‘I Don’t Like the Feeling of Being Pinned Down’

C Pam Zhang is ready to eat some duck. It’s a warm August morning at Le Coucou and admittedly a little too early for the decadent meal we’re here to dig into: leeks flecked with roasted hazelnuts; squash blossoms battered in buckwheat and filled with crab; a seafood gratin under a blanket of sweet sabayon; duckling for two in cherries and mushrooms. I’m intimidated, not only by Zhang’s look when I greet her outside — she’s dressed in a black, asymmetrical half-maxi-half-mini dress and smoking a cigarette — but because I’ve never eaten duck before. “It doesn’t have to knock any of your selections off the table,” she says, her breezy assuredness making me certain I’m in the hands of a gourmand. Why shouldn’t I try something as splendid as the feasts that can be found in Zhang’s sophomore novel, Land of Milk and Honey, which is all about the excesses of appetite, its junctures of joy and pleasure? Duckling it is.

A Black high-school student in Texas has been punished with two weeks of in-school suspension over his dreadlocks, despite the state having outlawed racial discrimination based on hairstyles. Behind the rise of egg freezing is a larger story of what medical anthropologist Marcia C. Inhorn calls “the mating gap.” Not everyone was surprised by Jann Wenner’s fall from grace. We’re not the only ones to notice that food-porn content has been getting decidedly more porn-y. Forget about designer handbags — the new status symbol is a full-body scan. There’s no such thing as “microwave safe” plastic. The trick for getting the perfect haircut. Sometimes peer pressure is good. And be sure to leaf-peep responsibly.

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