The king of spring vegetables, towering over the mostly young fresh grasses and ferns and alliums and greens, is the asparagus. I will happily eat an entire bunch as a meal, raw, dipping stalk after stalk into herbed yogurt or hummus until my urine is pungent enough to create visible cartoon stink lines. But a very strange thing about asparagus is that the best ways to cook this delicate, sweet vegetable are also the most intense. And that brings us to one of my very favorite cooking tools, the wok, and my extremely aggressive opinions about how you are probably using it incorrectly.

The wok isn’t an unfamiliar piece of equipment to most people; any moderately well-appointed kitchen will probably have one. But I do think there are serious problems with the way it’s generally used. The wok is a tool that’s designed to do a very specific job — cook quickly over extremely high heat. The high arcing walls of the wok, along with the thinness of the material, are all in service of this one goal. A good wok heats up quickly and evenly and retains its heat. The high walls allow you to toss food confidently; given the extreme temperatures, food will burn if it’s not constantly stirred, and you don’t want your food to go flying all over the place.

A wok is not a giant saute pan, nor is it a Dutch oven. The reason people think it can be used to, say, saute vegetables in olive oil for twenty minutes is because a huge proportion of the woks sold today are nonstick. These woks are garbage and if you care about them you should put them in the garbage can where they can be reunited with their families (their families are garbage, they come from the Garbage Clan, their coat of arms is a rotten banana peel gently nestled inside a styrofoam takeout container). Earlier this month, a collection of hundreds of scientists and safety experts released a series of condemnations and recommendations known as the Madrid Statement, which is primarily concerned with certain chemical compounds known as poly- and perfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs). These are the chemicals which cause non-stick pans to be non-stick (in addition to making fast food wrappers greaseproof, and many other very useful roles), and the authors of the paper make a very convincing case that these chemicals are under-regulated and almost definitely going to kill us all.

That’s in addition to the many reasons why a non-stick wok is awful. For one: high heat will cause it to warp and melt. Another: a typical tool to use in a wok is a metal ladle, which will scratch the coating and cause it to leach into your food. For another: a proper wok, by which I mean carbon steel — or possibly cast iron, but I prefer carbon steel because it’s much much lighter — will eventually achieve what’s basically a nonstick coating thanks to repeated uses, like the seasoning of a cast iron pan. (This is called “wok hei” in China, which means something like “the soul of the wok,” and is considered almost a flavor in food. China seems cool.)

An odd thing about the wok is that it’s a pretty common tool in the U.S., but looking through recipes, the vast, vast majority of them are Chinese-style stir-fry dishes. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course; a wok is an ideal tool for stir-frying, but I think stir-frying, to Americans, implies not a heating technique but a flavor profile. When we think stir-fry, we think of a few different key flavors: soy, chiles, sugar, cornstarch, garlic, ginger, sugar. We think, basically, of Chinese food, whether that means American Chinese food or whatever we think “authentic” regional Chinese food is.

The key thing about stir-frying isn’t the flavors, but the technique: high heat, short cooking time, frequent tossing. And there’s no reason why that technique should be limited to Chinese food. For me, I think spring is the ideal time to break out the wok, because the extremely short cooking time ends up maintaining the delicate flavors and textures of spring vegetables like asparagus. A stir-fry brings the best parts of spring vegetables out: their outsides are charred or fried lightly, but the insides barely cooked, like a perfectly done burger. Asparagus from a wok doesn’t taste like oil, or a sauce. It tastes like asparagus, but more so; the color and texture of the raw plant is preserved, but you get some nice char and caramelization to ramp up the flavors. The best way to cook the season’s produce is to heat the shit out of it, but just for a few seconds. So I put together a few wok-asparagus recipes with non-Chinese flavors, just to show that the wok is good for more than just beef and broccoli.

Wok-Fried Asparagus With Lemons And Walnuts

Shopping list: Asparagus, garlic, shallots, lemons, walnuts, olive oil, chile flakes, parsley, sugar, parmesan or pecorino

This is basically a riff on a Melissa Clark pasta recipe, just with asparagus instead of pasta. If you want to serve this over pasta that’d be fine too, though. Anyway: get a small pot of water on the stove on its way to boiling. Slice a lemon in half lengthwise, then slice those halves in half again. Thinly slice the quartered lemons into rounded triangles, discarding any seeds. Toss the lemon slices into the pot of boiling water and boil for a couple minutes, just to get some of the bitterness out of the pith. Drain and dry the lemons very thoroughly. Also, spread your walnuts on a tiny baking tray and put in the toaster oven for a couple minutes to toast.

Heat your wok to low and pour in a tablespoon or so of olive oil. Chop a shallot and a few cloves of garlic. Toss in a pinch of chile flakes, then the garlic and shallot. Cook over low heat until the shallot is a little translucent, then throw in the lemon slices and a pinch of sugar. Not a big pinch. A very small pinch. Stir until sugar is dissolved.

Prepare your asparagus: trim off the woody end, then chop into equal-sized pieces, maybe a couple inches long. Crank the heat on the wok to as high as it’ll go, then throw in the asparagus. Stir constantly; if you leave this for just one second everything will burn. Toss and fry for maybe two minutes, adding salt and black pepper to taste, then scrape everything out onto a plate. Top with walnuts, chopped parsley, and shaved parmesan or pecorino cheese.

Asparagus Hash With Eggs And Mustard Vinaigrette

Shopping list: Asparagus, potatoes, red onion, paprika, lemons, red wine vinegar, canola or vegetable oil, mustard, olive oil, eggs, honey

Set a pot of salted water on the stove to boil. Chop potatoes into hash-sized pieces, maybe a centimeter cubed. (Opt for small potatoes rather than the big russets here. Fingerlings or Yukon Golds are good if you want to be fancy.) Toss the potatoes in and boil until very nearly, but not quite, done. Strain them out, dump out the cloudy starchy potato water, fill up the pot with clean water and heat it up yet again (this time it’ll be for the eggs). Let the potatoes dry as much as possible.

Put your wok on the stove over low heat and pour in some canola or vegetable oil, maybe two or three tablespoons worth. (This will seem like a lot. That’s because it’s a lot.). Toss in about half an onion’s worth of chopped red onion, fry until translucent, then throw in a couple pinches of paprika. (Either Hungarian sweet paprika or Spanish smoked paprika will work here.) When fragrant, crank the heat to high and throw in the potatoes. What we’re doing here is shallow-frying; the wok is a great tool for shallow- and deep-frying. Toss the potatoes every once in awhile until browned and hash-looking, then scrape the contents of the wok out onto a plate or something. Taste one and season with salt. It probably doesn’t need pepper.

Trim woody ends of asparagus and chop into smaller pieces than before, maybe an inch long. Also check your pot of water. If it’s boiling, lower the heat to simmer and crack a few eggs into it to poach. Feel free to use whatever superstitious method you have for poaching eggs (Vinegar? Salt? Swirling water? Sure.). Return the wok to the flame and toss in the asparagus over super high heat, tossing to fry the way we did before. Season to taste. The asparagus and eggs should be done at about the same time; remove both from their cooking vessels.

Make your vinaigrette. Add a spoonful of mustard (dijon is classic, but really any will work; I prefer brown spicy deli mustard because it sustained my people through thousands of years of exile from our homeland) to a jar or bowl, then whisk in some red wine vinegar. Squeeze in a little lemon juice and a little bit of honey and whisk to combine, then drizzle in olive oil slowly while still whisking.

To serve: place potatoes on a plate, top with asparagus, then stick the poached egg in the middle and drizzle vinaigrette all around.

Ras El Hanout-Spiced Asparagus With Orange Yogurt And Couscous

Shopping list: Asparagus, Greek yogurt, orange, ras el hanout spice blend, vegetable oil, raisins, pine nuts, parsley, scallions, couscous, olive oil

Ras el hanout is a spice blend from North Africa — it doesn’t have a specific blend of spices, but generally is sweeter than, say, garam masala. To make this dish, first cook some couscous: put a measured amount of couscous in a bowl (along with a few pinches of salt), then bring to a boil an equal amount of water. Pour the water into the couscous, stir and quickly cover and let sit for about five minutes, then uncover and fluff with a fork. Also: Put some raisins in a glass tupperware and cover with boiling water. Let sit until you’re ready to use them. ALSO! Toast some pine nuts either in a toaster oven or in a dry cast-iron pan and reserve. And: Plop about a cup of Greek yogurt in a bowl, zest in maybe a quarter of an orange’s worth of zest, and squeeze maybe a quarter of an orange’s worth of juice in there as well. Add a little salt and stir to combine.

Slice some scallions into small rings. Get a wok on the stove over low heat, and pour in a couple tablespoons of oil. Toss in the scallions and stir for about a minute, then throw in a few pinches of ras el hanout. Stir for maybe thirty seconds to toast the spices.

Chop asparagus into some easy to eat sized pieces, discarding the woody ends, then crank the heat up to high. Throw them in and stir constantly for about two minutes. There may be some smoke. Scrape out the asparagus and scallions onto a plate.

Combine the couscous, raisins (which you have drained), and pine nuts. Top with the asparagus and then finish with a blob of the orange-d yogurt. Sprinkle some chopped parsley over the top and serve.

There’s much, much more to be said on the subject of woks; I haven’t even mentioned the fact that you can dry-fry in them, which leads to wonderfully blistered vegetables. But that’s okay as long as it emphasizes just how versatile and underused the wok really is–especially in springtime.

Photo by Alpha

“At most restaurants, you are served what you ask for so routinely that your eyes glaze over with boredom. Javelina does not fall into the trap of dull predictability.”
 — Everything about this review of trendy Tex-Mex spot Javelina is brutal.

The other day, Uber and Live Nation, the world’s most malicious entertainment company, announced that at “over 62 Live Nation venues and 20 festivals nationwide, riding with Uber will be easier than ever thanks to new designated drop-off and pick-up locations where available.” The deal, granting Uber privileged access to Live Nation-controlled venues, is not so dissimilar from one that its rival, Lyft, struck a couple of months ago with South by Southwest; as the festival’s “official ridesharing partner,” Lyft was able to use “designated pickup and drop-off zones around downtown Austin” to more nimbly ferry its human cargo from their Airbnbs to exquisitely branded slip-and-slide fuckfests and back again.

These partner agreements are not especially remarkable; brands will #brand. More notable was Lyft’s agreement that same week to become “the first and only Transportation Network Company permitted to operate” at the Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, in exchange for ten percent of its revenue. Lyft did not merely benefit from smoother access or louder promotion; Uber drivers were technically barred from picking up passengers at the airport’s arrival terminal because the service would not pay the airport’s demanded “concession fee.” Uber’s customers were caught in the middle, denied access to the transit service of their choice at a moment of need — unless they hailed a somewhat bold driver, anyway — for reasons largely inscrutable to them. (And there are lot of reasons they might choose Uber over Lyft! Like for instance, for the simple reason that Uber still seemed to provide better service in Austin during SXSW, despite all of the advantages that Lyft had accrued.)

It’s not a far leap from the Austin airport or a Live Nation venue to imagining Uber or Lyft using their apparently bottomless war chests to pay all kinds of gatekeepers for exclusive access: Maybe Lyft becomes the official ride to and from Regal movie theaters, or only Ubers are allowed at Yankee Stadium, and did you really think that your Lyft driver could roll up to the San Francisco airport? Certain roads, or lanes, perhaps, could be designated for Uber or Lyft only. On a grander scale, maybe Lyft outbids Uber to become the exclusive rideshare service provider in the Miami city limits. The proposition is potentially more attractive to a city government than it sounds on its face, particularly in a sprawling city like say, Atlanta, whose public transit system is patchy, unreliable, and underfunded, and whose existing taxi system is absolute garbage — even as it is being flooded by a younger, more moneyed population that, as trend pieces about Los Angeles have taught them, want to go out, drink in cool bars until they’re blotto, and not drive. (Or maybe they’re just over car ownership, whatever!!) In Atlanta’s case, an official ride-sharing service that satisfies their creative class’s transit needs with a privatized solution that is vastly superior to its existing taxi services would allow the city to continue to marginalize its public transit system, MARTA, which is largely used by people with lower incomes and people of color, while trickling a fresh stream of revenue into the city’s coffers.

This scenario sounds not unlike state-granted monopolies for utilities — or essentially a wholly privatized metropolitan taxi service. Which, weird, right? But as Uber and Lyft have grown, and their potential customer base has expanded from people wanting to “liv[e] in the future” to anyone who needs a car for any reason at any moment, their strategies, practices, and products have become, in a few not-small ways, come to resemble the vague outline of a utility or even privatized mass transit. In most cities, it would be an improvement over the status quo. Until it isn’t, anyway.

Cartoon of the original Gerrymander via the Commons

“Do You Cry Easily? You May Be a ‘Highly Sensitive Person’”

Headphones off or on, attention fixed or drifting, Ben Chatwin’s The Sleeper Awakes has something for whatever you need at the moment in which you’re listening to it. And, on a day like today, this is a pretty solid soundtrack. Enjoy.

★★★ The humidity oozing into the apartment made the question of whether it was cool enough to open a window irrelevant. On with the air conditioner, while grays and yellows churned slowly in the sky. Outdoors under the afternoon clouds it was not as bad as inside; the breeze moved slow and heavy. Children slumped in strollers. The sun brightened and faded. Glory streamed around the waist of an hourglass of cloud in the west. The pink and blue afterglow of sundown brought out the grain of the travertine on Lincoln Center. One or two people were outright asleep on the grass roof. Black puffs of incinerator smoke dispersed slowly in the darkening sky. The three-year-old sprinted along the turf in his socks. Other children barrel-rolled down the slope. Underneath, diners ate in the glassed-in dimness.

by Jamie Lauren Keiles

You don’t need to pick a god, but it might make things less awkward. For those of us who are used to working or playing with a goal in mind, the action of being spiritual can feel corny if it happens in a vacuum, and so choosing a god will help you to ground things a bit.

If you already have a god, you can go ahead and use that one. If you don’t, you might become comfortable with the idea of a benevolent or neutral higher power by working backwards from a place of evil. Perhaps you have experienced a sense of powerlessness before, maybe at the whim of opaque bureaucracy, arbitrary-seeming rules, faceless systemic injustice, or the impenetrable press-one maze of a toll-free number. If you can accept your inability to access meaning in these cases, you might try playing with a positive variation on that theme. Begin by appreciating the mundane or profane rhythms of daily life — the improvised jazz of cars merging on a highway, the decentralized flow of global currency, the invisible overlapping maps drawn by people moving between work and home and school. Search out intersections of rhythm and pattern and randomness and force, and there you might find for yourself a suitable deity.

If you aren’t afraid to skew granola, you can build your god from nature, with its relentless risings and settings and sprouts and decay. You might find comfort in rolling with the tides of the zeitgeist, a perfectly suitable god, controlled by the diverse and mysterious moons of trend and cool and corporate interest. Dress yourself in the fashions of the era and pray to the holy spirit of the times. You can even be your own god, so long as you can access a version of yourself capable of transcending the sum of your parts. Do not feel pressed to choose the same god or gods for all occasions. The purpose of the god is to give an object to your spiritual practice in the exact moment you want to try to be spiritual. If it makes you feel better, you can contextualize your god as an exercise or tool or functional delusion meant to help you explore and consider the possibility of a spiritual self. The is no reason to be dogmatic, emotional, or sentimental about the god you choose, unless of course you find this satisfying, in which case go ahead.

Once you have selected a god, a good thing to try is praying to it or engaging with it in some other meaningful way. For the same reason many people find letter writing easier than journaling, prayer should feel less corny or arbitrary with your god(s) of choice as an audience. If you are unsure what to pray about, consider the sorts of things you might stop yourself from posting to social media. In the privacy of your own god, there is no such thing as narcissism or selfishness or oversharing. Prayer is a good place to articulate goals, admit shortcomings, complain, or brag openly. Nothing is too dumb or too big to pray about.

Results-oriented prayer will probably be disappointing, but you can work around this obstacle by praying for clarity or reason or self-forgiveness or the strength to overcome something difficult. If you skew cinematic, you might even ask for a sign, and then go out in search of one. When you are in the market for a sign, one can usually be found without much difficulty. Your prayers don’t have to be fancy, and you probably won’t want them to be, because fancy prayer words like grace and salvation are so well-trodden they can often seem meaningless.

Feel free to pray in writing, by talking, by thinking, or in song. If you aren’t terribly creative, or aren’t in the mood to be, go ahead and plagiarize your prayers. Existing religions offer a wide library of convenient and ready-made texts for prayer-sayers, but you can also make bibles and psalms and mantras from any words that sound or feel good to you. Let the sad teen listening to music on the school bus be your cantor. When you were younger, you probably experienced words and music in a far more transcendent and affecting way than you do as an adult. Seek prayer that nurtures this relationship. Jenny Holzer truisms, advertising slogans, and exceptional tweets can all make for great prayers, as can great works of literature and hackneyed self-help. Look up to the heavens in a moment of ponderous frustration and think to yourself, “WHERE’S THE BEEF?” Repeat aloud in the morning and again at night, “IT IS IN YOUR SELF-INTEREST TO FIND A WAY TO BE VERY TENDER.”

You might also try ritual. If you eat breakfast every morning and wash your face at night, you are already well-poised to leverage the concept of repeated, ordered actions for spiritual ends. Rituals are an effective way of marking a noteworthy occasion, observing the passage of time, giving extra attention to a thing long neglected, or putting an outgrown emotional reservation to bed. Populate your ritual with gestures and words and objects that feel symbolic and circumstantial with respect to your broader spiritual goals. Obviousness and heavy-handedness will serve you well in this practice. Build a fire from the clothing and gchats of your former lovers. Mark the end of an illness with a ceremonial baptism in the hose. You might consecrate your ritual more effectively by producing alongside it some arbitrary rules, suggested readings, or the mandate of a witness. If the Catholic Church is any endorsement, a little bit of window dressing never hurt the project of manufacturing drama, so wrap your ritual in bolts of velvet, add a wine pairing, and infuse the surrounding air with the smell of blown-out candles. Repeat your ritual at specified intervals and soon you will have formed for yourself a holiday.

If symbolic ordered actions feel arbitrary and disordered, consider formulating your ritual in the framework of a pilgrimage. A journey of any length from one place to another will lend your ritual meaning by way of providing narrative structure: a beginning, a middle, an end. The in-betweenness of the journey offers a suitable time for reflection, growth, and the abandonment of old ideals. Where you go doesn’t matter so much, but there are metaphors waiting in high peaks, low basins, and childhood homes. In a pinch, however, the second-closest corner store will do.

If you are too busy or too dizzied by the frenzies of life to idle in a circle of votives, do not be dismayed. There are many spiritual moments to be found in the profanity of the everyday. Perhaps the most meaningful type arises when we are able to extract sensations of newness or weirdness from mundane routines. Travel is a luxurious exercise to nurture this way of perceiving. Experiencing a different configuration of daily life will help you to develop a lens that can see beyond the constructedness or contingency of practices in your own life you once considered irrefutable. If the (arguably imperialist) eat-pray-judge mode of inquiry isn’t within your reach, or just isn’t for you, exercise the muscle of relativism on home soil by applying mindfulness to the things you already do. At your next meal, eat slowly, or quickly, or with your hands, or in the dark, taking time to experience commonness as novel. Go for walks in the parts of your town or city that aren’t scaled for walking — industrial parks, train depots, places where density is thin. Seek out experiences that help to determine the boundaries of context and perhaps you will be left with a sense of truth that feels unshakeable and supernatural, if only for you in that particular moment.

A spiritual practice can be a good solution to the supposed problems of loneliness or FOMO. It’s easy when you’re home alone to wallow endlessly in the thought that the rest of humanity is out falling in love, seizing the day, or running into Katie Holmes in a Whole Foods, but a spiritual practice allows you the option of manufacturing a sense of meaning or intention in moments when meaning or intent is not immediately evident. People and drama and movies and work imbue our lives with easily accessible narrative structures. Get fired, get engaged, or get a raise and notice how the discrete incidents of your life will suddenly arrange themselves into a causal chain. A spiritual practice is a great way to reckon with the moments in life when a satisfying narrative fails to produce itself. Some enemies of spirituality might regard this mode of coping as intellectually lazy or willfully anodyne. I sympathize with the siren song of wake-up sheeple, but the inevitable fact of life is that sometimes we will encounter moments where mystery and anxiety transcend our available tools of reason. A spiritual practice is not a quick fix to explain these moments away, but rather a tool for observing them, marking them, and finding a satisfying way of sitting with them until, if ever, meaning becomes evident. Wherever you are at any given moment is exactly where you need to be, because the inevitable truth of the matter is, that is where you are. A spiritual practice might be a good way of helping you to internalize this fact.

As you conduct your spiritual experiments, keep in mind that your god is not an assignment. There is not pursuable end to any of this (well, except maybe death), and you should relieve yourself of any stress to produce a unified theory of everything or even package your understanding of the world in a way that is intelligible to someone else. If you do find a spiritual practice that is satisfying, consider resisting the urge to become evangelical. The logic of your spiritual life is likely contingent and specific to a degree that selling it to another human, in all of their own specificity, is often a risky gamble with an unsatisfying payout. If you do manage to find someone that inhabits your same supernatural paradigm, then by all means consecrate your love using the ritual of your choice. But remember, an authentic spiritual practice is not the same as a new age brand aesthetic, a touchy-feely dating strategy, or macrobiotic-tinged conversational affect. These spirituality-adjacent interests are each valid in their own right, but will probably not do much to help you contend with your protracted crawl towards death.

by Matthew J.X. Malady

pic.twitter.com/bEZRAAikNA

— Taffy BrodesserAkner (@taffyakner) May 10, 2015

Taffy! So what happened here?

So both of my children came home from school with a Mother’s Day gift for me, inside which was an assessment? employment review? census? on our relationship, laid bare over just few questions: What’s your mother’s age? What does she do? What’s her favorite food? That kind of thing. My older son, who is 7, came home with one that could easily have been switched with another kid’s, and I would have thought it had been, had he not confirmed that it was his. It said his favorite thing that I make are cookies; I’ve never actually made cookies during his lifetime, and maybe only once before that. He said my favorite thing to do was spend time at the spa, and though my husband and I have an ongoing joke about kelp wraps, I don’t think I’ve ever been to a spa except under the duress of wanting to be like everyone else for some womanly friendship trip, or graciously accepting a baby shower gift. Spas generally combine things I can’t tolerate: humidity, lavender scents, people touching me, nudity (my own and others’). Anyway, I asked him why he made so many things up, and what he said was devastating: He said he didn’t know the answers. I am normally someone who feels the upper ranges of working mother guilt. This made me take to my bed.

But the one you’re contacting me about is the one I posted on Twitter. It was my 4-year-old’s, which included many of the same questions. His answers, while not wholly inaccurate, were problematic just the same.

Which of these contentions from your son do you most feel the need to refute/address? Is it that you feed him lots of candy? That you like alcohol? That you simply adore tomatoes? In any case, the floor is yours. Also: Talk to me about that lentil soup!

I mean, he got a lot of them right. How old is your mother? 39, yes, accurate. What does my mother do? She writes, she goes to work. Yes, also true! What does my mother make? Lentil soup. And it’s true that I make a great lentil soup (though my older son loves it more). It’s from Susie Fishbein’s Kosher By Design Lightens Up cookbook, seminal stuff in these parts. What does my mom say to me? “Do you have to make?” Yes! Now, I saw some posts on Facebook from other mothers in the class. The other mothers say “You’re so cute!” and “I love you very much!” But though I say those things, too, this is what he remembers. And perhaps this is the thing I hope he carries through life: Yes, I love him, but does that even matter when you have to make? The final question was, “Why do you love your mother?” Because I give him candy. Fair enough! I do do that sometimes!

My bone to pick with my 4-year-old lay in the less accurate statements. It’s innocuous enough to say I like tomatoes. I’m fine with them, and mostly relieved he didn’t write Chipotle, or my own finger dipped repeatedly in a chunky peanut butter jar that I use to make sandwiches for other people.

Mainly, obviously, I object to several things about the alcohol comment. I am not a big drinker — not by a long shot — and often I characterize people I see drink on even a weekly basis as problem alcoholics. I also don’t really know where he got the word “alcohol.” I certainly never say, “Get me some alcohol!” I certainly never call a drink, “alcohol.” I occasionally say that I’m drinking a grown-up drink, but usually it is coffee. I object to his passing this on to the nice teachers who maybe now look at me a little sympathetically, who now probably think, “I wonder if old Taffy is drunk now” at drop-off. They are likely under the impression I am consuming alcohol so steadily, and with such little regard for taste and decorum, or even drink preference, that I only require one single component: the alcohol part.

Lesson learned (if any)?

Obviously, the most problematic is not my 4-year-old’s misconception that I love tomatoes, or even that he is broadcasting to his private school teachers that he is receiving candy on the regular — he is; I give my kids candy from airports when I come home from reporting trips, as a sort of guilt tariff, and, if anything, the thing that haunts me about that is how often it happens. I work a lot, and I travel a lot, and so he gets a lot of Sour Patch Kids, which he adorably refers to as his kids, as in, “Can you please hold my kids while I go to the bathroom?”

What lesson could I learn when the supposition isn’t true? These things are a horrible Loehmann’s dressing room mirror in the face of all you thought you were doing right. The lesson I’ve learned is that you think you know what you’re doing, you think you know how your kids think of you, and you don’t know anything. When it comes down to it, the ballad of us working mothers is that we can only hope to be truly understood by our children much, much later.

Just one more thing.

All this said, I was at the James Beard Awards a few weeks ago, where I was nominated in profile-writing (I lost), and I sat at the same table as my GQ colleagues, who were very nice to me. Now, I don’t believe I drank too much, but if I were to be a properly skeptical journalist, I’d have to ask myself these questions: Why did the waiter laugh every time he poured me more rosé? Why did I wake up the next day with a hangover? Why did it feel very important to me to touch the arm of everyone I was talking to? These are all things for me to take a hard look at.

“Fuckin endings, man, they weren’t as easy as they looked.”
 — Elmore Leonard

14. ‘Mad Men’

13. ‘Breaking Bad’

12. ‘Lost’

11. ‘The Shield’

10. ‘The Wire’

9. ‘The Sopranos’

8. ‘Six Feet Under’

7. ‘Buffy The Vampire Slayer’

6. ‘Caroline In The City’

5. ‘Seinfeld’

4. ‘Cheers’

3. ‘Newhart’

2. ‘St. Elsewhere’

1. ‘M*A*S*H’

Note: Originally posted on September 30, 2013, this post has been updated to reflect recent events.