Salty, Not Sweet

A Life in the Food World For five decades, the global culinary landscape has undergone a radical transformation. We have moved from an era of formal, stuffy French dining and predictable home cooking into a golden age of hyper-local ingredients, boundary-pushing celebrity chefs, and global food fusion. To

RG NFL Power Rankings, Week #5

Keep in mind these rankings are based on the teams' performances on the field this season, and take no other facts under consideration: 1. 49ers 2. Chiefs 3. Vikings 4. Jaguars 5. Bears 6. Seahawks 7. Raiders 8. Bills 9. Ravens 10. Giants 11. Browns 12. Bengals 13. Panthers

The Italian Job

For generations, the global imagination has been captured by a specific, idealized version of Italy. It is the Italy of the "Tuscan sun" enchantment—a sun-drenched, postcard-perfect landscape of rolling vineyards, ancient ruins, cypress-lined paths, and the timeless comfort of slow, glorious food. It is

How Architects Live

In the spring of 1962, the legendary advertising executive David Ogilvy sat down to write what would become one of the most famous internal memos in corporate history. He was trying to explain a fundamental paradox of the creative profession. "The best ideas," Ogilvy wrote, "come as

The Game

The modern National Football League is a corporate fortress. It is a multi-billion-dollar monolith guarded by hyper-managed public relations armies, clinical press releases, and coaches and athletes trained to say absolutely nothing in fifteen different ways. But if you flip the clock back thirty years—back to

NFL Picks Week #4

Things are still settling down for the most part as we are getting closer to knowing what these teams are. As always, my picks are straight-up, no points. Steelers over Browns Commanders over Colts Bills over Patriots Bears over Jets Bengals over Jaguars Giants over Cardinals Eagles over Rams

Momo

THE NEON NIGHTMARE OF THE ROAD NOT TAKEN Just for a second, shut up and listen. The world out there isn’t just breaking; it has already rotted down to the floorboards, and you’re standing on the splinters pretending it’s a dance floor. You sit in your climate-

Why Donald Trump is the Living Ghost of Charles Foster Kane

The rain never stopped in New York, but inside the penthouse of Trump Tower, the world was cast in twenty-four-karat gold. It was a fortress of glass and steel, suspended above the concrete canyons of Manhattan. From this vantage point, the people below didn’t look like voters,

Roll the Calls

It is impossible to discuss Ari Emanuel without immediately confronting the awkward shadow of Jeremy Piven, which is a bizarre sentence to type about a real human being who oversees billions of dollars in corporate media assets. But that is the unique cross Emanuel has to bear. For twenty years,

NFL Power Rankings Week #4

Keep in mind these rankings are based on the teams' performances on the field this season, and take no other facts under consideration. 1. 49ers 2. Chiefs 3. Raiders 4. Vikings 5. Bills 6. Jaguars 7. Bears 8. Seahawks 9. Bengals 10. Ravens 11. Lions 12. Steelers 13. Giants

Life and Lobster

The air in Portland, Maine, smells of salt, kelp, and diesel exhaust—the distinct, unglamorous perfume of a working waterfront. For Jim Tselikis and Sabin Lomac, this smell was the backdrop of their youth, an olfactory anchor tied to memories of summers hauling traps and cracking claws on weathered wooden

Resident Punk

How I Smoked, Drank, and Stumbled My Way Through the '70s Punk Scene (and Beyond) Legs McNeil has always preferred his history covered in cheap beer, stale cigarette smoke, and the kind of floor-staining sweat that only a packed room at CBGB could ever truly ferment. Fifty years

Roundabout Now

The history of American transportation is largely a chronicle of straight lines and stubborn boxes, a grid-iron obsession born from the minds of surveyors who looked at a continent of rolling hills, ancient forests, and sprawling plains and decided that everything should intersect at right angles. For generations, the

Saying No to New

It is genuinely difficult to remember what life was like before we treated obsolescence as a moral imperative, mostly because we haven’t lived through a Tuesday in the last twenty years where someone wasn’t trying to convince us that our current iteration of existence is deeply, almost embarrassingly

The Last Test, and Why It Was the Best Decade Anyway

On November 4, 1979, a group of Iranian students, radicalized by decades of American support for the deposed Shah and freshly emboldened by the revolution that had just toppled his government, stormed the American embassy in Tehran and took sixty-six American hostages, fifty-two of whom would remain in

Operation Sparrow

The Incredible True Story of the Spies Who Tricked Hitler and Won the War The history of the Second World War is paved with stories of immense bravery, unimaginable sacrifice, and technological breakthroughs that changed the course of human events. Yet, hidden beneath the well-documented battles of Normandy, Midway,

The Decade Spends Down Its Last Currency

The final three years of the decade don't get remembered with anything like the gravity of Watergate or the moral seriousness of Chinatown, and there's a reason for that, one worth being honest about rather than smoothing over for the sake of a tidy narrative. By

Radical Grammar NFL Picks, Week #3

For whatever reason, I forgot to post my picks for the NFL games this week. I usually post them on Thursday before the game that night, but I didn't. So, here they are, including the last night's game: Packers* over Falcons (already 0-1 for the

Brought To You By

We know how the trick works. We have seen the documentary footage, read the serialized investigative journalism, and absorbed the paperbacks with earnest, professorial subtitles. The tobacco industry lied about lungs turning black for decades. Big Pharma hid the data when the side effects got messy. Big Oil treated the

Yo, Adrian

Rocky opened that November, written by and starring Sylvester Stallone, an actor who, despite being so unknown and so broke at the time, had reportedly turned down considerably larger offers for the script itself because studios wanted a bigger star in the lead role, and he refused to sell it

The American Way of Killing

Look at the clock. Look at the bloody calendar. We are living inside a slaughterhouse of our own design, and we refuse to look up from our glowing rectangles long enough to notice the blood dripping from the ceiling. Malcolm Gladwell has written a book—The American Way of Killing—

Blitzkrieg Bop and the Death of Excess

The Ramones released their self-titled debut that April, fourteen songs in under thirty minutes, no guitar solos, no orchestral pretension, nothing but pure, stripped-down, breakneck simplicity delivered by four guys from Queens who'd adopted a shared fake surname and built an entire aesthetic out of leather

True North

On the Road in Canada For more than half a century, Paul Theroux has hauled his luggage, his skepticism, and his extraordinarily sharp eye into the far corners of the globe. He has ridden rattling trains through the dust of Africa, peered out at the steppes of Patagonia, and generally

Two Hundred Years and a Trial by Fire

America turned two hundred years old on July 4, 1976, and the country threw itself a party of genuinely staggering scale — tall ships crowding New York Harbor, fireworks over every city with a budget to afford them, a nationwide outpouring of flag-waving celebration that arrived, strangely enough, less than

Radical Grammar Pre-Week 3 NFL Power Ranking

Keep in mind these rankings are based on the teams' performances on the field this season, and take no other facts under consideration. 1.  49ers 2. Seahawks 3. Raiders 4. Chiefs 5. Vikings 6. Bengals 7. Bills 8. Eagles 9. Jaguars 10. Bears 11. Patriots 12. Ravens 13. Jets