“Quitting smoking is the khakis of existence. Quitting smoking is the Chipotle on St. Marks Place. I am totally not cool. I may as well be someone’s stupid Brooklyn dad. My hair is its natural color. Most days I’m just wearing whatever. I do yoga endlessly. What am I now?”
 — You ever notice how people who quit smoking think it’s the most fascinating thing in the world?

“Don’t sign off at all. With the rise of Slack and other office chatting software, e-mail has begun functioning more like instant messaging anyway. ‘Texting has made e-mail even more informal than it is,’ Pachter says. In conversations with people we know, complimentary closings have started to disappear. Tacking a best onto the end of an e-mail can read as archaic, like a mom-style voice mail. Signoffs interrupt the flow of a conversation, anyway, and that’s what e-mail is. ‘When you put the closing, it feels disingenuous or self-conscious each time,’ Danzico argues. ‘It’s not reflective of the normal way we have conversation.’ She ends all her e-mails, including professional ones, with the period on the last sentence — no signoff, no name, just a blank white screen.”

★ A light drizzle was blowing, but the raincoat stayed off in the residual sweltering from getting the suitcase packed and out the door of the stifling apartment. After delays in the dark of Penn Station, the train emerged into blue mid-morning twilight in New Jersey. Male blackbirds perched on the reeds, darker little dashes on the gloomy background. The phone rang with a robot calling to announce that the plane would leaving 50 minutes late. Egrets stood almost up to their white bellies in the water. There was water on empty lots, creeping into a turn lane, ponding along the rail beds. Down below the AirTrain, the lower branches of trees were submerged. The first glimpse of gray dull-shining tarmac looked like an estuary. Flash-flood warning tones blared from one phone after another in the men’s room. Rain streaked the glass of the restaurant as two women hailed a third to join them for late-morning mimosas. An old bald man in a gray suit, wearing a Princeton necktie and carrying a straw hat with a Princeton hatband, asked to have a cold bottle of beer. The rain hit the windows harder. The extra 50 minutes passed, and another 25 or 30 minutes. The plane finally appeared; one load of passengers was exchanged for another. The rain stopped. The plane sat. There would be a 15-minute wait. An hour and a half into the 15 minutes — as the phone’s browser announced that the connecting flight from Philadelphia was already wheels-up and gone — the plane finally got cleared into its ration of sky, hitting the clouds almost immediately. It climbed to the top of the lowest layer of clouds, but only barely. In almost no time it came back down through them, disclosing a graveyard and then rowhouses through bright mist. A pleasant breeze rode up the jetway as the gatechecked luggage slowly arrived. There was another plane, already at its gate; only its crew, gone wayward in the rain-tattered system, could not be accounted for. The sky darkened. At last they were found, the plane sent out. Not far from the runway, the pilot got on the speaker with a regretful announcement about thunderstorms along the way and a wait for “route approval” and the fact that he was killing the engines for a while. Then he turned them back on, and the plane went up for a quick glimpse of a smoldering refinery before hitting the clouds again, clouds upon clouds, on up through to a view of tumbled mountains and pillars of them, ivory and gray against blue, with ever more spaces between them. The land appeared in patches and then expanses. One flat gray cloud, moving alone, trailed a curtain of rain from its leading edge. Then there were no clouds but a few high ones, and haze over fields all the way to the barrier islands and the ocean. Whitecaps appeared and dissolved in the dark green water. The concrete of the runway twinkled in the sun. A pine thrust up against clear blue sky. The day here had by all accounts been a hot one, but it was cooling off. The sneakers were swapped out for dress shoes in the parking lot, the sport coat shrugged into. In the cold of the funeral parlor there was no weather at all.

by Joel Johnson

Hey!

As jizz-mopping gigs go, this isn’t my worst. The worst was the Uber gig, seven months back. Fully-fucking-autonomous cars that can park themselves in your driveway to wait, or figure out when it’s polite to double-park or not (and in which cities the ticket fines aren’t worth the efficiency), but too dumb to clean themselves out when a fare decided to tug one out on the way to the airport. And the suits cheaped out on the cleaning supplies, too; just a cheap sponge and some protein-unwinding, mostly all-organic cleaning spray. They were saving their money for the autonomous car washers, which spun up for the first time after I’d been scratching at the edges of dried cum with a nitrile-covered fingernail for seven weeks. Two weeks after *that* — enough time to make sure the moisture and DNA sensors woven here and there into the seat fabric weren’t too finicky, and that the big steam blaster wouldn’t fuck them up — we were all out of a career, nearly a month faster than anticipated.

This one is better, or at least less hands-on. A little RV company opened up a second depot on an empty parking lot in a long-gone resort up here in the Catskills. All these little motile homes look custom, but they’ve all got the same floor-plan inside, give or take a divan, and the sleds they drive around on are industry-standard shit: four wheels and a battery, the same thing you see in road trains hauling whatever on the interstate. They’ve all got cute names like “Furthur” and “Voyager,” and they don’t look like a bad place to spend a month in: bay windows to look out at the forest, a little range for cooking. If I get past the threshold, I’d definitely consider renting one.

What’s nice is that the cleaner modules themselves are automatic, and if I have to get my hands on the filth, it’s at least gone through the sloshy, soapy tummy of one of these things before I have to deal with it. I don’t really mind the jizz stuff, honestly, but dealing with shit still bums me out, so I avoid it if I can. The cleaners handle everything up-to-but-not-including a fat, spiteful, targeted turd. Smears are fine; the wall cleaner gets them. But for some reason these assholes will pack up their clothes, put away all the dishes, give a five-star rating to the RV company, and then squat right in the middle of the floor and take a huge shit. I mean, there are gadgets that *can* clean those up, I’m sure, but we can’t use a big steam blaster in the RVs because of all the Etsy knick-knacks that would just evaporate, and the Roombas just walk right up to it, do a little curtsey, and go around.

I think it might be something sexual. Or symbolic. I don’t know. It’s rude, for sure, but it’s also keeping me in work for at least a few more weeks. Heck, maybe longer. The RV fleet is just a start-up side project for this other-side guy who is making ridiculous money doing something with fish. My profile had projected this career to be obviated in 12 weeks, but I’ve been here for four months and haven’t gotten a two-weeks-notice pop-up yet. I figure there’s a way to automate even the delicate fabric stuff — there’s that tree-looking thing that wheels around in full-service condos that I’m sure would work — but I think the human touch is part of the whole B&B vibe. According to the jobs app, they’ve got another 90+ days before they anticipate obviating this career, but they don’t seem to be in a rush to figure it out.

I’m not sure I can trust what the jobs app says anymore. I mean, it’s nice! I really like the updated interface. You can sort by Projected Life of Career or by career categories, and it has all your personal data loaded so it already knows what you’re qualified for. (I haven’t tried any of the career training games except for ‘Caregiver’ because it’s a prerequisite in the tutorial.) I’ve got My Physical Risk set really low, so it’s not showing me any careers with bonus multipliers. And I don’t have any other continents checked so I’m only getting the NA pool, which takes me out of the lottery. I’m probably not managing my effort optimally given how many of the really nice careers’ countdowns are already flashing, and it’s not like there’s another app to use lol. (Ah me! If only it were still two summers ago, when the termination day on that watercolor pet portrait gig seemed unfathomably distant. Still the best thing we ever did, even if the pay rate set us behind the curve by a half-percent and we got fired six weeks early when they wheeled in that dog scanner.)

Honestly, it doesn’t matter. At this rate I’m not projected to cross for, like…well, I could check the app, but it’s like twenty years and change. And that’s with me saving 85% of everything I make over the minimum monthly income *and* with the future minimum increases factored in. And I might get cancer! Some of the Reddit threads have their own calculators that indicate the ones in the apps are being optimistically tuned, even though that’s fucking illegal. (At least I think it’s illegal.) There’s a guy on there who I used to think was a steel-beams kook, but now is saying that all the baseline threshold-threshold dates are projected out for 70 more years because that’s how long it will take for all the people who will never cross over to die off. I mean, he’s still a fucking racist, but he might be right about that. I’m super glad I’m working, at least.

Anyway, I miss you guys. I wish we could have kept living together, but I understand why it made sense to do what you did. If I had a chance to marry into a family now…even though I still think we could have pooled our money and bought into retirement earlier than you think we could have. They can’t just let everyone run around scrounging after the career tables wrap up, can they? People would fucking riot.

If you get a chance, rent one of these RVs and come see me! (Just tell it to come to the resort and I can walk over to the campground lot.) I expect I’ll be here for a while longer, and I’ve got a cool setup out in the woods — a little stove and everything — which should last me until winter hits.

Just do me a favor and jerk off on a tree like a decent human being.

Pat

Hey, thanks for writing back. Your Insta is amazing! I’m very jealous. So green!

I’ll try to make it out soon. It’s hard because I blew all my transit on going back home in May. We can buy more but Richard is on again about how we have to live within our means, which I gather is his attempt to act normal, or what he thinks is normal. It’s so stupid. We can afford extra credits on just our monthly interest alone, but it puts that stupid badge on your profile that says “Mega Traveller” and apparently that’s gauche now or something.

Anyway, I’m sorry to bitch about it. I know I shouldn’t, but it seems like everyone who lives on this side has to appear to act really guilty all the time, like everything here is perfect. And yeah, we’ve got food (you have food, right?) and I can live a “normal” lifestyle, but I can’t go shopping without getting dirty looks from people who see me carry stuff home, like I’m the one who invented the check-out machine or that I’m some weird poseur because I want to actually leave the house to shop. There’s just nothing to do! How many books can you read? How many games can you play? I even had the house install one of those tanks where you only feel pleasure and can’t think coherent thoughts, because it’s supposed to be really good for you, but that’s boring, too. I mean, it feels amazing when you’re in there, but once it’s over you can’t remember any, like, time, so it’s just this spot in your memory where you remember feeling good but you don’t feel any calmer afterwards. (My skin feels great, though.)

There’s like 50+ years left of this shit before we go full auto, and I am not sure I’m going to be able to keep myself busy until then. Or after, I guess. Ugh, I should come see you. Richard would plotz, but who cares! I just don’t understand how any of this works. We’re supposed to be rich because our money is going to keep growing until…nobody uses money? Fucking doubt it. We’re going to be, like, 5 days from the flip and the richest guys are going to push back the date again, because who wants to be not rich? Ever? They’ll just say we have to keep using money to keep track of things, and it’s been such a great system for this long, and there are too many contracts in the chain that still aren’t resolved, and f;alkshflasdihaskhr.

(Winton says hi, btw. He’s doing great. We have a girl come in once a week because we are trying to do our part, even though she sucks, and she’s teaching him a little Portuguese, which is awesome.)

J.

I’m sorry to hit you up like this, but I need help. Do you think you could send me 5.442? I know it’s a lot, but I need to have my fund over 15 or I’ll look off-track and nobody is hiring people who are off-track anymore. I don’t think I can handle going through the winter in a stand-up shelter and this RV gig is kaput. (They bought one of those tree-things.)

I promise I will never, ever pay you back.

Pat

No problem! Just don’t say anything to Richard about it. Like, don’t say thanks, because I know you’ll want to. He won’t care, but he’ll feel compelled to lecture me about it since he won’t feel comfortable lecturing you.

Check your account. It should be in there! And I sent you a little extra so you can at least lay down for a few weeks while you wait for the careers app to refresh.

J.

Welp, this sucks. I hope you haven’t been avoiding my messages because you feel weird. Don’t. It’s not your fault. There was every indication that this would happen. (I just didn’t expect it to happen this year! The timetables are fucked.) I didn’t even get a notice before I was fired. One second I was down in a sump attaching the hoses to the feeder-scrubbers, and literally the next second a hose snaked down from the porthole into the sewage and plugged itself in. Scared the shit out of me. (Metaphorically, sadly.) By the time I crawled out and unsuited they’d already paid me and cancelled the career for the entire Eastern Seaboard.

A bunch of us got together and built this nice camp rig up in New Hampshire that is holding steady for now. Karen sprang for takeout yesterday and used the drone’s camera as it flew out to us and we all looked at the stream. The harvester line is about to cross over I-93. They’re leaving the trees up, of course. It honestly doesn’t look that different behind the line than in front of it. Just more manicured, somehow. I can’t imagine how many calories they can possibly be getting from a bunch of second-growth scrub floor, but they’re going to pick up what they can all the same. The harvest will be here in a week or so; I guess I’ll get to see how they work up close when they cross over our camp! I still get tickled at seeing new bots. Dumb, I guess.

We’ve got the standard three-sisters garden going up here and it’s working well enough, but it’s so fucking hot already. July is going to be tough. I know they’re saying they’re not abandoning us, but come on. They ran out of careers two months ago and we’re still 87 years from a North American cross-over? We’re not all going to make it. None of the new algae farms around Greenland are even producing, from what I’ve read. (Well, they are, but it’s just as much bacteria than anything else. Why are we in a rush to collect all this cum and shit if we don’t give it time to break down! Basic aquaponics, fam.)

I should have worked harder. They said we were all going to get over eventually, and it sounded a lot like a hymn, but I sang along anyway. And I know there are a lot of very smart people working their asses off trying to buy us some time. But I still feel like this is my fault. I just never thought there would come a point where they’d have to leave anyone behind. (At least not in the U.S.!) How hard is it to make another tanker of Soylent, right?

I truly, genuinely hope you are well. Please don’t ice me out!

Pat

Lol Pat I am so sorry! I changed emails. It took me a while to realize I screwed up the forwards.

You’re being overdramatic a little, aren’t you? Have you been watching the news? Half of the lunar yeast farms are already running! There’s a payload of Soylent dropping into the Great Lakes like twice a day.

Be patient, okay? They only killed the timetables because everything is moving too fast to calculate. We hit full auto a decade-and-a-half ahead of schedule! That’s good news, not bad! Everyone will cross over soon enough. (At least here.)

Just wait a little longer. They’ll figure this out. Just a little longer.

I mean, it’s not like you ever liked working, right? Enjoy it. Read a book!

Tchau!

J.

P.S. You have got to get one of these tanks.

Dear Colleagues,

Mark June 1st as a milestone day for our company. In the last 24 hours, our colleagues at Vanity Fair broke a number of internal records with their Caitlyn Jenner July cover story. With 13.1 million organic video views, we had our best video day ever. And, VanityFair.com generated its highest-ever single-day traffic with more than 9 million unique visitors. The story was trending on Twitter within the first 10 minutes of being live and on Facebook within the first 2 hours — and continues on Day 2 to be number 1 on Facebook and number 3 on Twitter.

This is fitting recognition for a brand that continues to demonstrate how brilliant journalism, striking images and editorial excellence elevate our culture and our company on every platform.

These successes should be celebrated by all those who contributed. Nearly every brand promoted the story on social media and on their sites — showing the power of the entire Condé Nast network.

Congratulations to Vanity Fair and to everyone who made June 1st a day to remember.

It might be the beginning of June, but that doesn’t mean the soil here in the Northeast is quite ready to give us the fruits and vegetables we’re pretty sure we remember it was able to last year. There’s some asparagus, sure, some baby greens, some rhubarb and ramps, but every springtime visit to the farmers market reminds us that spring is a garbage season, that it lasts much longer than we think it will, and that nothing really starts producing in New York until near the end of the month. That said, tomatillos are in season now, albeit not locally, and you should be eating them.

Tomatillo means “little tomato,” but it isn’t much of a tomato at all. It’s in the same family as the tomato (it’s a very big family, also including the eggplant, all peppers, tobacco, and the petunia), but not the same genus, so it’s not particularly closely related. A much closer relation would be the cape gooseberry, a small yellow fruit to which it bears an even more striking resemblance. The tomatillo can range in size from a very small tomato to a medium-sized tomato, and in color from yellow to purple, but the vast majority of the tomatillos you’ll find in the U.S. are a vibrant light green, wrapped in a dry papery husk.

You can tell as soon as you slice into a tomatillo that it isn’t really a tomato; in place of the tomato’s ribs and squishy seed-pod goop, the tomatillo is crisp and airy, with tiny edible seeds sprinkled around its core. The flavor is not easily comparable to very many other common fruits or vegetables; typically, any fruit that’s as tart and crisp as a tomatillo is considered unripe. That taste and texture is becoming more common in the high-end restaurant world; chefs love to experiment with green strawberries, green plums, and other unripe fruits because they add such an unexpected note of acid and non-sweet fruitiness. But unripe fruits can be hard to find, and tomatillos are not at all hard to find.

Acidity from tomatillos is different than other acidic elements. To add acid from a raw source (meaning, not from vinegar or prepared other souring agent), usually you’d only use the juice, as with a lemon, a lime, or a yuzu, whereas a tomatillo is used for its flesh and not its juice. Other highly acidic fruits, like kiwi, pineapple, and grapefruit, are also very sweet, which makes them tricky (though not impossible!) to use in savory dishes. Tomatillos, though, are highly acidic and have a minimal amount of sugar in addition to a kind of herbaceous fruity flavor and a very crisp texture. There isn’t really any substitute for them in most dishes, not even green tomatoes, which look similar on the outside.

They are hugely important in Mexican cuisine, which places a lot of emphasis on acidic flavors. They’re used both raw and cooked, and can be cooked in a variety of ways, though their most common use is in sauces, especially in salsa verde. It’s also common to find them in the lighter moles, like mole verde and mole amarillo, and the fruit’s acid lends assistance in balancing out fatty meat dishes, especially stewed pork.

I like tomatillos because I love acidic food; just last weekend I ate an entire god damn lemon, for fun (these things are a prized treat at a horse show where I grew up). But I also like playing around with them because they’re more versatile than people think. Search through any database of recipes and your results for “tomatillo” will net you about a hundred salsa verdes, some chile verde pork stew, sauces with avocado or poblano, maybe a cheeky green Bloody Mary or gazpacho. But there’s no particular reason to restrict their use to traditional Mexican food (or American cocktails, or Spanish soup), and there’s also nothing particularly interesting about the way I make salsa verde (I just do this), so today’s recipes will not be very Mexican at all.

Tomatillos make an excellent addition to many flavor bases, the result of that early step in recipes where you’re sauteing onion and garlic and maybe other stuff in oil. Chopped tomatillos add acidity and body and a little sweetness, and pair well with cuisines from India to Italy. Raw tomatillos are stronger, less sweet and more sour, and maintain a crisp flavor, somewhere between a tomato and a jicama. There’s nothing about them, really, that would stop you from sticking them in any recipe that needs a hint of sourness or crispness.

When shopping, look for very firm tomatillos and for a husk that is as non-dry as possible; eventually it’ll get crackly and brittle, which means the tomatillo is old. And get the smallest ones possible to maximize their sweetness. Before you cook them, peel the husk off and discard (it’s not edible) and wash the tomatillo, which is invariably sticky. From there you can chop them up however you want; the whole thing is edible, and even the stem part is pretty tender, though if I’m serving them raw I like to cut out a little triangle just at the toughest part of where the stem was attached.

Raw Tomatillo And Spring Vegetable Salad

Shopping list: Tomatillos, spring greens (baby bitter greens are best, like baby chard, arugula, or mizuna; a mix is good), asparagus, pumpkin seeds, avocado, a sharp aged cheese (parmesan, gran padano, garrotxa), scallions, rice wine vinegar, sugar, olive oil

Stick a cast iron pan over medium heat. When it’s hot, scatter in a handful of pumpkin seeds, tossing infrequently. After about 45 seconds, the seeds should be fragrant and toasted, so remove and allow to cool. Slice tomatillos thinly into rounds. Trim woody ends of asparagus and slice (diagonally, aka “on the bias,” if you’re feeling fancy/like a dick) into inch-long pieces. Slice a scallion or two into thin rounds. Cut your avocado into chunks, and shave some cheese into decent sized pieces (no tiny grated crumbs; you want to be able to stab a piece of cheese with a fork). Toss all this stuff in a big bowl and add in a few handfuls of the greens.

The dressing is just vinegar, sugar, and olive oil; this salad is pretty acidic and salty so your dressing should be a little more sweet than normal. Toss everything together and season to taste with salt and pepper.

Pasta With Tomatillo, Ricotta, And Sunflower Seed

Shopping list: Tomatillos, cherry tomatoes, pasta of your choice (I like a short curly pasta), ricotta, sunflower seeds, garlic, olive oil, chile flakes, white wine, shallots, oregano

Start a pot of salted water to boil for your pasta. In a big saute pan, heat up a couple tablespoons of olive oil. Chop a few cloves of garlic and a medium-sized shallot and toss into the pan along with a pinch of chile flakes. Dice up a few tomatillos and a much smaller amount of cherry tomatoes, maybe a ratio of 3:1. When the shallot is translucent, throw in the tomatillos and tomatoes and a splash of white wine, and allow to cook down while the pasta cooks, maybe 15–20 minutes.

In a bowl, mix together a bunch of ricotta cheese with a small handful of sunflower seeds and either chopped fresh oregano or dried oregano and a bit of salt.

When the pasta is almost done, remove and drain and toss into the sauce to finish cooking. Season to taste. When the pasta is cooked, move the whole thing onto a plate and plop spoonfuls of your ricotta mixture asymmetrically around the plate. Finish with another drizzle of olive oil.

Fried Tomatillos With Labneh And Za’atar

Shopping list: Tomatillos, eggs, cornmeal, labneh (or Greek yogurt, cheesecloth, and time), za’atar spice mix, vegetable oil

If you can’t find labneh, a sort of cheese-yogurt thing, you can make it really easily: just place some cheesecloth or a clean dishtowel in a pasta strainer, then plop in a whole bunch of Fage Greek yogurt and allow the water to drain out overnight. That’s it!

Set up your frying station. You want a cast iron pan with about a quarter inch of vegetable oil in it. Beat an egg or two and put it in a bowl. Mix cornmeal with za’atar (it’s a Middle Eastern spice blend made of an oregano-like herb, sumac, usually sesame seeds and thyme) in a ratio of about 8:1. Slice tomatillos into rounds about a quarter-inch thick and pat the cut sides dry.

Heat the oil up so when you toss in a bit of any material you’ve got on hand it sizzles but doesn’t explode. Take each slice of tomatillo, dip in the beaten egg, then dip in the bowl of cornmeal, shaking off any excess. Place carefully in the cast iron pan to shallow-fry (if it doesn’t sizzle when you put it in, take it out and raise the heat) for maybe two minutes on each side. Serve with labneh.
Tomatillos have uses far, far beyond what I’ve done here — I especially like them in curries, on the grill, in soupy black bean dishes, and in chicken soup — but I hope this entices you to maybe try using tomatillos for more than salsa. They’re a really spectacular, unique ingredient, and the U.S. is unusual in that they are a very common sight throughout the entire country. (Just try finding tomatillos in France.) So let’s take advantage of them!

Photo by Timlewsnm

22. Trapped on elevator
21. Trapped underground in subway
20. Trapped under river in subway
19. Struck by bike messenger
18. Exploding manhole
17. Electrocuted by stray voltage
16. Caught in scaffolding collapse
15. Crane collapse
14. Struck by flying tree limb in storm
13. Struck by falling glass/ice/plywood
12. Struck by falling air conditioner
11. Falling through open sidewalk grate
10. Aging sidewalk grate gives way
9. Balcony gives way
8. Crushed by falling concrete from subway platform ceiling
7. Falling onto tracks of subway
6. Falling between cars of subway
5. Walking into empty elevator shaft
4. Sliced in half by elevator
3. Caught in tunnel during flood/having to go to New Jersey
2. Bridge collapse
1. Priced out of apartment

This is as much an endorsement of the film as of this song, a bright instrumental guitar piece from British band Django Django, from its soundtrack. Slow West is a gorgeous and strange Western that feels odd and almost slight — its grim story is overtaken by a powerfully weird tone — until days after you’ve seen it. Then you wonder, perhaps after hearing a piece of its soundtrack again: Was that movie actually great? If for nothing else, see it for Ben Mendelsohn, the greatest working dirtbag actor.

“One account was called ‘I Am Ass.’ Ass had a Twitter account, an Instagram account, multiple Facebook accounts and his own website. In his avatars, Ass was depicted as a pair of cartoon buttocks with an ugly, smirking face. He filled his social-media presences with links to news articles, along with his own commentary. Ass had a puerile sense of humor and only a rudimentary grasp of the English language. He also really hated Barack Obama. Ass denounced Obama in posts strewn with all-caps rants and scatological puns. One characteristic post linked to a news article about an ISIS massacre in Iraq, which Ass shared on Facebook with the comment: ‘I’m scared and farting! ISIS is a monster awakened by Obama when he unleashed this disastrous Iraq war!’” — Read Adrian Chen on the professional nightmare mercenaries of Russia’s Internet Research Agency.