The Deleted Scenes - New and Old #113
Haunted by the Ghost of 2019, The Atlantic, Helena Fitzgerald, December 8, 2022 I’ve been thinking a lot about the pandemic lately. Specifically, the long tail of it, how we’re in this period that is post-pandemic in the sense of “no longer in a crisis” but not quite “whew, that’s over.” In some ways, I find this subtly off quasi-after period more difficult than lockdown. While I don’t think I agree that we can’t go back to 2019, I think this article gets at some of this. Like this bit:
Or this: “The name of a year becomes a shorthand for a particular catastrophe, rupture, or cultural shift. When 2020 became synonymous with crisis, 2019 became synonymous with normalcy, with ‘real life.’” And yet, “none of it feels quite the same.” And finally this, which captures my own feeling of just having subtly aged through all of this. As if there’s some part of myself which is now closed off:
It’s a funny thing how many of the same people who warned about the unknowable fallout from the COVID-19 restrictions are the same people who laughed at “reentry anxiety” or who would laugh at these feelings of lingering uncertainty now. The people who now insist on snapping back to the pre-pandemic everything are whistling past the graveyard, and are ignoring the warnings they once issued. Now, when Fitzgerald says that “we can’t imagine a new way of being if we cling to an old one,” I think she goes too far. And it kind of makes me think of the time Democratic politico Rahm Emanuel counseled “Never let a crisis go to waste.” But aside from that, almost every line in this piece captures what it feels like to be a young person almost on the other side of this thing. I love little bits of local life and news like this. I’ve never done fly fishing—some very casual fishing with live worms and lures only—but I find the art of it fascinating. In the big L.L. Bean store, I like looking at the drawers of fly fishing lures. A nice detail here:
And this bit of human psychology:
Nice, pleasant read. Cooking With Garlic: Everything You Need To Know, The Woks of Life, May 1, 2023 I’ve linked The Woks of Life once or twice before. It’s a really great Chinese cooking/recipe blog with some travel and culture pieces too. The quality of the recipes is fantastic: if you follow them, you’re almost guaranteed to get it right. They are obviously tested and retested before being written and published. This is a wonderfully detailed guide on using garlic in Chinese cuisine, which, the piece notes, might just use garlic in more different ways than any other cuisine. If you cook and use garlic, this will be very interesting to you. Go read “sizzled garlic” in particular!
I’ve had this thought myself—like when I drive further to go to Walmart to save a dollar or two on something. But I don’t think it’s a contradiction or hypocrisy. Especially not in the case of chain restaurants. Every chain, after all, started as a single location. Many arose from successful independent businesses—as CAVA did—rather than being corporate inventions like Applebee’s. It seems fickle to punish businesses for being too successful, as long as they’re not doing anything dishonest or wrong. This makes me think of two things. One, my dad’s preference for McDonald’s on road trips, because you know what you’re getting. And two, my idea in this piece that doing the “right thing” (driving less, shopping local, etc.) should not be like “eating your vegetables.” It should just work well and be a competitive option. And this higher-level analysis gets at why it doesn’t always feel that way:
None of these things—walkability, community, local commerce—should be issues. They should just be the way things are. But there’s room for a restaurant to scale up too, I think. Related Reading: Thank you for reading! Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to help support this newsletter. You’ll get a weekly subscribers-only post, plus full access to the archive: over 600 posts and growing. And you’ll help ensure more material like this! You're currently a free subscriber to The Deleted Scenes. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription. |
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