Sorry about that. I recently changed the software that drives this site, and I'm slowly adding back some of the extra pages and functionality that used to be on the old site.
For now, please accept my apologies and let me invite you to explore the content on the rest of the site.
Monday, November 3, 2008
Yeah, it’s been a nutty couple of months, but we’re now in Chicago.
Which means that we’ll have the chance to be here tomorrow night:
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Oh Berkeley, I’m going to miss you.
Friday, July 4, 2008
Happy fourth, everyone.
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Oh my.
Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead is easily the best book I’ve read in the past few years, full of richly precise prose and just brimming with grace.
I’ve been meaning to revisit it, but realistically I won’t be able to make time for that until after our move in early fall.
Today I discovered that Mrs. Robinson has something even better planned for early fall: a new book. And not just any new book, but a companion to Gilead.
Hundreds of thousands were enthralled by the luminous voice of John Ames in Gilead, Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel. Home is an entirely independent, deeply affecting novel that takes place concurrently in the same locale, this time in the household of Reverend Robert Boughton, Ames’s closest friend.
Glory Boughton, aged thirty-eight, has returned to Gilead to care for her dying father. Soon her brother, Jack—the prodigal son of the family, gone for twenty years—comes home too, looking for refuge and trying to make peace with a past littered with tormenting trouble and pain.
Jack is one of the great characters in recent literature. A bad boy from childhood, an alcoholic who cannot hold a job, he is perpetually at odds with his surroundings and with his traditionalist father, though he remains Boughton’s most beloved child. Brilliant, lovable, and wayward, Jack forges an intense bond with Glory and engages painfully with Ames, his godfather and namesake.
Home is a moving and healing book about families, family secrets, and the passing of the generations, about love and death and faith. It is Robinson’s greatest work, an unforgettable embodiment of the deepest and most universal emotions.
(via Looking Closer)
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Sunday, March 30, 2008
Standing in the cheese aisle, I saw three words I never expected to see together: “Goat Truffle Tremor.” Stranger than that, I wanted some. zalmtweet
Friday, March 28, 2008
Reading things in the sports pages like “Takashi Saito (buttocks)” makes me grateful that my profession doesn’t have a nationally published injury report. zalmtweet
Thursday, March 27, 2008
A few weeks ago I put up a teaser about our upcoming move. Some of you good naturedly took a shot at it. And it was the kind of thing that would have been fun if I hadn’t then more or less forgotten about it. So I apologize for being woefully anticlimactic.
Here’s the scoop: sometime in August or possibly as late as September, we will be moving to the south side of Chicago. More specifically, we’ll be moving to Hyde Park so that the lovely Dr. Zalm (my wife) can begin her postdoctoral work at the U of C.
This will be my second stint in Chicagoland, although this time it will be in the city rather than in the suburbs. And oddly enough, it will be the second time I will have lived in Hyde Park. Although the first time was a little further east.
It’s going to be hard to leave, because there’s an awful lot that we love about Berkeley and the friends that we have here. Once we accepted the position, we went through a few weeks of what could only be described as, well, mourning.
Eventually, I’m sure that we’ll be excited about the move. I grew up near Chicago, so I know that it’s an incredible city in many ways.
But the move is really too far away at this point for us to really engage in the excitement of finding a place to live and searching for new clients or employment for me.
So there you have it. Sorry to have left you hanging.
More to come, I’m sure.
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
So I’m late to the party as usual, but I’ve started playing with Twitter. It turns out that throw-away 140-character posts read by very few are easier to churn out than more thoughtful 400-word posts read by comparatively less few.
Sad, but true.
So feel free to follow along and you too can discover things like: which part of me is sunburnt? Or, how did my NCAA bracket end up? Or, what were people doing in the street outside my apartment on Easter?
Thrilling stuff, to be sure.
And yes, I’m aware that this could very well be a gateway social networking app, leading to darker waters like *gasp* Facebook.
I guess I’m just that kind of brave.
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
So it’s been five years.
Five years of the biggest failure of leadership in my lifetime.
Five years of clueless, careless strategy heaped on a premise that was faulty to begin with.
The costs are staggering: unknown hundreds of thousands of lives lost, five hundred billion dollars spent (roughly $200,000 a minute!), with the eventual cost an order of magnitude higher than that. The opportunity costs are colossal.
Honestly, I still don’t know why. It wasn’t that we needed to. Instead, half of our politicians really, really wanted to. And the other half cravenly decided it was in their own best interest to let it happen.
And don’t get me started on the 87 percent of white evangelical Christians who thought it was the right thing to do.
What should we have learned from the last five years? Hilzoy’s suggestions are worth listening to:
1. “Each war is itself, and not another war.”
2. “War sucks. It is horrendously destructive to everyone it touches. It can shatter entire societies. Sometimes it’s necessary, just as sometimes it’s necessary to amputate all your limbs, but that doesn’t make it any less awful.”
3. “There should never be a rush to war, any more than there should be a rush to an outbreak of plague, or having your city hit by an asteroid, or any other utter catastrophe. Any time people seem to be rushing to war, that is a time to stop short, catch your breath, and think things through as carefully as you possibly can. Because if people are rushing to war, they have probably gone collectively insane, and it is imperative not to join them.”
4. “If the case for war is not clear, it is probably wrong. [...] If the case for war rests on magical thinking, it is certainly wrong. And if it relies on the idea that a country can be reconstructed essentially from scratch without enormous effort and commitment and skill and luck, then it rests on magical thinking.”
5. ” ‘Why not?’ is never, ever a good enough reason for a war.”
The other day my friend asked me, based on my past life as a student of foreign affairs, what I thought we should do now in Iraq. I didn’t have an answer for him, because the truth is: there are only bad answers to that question.
But any answer should really begin with something else Hilzoy wrote in that piece:
“I can only hope that somehow, some way, we can begin to redeem our honor. The only way I can think of is by doing an awful lot of good in the world, living by the principles we claim to espouse, and resolving never, ever to do anything as pointlessly destructive as this again.”
That would certainly be a start.
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
It’s hard to say which I find more useless on my iPhone: Spin the Bottle or The Roman Road to Salvation.
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
While preparing to have some friends over to watch the Academy Awards on Sunday night. I stumbled upon a recipe for Confit Byaldi— the fancied-up titular dish from what was destined to be the year’s Best Animated Feature, Ratatouille.
The recipe was created for the film by Thomas Keller, the renowned chef of Napa’s French Laundry. It looked like it would require a lot of slicing, but it also looked beautiful, so I decided to give it a shot.
The first step was to create a pipérade — a chunky reduction of peppers, tomatoes, onions, garlic and herbs. At this stage, it’s a good idea to cook off as much liquid as possible, since the sliced vegetables will be adding more liquid later:
The next step involved slicing the squash and tomatoes into rounds 1/16 of an inch thick. (I didn’t use eggplant for this recipe because three of the eventual diners, including my wife, didn’t so much care for eggplant.)
This was a bit arduous, but I’m not sure if it would’ve been easier with a rodent pulling on my hair.
Next came the most fun part of the dish: arranging the alternating slices on top of the pipérade. If you try this yourself, it’s ideal to choose tomatoes that have roughly the same circumference as the squash. (Mine were a little larger, but that’s what I get for making the dish in winter, I guess.)
After a couple of hours in the oven, mostly covered, I ended up with something that looked great, smelled amazing, and tasted delicious. Quite a trifecta.
And it was marvelous with cedar-plank-grilled salmon.
I don’t know what I would’ve cooked if that surfing penguin movie had won.
Friday, February 22, 2008
It’s official. We will be moving near the end of the summer.
Our destination is shown below:
For those of you who don’t already know… any guesses?
Blade Runner
The Road
Obligatory Villagers
Hair of the Dog Rose Belgian Tripel Ale