"I remember one of the first things my parents would say about Americans when we immigrated to America, was that they always seemed so unhappy..."

"... despite the fact that they were so much richer than us. We were living on government cheese for a time, and my parents and other Russians would say: Oni ot zhira besyatsa. Which translates very vaguely as: They’re wild with their own fat. They’re so juicy and fat, and yet they don’t know what to do with it. Just enjoy the fat. But sometimes this greater meaning combines with this egotistical impulse to have more and more and more. And to not die is one of those almost Protestant extensions of everything. And striving. Why should the striving ever end?"

Said Gary Shteyngart, in his interview with Ezra Klein, the "I" in the headline "I Keep Telling People We’re Living in This Dystopian Novel" (NYT). The novel is Shteyngart's "Super Sad True Love Story" (commission earned).

"Just clarifying, I made this tweet at 5am while playing speed chess, eating mozz sticks.... I didn't mean 'WW3' literally I was being semi-comedically glib."

Everybody's a comedian.

Just clarifying, I made this tweet at 5am while playing speed chess, eating mozz sticks & listening to live updates on the scale of the damage & breadth of countries already getting attacked. I didn't mean "WW3" literally I was being semi-comedically glibhttps://t.co/YhE9AKWFcg pic.twitter.com/4hGYR8h8Ol

— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) February 28, 2026

If you "don't know of a 280 character way of describing whatever this is," there is always the option of saying nothing. I can't copy the tweets of the sayers of nothing, and they can't go viral, but thanks to everyone who's quietly contemplating the situation and hoping for the best.  

Screenshot, in case Benz has the sense to delete it:

"[O]ne server... has watched diners grapple with a layered dessert consisting of honeycomb semifreddo covered in a tundra of shaved Comte cheese"

"'We get a lot of people who will take a couple bites and be like, "Well, I just thought it was way too much cheese,"' he says. 'I will have sat there and watched you just scoop right off the top, which is quite literally all cheese.' Now, he provides a bit of gentle parenting, making sure diners reach their spoons to the bottom of the dish and get semifreddo in each bite. In a world of Yelp Elites and TikTokers and Beli-trackers and, yes, restaurant critics like myself, it makes sense to leave nothing open to interpretation. Only, interpretation is half the fun...."

From "It’s time to retire the restaurant monologue/When did dinner out start to feel like a TED Talk?" (Eater).

Have you misinterpreted any food lately? 

Have you provided fun through food interpretation? All I can think of is the David Sedaris diary entry where he talks about a restaurant's use of foam: "I had a foie gras soup that looked as if it had been pissed on. Hugh had sea urchins, the shells emptied out and filled with what looked to be dirty bubble bath... [S]hould the trend continue, you’d never again be able to tell if the waiter had spit in your food." From "Theft by Finding" (commission earned).

Eat Cheese or Die.

You may remember the old slogan:

The riff on New Hampshire's "Live Free or Die" license plate couldn't make it to the actual license plates here in Wisconsin, but it was the winner of our Wisconsin hearts and minds. Of course, in real life on real license plates, it had to be "America's Dairyland." And 40 years later, it still is... though it looks as though we might be about to replace it (with something simpler).

Anyway, speaking of real life, the implausible slogan — "Eat Cheese or Die" — may be (sort of) true. I'm reading "A Study Linked Cheese to Lower Dementia Risk. Is That Too Good to Be True?"

"The spiral staircase leading up to the roof-deck at Los Angeles’s Tesla Diner is beautiful, or at least it is expensive-looking."

"It has video screens overhead and glowy lights at the base of each step and its own special soundtrack, a down-tempo, bleepy-bloopy composition that whooshes in as a notable contrast to the main dining room’s dad rock...."

I'm reading "Elon Musk's Utterly Mundane Vision of Dining/The Tesla Diner looks a lot like what we already have, just weirder and worse," by Ellen Cushing in The Atlantic (gift link).

Yeah, why not kick Elon Musk around over basically nothing? Nearly all of the food bought in restaurants in America is utterly mundane, isn't it? But somehow this utter mundaneness is "weirder and worse." But what's this about the music? What exactly would this "dad rock" be? Bruce Springsteen? I ask Spotify and it spits out a playlist of 125 songs and #1 is "Born to Run"... oops, I mean "Born in the U.S.A." "Born to Run" is #111.

A sample of the food: "The chili was oversalted and oddly smooth, with a slab of nonmelting cheese sitting on top of it like a pillbox hat.... The french fries had a disconcerting astringency, like they’d been dusted in the same stuff that’s put on Hint of Lime Tostitos. All together, the food, like its surroundings, is simultaneously over- and underconsidered, high form and low function. It isn’t bad so much as odd."

Anyway, did you see Elon Musk reuniting with Trump at the Charlie Kirk memorial? Did you wonder what they said? A lip-reader at TikTok has Trump doing all the talking: "How are you doing? So Elon, I've heard you wanted to chat. Let's try and work out how to get back on track. I've missed you." Lots of nodding from Musk. 

"When Mr. Heiman, 72, began his career in the 1960s, whey was pumped down a river, spread on a field or fed to pigs."

"In other words, it was waste, and the only goal was to get rid of it as cheaply as possible. Times have changed. 'In the last decade or so, there are times when cheese is the byproduct of cheese production, and the cheese plants make more money off the whey production,' said Mike McCully, a dairy industry consultant...."

From "America’s Protein Obsession Is Transforming the Dairy Industry/Whey, the liquid byproduct of cheese making, was once considered waste. Now it is a key ingredient in the protein powders that Ozempic users and weight lifters are downing in ever-greater amounts" (NYT).

As Jesus said, "The first shall be last, and the last shall be first."

"Flannery O’Connor’s favorite meal at the Sanford House restaurant in Milledgeville, Georgia, where she lunched regularly with her mother..."

"... was fried shrimp and peppermint chiffon pie.... Every morning started with Catholic Mass followed by cornflakes and a thermos of coffee in her spinster bedroom while she wrote for three hours. The writing time, she said, was her 'filet mignon.'... [O'Connor's biographer] told me that 'you wouldn’t want to eat what O’Connor ate' and described the cuisine she ate at home with her mother as a 'curdled, dry, dyspeptic kind of fare.' At home, O’Connor and her mother rarely had their meals in the dining room. Left to her own devices, O’Connor might eat a tin of sardines for lunch. Once, during the brief time in which O’Connor lived alone in New York City, she served her friend Lyman Fulton nothing but 'goat’s milk cheese and faucet water'—which later became a running joke between them.... [T]he restaurant’s recipe for the peppermint chiffon pie... looked unappetizingly dour. It called for evaporated milk, gelatin, and a premade Keebler’s Chocolate Ready Crust crust. The peppermint flavor and pink color came from melted peppermint hard candy...."

Writes Valerie Stivers, in "Cooking Peppermint Chiffon Pie with Flannery O’Connor" (Paris Review).

The recipe refers to the candy as "Starlight," and they are still sold under that name. Here's an Amazon Associates link to the product, in case you're yearning to relive old-timey hard-candydom. And here's the Keebler chocolate crust. Now all you need is a can of evaporated milk and some packaged gelatin and you can figure out how the restaurant did it. Stivers makes a posher version of the antiquated treat. She makes the crust from scratch... if you consider Oreos scratch. 

"You can go to your camper and do whatever you want. I even get television in there.... The camper taught me how to watch TV.... I go to YouTube."

"Anything. And everything. There’s so many things on YouTube. You’ve got Ibsen, you got Chekhov, you got Strindberg. All on the internet. I even like TikTok when I see it from time to time.... TikTok. Yeah. I saw, like, a 14-year-old girl who was deaf, her whole life, and they do something with her, and she actually starts to hear for the first time! How 'bout that? And sometimes the dogs, they rescue them. You watch the guy go in there and bring this beautiful, sad dog back to, uh, being somewhat — aware of things.... Well, I love that stuff!"

Said Al Pacino, quoted in "The Interview/Al Pacino Is Still Going Big" (NYT).

I'm quoting from the recording. The transcript is edited down a bit and it misses some of the feeling. I thought the interviewer, David Marchese, rushed by some of the best material Pacino seemed to want to hand him. For example, when Pacino spoke of the beautiful, sad dog becoming aware, Marchese intruded with "You're such a softy," categorizing Pacino's feeling as shallow sentimentality as opposed to some more subtle existentialism.

And one of the topics was Pacino's nearly dying of of Covid.

"... a curiously undersung regional delicacy: the cold-cheese slice, whereupon a giant fistful of uncooked mozzarella is added to a plain slice..."

"... just as it emerges hot from the oven. Local legend has it that Little Vincent’s developed this innovation as a way to help overeager patrons, unwilling or unable to wait for their pizza’s heat to dissipate, avoid burning their mouths; whatever its true origins, it is perplexing that nobody else has thought to copy the idea.... A cold-cheese slice offers the thermal and textural contrasts that define the best kind of street eating...."

From "33 Eating Adventures/A Turkish feast among jet-skiers in Sheepshead Bay, dosas worth a drive to Jersey, and carnitas in someone’s Woodside backyard" (NY Magazine).

"The sliding doors of a supermarket open into a dilemma: Though one may find comfort in the grocery store’s order and abundance..."

"... its high stakes can also provoke anxiety—after all, this is the place where we trade hard-earned money for sustenance. 'Everything was fine, would continue to be fine, would eventually get even better as long as the supermarket did not slip,' Don DeLillo’s narrator Jack Gladney observes in White Noise, commenting on the structure that supermarkets, with their rows of neatly ordered products, impose on his chaotic life. Thirty years later, Halle Butler’s protagonist in the novel Jillian enters a gourmet grocery store on a whim.... The prices are so out of her budget that she has to give herself a pep talk before buying anything. 'I mean, I work all the time,' she mutters. 'This is why I work, isn’t it? I’m a hard worker. I can buy this cheese. It’s just cheese, I guess.' But it’s not just cheese...."

Writes J. Howard Rosier in "The Indignity of Grocery Shopping/In her latest work to be translated into English, Annie Ernaux examines the malaise of the modern supermarket" (The Atlantic).

"This sudden enthusiasm for cottage cheese has been attributed partly to a new generation focused on protein and nutrients and also madly keen on 'bowl' meals..."

"... filled with grains, vegetables and fruit. 'All of these ingredients together make for a super nutrient dense cottage cheese bowl that will have you full for literally hours'...."

From "Why is cottage cheese trending again?" (London Times).

We're told there are blogs and TikToks devoted to re-popularizing cottage cheese. One suggestion is to whip it (in a blender, I think) to change the oft-disliked consistency and make it more like the substance that — over the last 50 years — replaced it: yogurt.

"Grief reigns in the kingdom of loss. I refer to not only the loss of a loved one but also the loss of a hope, a dream, or love itself."

"It seems we don’t finish grieving, but merely finish for now; we process it in layers. One day (not today) I’m going to write a short story about a vending machine that serves up Just the Right Amount of Grief. You know, the perfect amount that you can handle in a moment to move yourself along, but not so much that you’ll be caught in an undertow."

That's item #13 on "MONICA LEWINSKY: 25 'RANDOMS' ON THE 25TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE BILL CLINTON CALAMITY/My name became public 25 years ago this week. What have I observed and learned in the quarter century since? Oh, plenty" (Vanity Fair).

Okay, let me try to write 25 "Randoms" on the text printed above:

Oh, my! I've got 14 tonight! Let me know which TikTok videos won you over this time.

1. The mouse is going to eat your food, so why not embrace reality and construct a cheeseboard for the little darling.

2. Painting the one who says "I am too ugly to be painted."

3. So you say girls don't have hobbies?

4. The awesome high dive.

5. "Michigan is the Texas of the Midwest," etc.

6. How to deflect passive aggression.

7. The Jesus miracle nobody talks about.

8. The little girl has serious problems with the family dog and the family decor.

9. Sticker review suddenly becomes a phone-camera review.

10. The scar experiment.

11. Stand in awe of your ability to retain fat.

12. When you're in the mood to eat a wicker chair, what should you eat?

13. How exactly did kale become a thing?

14. Instant Karma Karen.

"The Dutch like to say, 'Acting normal is crazy enough.' And we think that rich people are not acting normal."

"Here in Holland, we don’t believe that everybody can be rich the way people do in America, where the sky is the limit. We think 'Be average.' That’s good enough...”

Said Ellen Verkoelen, "a City Council member and Rotterdam leader of the 50Plus Party, which works on behalf of pensioners," quoted in "The Country That Wants to ‘Be Average’ vs. Jeff Bezos and His $500 Million Yacht/Why did Rotterdam stand between one of the world’s richest men and his boat? The furious response is rooted in Dutch values" (NYT).

“When I was about 11 years old, we had an American boy stay with us for a week, an exchange student,” she recalled. “And my mother told him, just make your own sandwich like you do in America. Instead of putting one sausage on his bread, he put on five. My mother was too polite to say anything to him, but to me she said in Dutch, ‘We will never eat like that in this house.’” 

At school, Ms. Verkoelen learned from friends that the American children in their homes all ate the same way. They were stunned and a little jealous. At the time, it was said in the Netherlands that putting both butter and cheese on your bread was “the devil’s sandwich.”...

I've got 5 TikToks for you tonight. Let me know what you like best.

1. A way of planting potatoes.

2. A way of slicing apples.

3. Camping... and terrorized by ducks.

4. A song about thinking of what you wanted to say long after it's too late.

5. Coming upon a sandwich station that someone else did.

"British workers 'lead the world' in refusing to return to the office five days a week.... Well, it’s nice to lead the world in something."

And the good news doesn’t end there. Even criminals are now being allowed to 'work from home,' completing their community service not by picking up litter but making facemasks and greetings cards from bed. Which is fair enough if you think about it. After all, the WFH culture has decimated the burglary industry. How are they expected to break into Clive’s house when there’s Clive right there on the sofa, curtains closed, rewarding himself with ten minutes of Baywatch because he managed to answer an email between 10am and 10.03? It’s the least we can do to let burglars serve their sentence in their Y-fronts. But seriously, it seems WFH is not good for you and it wasn’t good for Boris Johnson. The prime minister said that when he did it 'you spend an awful lot of time making another cup of coffee... getting up, walking very slowly to the fridge, hacking off a small piece of cheese, then walking very slowly back to your laptop and then forgetting what it is you’re doing.'"

From "The real reasons British workers like WFH — and it’s not cheese, Boris" by Carol Midgely (London Times)(the "real reason" is the expense of living in London).

"A British drug dealer was busted after he shared a photo of his hand holding a block of cheese — and police were able to analyze his fingerprints."

"Carl Stewart, 39, of Liverpool in northwest England, sent a picture of a block of mature blue Stilton he picked up in the upscale British retail chain, Marks & Spencer, Merseyside police said. He had sent the photo on an encrypted messaging service called EncroChat — where he used the handle 'Toffeeforce' to peddle cocaine, heroin, DMA and ketamine, cops said."

The NY Post reports.

Interesting that a drug dealer would buy mature cheese at an upscale store.

"[W]hen an alleged rapist writes a book about a brilliant but problematic novelist, and when that book is lauded and celebrated up until..."

"... the moment two women say the author assaulted them — when all that happens, you wonder how the 900-page tome reads in hindsight." 

Writes Monica Hesse (in WaPo). She bought the book after the publisher withdrew it. You can still download the Kindle version. [ADDED: You can even buy the hardcover book at that link. Amazon has its stock to ship. But the publisher, Norton, isn't shipping any more books, and it's not doing publicity.]

That takes some of the heat out of the argument that the book has been censored. I stand by my opinion — expressed here — that the book should be sold no matter what the author, Blake Bailey, may have done. The book is not doing any sort of active harm — where we might have a real debate about censorship. It's just the argument that the author is a bad person, and these are only allegations. I would support publishing the book even if Bailey had shot a man on 5th Avenue in broad daylight. Roth is an overwhelmingly important writer, and this was the biographer he authorized, which caused many people to give interviews to Bailey. It's unfair to the Roth to deprive him of the story of himself that he chose Bailey to tell, and it's unfair to keep that story from us.

But we can get the Kindle version. And maybe we're more interested in it now. Monica Hesse got interested — interested in reading the book with "hindsight." I guess that means that all the time she's reading about Roth, she's thinking about how she's hearing the story of this "problematic" man as analyzed by another problematic man. Let's see what Hesse makes out of her assigned task of perceiving the problematic through an extra layer of problematizing:

You find yourself scrolling to a random page and reading a description of Roth’s first marriage: “Maggie’s sinuses were, of course, the least of their problems. Even at the best of times she couldn’t resist interrupting his work on the thinnest of pretexts (‘Could you go out and get half a pound of Parmesan cheese?’).” One could write a whole essay unpacking the premises propping up this sentence. Why is it unreasonable for Philip Roth to be asked to purchase an ingredient for the dinner he is presumably going to eat? Who purchased the rest of the groceries? One assumes it was Maggie. Was her day not “interrupted” when she shopped for and prepared the meal? What is the difference between a “thin pretext” and a valid request, other than whether the asker is Philip Roth or his shrewish, sinus-clogged wife? 

Ha ha ha. That is rich. That's some really good feminist writing. Bailey is damned by his "thinnest of pretexts." He assumes Maggie just wanted to interrupt Roth, that there couldn't possibly be a legitimate reason for the person cooking dinner to ask the other person in the house to go out and buy a missing ingredient. Bailey seems to think that a person in a house with a Genius at Work must know not even to ask for help with mundane household matters.

Here — if you're going to Amazon to download the Kindle of the Roth bio (or anything else) — why not buy this sign to tack onto your study door and see how it works out with your stuffed-up spouse:

"The Capitol complex is a place where Americans can go to watch their representatives, to speak with those representatives, to petition for the redress of grievances."

"The building and its grounds also are part of the fabric of the city. Streams of bikers pass through on morning and evening commutes. Tourists gather for concerts on the lawn. When it snows, the front face of Capitol Hill becomes a popular sledding spot, with neighborhood children sometimes transforming discarded protest signs into makeshift sleds. This is not just an amenity for neighbors and visitors. It is the tangible manifestation of the idea that the government is a part of American life, rather than something separate and apart." 

From "The Capitol Attack Was a Failure of Policing, Not Architecture/Building a permanent fence around the Capitol is not the right approach" by the Editorial Board of the NYT. 

They're reacting to the statement by the acting chief of the Capitol Police, Yogananda Pittman: "In light of recent events, I can unequivocally say that vast improvements to the physical security infrastructure must be made to include permanent fencing...." 

The NYT description of the Capitol grounds makes me think of our state capitol grounds here in Madison. Such an important gathering spot. To lose it to fencing would sacrifice a lot and send a terrible message about the accessibility of government and the ineffectuality of the police. It feels like giving up.

But, you know, you used to be able to walk around on the White House lawn. From a 2014 WaPo article:

"Smell can never truly be understood through science, Muchembled argues, because it is always vulnerable to the whims of popular taste."

"In sixteenth-century France, amid religious moralizing and the pervasive fear of witchcraft, the scent of a woman’s undercarriage, once considered an ambrosial ideal, became synonymous with the occult. The stigma was worse for aging women, who became seen as olfactory ogres; Muchembled quotes the poet Joachim du Bellay’s disgust at an 'old woman older than the world / older yet than squalid filth.' Our own experience confirms that smells are subject not just to major cultural changes but also to minor shifts in context: the same smell that greets you at the door of a cheesemonger has a very different effect when confronted at the door of a porta-potty."

From "How to Make Sense of Scents/Can language ever capture the mysterious world of smells?" by Rachel Syme (in The New Yorker)(discussing "Smells: A Cultural History of Odours in Early Modern Times" by Robert Muchembled).