Things I Saw This Week - Friday, December 24
TISTW is a collection of reads, visuals, and music, curated by Elle Perry, a Memphis-based journalist, featuring art and culture, food, cities, and more. (Issue No. 131)
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I still haven’t figured out the best way to notify folks when I plan to take a week off. I’m open to suggestions. Because of last week’s hiatus, this issue is a little denser.
Here’s a glimpse of what I saw last week, featuring one of my favorite objects, beautiful lighting.
Art
Adding this documentary to my ever-growing list:
If you’re sad about “Insecure” ending its five-season run, you might be happy to know that Natasha Rothwell, the actress and writer behind fan-favorite Kelli, is creating a romantic comedy TV show with her at the center.
Speaking of endings, the year end approaching means most everyone is writing recap and “best of” lists. Highlights:
Black Women Are Fighting For a Place in Country Music—And Winning
How Black women reclaimed country and Americana music in 2021
Cities
More on the fate of Penn Station, courtesy Bloomberg’s Kriston Capps.
From Kriston, at Bloomberg CityLab: Preservationists Want to Save Penn Station. Yes, That Penn Station.
In other NYC news, the city is banning gas stoves and heaters from new buildings.
On ‘60s French Brutalist ski towns:
But, while no one has ever doubted the quality of the skiing, there’s been a creeping reappraisal of their design over the past decade, whether the result of cyclical tastes or just mid-century nostalgia. As stark concrete has crept back into vogue, so has Flaine, which was masterminded by legendary Bauhaus architect Marcel Breuer, and is dotted with Picasso, Dubuffet and Vasarely sculptures. Designers have begun hailing the once-derided Les Arcs, where Corbusier disciple and design pioneer Charlotte Perriand led a team that built sloping, cantilevered buildings that meld into the landscape (the recent Perriand exhibition at London’s Design Museum further boosted her recognition). This was a time, after all, when serious architects, designers and town planners were effectively given open-ended briefs to design whole new towns, in the process often expressing a new kind of post-war thinking about democratic social spaces and the environment.
Beijing-based landscape architect Yu Kongjian is working with flooding, instead of around it.
And, in California’s aim to spend $1 billion on parks, which should get funding?
“If you’re thinking of park access on a county-wide scale, about 50% of LA County residents don’t have a park within a 10-minute walk of where they live. But if you look at low-income communities of color across the county, that number actually jumps to 70% — so 70% of residents in South LA, in Willowbrook,” she says.
Culture
Famed writer Joan Didion has died.
Joan Didion, a virtuosic prose stylist who for more than four decades explored the agitated, fractured state of the American psyche in her novels, essays, criticism and memoirs, and who as one of the “New Journalists” of the 1960s and ’70s helped reportorial nonfiction acquire the status of an art form, died Dec. 23 at her home in Manhattan. She was 87.
Two recent stories on Black archivists:
The Washington Post: The radical power of ordinary Black life.
Food
Here’s how some long-haul truckers cook holiday meals while on the road.
In interviews, many long-haul truckers said they were working through the holidays to make extra money and meet the demands of the moment. But they’ll find ways to celebrate, within the limits of their tight spaces and schedules. Their plans include decorations, music and festive meals of roast meats, casseroles and charcuterie boards — most of it prepared, ingeniously, in the confines of the truck.
Margie Gilles, a trucker from Wisconsin Rapids, Wis., used to eat half of her meals at truck stops. She quickly grew tired of fast food, and dining options dwindled even more during the pandemic. She said her cooking skills have vastly improved over the last two years.
This Thanksgiving, Ms. Gilles, 55, made a stuffed roast duck, roasted yams, green-bean casserole, cheesy garlic mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce — all using the portable induction cooktop stashed behind the driver’s seat and an air fryer that sits on a shelf where the passenger seat used to be. (She went easy on herself for dessert, and bought a cherry cheesecake.)
For Christmas, she’ll make a leg of lamb and an eggplant casserole. She’ll park at a rest stop and play holiday songs on her violin with the windows down, so other truckers can listen She’ll also offer to share her food with anyone who is around.
Something I’m anxious to try: sweet potato crème brûlée.
And, for your perusal, some food headlines of note:
How I Got My Job: From Making Artisanal Jam to Public Service at SF City Hall and Beyond
These mushroom foragers hit the jackpot. Then they got creative
Cheers! Brunch's favorite beverage, the Bloody Mary, turns 100
And, one with an Atlanta focus: Classic Atlanta fast-food chain closes Little Five Points restaurant.
Zesto restaurants have been featured in numerous movies and TV shows over the years. The Little Five Points location was the set for a scene in the critically acclaimed FX series "Atlanta." Stone Mountain native Donald Glover is a co-creator and starring actor in the series.
(Here’s the scene. FX recently announced that “Atlanta” would be back for its third season in March, after a three-year break.)
Social Media
Yahoo! Finance reports that Black folks are the largest group to produce and share content on Facebook, but many are frustrated with the platform and are leaving.
Work
Wired has an excerpt from “The Love Makers,” by Aifric Campbell, that explores the concept of nanny robots.
Robotic childcare will have significant implications for childcare workers and wages. Nurseries may be able to support more children, and more people could be attracted to the field or prove competent in it with the addition of AI assistance. This could reduce earnings in what is already a low-paid occupation, though of course it could just improve the quality and therefore the perceived value of the service. Eventually, most societies should come to value important labor even if it was previously provided for free—primarily by women in domestic households—but this is a wider problem for many service industries. We would hope that parents and taxpayers would value childcare and other AI-augmented human services and believe that good wages and investment in good technology are essential. Society needs to become more attentive to technology’s potential to improve the human condition rather than simply focusing on more immediate payoffs, like wealth and consumption.
Podcasts I Listened to This Week
How I Built This with Guy Raz | Airbnb: Joe Gebbia (from 2016)
A chance encounter with a stranger gave Joe Gebbia an idea to help pay his rent. That idea turned into Airbnb — a company that now has more rooms than the biggest hotel chain in the world.
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