→ December 31, 2019
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Dark Money (book).

Jane Mayer’s Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right is the most horrifying book I read all year – but it’s not a horror novel, just a work of well-investigated, well-argued non-fiction that details how archconservative billionaires, usually mad over having to pay taxes, have spent hundreds of millions or more of their own money to buy control of our government. Their efforts helped catapult the retrograde right-wing of the Republican Party from the fringes to the party’s new core, gave them control of the legislative and executive branches, and have, for the last two years, allowed them to pack the federal judiciary with judges who agree with their reactionary views on taxation, environmental regulations, and women’s rights. If this book doesn’t horrify you, you must be one of them.

The main target of Dark Money is the Koch brothers, David (who just died this August) and Charles, who run the second-largest closely held company in the United States. Before David’s death, each was worth around $50 billion, each had longstanding individual efforts to avoid paying taxes, and their company had decades of violations of environmental regulations, including dumping benzene, a known human carcinogen that we absorb by breathing its vapors, into the air near their oil refinery in Corpus Christi. The Kochs’ response to these various federal actions against them has been to pump hundreds of millions of dollars into various front groups that donate to legislative and gubernatorial candidates who promise, in turn, to roll back environmental protections or to push tax cuts for the highest brackets; and to fund professorships at various universities where the positions will go to so-called “free-market advocates” and where the Koch brothers may have had say in hiring. Along with other anti-tax, anti-regulation billionaires, including the DeVos family, Wilbur Ross, John Olin, Art Pope, and more, the Kochs helped found the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation; spent hundreds of millions fighting climate reform; and helped fund massive gerrymanders in states from Ohio and Pennsylvania to North Carolina. They’ve packaged most of these policies, which help them directly or indirectly by helping the businesses they own, as issues of “freedom,” while tying some of them to issues that matter to social conservatives, so that they might convince enough voters to swing their way even when those policies (such as eliminating laws or regulations that fight pollution) would hurt those voters themselves.

Even if you agree with some of the positions that these billionaires are pushing, Mayer’s main thesis here is that our democracy has been bought by a tiny number of people, so that fewer than 20 of these billionaires are setting wide swaths of federal and state policies for a country of 300 million. It is improbable that this extreme minority, all of whom are white and quite old, nearly all of whom are male, and all of whom are in the top 1% of the top 1% of the top 1% of Americans by wealth, would all agree among themselves on policies that are also beneficial to the country as a whole … but even if, improbably, they did so, that’s not how our system of government is supposed to work, and not how most Americans think it works. But, as Mayer describes through her history of the Kochs and of the way money has metastasized throughout our political system, since Citizens United – a Supreme Court ruling that resulted from funding by the Koch brothers and their allies – this is exactly how our government works. Billionaires buying the policies they want is a feature, not a bug.

Mayer also goes into the Nazi roots of the Kochs’ fortune; it is unlikely that the brothers would have become this wealthy had their father not helped Adolf Hitler build a major oil refinery in Hamburg that let the Nazis refine high-octane fuel for their warplanes. Fred Koch, Charles’ and David’s father, also helped Joseph Stalin develop the Soviets’ then-moribund oil industry, helping ensure the dictator’s grip on power and setting the stage for the Cold War after the second World War. It’s estimated they spent nearly $900 million in the 2016 election to try to elect their favored, hard-right Republicans to state legislatures across the country and ensure control of both houses of Congress. Is that possible if Fred Koch doesn’t take Hitler’s money?

There isn’t a simple solution to the problems Mayer details in Dark Money, and she doesn’t pretend there are, instead pointing out every policy change and judicial decision that created this particular monster. Lax IRS regulations have allowed billionaires to funnel money into “non-profits” that don’t have to disclose their donors but manage to skirt rules against such groups funding candidates. Citizens United gave corporations the free speech rights previously reserved for individuals. A lack of federal rules on soft money, donated to groups (like Super PACs) but not directly to candidates, has further enabled the wholesale purchasing of legislators; corporations can’t contribute directly to candidates, but they can fund Super PACs, which can then campaign for or against candidates as long as they aren’t coordinating with the candidates they support. None of this will change soon; it certainly won’t change as long as this version of the Koch-funded Republican Party retains control of the Senate, the White House, and much of the federal judiciary. A huge part of the power of Dark Money is that Mayer channels her obvious indignation into providing more details on the shady (yet legal!) behavior of these billionaires, rather than just delivering a screed on the subject, even though the desire to deliver a screed would be easy to understand.

I don’t think boycotts accomplish a whole lot – they require such enormous coordination, and the presence of viable alternatives – but I am at least trying to avoid spending my money with companies owned by these reactionary billionaires and other companies that support their efforts (such as by funding the American Legislative Exchange Council, the conservative lobbying group that goes so far as to write bills for their member legislators to submit). I wouldn’t shop at Menard’s if I lived in the Midwest, not with its owner helping fund fights against unions and saying he “doesn’t believe in environmental regulations.” I won’t buy paper goods from Georgia Pacific, although I’m realistic – if I buy a new house, or do some renovations, I probably have no say over where any plywood or OSB comes from. And I don’t think I’m going to move the needle with any of these companies; I would just rather know my money isn’t going directly to help the subjugation of our democracy.

Next up: I’m reading a pair of Evelyn Waugh novels – first The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, and then Black Mischief.

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→ December 16, 2019
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Yellow & Yangtze app.

Yellow & Yangtze is Reiner Knizia’s update to his all-time classic Tigris & Euphrates, which still sits in the top 100 on Boardgamegeek and pioneered the “highest/lowest score” mechanic, where you score in multiple categories, and your lowest score is the one that’s compared to your opponents’. Both are abstract games of area control that are well-balanced so that it rewards strategy but also has mechanisms for preventing runaway winners or leaving someone totally in the dust. Dire Wolf Digital just released an app version of Y&Y that I think is incredibly strong, including quality AI players (on the hard setting), great graphics, and intuitive game-play, and it’s kind of selling me on picking up the original game at some point too.

Yellow & Yangtze makes several major tweaks to the rules of T&E, using hex tiles instead of squares, introducing a fifth color of tiles that you can use like a wild color, needing three tiles rather than four to build a pagoda, and giving each of the other four colors of tiles a unique power. You get six tiles at a time in your hand, plus a ‘leader’ in each color. On a turn, you get two actions, most of which will involve placing two leaders or tiles on the board. You must place a leader next to a black tile. When you then place a tile of the same color as a leader in the same cluster of tiles, you get one point in that color. If you make a triangle of three hex tiles of the same color, it becomes a pagoda, and then gives one point per round to the player whose leader of that color is in the same cluster. Each cluster can only have one leader in each color, but it can have leaders from different players.

The conflicts between players are similar to the original. If two kingdoms (the game’s name for clusters) are connected, there’s a war, and it’s settled by players with leaders in each kingdom contributing red tiles from their hands. If you place your leader into a kingdom that already has a leader of that color, it’s settled by both players contributing black tiles. When you place a green tile, you get to choose your replacement from the display of six tiles; otherwise, you get new tiles after your entire turn, and they’re random. When you place a blue tile, which may only go on a river or shoreline space, you can continue to place more blue tiles for free as long as they’re all adjacent. If you have blue tiles, you can also destroy any tile on the board in a “peasants’ riot;” you blow up a black tile with this and then any leaders adjacent to it are also removed if they aren’t still adjacent to another black tile. Yellow tiles are wild; you get points in the yellow category, but at game-end, those points are distributed to your other four scores to always raise your lowest score.

The app is just great. It looks fantastic, with very bright, clear colors, so that there is no confusion between tiles or about what’s been placed where. The screen shows you your tiles and as much or as little of the board as you want, with smaller indicators for which opponents still have their leaders in hand (five dots under each opponent’s name, with unplaced ones lit up) and what six tiles are on display for players who place green tiles (a ring on the lower right). Your scores are in the lower left – you can’t see opponents’ scores – and if you have an active pagoda that score has a flickering flame behind it, which makes it much easier to track. The easy AI is just tutorial level, the medium is just modestly challenging, but I have a hard time beating the hard AI when I play against two of them. The hard AI loves to use that peasants’ riot feature, which is probably good strategy but feels extremely personal.

The app is $9.99 right now, on the high end for board game adaptations, although with the cardboard game over $40 it’s good value for the game play provided. Dire Wolf Digital does great work, with this their second outstanding app release of 2019 (along with Raiders of the North Sea) and their Lanterns another favorite of mine for its animations; you can add Y&Y to the list, as I think it checks every box for an app, with challenging game play, great graphics, and high ease of use.

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→ December 9, 2019
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Imhotep The Duel.

Imhotep came in at #24 on my top 100 boardgames list last month, one of the best games from one of my favorite designers, Phil Walker-Harding, the same mind behind Gizmos (#37), Sushi Go Party! (#87), Bärenpark (#88), Silver & Gold (#48), and Cacao (#43), although if there’s a hiccup with Imhotep it’s that the game, designed for 2 to 4 players, becomes a bit like two-player solitaire if that’s your player count. Enter this year’s Imhotep The Duel, which reimagines the base game for two players in a way that forces more interaction and requires you to think about what your opponent might be doing far more often than you would in the original game. It takes the feel and many of the main elements of Imhotep but changes some of the fundamental mechanics to make it a new game, and also condenses the playing experience to about 20 minutes. Like 7 Wonders Duel, this is how a two-player version of a larger game should relate to its original.

In Imhotep The Duel you’re still trying to unload goods from boats on to four different spaces – the obelisk, the temple, the pyramids, and the tombs – but this time, each player has their own track of four player spaces, each of which has a basic and advanced side, and all of the goods are different, whereas in the original you were just placing your stones. Each player has four meeples and will place them on a 3×3 board that has six boats along two of its adjacent sides. Each space on the grid corresponds to one space on each of two boats, one touching its column and one its row. When a boat’s row/column has at least two meeples on it, either player may choose to unload the boat, assigning the goods in those spaces to players whose meeples were in the corresponding spaces.

Imhotep The Duel setup

On a turn, you may place a meeple, unload a boat, or use a blue action tile that lets you do something more powerful. If you’ve placed your four meeples, you have to unload a boat or use an action tile that doesn’t require placing a meeple, so there will be frequent unloading throughout the game. The tiles on the boats correspond to the four spaces on each player track as well as the blue action tiles, which let you place 2 or 3 meeples in one turn, steal any single good from a boat (skipping the meeple/unloading mechanism), swap two tiles on one boat and then unload it, or place a meeple and then unload up to two boats in one turn.

The basic scoring sides for the four spaces on your track are straightforward, and three of the four have a competitive aspect to them. The obelisk tiles are all identical and score one point per tile, but the player who has the most at the end gets a six-point bonus. The pyramids come in two colors with six tiles in each color available, and each tile you place on one pyramid is worth N points, where N is the number of tiles you’ve placed there so far – so 1-2-3-4-5-6 tiles are worth 1-3-6-10-15-21 points. Since those are scarce, going for the same pyramid as your opponent limits both of your upsides. The tomb tiles are numbered 1-12, each unique, and you score for contiguous groups of tiles, with those values also scaling up with a maximum of 5 adjacent tiles for 25 points. Groups of 6+ also score at 25, so your opponent might try to give you a tile that joins two of your groups and takes potential points away. Only the temple tiles are noncompetitive – each has 1 to 4 dots on it representing its point value.

The ‘B’ sides introduce a bit more competition and strategy but are still pretty simple to grasp. The obelisk gives a bonus of 12 points to the first player to get to 5 tiles and 6 points to the second, but if one player gets 10 tiles they get all 18 points. The temple switches from one point per dot to points for collecting sets of tiles with 1, 2, 3, and 4 dots. The pyramids now only score for your pyramid with fewer tiles on it, and you lose 6 points if you have 0 tiles on either pyramid. The tombs now score 4 points per group of tiles, with one tile still constituting a group, so you want to separate your tiles as much as possible (e.g., only getting odd-numbered tiles).

When there are no longer enough tiles in the supply to refill a boat a player has unloaded, that boat is removed from the game. The game ends when the fifth boat has been unloaded, so there will always be one boat (with three tiles on it) that isn’t unloaded. Players add up their points from the four scoring areas, then gain one point per unused blue action tile and one per meeple still on the 3×3 board. I timed my last game, against a player who’d never played this version before, and we finished in just under 20 minutes. It’s fun, portable, and fast to set up & play, and I’ll put it among my top ten two-player games when I next update that list. I got it for $13 on sale but it’s still just $19 on amazon.

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→ December 7, 2019
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Knives Out.

Knives Out might as well have been made explicitly for me. I can’t remember the last time I saw a movie that fit so many things I like in movies or even literature. It’s a mystery, and a fairly clever one. It’s witty on multiple levels. It’s very fast-paced, with a sort of hyper-reality to the dialogue. It left me wanting more of the same, and never felt overstuffed. It’s an homage to my favorite genre of films and novels, but never descends to parody. It’s not quite perfect, but my god did I enjoy every minute of it.

Rian Johnson wrote and directed the film, and did a similar homage to noir mysteries with his first feature film, Brick, but without the humor of this film, which is very much a British mystery in the style of Agatha Christie’s novels. He’s assembled an incredible cast, with Daniel Craig chewing scenery all over the country manor house as the pompous ‘gentleman detective’ Benoit Blanc – so we’re not even going to be subtle about the Christie allusions – who is Hercule Poirot with an exaggerated southern drawl that another character compares accurately to Foghorn Leghorn. It’s a bit of overkill, because he wrote the film like every Poirot or Miss Marple novel where there’s a bunch of eccentric characters who get very little depth or development, but given how much these actors appear to be enjoying the ride, it’s hard not to enjoy watching them do so.

Blanc, like Poirot in most of his novels, isn’t introduced until some time has already elapsed in the story. Instead we are introduced to Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer, a delight as ever), bestselling mystery writer and, as of the opening scene in the film, recently deceased. A week later, two police officers (LaKeith Stanfield, woefully underused, and Noah Segan) arrive to question all of the family members, with Blanc sitting in the background and only interjecting after the formal questioning is over. The family members are all simply aghast at the implication that the patriarch was murdered – well, all except for his mother – and get worked up when Blanc starts probing. Enter Marta (Ana de Armas), Harlan’s private nurse, a Peruvian woman whose mother is an undocumented immigrant and who can’t lie without throwing up. Blanc uses the latter feature to his advantage, while others try to exploit the former for their own ends. Marta was the last person to see Harlan alive, and knows more about the circumstances of his death than anyone else, so Blanc appoints her his deputy (in a way) and sets about solving the crime.

Knives Out is all story and dialogue, and I’m good with that. I especially love the Poirot stories because I enjoy his character – the pompous, brilliant little Belgian man with the “face fungus” and silly hat and ability to solve crimes by the “psychology” of the suspects – and Blanc offers a lot of that too, similarly enamored of his own abilities, perhaps less perceptive when it comes to the suspects’ psychological motives but more entertaining with his turns of phrase. If you’re looking for complex characters or character growth, though, it’s not here: this is an old-school whodunit that lives and dies – pun intended – by the murder and its solution, buoyed by rapid-fire dialogue that would do His Girl Friday‘s writers proud. It is frequently funny, never riotously so, but consistently amusing, and Johnson did imbue several of the characters with varying degrees of wit, with Linda (Jamie Lee Curtis, who really inhabits her role and could carry a movie in that character) dashing off some of the best lines. So you’ll get to see a stupendous collection of actors – Michael Shannon, Don Johnson, Toni Collette, Chris Evans, Chris Evans’ sweater, even M. Emmet Walsh – get not quite enough to do, but do a lot with what they get.

The story itself is good, but I think it’s a bit too easy to solve. I suspect I know what Johnson was trying to do, but it doesn’t quite work. I wasn’t sure I knew it until the end, and even then I realized I missed one really big clue, but it’s a bit too clear from the midpoint of the film who the most likely culprit is. Johnson does dial up the resolution to eleven, though, and perhaps the greatest strength of the script is how often little lines or events from earlier in the film pay off at the end. It rewards you for paying attention, and my attention was rapt from the beginning.

Johnson has already said he’d like to do a sequel with Blanc as the lead detective solving another murder, and I’m here for it – but I acknowledge I am at the absolute center of the circle encompassing the target audience for such a film. I love an old-timey murder mystery, and Johnson gave me the best new one I’ve seen or read in a very long time. It has flaws I wouldn’t forgive in a non-genre film, but great genre fiction often adheres to the genre’s intrinsic rules. I wish I could have seen Curtis fire off a few more quips or to know how Evans character became such a spoiled disaster, or gotten more mileage from the gag about the grandson who’s an alt-right troll (and looks like someone hit Mark Gatiss with a Benjamin Button ray), but this isn’t that kind of movie. Your mileage may vary.

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→ November 29, 2019
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Cookbook recommendations, 2019.

I’ve streamlined this post a bit this year, as I’m using certain new books more and have set some older ones aside, and also I’d rather focus on the books I think you’re most likely to enjoy.

New for 2019

The new cookbook I’ve used the most this year is Yotam Ottolenghi’s Simple, which mostly lives up to its name. The majority of the recipes I’ve tried from the book can be executed start to finish in well under an hour, often closer to 30 minutes, as long as you ignore the utterly ridiculous quantities of chopped fresh herbs it calls for. The gigli pasta with chickpeas and spinach is a huge winner that I make at least once every two weeks. The mustard-marinated kale salad is a great platform for lots of dishes and as a side salad on its own even without the grilled asparagus it includes. The zucchini-feta fritters are excellent. The bulk of the recipes are vegetable-forward, like his other books, but not strictly vegetarian. It’s such a great go-to for weeknight dinners and many of them will provide you with leftovers if you’re cooking for fewer than four people.

I got an Ooni outdoor pizza oven last offseason and then got Marc Vetri’s Mastering Pizza to help me make better use of it; Vetri’s Neapolitan dough recipe is easily the best I’ve found, and it works every time. There are actually two versions: one that you ferment slowly over about 48 hours, and another you can start when you get up in the morning and use that night for dinner. His focaccia recipe is excellent as well, and I use his very basic tomato sauce for margherita pizzas. There are lots of other pizza dough styles in here, like the roman pizza al taglio, but I love the Neapolitan version so much I haven’t tried any of the alternatives.

I’ve just started to dive into two newish cookbooks, Yasmin Khan’s Zaitoun: Recipes from the Palestinian Kitchen and Nik Sharma’s Season: Big Flavors, Beautiful Food. I’ve made a couple of recipes from each with success, including the za’atar crusted salmon from Zaitoun and the spicy sautéed Brussels sprouts from Season.

I introduced this book in last year’s post, but I can give a much stronger recommendation now to Brave Tart, from Stella Parks. Brave Tart‘s real emphasis is homemade recreations of popular American dessert items, especially branded ones – Parks’ versions of Oreos, Thin Mints and Trefoils from the Girl Scouts, Little Debbie Oatmeal Pies, and so on. Parks also writes for Serious Eats, and their ethos of testing the hell out of every recipe, using weight rather than volume, and offering concise explanations for anything that deviates from the norm carries over into the book. Her basic chocolate chip cookie recipe is the best I’ve ever made. Her shortbread cookies are excellent. I didn’t love the Oreos, but the filling recipe is excellent.

Essentials

There are two cookbooks that I insist any home cook have. One is the venerable Joy of Cooking, revised and altered through many editions (I own the 1997, now out of print), but still the go-to book for almost any common dish you’re likely to want to make. The recipes take a very easy-to-follow format, and the book assumes little to no experience or advanced technique. I still use it all the time, including their basic bread stuffing (dressing) recipe every Thanksgiving, altered just with the addition of a diced red bell pepper.

The other indisputable must-have cookbook is, of course, Ruhlman’s Twenty, by the best food writer going today, Michael Ruhlman. The book comprises twenty chapters, each on a technique or core ingredient, with a hundred recipes, lots of essays to explain key concepts or methods, and photographs to help you understand what you’re cooking. It’s my most-used cookbook, the first cookbook gift I give to anyone looking to start a collection, and an absolute pleasure to read and re-read. Favorite recipes include the seared pork tenderloin with butter and more butter; the cured salmon; the homemade mayonnaise (forget the stuff in the jar, it’s a pale imitation); the pulled pork; all three duck recipes; the scrambled eggs with goat cheese (using a modified double-boiler method, so you get something more like custard than rubber); and the homemade bacon. Many of these recipes appear again in his more recent book, Egg: A Culinary Exploration of the World’s Most Versatile Ingredient, along with more egg basics and a lot of great dessert recipes; and Twenty itself builds on Ruhlman’s Ratio, which shows you master formulas for things like doughs and sauces so you can understand the fundamentals of each recipe and extend as you see fit.

I’ve long recommended Baking Illustrated as the perfect one-book kitchen reference for all things baked – cookies, cakes, pies, breads, and more. It’s full of standards, tested to ensure that they will work the first time. You’ll need a scale to get maximum use from the book. I use their pie crust recipe, their peach pie recipe, their snickerdoodles recipe (kids love it, but moms seem to love it even more…), and I use their pumpkin pie recipe every Thanksgiving. The prose can be a little cloying, but I skip most of that and go right to the recipes because I know they’ll succeed the first time. That link will get you the original book from the secondary market; it has been rewritten from scratch and titled The Cook’s Illustrated Baking Book, but I can’t vouch for it as I haven’t seen the new text.

J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s mammoth The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science, named for Kenji’s acclaimed and indispensable column over at Serious Eats, is a must for any advanced or aspiring home cook. Unlike many of the books here, The Food Lab is a better resource for its text than its recipes – I’ve made a bunch of dishes from the book, with a few that just didn’t work out (e.g., the pork shoulder ragout), but every page seems to have something to teach you. His marinated kale salad recipe changed my view on how to do those at home. The one caution I’ll offer is that it doesn’t include any sous-vide recipes, which is something Kenji does a lot on Serious Eats’ site, although he does have a section on replicating the sous-vide technique using cheaper materials like a portable cooler.

If I know someone already has Ruhlman’s Twenty, my next gift choice for them is Nigel Slater’s Tender: A Cook and His Vegetable Patch, a book about vegetables but not strictly vegetarian. (There’s a lot of bacon here.) Each vegetable gets its own section, with explanations on how to grow it, how to choose it at the market, a half-dozen or more basic ways to cook it, and then a bunch of specific recipes, some of which are just a paragraph and some of which are a full page with glorious pictures accompanying them. The stuffed peppers with ground pork is a near-weekly occurrence in this house, and the warm pumpkin scone is the only good reason to buy and cook an actual pumpkin. I own but have barely cooked from his sequel on fruit, Ripe: A Cook in the Orchard, because it’s more focused on desserts than savory applications.

Another essential if you want to cook more vegetables is Hugh Acheson’s 2015 book The Broad Fork, which has become the first book I consult when I have a vegetable and am not sure what I want to do with it. Acheson conceived the book in response to a neighbor’s question about what the hell to do with the kohlrabi he got in a CSA box, and the whole book works like that: You have acquired some Vegetable and need to know where to start. Organized by season and then by plant, with plenty of fruits and a few nuts mixed in for good measure, the book gives you recipes and ideas by showing off each subject in various preparations – raw, in salads, in soups, roasted, grilled, pureed, whatever. There are main course ideas in here as well, some with meat or fish, others vegetarian or vegan, and many of the multi-part dishes are easy to deconstruct, like the charred-onion vinaigrette in the cantaloupe/prosciutto recipe that made a fantastic steak sauce. Most of us need to eat more plants anyway; Acheson’s book helps make that a tastier goal. It’s also witty, as you’d expect from the slightly sardonic Canadian if you’ve seen him on TV. He has a brand-new cookbook out called Sous Vide: Better Home Cooking, that I’ll pick up shortly. I also really like his podcast Hugh Acheson Stirs the Pot.

You know, a lot of people will tell you go get Julia Child’s classic books on French cuisine, but I find the one I have (Mastering the Art) to be dated and maddeningly unspecific. Julia’s Kitchen Wisdom is a slimmer, much more useful book that focuses on the basics – her explanation of vinaigrettes is still the gold standard, and her gift for distilling recipes and techniques into simple little explanations shines here without the fuss of three-day recipes for coq au vin. Oh, that’s in here too, but she does it in two and a half hours.

Experts

The The Flavor Bible isn’t actually a cookbook, but a giant cross-referencing guide where each ingredient comes with a list of complementary ingredients or flavors, as selected by a wide range of chefs the authors interviewed to assemble the book. It’s the book you want to pull out when your neighbor gives you a few handfuls of kale or your local grocery store puts zucchini on sale and you don’t know what to do with them. Or maybe you’re just tired of making salmon the same way and need some fresh ideas. The book doesn’t tell you how to cook anything, just what else to put on the plate. Spoiler: Bacon and butter go with just about everything.

Yotam Ottolenghi’s Plenty is an outstanding vegetable-focused cookbook that uses no meat ingredients (but does use dairy and eggs), although Ottolenghi’s restaurant uses meats and he offers a few suggestions on pairing his recipes with meat dishes. The recipes here are longer and require a higher skill level than those in Tender, but they’re restaurant-quality in flavor and presentation, including a mushroom ragout that I love as a main course over pappardelle with a poached egg (or two) on top and my favorite recipe for preparing Belgian endives (a pinch of sugar goes a long way).

Thomas Keller’s Bouchon Bakery cookbook ($11 for Kindle right now) has long been my standby for high-end dessert recipes, but unlike Baking Illustrated, the recipes are written for people who are more skilled and incredibly serious about baking. Ingredients are measured to the gram, and the recipes assume a full range of techniques. It has the best macaron recipe I’ve ever found – close second is I Love Macarons – and the Bouchon book has also the homemade Oreo recipe I made for Halloween a few years ago (but you need black cocoa to do it right, and I use buttercream as the filling instead of their unstable white-chocolate ganache).

For the really hardcore, Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen is an essential kitchen reference, full of explanations of the chemistry of cooking that will make you a smarter cook and help you troubleshoot many problems at the stove. I haven’t read it straight through – it’s 700-plus pages – but I’ll go to the index and pull out some wisdom as needed. It also explains why some people (coughmecough) never acquired the taste for strongly-flavored cheeses.

I can sort of recommend Flour + Water: Pasta, a cookbook from the chef/owner of flour + water in San Francisco, although it’s not for everyone. The restaurant is nationally renowned for its fresh pasta dishes, and this cookbook is a grand tour of regional Italian cooking, with just about any style of pasta you can imagine, and the best directions on how to form, knead, and shape the pasta that I’ve come across. Every pasta dish I’ve made from this book has come out great the first time. There’s a catch, however: the non-pasta aspects of the recipes are poorly written and were clearly never tested by any non-professionals. One recipe calls for starting a sauce by cooking onions over high heat … for eight minutes, which is fine if you want to burn them (you don’t). Times and temperatures are off throughout, so if you’re a novice in the kitchen, this isn’t the book for you. If you’ve cooked a lot, especially Italian sauces, then you’ll spot the errant directions and make adjustments as you go. And the pasta is truly spectacular, enough that you might do as I did and spring for a garganelli board (used to shape a specific hand-rolled noodle).

Richard Blais’ Try This at Home has become a staple in my kitchen both for about a half-dozen specific recipes in here that we love (sweet potato gnocchi, lemon curd chicken, arroz con pollo, sous-vide chicken breast) and for the creativity it inspires. Blais has lots of asides on techniques and ingredients, and if you actually read the text instead of just blindly following the recipes, you’ll get a sense of the extensibility of the basic formulas within the book, even though he isn’t as explicit about it as Ruhlman is. His second book, So Good, came out in May 2017; I’ve tried four recipes so far, with the chicken thighs adobo and spicy green pozole both hits. I make that adobo recipe, which uses lots of ginger and garlic, a bit of brown sugar, and some vinegar (he recommends pineapple vinegar, but I haven’t found that in any stores yet) for a unique flavor profile.

Bread

I’ve owned and given away or sold a lot of bread-baking books, because nothing has been able to beat the two masterworks by baker/instructor Peter Reinhart, The Bread Baker’s Apprentice and Whole Grain Breads. Reinhart’s books teach you how to make artisan or old-world breads using various starters, from overnight bigas to wild-yeast starters you can grow and culture on your countertop. If that seems like a little much, his Artisan Breads Every Day takes it down a notch for the novice baker, with a lot of the same recipes presented in a simpler manner, without so much emphasis on baker’s formulas, and is a good value at $24.

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→ November 25, 2019
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Palm Island.

Palm Island is a solitaire game with one of the most clever gimmicks – I use that term with endearment – I’ve seen in a while: You hold the entire game in your hand, hence the name “Palm Island.” It manages to sneak in some resource management and ‘building’ concepts while forcing choices by setting up the cards so you can’t do everything you want to do. You’ll cycle through a small deck of cards eight times, trying to gain as many points as possible by using the cards with resources on them to upgrade the cards worth victory points.

The base game comprises a deck of 17 cards, one of which is just the round marker, while the others are double-sided and have different abilities depending on which side is pointing up. After shuffling the other 16, all in their starting orientation, you look at the top two cards and choose your actions. You can rotate some cards 90 degrees clockwise to make a resource (fish, wood, stone) available, often for free but sometimes at the cost of other resources. When you use a resource card to pay for something else, you rotate it back 90 degrees counterclockwise. You may also spend resources to turn some cards 180 degrees, unlocking more powerful abilities/more resources/more points, or to flip them over, unlocking even more of the same. The base deck has two housing cards that you can upgrade three times (turn 180, flip over, turn 180 again) to get to 6 victory points, and two temples that you can upgrade three times to get to 10 victory points, but I don’t think it’s possible to hit all four of those maximum figures with the original deck, and the order in which those cards appear affects your ideal strategy.

There are a handful (pun intended) of other restrictions on how you use these cards. You can only have four resource cards rotated to the right at any time; to rotate a fifth one you must discard one of the others by rotating it counterclockwise back into place. When you rotate a card 90 degrees to make its resource(s) available, you place it at the back of the deck; if that card returns to the top before you’ve used it, you lose that resource, rotating the card back 90 degrees counterclockwise and also placing it at the back of the deck. You can keep the top card in place and keep using or discarding (to the back) the second card, but once you reach the round marker card, you have to use or discard that top card as well – you can’t roll it over into the next round.

Palm Island card play

Some of the resource cards can be worth points if fully upgraded as well, although it can be at the cost of some of its resource powers – the Logger cards, which give you one wood at the start and two wood if upgraded twice, are worth five points if upgraded all three times but don’t give you any wood in that state. You have to upgrade at least some of the resource cards to be able to max out the housing or temple cards, the latter of which requires eleven total resources to go from its 2x state to its 3x state. This combination of features means you have to make a series of choices that will be determined by the order of the cards in the deck. The rules say you can look through the entire deck once before you start, but once you’ve started you can only look at the top three cards.

The game comes with Feat cards you can gain by hitting certain milestones in your games, starting with scoring 30 points, which I did in my first game and do almost every game now, up to some more difficult goals – it took me several plays and a bit of luck with card order to finally hit 40 points – or more specific ones, like upgrading all your Logger cards three times. Those Feat cards are nearly always useful, some more than others, but getting them at the wrong time can mess with your card sequencing.

There are two base decks in the game, so you can play competitively or cooperatively with someone else, although it’s a bit of a kludge for a game that was clearly designed with the solo player in mind. I’ve timed myself and none of my games has taken more than 13 minutes to play. For a novel solo experience it’s worth the price, maybe not as clever or challenging as my favorite solo game, Coffee Roaster, but cheaper and much more portable.

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→ November 6, 2019
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Standard Deviations.

While working on my own forthcoming book The Inside Game (due out April 21st from HarperCollins; pre-order now!), I stumbled across a chapter from Prof. Gary Smith’s book Standard Deviations: Flawed Assumptions, Tortured Data, and Other Ways to Lie with Statistics, a really wonderful book on how people, well-meaning or malicious, use and misuse stats to make their arguments. It’s a very clear and straightforward book that assumes no prior statistical background on the part of the reader, and keeps things moving with entertaining examples and good summaries of Smith’s points on the many ways you can twist numbers to say what you want them to say.

Much of Smith’s ire within the book is aimed at outright charlatans of all stripes who know full well that they’re misleading people. The very first example in Standard Deviations describes the media frenzy over Paul the Octopus, a mollusk that supposedly kept picking the winners of World Cup games in 2010. It was, to use the technical term for it, the dumbest fucking thing imaginable. Of course this eight-legged cephalopod wasn’t actually predicting anything; octopi are great escape artists, but Paul was just picking symbols he recognized, and the media who covered those ‘predictions’ were more worthy of the “fake news” tag now applied to any media the President doesn’t like. Smith uses Paul to make larger points about selection bias and survivorship bias, about how some stories become news and some don’t, how the publish-or-perish mentality at American universities virtually guarantees that some junk studies (found via p-hacking or other dubious methods) will slip through the research cracks, and so on. This is more than just an academic problem, however: One bad study that can’t survive other researchers’ attempts to replicate the results can still lead to significant media attention and even steer changes in policy.

Smith gives copious examples of this sequence of events – bad or corrupt study that leads to breathless news coverage and real-life consequences. He cites Andrew Wakefield, the disgraced former doctor whose single fraudulent paper claimed to find a link between the MMR vaccine and autism; the media ran with it, many parents declined to give their kids the MMR vaccine, and even now, twenty years and numerous debunking studies later, we have measles outbreaks and a reversal of the eradication the hemisphere had achieved in 2000. Smith chalks some of this up to the publish-or-perish mentality of American universities, also mentioning Diederik Stapel, a Dutch ex-professor who has now had 58 papers retracted due to his own scientific misconduct. But these egregious examples are just the tip of a bigger iceberg of statistical malfeasance that’s less nefarious but just as harmful: finding meaning in statistical significance, journals’ preferences for publishing affirmative studies over negative ones (the file drawer problem), “using data to discover a theory” rather than beginning with a theory and using data to test it, discarding outliers (or, worse, non-outliers), and more.

Standard Deviations bounces around a lot of areas of statistical shenanigans, covering some familiar ground (the Monty Hall problem and the Boy or Girl problem*) and less familiar as well. He goes after the misuse of graphs in popular publications, particularly the issue of Y-axis manipulation (where the Y axis starts well above 0, making small changes across the X-axis look larger), and the “Texas sharpshooter” problem where people see patterns in random clusters and argue backwards into meaning. He goes after the hot hand fallacy, which I touched on in Smart Baseball and will discuss again from a different angle in The Inside Game. He explains why the claims that people nearing death will themselves to live through birthdays or holidays don’t hold up under scrutiny. (One of my favorite anecdotes is the study of deaths before/after Passover that identified subjects because their names sounded “probably Jewish.”) Smith’s reach extends beyond academia; one chapter looks at how Long-Term Capital Management failed, including how the people leading the firm deluded themselves into thinking they had figured out a way to beat the market, and then conned supposedly smart investors into playing along.

* Smith also explains why Leonard Mlodinow’s explanation in Drunkard’s Walk, which I read right after this book, of a related question where you know one Girl’s name is Florida is incorrect, and thank goodness because for the life of me I couldn’t believe what Mlodinow wrote.

I exchanged emails with Smith in September to ask about the hot hand fallacy and a claim in 2018 by two mathematicians that they’d debunked the original Amos Tversky paper from 1986; he answered with more detail that I ended up using in a sidebar in The Inside Game. That did not directly color my writeup of Standard Deviationshere, but my decision to reach out to him in the first place stems from my regard for Smith’s book. It’s on my list now of books I recommend to folks who want to read more about innumeracy and statistical abuse, in the same vein as Dave Levitan’s Not a Scientist.

Next up: About halfway through Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Calculating Stars.

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→ November 3, 2019
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Parasite.

Parasite won the Palme d’Or this year at the Cannes film festival, making director Bong Joon-Ho the first South Korean to win the top prize at that event, and the film has since racked up tremendous critical accolades and earned $5 million-plus already at the U.S. box office. It’s enough of a hit that it showed at my local, mainstream multiplex this weekend. It’s South Korea’s submission for this year’s Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, and I’ll be shocked if it doesn’t make the shortlist. On this Friday night, there were 20 people in the theater, including us, there to watch a Korean-language film with no actors who’d be recognized at all in the U.S. I’m thrilled to see it get this kind of audience because Parasite is a remarkable, funny, dark, and deeply metaphorical movie.

This upstairs, downstairs story revolves around the Kims, an unemployed family of four living in a dank semi-basement in Seoul where they steal WiFi from neighbors who forget to turn on passwords; and the Parks, a very wealthy family in the city with two young children and more money than they know what to do with. The two families intersect when Ki-woo, the Kims’ college-aged son who doesn’t attend school because he can’t afford it, gets a job filling in as the English tutor to the Parks’ teenaged daughter, Da-hye. Seeing how well the other half is living, Ki-woo hatches a plan to get the rest of his family hired – his sister as the Parks’ son’s art teacher, his father as the chauffeur, and his mother as the housekeeper – by also getting their existing help fired. This all goes very well until one night the housekeeper returns, revealing a secret of her own, turning the film from a hilarious farce into a darker satire that ultimately ends in violent chaos.

For about 3/4 of its running time, Parasite is consistently, laugh-out-loud funny. From the lengths to which the Kims go to perpetrate their con on the Parks or to justify their increasingly unethical behavior to themselves, on to the utterly ridiculous Park family themselves. The three Park characters who have something to do in the film – their son barely speaks at all – are all deeply stereotypical, with the mother (stays at home, can’t take care of herself or the house, heavily neurotic) and daughter (acts/dresses below her age, falls in love with her tutors) both so much so that I wondered if they were meant to be caricatures. The plot to get rid of the chauffeur is amusing; the subsequent plot to get rid of the housekeeper is bananas. Even as the film starts to become violent, there are still moments of humor, including some great physical comedy, until the final cataclysm tears the cover off and reveals the swirling mess of class rage that was beneath the surface the entire time.

Bong isn’t subtle about the fact that the film is replete with metaphor; Ki-woo uses the word “metaphorical” several times, often because he is trying to impress the Parks, but the presence of the word at all felt a bit like a message to the audience to wake up and smell the symbolism. There’s water everywhere in this movie, but while it’s clean and revivifying for the Parks, it’s anything but for the Kims; while water brings the Parks a modest nuisance, it eventually contributes to the Kims’ destruction. The physical locations of their living spaces – the Kims halfway (or more) underground, the Parks on the upper floors of a house with lower floors that they never even visit themselves – correspond to their relative status and their absolute status within a South Korea that rapidly developed after the Korean War but has created substantial income inequality, especially for older citizens. The rock, the Parks’ son’s artwork, the use of American “Indian” imagery – Parasite is absolutely rife with metaphors to underscore the conflict between the Parks and the Kims.

I assume Bong’s use of Kim, the most common family name in South Korea, for the lower-class family, was not a coincidence; Park is the third-most common name, so perhaps the point was that neither of these families is all that atypical, and that Bong is trying to represent wide swaths of Korean society. He’s also created a real dramatic balance between the two families; while the Kims are rascals, they’re not heroes, and if you were still rooting for them at the time that they dispatch the housekeeper, their ruse should be enough to dissuade you. There are no heroes here, no ‘good guys;’ it’s a movie about a lot of regular people who do bad things in the quest for money and all that it brings: status, comfort, freedom from future financial worry.

I won’t spoil any of the end other than to say it turns quite violent, although in the context of everything that has come before, it felt like the inevitable conclusion after two hours of growing tension that had no outlet for release, as the Kims wanted to preserve their ruse at all costs. When one of them finally realize that the Parks will never see them as anything but the hired help – and thus as lesser people – Parasite reaches a disturbing climax and conclusion that will cause you to rethink everything that came before.

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→ October 23, 2019
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The Queen.

If you’d like to win a free, signed copy of this book, sign up for my free email newsletter by this Friday, October 25, at 12 pm ET. I’ll choose one subscriber at random to win the prize, graciously donated by Josh and Little, Brown & Co.

Josh Levin has been writing for Slate since 2003 and has co-hosted their podcast Hang Up and Listen for a decade now. (I appeared on the show way back in 2013.) His first book, The Queen, has nothing whatsoever to do with sports, however; it is an engrossing profile and history of Linda Taylor, the woman tabbed by Chicago newspapers and made infamous by Ronald Reagan as a “welfare queen,” whose fraudulent activities were widely embellished by the media and conservative politicians … and who also probably committed other, far worse crimes during her long life of malfeasance.

Linda Taylor was a welfare cheat, and got caught multiple times doing so, although attempts to prosecute her weren’t always successful, and authorities didn’t always follow through even when she was caught because the laws didn’t adequately address this type of public assistance fraud. She used different identities to apply more than once for aid, and used the names of children who weren’t hers, or didn’t exist at all, to ask for more. It’s possible that she was among the most financially successful people exploiting the public aid system in the 1970s, and that that alone would have been enough to make her story newsworthy.

Levin does way more than tell the story of Taylor’s misdeeds around welfare, however. For one thing, he gives readers a detailed biography of Taylor, from birth to death, giving much-needed balance to her story. He explains the roles that uncertain parentage and mixed-race status in a time when that could leave someone ostracized from white and black circles had in shaping her life, while also using interviews and public records to show that Taylor was more than just a con artist, with credible accusations of kidnapping and even murder following in her wake. One of the more interesting threads in Taylor’s biography is her false claim that she was the daughter of a man in Chicago who died and left behind a maybe-illegal fortune, leading to a trial that hinged as much on her own history of lying as anything else.

That alone would make for a pretty good, if short, book, but Levin adds a second and more substantial layer to Taylor’s story by explaining how she became the front-page welfare queen whose thimblerigging became fodder for politicians and activist journalists in Illinois and, eventually, across the country. Levin details much of the life of George Bliss, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for the Chicago Tribune, whom Levin credits with putting Taylor in the spotlight and helping create the image of her as both an extensive welfare cheat and a symbol of wrongdoing around the public aid system, both by recipients and by people working within the government. That was then picked up by members of the Illinois state legislature, who at one point managed to create their own extrajudicial investigative team to go after welfare frauds, and subsequently by Ronald Reagan in his 1976 presidential campaign.

Reagan, who had left office as California’s governor after two terms in 1974, was a primary challenger to Gerald Ford, who of course was the first unelected official to ascend to the Presidency and was seen as vulnerable for that reason and his tie to the disgraced President Nixon. Reagan began using the story of the “Chicago woman” who used dozens of aliases and the names of hundreds of children to collect hundreds of thousands of dollars in undeserved welfare checks. He was referring to Taylor, but overstated the extent of her crimes and her takings, and continued to embellish the story as the campaign continued – even over objections of some of his own campaign staffers. Levin spins this into a larger point about Reagan’s penchant for dissembling, misrepresenting, or outright lying – and the lack of accountability even from the media covering his campaign at the time – and while Levin never draws the direct parallel to our current President or the contemporary environment of “alternative facts,” I found it impossible to read The Queen without thinking that even Trump’s original campaign was a direct descendant of Reagan’s. Trump is just more blatant about his lies, and perhaps more unrepentant about it, but he was hardly the first – especially when it comes to demonizing people of color.

And that’s the other significant theme of Levin’s book: This is very much a story about race. Taylor’s precise ethnicity is unclear, and she passed for white, black, Latina, and Filipina at different points in her life, but at a time when the “one-drop rule” still existed through the American south, she was generally seen as black. That made her the ideal target for politicians courting white voters angry over the stagnant American economy of the post-oil crisis 1970s and the societal changes that resulted from the civil rights movement. Race-baiting is hardly new in American politics, but Taylor’s race and the breadth of her actual or presumed crimes made her the perfect talking point for candidates looking to appeal to the “economically anxious” non-Latinx white voters who, in 1976, constituted 89% of the U.S. electorate. As I write this, we’re dealing with the current President accusing Democrats pursuing an impeachment inquiry of a “lynching,” invoking a term used almost exclusively to refer to the murders of black men across the American south between the civil war and 1981, when Michael Donald was lynched in Alabama by multiple members of the Ku Klux Klan. Levin makes the case that this sort of coded language is hardly new, and was widely used by a candidate who would go on to serve two terms as President, winning re-election by a historic landslide in 1984.

There’s quite a bit more detail in The Queen, including side threads on the officers who first brought Taylor to some measure of justice (and led to her infamy), Taylor’s daughter and her role in some of the ongoing scams, and comments from people whose lives were affected, almost all adversely, by Taylor’s involvement. The possible murder committed by Taylor for a modest financial gain is an appalling enough story, although Levin can only go so far with that subplot because Taylor was never even arrested for that crime, and the same goes for the accusations that she kidnapped children and either sold them or used their identities to gain more public aid while neglecting the kids. There’s a lot of misery in The Queen, some of it belonging to Taylor herself, but it’s also very much a story of the modern United States – of race and class divides, of lying and self-serving politicians, and of a media culture that still is learning the importance of holding people accountable for their words.

Next up: Just about done with the second book in Paul Theroux’s Riding the Rails trilogy.

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→ September 13, 2019
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Bowlaway.

I’d never even heard of Elizabeth McCracken until my friend Eden suggested to me at Gen Con that I check out McCracken’s newest novel Bowlaway. McCracken, who edits Ann Patchett’s novels, was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1996 and has earned some smaller plaudits for her work since then, but this was the first time I’d encountered her. Based on n of 1, at least, she is a wonderful storyteller on par with Patchett, and while I’m not really sure if there’s a broader point to Bowlaway, I was completely enraptured by the story, which washes over the reader with waves of fun or interesting characters.

Bowlaway opens with a woman in a graveyard in a fictional town just outside of Boston just after the turn of the 20th century, and no real clue of how she got there. Bertha Truitt doesn’t remember her previous history, or just isn’t telling, but she enters the town on a mission to introduce candlepin bowling, a regional variation on bowling with a much smaller bowl and slimmer pins. She founds an alley called, of course, Bowlaway, and attracts a group of regulars, including several local women, while also employing a pair of the town’s eccentrics. Bertha marries and has a child, and when she dies, the narrative shifts to her husband, then to his housekeeper, and on around to other people who are all primarily connected through the bowling alley, including one later owner who wants to ban women from the alley.

The characters are mostly well-drawn and three-dimensional, flawed and interesting and often amusing in their own peculiar ways. Bertha’s departure from the novel is a disappointment, as she’s the most larger-than-life character in the book and provides so much of the spark that sets the novel ablaze. If there’s a movie or TV series to be made from Bowlaway, it’s going to revolve around Bertha, who has most of the best lines in the book and could also be the breakout character getting quoted and captured in GIFs. Margaret, the housekeeper, is also very well-written, but her character is suffused with sadness and there’s a sort of simplicity to her personality that makes her less enjoyable on the page. The one character I found a bit disappointing is Bertha’s husband, Leviticus Sprague, whom McCracken gives an idiosyncratic way of speaking but who disappears into the bottle after his wife’s death; Margaret’s kids are also a bit meh, especially the profligate one who also takes to drink.

While Bowlaway has a real conclusion to its plot, it’s not clear whether there’s a point to all of this other than to tell a good, fun story. McCracken seems to love her characters, and that alone is enough to make the book a compelling read, although I did stop a number of times because of that persistent, subcutaneous feeling that I was missing a greater theme. It’s not quite empty calories, since McCracken’s prose is good (and smart) and the characters work, but it’s unusual for me to read fiction that isn’t genre that doesn’t have something more significant going on underneath the hood.

There is, however, the mere passage of time, which itself does allow McCracken to get into some additional cultural shifts as her fictional town goes from a somewhat sleepy hamlet to an active suburb of Boston, connected to the city via mass transit. The novel spans something close to 70 years – she’s vague with some of the dates – so she tracks characters, the alley, and the town across the decades, working in real-world events like the Great Molasses Flood. She also has the habit of dispatching characters major and minor in gruesome ways; the molasses takes one, another goes the way of Old Krook; others are killed by flying objects or a runaway horse. Death is just another detail in the world of Bowlaway, especially when the characters aren’t essential.

It’s really a better book than I’ve made it sound here – I tore through it and, once I got past the fact that the best character was gone before the midpoint of the novel, found myself enraptured by McCracken’s prose and knack for spinning new stories out of the spare threads of the ones before. I don’t know that it amounts to much, but the journey there is enough.

Next up: Gary Smith’s Standard Deviations: Flawed Assumptions, Tortured Data, and Other Ways to Lie With Statistics.

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