From Food Before making this, I had never made a real risotto, before. I was always intimidated by it, and reading recipes did nothing to ameliorate my anxiety. The ideal creamy-but-toothsome consistency was notoriously elusive. There was a lot of butter and cream and cheese. Also, there were multiple pots and pans at work: one […]
Recipe: Autumn Squash Risotto Read More »
Today is my mother’s birthday. October is also Breast Cancer Awareness month. She is a breast cancer survivor. In that spirit, I link to this post, which critiques the “narrative” surrounding breast cancer — namely, that early detection always saves lives. I suggest that everyone read it, because it highlights some interesting truths about diagnosis
Happy birthday, Mom. Read More »
Tomorrow, I’m heading to the Detroit Design Festival, where I’ll be creating my very first art installation for the Bordertown design group. The group has contributed costumes, games, souvenirs from aborted utopias, and other wonderful things. My piece is a series of design fictions about the future of border security in Istanbul. I based those
A long time ago, my medieval studies professor said to me: “So, what are you interested in? What subject do you see yourself spending the rest of your life learning more about?” “…I’m not sure,” I told her. I want to be a novelist, I wanted to say. “I ask because you’re going to have
I have successfully defended my second master’s thesis. Read More »
My mother is a cancer survivor. During my third year of university, we learned that she was suffering from ductal carcinoma in-situ, a slow form of breast cancer that was undetectable by self-exam or mammogram. In her case, it took a stubborn doctor and a galactogram to diagnose her. Another family member had been diagnosed
Like many of my generation, I greeted the death of Osama bin Laden with frantic text messaging. Then tweeting, then emailing and strangely, housekeeping. At three a.m., I turned on a vacuum. Two minutes later, I shut it off. The BBC continued confirming what I had heard hours earlier. He was dead. We had killed
On the death of bin Laden Read More »
“Grief is not knowing where to give the love that does not stop.” -from Better to Have Loved: The Life of Judith Merril, by Judith Merril and Emily Pohl-Weary
And now, a word from Judith Merril: Read More »
Please excuse the over-exposure of this photo. It’s the inevitable consequence of low lighting and late eating. For a recent family birthday dinner, we visited Ferro, and this drink, the Negroni, convinced me to blog the location.
A magnitude 5.5 quake hit the Ontario-Quebec border region today. You can see the epicentre here, and read another article here. Apparently it’s being felt as far as Ohio, but what I felt was one of those mild but noticeable “Is the earth shaking or am I having an inner ear episode?” kind of quakes.
The quake is no lie. Read More »
I got hacked this weekend. My pal René Walling let me know about it in an email Sunday morning, and I immediately phoned up my host to ask for help. I’m hosted through Superb, a company recommended to me by the late, great Emru Townsend (through whom I met René). When Emru made this recommendation,