PicoBlog

(click little red triangle thingy above to listen to a recording of me reading this to myself) As you enter this new year, as you pack away the Christmas decorations and get out your stretchy pants, as you face the onslaught of false promises offered you through new disciplines and elimination diets, as you grasp for control of yourself and your life and this chaotic world - May you remember that there is no resolution that, if kept, will make you more worthy of love.

“The world’s largest concentration camp,” is what Norman Finkelstein calls Gaza.  That narrow strip of land, which has spiraled into an endless expanse of death, is the central protagonist of Gaza: An Inquest Into its Martyrdom - a book that reads into the soul of Gaza. Finkelstein chronicles Gaza through the intimacy of pain and knowledge. He, more than most, intimately understands the crucible of concentration camps and the harrowing tale of a besieged people.

A few weeks ago, Katy Hershberger from Publishers Marketplace called me about a story she was considering for Publishers Lunch. She had a few questions for me in the wake of my first two Substack posts, and asked if I would be willing to answer them on the record. I said I would. She later wrote back and said the story was on hold. I asked her if I could publish our Q&A anyway and she said fine.

Whaaaat is the Deal With Dimples McGee Over Here? The face of an unrepentant murderer. Trust me, you’re going to need this after next Friday, when his single “Sign Of The Times” has been released. He is going to be EVERYWHERE (on SNL, countless chat shows, and doing promotional interviews for the forthcoming & guaranteed harrowing Christopher Nolan WWII drama, Dunkirk, and on the cover of Rolling Stone and what have you) and there will be no escape.

ONLY ONE MORE DAY UNTIL SPRING! We’ve nearly made it to this season of bird chirping, new foliage, flower buds, pastels and more daylight. To celebrate this happy season, I wanted to create a jam that was reminiscent of the freshness that spring reminds me of. Although most-likely available year-round wherever you live, cucumber is technically a spring vegetable. It’s green, crisp, and cool (as a cucumber). You can find my recipe for it here.

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The theory that beauty standards are products of evolution — that it is human nature to find certain physical features acceptable and others not, that modern appearance ideals are simply biological inevitabilities — is, in my estimation, the steamiest, stinkiest load of shit to ever come out of beauty culture. Dr. Hannah McCann, a cultural studies lecturer at the University of Melbourne, agrees (although she phrases it a bit more eloquently). “To suggest that there are universal ideals of beauty that transcend culture,” she wrote in 2019, “completely fails to comprehend the way that ideals of beauty have been constructed in order to be sold.

NOTE:Finally finding some time to post a few of my articles here. First up is this piece I wrote sometime ago for the good folks at KosherWine.com. If memory serves, it appeared in their print newsletter which gets distributed to customers — but is not otherwise online. I have very mildly fiddled with it here. An interesting trend in Israeli wine over the past decade has been the search for, and release to market of, wines made from native or indigenous grape varieties.

I am counting both of these as Ws. Yeah, Elon bought twitter and not Tesla, but we are rounding up here. But everyone is dropping one of those right now. And I wanted to spare you from my uneducated half guesses. So instead of making wild, silly predictions that I will never look back on, I wanted to draw a line in the sand and make a declaration. One prediction that I am confident is right.