Made this excellent recipe from Saveur for salt-baked loup de mer. There is something so perfect about salt-baked white fish. And Saveur has a nice trick—whip the egg whites before mixing it with the salt.
Instinctively, when dictators are toppled, we invade their castles and expose their vanities and luxuries—Imelda’s shoes, the Shah’s jewels. We loot and desecrate, in order to cut them finally, futilely, down to size. After the fall of Baghdad, I visited the gaudiest of Saddam’s palaces, examined his tasteless art, his Cuban cigars, his private lakes with their specially bred giant fish, his self-worshipping bronze effigies. I saw thirty years’ worth of bodies in secret graves, along with those of Iraqis bound and shot just hours before liberation. In Afghanistan, Mullah Omar, a despot of simpler tastes, left behind little but plastic flowers, a few Land Cruisers with CDs of Islamic music, and an unkempt garden where he had spent hours petting his favorite cow.
You should definitely see the “Maurizio Cattelan: All” exhibit at the Guggenheim. Very fun stuff. Oh, and don’t miss the little gallery of 1960s Monochrome. Love Monochrome.
My new hat! (And my very, very serious face.)
We’re reading Jane Smiley’s The Greenlanders for class this week and I keep thinking of Iceland. I took this picture one afternoon. We had driven all the way up from Reykjavik to the West Fjords, and were on our way to the town of Ísafjörður. The route on the map indicated that we’d pass by a beautiful waterfall, Glymur, one of the tallest in Iceland. As you drive, the fjords and the light are maddeningly beautiful. But once you step out of the car, it feels as if the wind will drive you off the cliff. We ended up going slower than we would have liked; the GPS kept telling us the waterfall was below us—and we peeked our heads over the edge, which you see here in this picture, terrified, just to check. We were also behind a lone man in a rental car, who constantly stopped to take pictures. We’d often would pull over at the same lookouts and stand, leaning all our weight against the wind, snapping pictures of the light, the view, the land. When we finally resigned ourselves to the idea that we had missed Glymur, we descended, and there, as we rounded the bend into a fjord, we saw a lush, green cliffside. And this beautiful, sparking waterfall. The air was quiet, the wind gone; we were protected by the bluffs. It was truly awesome to realize how quickly the landscape changed, how a mere ten minutes ago it felt as if we were going to be blown off into sky, and now, here we were, drinking water from the waterfall, with nary a breeze to make the water do anything but gently mist around us.
When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.
Charlize Theron Photographed by Annie Leibovitz for the December Issue of Vogue
I reviewed Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi for The New Yorker’s Briefly Noted.
Woody Allen impersonations on The Trip. Still cracks me up.
