On Numbers (or, The Desk Digest May 2024)

There are a lot of you, in a lot of places. Hello.

There are over 38,000 people receiving this email, in all 50 United States and 166 countries of the world. Numbers are quite abstract: I know there are over 20,000 exceptionally dedicated readers who open the emails within 24 hours, but sometimes I can write an especially compelling subject line or the stars decide it’s fate, and many more join you. But the number of readers with whom I regularly chitchat is much smaller, by design and by necessity. I can only know so many of you. I can only take in so much information before this newsletter is all-consuming. I am sending this Digest out today despite it being a federal holiday in the U.S. because as a freelancer, I hardly recognize holidays, and also, there are many people reading from outside its borders (as amorphous as the boundaries of empire are). 

I try to write for the whole world, not just the U.S., yet I live my life between New York and Puerto Rico—I am who I am, and who I am has never been a globetrotter. The best I can do is not work according to the national schedule.

I didn’t get as much work done on my manuscript in May as I would have hoped. Everything kept getting in the way: life, the stress of weather when one has a large dog (weeks of excessive rain followed by an about-face toward excessive heat), assignments I took on while worried about money, extra reporting and work I gave myself for this newsletter because I miss reporting and forcing myself into creative labor that isn’t word-based. (I designed a digital zine that will come out in June, the first of hopefully many new publications.)

A large dog wrote this email.

Aleksandar Hemon, the writer whose The World and All That It Holds I read last month, said on a podcast conversation about the book and his many other creative endeavors (electronic music among them) that he’s “a dilettante and scatter-brained.” It stuck with me, for its humor and self-deprecation and its necessity: I am a better writer when I force my brain to work against its textual tendencies, to make collages and design print, to see the way the light is coming through the trees onto a drip of water on the sidewalk and splashing onto browned, fallen leaves. The diffusion of the light, through trees and off the slate sidewalk, reflecting against the water, dripping dripping dripping. To see it, appreciate it, figure out how to describe it. I never appreciated light before life in the tropics, I want to say, but it’s a lie, because I would always thrill at the way light hits the glass of lower Manhattan at the right early hour when you’re biking over the Brooklyn Bridge. I still feel, whenever the skyline comes into view, like a superhero getting their powers restored. Leaving taught me the meaning of home.

I read an essay in a magazine about the writer going sober and starting to notice so much more in the world, and I thought, It’s not that way always for everyone? You’re not always noticing everything? In May, I was attention frayed, and I’m not usually like that, but I know enough at this point to know that it’s part of the process. Come apart, put yourself back together, get to work, use the light.

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Here’s what I’ve published this May:

May 6: “Climate Nausea”

“I’m reading about quinoa. Reading about quinoa teaches us so much about how food narratives function in the Global North: Those in affluent nations see something shiny, just like the men with the big boats, and because we want something new, because we survive by making more, more, more new, we fuck some people over who have no voice in the matter, then never think about it again. We say, Remember quinoa?”

May 10: “From the Desk Recommends… A Lot of Listening” (Paid)

The monthly roundup of podcasts and writing, plus the usual playlist. I do a book giveaway for paid subscribers every month in these posts, too.

May 13: “On Soy Milk”

“All signs point to the end of oat milk’s reign as plant-based champion. But does that mean a thoughtless return to cow’s milk?”

May 17: “The Monthly Menu: Eating In” (Paid)

We didn’t eat out for an entire month, without trying. We relied on staples and routine. Get the full scoop in the post!

May 20: “The Desk Dispatch: Page, Stage, Plate?” by Siobhan Phillips

“Ambivalence flourishes in text—because of text. Smart-Grosvenor, like Jaffrey, takes advantage of that gap between description and enactment that attends words about food. It is writing that allows both women the not-quite-performance that not-quite-substitutes for related artistic aims. Writing grants them a somewhat-satisfactory profession in their somewhat-refusal of domestic jobs. Writing, that is—description, not provision; memory (or anticipation), not existence; absence, not presence.”

May 31: “The Desk Book Club: Longthroat Memoirs May Discussion” (Paid)

Forthcoming!

Friday is the first the Desk Book Club discussion of Longthroat Memoirs: Soups, Sex and Nigerian Taste Buds by Yemisi Aribisala. Buy it from Archestratus for 20 percent off!

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If you’re looking for cooking inspiration, remember to scroll through The Desk Cookbook.

My book No Meat Required at Barnes & Noble Union Square

News

I wrote for FoodPrint about the “climate savior” narratives of certain crops—what does it mean for reliable tropical crops to be more available as climate change warms more regions that historically couldn’t sustain them?

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My book No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating will be out in paperback on June 25. Please consider a preorder!

Reading

I made a list of books to buy in New York. Here it is:

You Glow in the Dark by Liliana Colanzi
Playboy by Constance Debré
Swimming in Paris: A Life in Three Stories by Colombe Schneck
I Heard Her Call My Name by Lucy Sante
Deborah Levy + Annie Ernaux + Nathalie Léger
A Last Supper of Queer Apostles by Pedro Lemebel
MAGICAL/REALISM: Essays on Music, Memory, Fantasy, and Borders by Vanessa Angélica Villarreal