Everything you think you know about climate change is wrong: It’s actually much worse.

“Bob is the ultimate bad boyfriend, always so cool because he’s so completely uncool, and always desperately desirable because he’s never what you want him to be. So to the true Bobbista this video is just great. For a horrible moment you think the dude on the squeeze-box at the beginning is Bob in his final metamorphosis (he’s got that Bob head angle, looking upwards and kind of quizzical, like a dog who’s not quite sure if he’s going to bite you or jump over your shoulder), but then you get a glimpse of Bob side-on. Yes, it’s really Bob. You think, cool, Bob hasn’t turned into an accordion artist. Cooler: he hasn’t died.”

Dissing, punting, sussing, gussying, grousing: the Times’ associate managing editor for Standards does not approve.

“There’s been a lack of acknowledgement by our president in understanding what it is that the American military provides in terms of, obviously, the safety, the security of our country. I want him to acknowledge the sacrifices that these individual men and women, our sons, our daughters, our moms, our dads, our brothers and sisters are providing this country to keep us safe.”
-Sarah Palin tells Fox News’ Greta Von Susteren that President Obama needs to give more respect to the troops.

Are you one of the two Sydney college students photographed in the act of copulation atop that city’s famous clocktower? If so, please get in touch with Australia’s Daily Telegraph. There’s probably a quick buck in it for you!

Our pre-Thanksgiving cooking section has been, we hope, very helpful. Here, we show you how to make (and even eat!) the elusive perfect cranberry sauce-especially perfect for the single man alone at Thanksgiving.

Eric Asimov gives a rundown on alcoholic digestives, those heavenly nectars which provide abdominal relief from the overindulgence often associated with Thanksgiving or other holiday meals. He focuses on amari, the Italian iteration of the soothing tonics.

The word refers to the bitterness, derived from quinine, that unifies this disparate group of liqueurs. Hundreds of amari are produced in Italy. Each has a proprietary formula that generally includes various herbs, roots, flowers and spices, which are macerated in alcohol, sometimes blended with a sweet syrup and tempered in barrels or bottles.

Among the amari are various stylistic subsets. Some are made with artichokes, like the well-known Cynar. Others incorporate black truffles, or the husks of green walnuts. Perhaps the best known are the fernets, which refers not just to the famous Fernet-Branca but to an entire run of bracingly bitter amari.

Do read on, there’s plenty more to learn. But this dovetails nicely with something I’d like to share: Alex Balk’s Foolproof Alcohol Intake Reduction System.

The plan is simplicity itself, but let me share with you its origin: Recently, I found myself in a situation where it occurred to me that perhaps I might be skirting that delicate mark between convivial inebriate and comprehensive dipsomaniac. It is a distinction between which we all straddle at one point or another, and there’s absolutely no shame in recognizing that you’re on the other side of the line so long as you’re willing to do something about it. So I sat myself down and came up with a scenario by which to regulate my intake: I would drink nothing alcoholic but Fernet-Branca.

Should you be unfamiliar with Fernet, here’s a brief description:

Fernet-Branca is a dark, syrupy alcoholic drink similar to an amaro, with a flavour that’s best described as being a cross between medicine, crushed plants and bitter mud. The exact recipe of Fernet-Branca is a secret but the producers, Fratelli Branca Distillerie, do say that it contains 27 different herbs and spices taken from four continents. Among the known ingredients are aloe, gentian root, rhubarb, gum myrrh, red cinchona bark, galanga and zedoary. The rumoured ingredients include saffron.

While it sounds a bit unpleasant, that’s the point. More importantly, it is 80 proof, so your demanding liver will be less upset with you for rationing its usual treats.

Unsurprisingly, Fernet is massively popular in San Francisco. This makes a lot of sense, because the drink is the liqueur equivalent of the kind of person who radiates disdain for American professional sports but can go on and on about the beauty of soccer. It adds an instant patina of class — one of the more telling class distinctions of our age, as I believe Joseph Epstein said somewhere, being the preference for bitter over sweet — and sophistication by the mere act of chugging it down. The fact that your resulting belches will convey the fragrance of those gifts ferried across the desert to celebrate the birth of Our Lord must be considered a pleasant side effect.

And that’s how the system works. Should you wish to reduce your intake of alcohol, restrict yourself to Fernet. I assure you, you will be back in the category of “genial tippler” in no time. I should note that I myself was unable to fully abide by this rule because my preference for not constantly convulsing made a wider palette of beverage an almost medical necessity, but I’m still pretty sure the idea is a solid one. You’re welcome.

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

Today in The Poetry Section: three new poems by Monica Youn, from her forthcoming book, Ignatz.

ON IGNATZ’S EYEBROW

the way water is always rushing between a ferry

and its dock in that ever-present gap where

the rush is the speed of the water and the rush

is the sound of the water and the water is

bitterly cold and is foul in its bitterness and

the gap is irreducible space and time and

is the ache felt by the ferry in the cold

of its iron bones which will never clang

against the framework of the dock

in the satisfying clash of solid surfaces because

the gap is where such satisfaction helplessly

dissolves the way Ignatz now feels his anger

dissipating in that self-same gap between

the trigger and the smack between his anger

and its object the way one eyebrow

can never meet the other in a true unbroken V

no matter how doomy how dour

how darksome his invariable frown.

IGNATZ AT THE SHRINE OF THE SINNERS

Night like a black

glass bell

and the fading

echo of the detox

mantras:

helpless helpless

helpless helpless

if fleshly importuning

were to fall silent…

*

Each sinner’s left behind

a little sinner

diorama:

laminated photos,

silk flowers

strung with wire.

Ignatz

tiptoes unseen through

thickets

of votive prayer

candles

holding as his candle

snuffer

an aluminum

rose.

AT THE FREE CLINIC IGNATZ
snoozes with his head down on the secondhand classroom desk with his elbow on the part of it that curves around to support his elbow so that he can shut his eyes against the bend of his own arm with his cheek pressed against the laminated desktop and his fingers just draping over the laminated plywood edge that is the same edge that curves around to dig slightly into his ribcage which is tilted so his lower spine stays in contact with the molded contours of the glossy seagreen chair that curves around to where his thighs begin and rises slightly where his legs need to rise and rounds off gently and ends just where his legs need to bend down to the floor so that if this is a lesson in how something harder and something softer can achieve a mutuality if the harder thing has a curvature that suggests an accommodating mindset and the softer thing is willing to relinquish some measure of contingency so the softer thing can come temporarily to rest and if a test were devised on the subject of this lesson then what would be gained for one who took this test and passed it or one who took this test and failed?

Monica Youn is an attorney at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, where she is the director of the campaign finance reform project. Her first book, Barter, was published in 2003 from Graywolf Press and her second book, Ignatz, is forthcoming from Four Way Books in Spring 2010. She has been awarded poetry fellowships from the Library of Congress, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Stanford University and has been a visiting professor of creative writing at Pratt Institute and at Columbia University.

You can reach the editors at poems@theawl.com.

This barely is a recipe at all, which is the reason for it. Who is interested in cooking a side vegetable? But if you are feeding yourself, you need to include side vegetables or you will eventually develop chronic ailments. If you are feeding other people, they will be gratified by the variety and will feel properly cared-for. Multiple dishes! A balanced meal! Here is a way to do that with as little effort and attention as possible, and with only a minor amount of danger. You need: garlic. Salt. Cooking oil. One head of romaine lettuce.

Wash the romaine. Nothing that requires washing is easier to wash. Shake the excess water off each leaf as you go-snap the wrist a little-and stack the leaves on a cutting board. Before the stack gets too unwieldy, chop the leaves crosswise into strips about as wide as a thick-fingered person’s finger. Chop those strips in half, or into thirds if you like, and put them in a colander. Keep going till you have as much as you want-half the head should take care of two people, unless it’s an itty-bitty one.

Quickly smash and peel two or three or four cloves of garlic. Maybe bust them up a little more with a knife. Do not mince the garlic. Mincing the garlic is not only against the spirit of the recipe, it is bad for the dish.

Identify the dish on which you will serve the vegetable, get it out, and put it on a stable surface somewhere near the stove. Do not start cooking until you have done this.

Pour enough oil in a frying pan to cover the bottom. Corn oil is good, as is canola. Olive oil is distracting here. Put the pan on your biggest, hottest burner and turn it up pretty high. The ideal would be to use a lightweight wok over a blasting double-ring gas flame, if not a jet engine, but you might want to try the top end of medium-high the first time or two.

Let the oil get hot, then throw in the garlic. Let the garlic get brown in parts. If the oil isn’t hot enough, let the garlic sit there and wait till it does get hot enough, at which time the garlic will get brown.

When the garlic is ready, throw the chopped romaine into the hot pan. This is where the little bit of danger comes in: if you put in only part of the romaine, and it is still wet, there may be violent little splatters of hot oil. Do not be timid. What will protect you from splattering romaine is the romaine itself, a solid pan full of it. If you approach it falteringly and drop in a little handful, the hot oil will sense your weakness and attack. If you then panic and try to shield yourself with a pot lid, you will lose control of the situation entirely. You are a human being; the contents of the pan are plant matter. Calmly and quickly deliver all the chopped leaves, and the only thing they will splatter will be their fellow leaves.

Stir the romaine. It will be wilting. Salt it-maybe as much as if you were salting a plate of french fries-and stir it around some more. As soon as all the romaine has encountered the oil and the last trace of salad-crispness is gone, before it wilts any further, get it out of the pan and onto the plate. You don’t have time to hunt for the plate now.

There. You have a vegetable, a vegetable so vegetable-y you could serve it to vegans. In fact, you have a lot of vegetables, since you can do the same thing (with slightly different chopping and timing) to cabbage, bok choi, baby bok choi, and at least three-fifths of the leafy produce in any Chinese market. You can do it with bagged spinach, and you won’t even need to wash anything (make sure the bag is open before you start). Don’t think about it; just grab something and cook it. Serve with white rice, to accompany some heavier or more flavorful dish. Or a simply-cooked piece of meat.

New Old Video Footage: Jeff Mangum, “Two Headed Boy”

So, you know Neutral Milk Hotel’s Jeff Mangum reappeared last year, after going underground for a decade after making what some people believe (what this person believes) is one of the ten-or-twenty-or-so greatest albums of all time, ever, by anyone. The reappearance was brief. And there’s been no new music. But Merge Records recently rereleased In the Aeroplane Over the Sea as well as the band’s other, slightly less perfect album, On Avery Island. And also, in celebration, a pair of video clips of Mangum playing solo at the Knitting Factory in 1998. The footage is, umm, intense. He is like a cross between John Fogerty in 1969 and Jack Nicholson, all frozen solid at the end of The Shining. When he open his mouth to holler, you can almost see his eyes rolling back in his head like a shark. Like he is feeding on his bonkers. And he is so, so, so good.