompted by two things I think 1) every time I hear use “assigned sex at birth” I wonder if people who say that have ever left their rooms, been in a maternity ward, had a scan, or begin to understand in any shape or form what is going…