friday link love

Folks, happy Friday and here are a few links – sorry the list is so short, but Labor Day weekend (which I spent mostly editing) was followed by a shorter week (where there’s a same amount of work spread over 4 days instead of 5). Our carbon monoxide detector went off Tuesday morning at 1am while I was trying to make an overnight brisket for Rosh Hashanah and scared us half to death, and ruined our sleep, not to mention it’s really not fun to play fridge tetris at 1:30 in the morning, trying to find a place in your tiny New York fridge for a giant brisket. The following morning, I shattered my phone so badly that I managed to give myself a few paper cuts (phone cuts?) during the course of the day. I had to go and get it fixed the following day. Also, my almost 3-year old computer is acting up and I’ve been working with a senior Apple care support technician to fix it. Being promoted to a senior technician sounds serious – you get a direct line to your person and you just call them with next stages of fix instructions. I think most of today will be spent erasing (again) everything and seeing how things are working before manually adding all the saved documents again. So, yeah, this week — a little nuts.

But there were two lovely, bright spots during the week. One was going on the Heritage Radio’s show, The Food Seen, hosted by a wonderful Michael Harlan Turkell, a talented photographer and trained chef. We chatted about career transitions, kimchi, working with chefs, and our love of Russian dumplings, just to name a few topics. Here’s a link to the interview in case you want to listen to it.

The second was getting a lovely gift from Zachary Golper, who owns Bien Cuit in the form of a fermenter for my challah. I don’t know if it was my kneading prowess of his fermenter (I suspect it’s his magic that did the trick), but I finally reached challah nirvana because what came out of the oven was not only stunning, but tasted like a beautiful, delicate, eggy cloud.

I hope you all have a great weekend! We’re going to our friends’ wedding in the city tomorrow night and outside of that, I have a pile of Marc Forgione first pass edits that I must get through or else. Oh, and a computer to fix, recipes to test, writing to do, and general freelance organization that happens when you work for yourself. Hopefully next week I can tell you about this soup I made with some old sauerkraut!

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An artist mom started letting her four-year-old daughter finish her sketches, and they’re stunning.

What does the fox say? It’s so random and quirky. “But if you meet a friendly horse, will you communicate by Morse?”

A parody of that Washington Post piece on questions on Syria you were afraid to ask. This one is on Great Britain.

The debate on Syria is split within both parties; not by party lines.

Wolves, pack animals and social creatures, howl for friends.

Marriage policy encourages one spouse to work and the other to stay at home.

Seamus Heaney passed away last week and the news has affected me emotionally quite a bit. Even when I was struggling with learning English, Heaney’s poetry affected me. His translation of Beowulf is the finest I’ve read. This is a particularly poignant article that’s worth your time, especially if you were/are a fan of Mr. Heaney’s work.

And here’s is my favorite link in a long time: Generosity is more evolutionarily advantageous than selfishness! I have long argued that the prisoner’s dilemma (part of game theory, if I’m not mistaken) states that if the prisoners collaborate then they both wind up better in the end — as opposed to working against one another. Having spend a decade working on Wall Street, I can tell you that often the opposite is practiced for one firm to achieve advantage over the other. It doesn’t make people good or bad, but it’s part of the competitive nature of our society/culture/world. But perhaps it would help all of us to be more helpful, more collaborative, less afraid of losing our own advantage. I suppose it would be the opposite of Ayn Rand’s teachings – and I’m okay with that.