This is my favorite track from Mikal Cronin’s great new record. Kristen Schaal in the video is just a bonus beyond which any of us could have ever expected. Enjoy.

For years, I grilled onions alongside burgers, hot dogs, sausages, asparagus, zucchini, and the other stalwarts of the American grill. Thick slices of onion, a dozen rings nestled within each other like a teary matryoshka, placed carefully on the grill so as to lay, with totally misguided optimism, over several bars of the grill-top grate. Of those dozen rings, perhaps one would survive, the others doomed to fall through the gaps in the grate and, infuriatingly, sit there beneath the propane burners, out of reach and covered in soot, or to land right on the charcoals, where they would slowly burn. The onion does not want to be grilled. It is not built for it. But some of its relatives are.

Some people skewer small onions, cipollini or pearl onions, and grill them. These onions are thick and dense, and without very mindful control of your heat, the outside will almost surely burn while the inside remains raw. Raw onions are gross. More recently, some people grill ramps, the small, wild, leafy onions that are among the first spring vegetables to be harvested. But ramps cost about a billion dollars an ounce. They are more expensive than cardamom and pepper during the peak days of the spice trade. They are more expensive than tulips in the Netherlands in the sixteen thirties. They are more expensive than an instant-messaging startup with five hundred million users in Poland. They are also kind of tricky to grill; any plant that has two distinct parts — in the ramp’s case, a firm, dense, white/pink stalk and a delicate green leaf — is hard to cook intact, because they have different cooking needs. Grilling ramps without ending up with either raw stalk or soggy burnt leaf is very difficult.

A better option is the humble scallion.

Of all the members of the onion family, only scallions should be eaten raw. They are also the same shape all the way through, from root to leaf — a thin cylinder. Everyone who’s grilled a stalk of asparagus knows the ease of grilling a thin cylinder: It rolls easily to expose different sides to the heat; it is unlikely to stick; and it cooks quickly and evenly. And because scallion greens are just a touch hardier than ramp greens, they aren’t likely to burn before the whites are done. Also, scallions cost, like, a dollar for two big bunches.

Scallions are easily my favorite vegetable to grill. Aside from being easy and cheap, they taste outrageously good, their sugars caramelizing quickly and matching perfectly with the charred flavor of the grill. They can be twirled and placed on top of burgers or nestled into a hot dog bun, or placed on a plate with unnecessary ceremony and dressed as their own dish, like asparagus. People are often surprised when you bring scallions to a BYO-grillables party, but they’ll understand after they try a bite. And they’re versatile; if you want to play around with different flavors, there’s basically nothing you can’t add to a grilled scallion, because nearly every culture on Earth grills, and nearly every culture on Earth uses some kind of onion.

In Mexico, the spring onion — which is not a scallion, but is actually the very young version of a typical yellow onion, that is, very briefly, edible — is a required accompaniment to grilled meats. In Spain, calcots, which are somewhere in between a scallion and a leek, are grilled and eaten with romesco sauce after harvest in the fall. And in Japan, yakitori (grilled things) often includes grilled negi, which is — wait for it — basically a scallion.

This advice works for all kinds of grills — propane, charcoal, broiler — and even some things that aren’t really grills, like a grill pan or even a super hot cast iron pan. Here are some suggestions!

Mexican-Style Grilled Scallions

Shopping list: Scallions, olive oil, cilantro, cotija or feta cheese, limes

Super simple. Slice off the roots of each scallion, losing as little of the white part as possible. Brush or rub with a little olive oil; go very sparingly on this. In fact, if you want, you can use none at all. Place on grill over medium heat and roll occasionally; you want a little blackening. When done, season with salt, sprinkle cheese and chopped cilantro over the top. Serve with lime wedges for squeezing. Alternately, use lemon and chopped parsley or oregano for a more Mediterranean flavor.

Spanish-Style Grilled Scallions

Shopping list: Scallions, sweet peppers (red bells or those baby sweet red peppers are good), garlic, tomatoes (canned is fine), almonds, parsley, red wine vinegar, sliced bread, olive oil

There are two closely related sauces for calcots, the larger leek-like onions that are eaten in Spain: romesco and salvitxada. Both are basically red pepper and nut sauces, but salvitxada has toasted bread in it, and also I’m not a hundred percent sure how to pronounce it. This recipe is for salvitxada.

Toast a slice of regular bread and leave it aside to cool and dry and get sort of unpleasant. Heat your oven to 400 degrees. De-stem and de-seed two red bell peppers, or an equivalent amount of other, better sweet peppers. Chop some garlic. Toss the garlic and peppers in olive oil and put in the oven until soft, maybe half an hour.

In a food processor, add a small handful of almonds, peppers, garlic; about half a bunch of parsley; and and maybe two or three drained canned plum tomatoes. Whirl the food processor to break all this up (especially the pesky almonds) while drizzling in olive oil. When relatively smooth, crumble in your toast and add a tablespoon of red wine vinegar. Whirl again, then taste. Add salt to your liking. Keep whirling until smooth and about the consistency of hummus. If it’s too thick, add olive oil or just plain water. If it’s too thin, add some more crumbled toast or almonds.

Brush scallions with olive oil and grill as before. Serve alongside the salvitxada sauce.

Grilled Scallions With Creamy Grilled Salsa Verde

Shopping list: Scallions, tomatillos, jalapenos, olive oil, cilantro, limes, avocado, skewers

Prepare your tomatillos: peel the papery husk off, then wash thoroughly until they’re not sticky anymore. Skewer maybe eight of them and place on the grill over medium-high heat. Watch them carefully and flip when they begin to develop splotchy black spots on the hot side. When blistered lightly all over and a bit soft to the touch, remove and let cool. Throw them in a food processor. De-stem and de-seed a jalapeno, chop it up, and throw it in too, adjusting how much depending on how much spice you want. I like a raw jalapeno for this, but you can grill it too for more smokiness and less spiciness. Throw in half a bunch of cilantro and about a quarter of an avocado, along with a squeeze of lime. Blend thoroughly while drizzling in a little bit of olive oil — not much, maybe a tablespoon. Add a little bit of water if it’s too thick or not blending well. Taste and season with salt. Grill scallions. Serve with sauce.

We’re still a couple of weeks away from cheap abundant delicious asparagus for grilling, but the weather is demanding that we get out and stand around hot fires in parks and backyards and on roofs. There isn’t really anything seasonal to grill quite yet, but there are scallions: cheap, grown year-round in nice hot places, and surprisingly delicious without being snobby.

Photo by Guy Montag

One of the tougher things about growing older is making peace with the fact that you’re never going to get around to doing most of what you put off under the delusion that you’d have plenty of time and energy for it at some indeterminate point in the future. It’s a long list of abandoned aspirations but, for me, one of the easier things to accept is that I’ll never properly appreciate art or its history, since there seems to be so much involved and also who can be bothered to learn the secret language art-types have created to make you think that drawing pictures of naked ladies or placing a piece of literal doody atop a theremin as the center of a “light-themed installation” is somehow more transformative than your bourgeois mind could ever comprehend? I mean, I get the naked lady stuff but the doody-topped theremin thing is like, come on, you’re never going to make me insecure enough to think I’m missing out on some sort of conceptual brilliance there. Does that make me a philistine? Sure, why the hell not. Thank God, then, for Julian Barnes, who helps you feel like if you don’t get art at least you’ve got someone smart who’ll tell you what you’re missing.

by Benjamin Hart

It’s hard to pinpoint the moment when New York and also technology started to feel like such a chore. Maybe it was when I urinated in a slim-fit adult diaper while waiting in line for the iPhone 4 for ninety-three hours and pronounced the experience “worth it,” or when I found myself testing out tweets on my wife during foreplay, or when a rat scurried across my face and into my mouth while I was checking Facebook and waiting for a C train that never arrived. But a few weeks ago, on a gray April day, as I ambled by the Duane Reade where my favorite dive bar McHurlihan’s once stood, while joylessly scrolling through my Twitter feed in between reading a saved Instapaper article about how to live in the moment, I realized I had to leave New York and stop using the Internet for a while.

When I moved to Williamsburg in 2002, scraping by in the center of the universe seemed like a grand adventure. I’d drink until dawn at places like The Station, Whirlybird, and JJ’s Good Time Emporium on the Lower East Side (now closed); I’d do lines off the grimy concrete of McCarren Park Pool (now clean); and then take the L to Bushwick and try not to get mugged on my way to a warehouse party (now safe). Instead of staring at my phone compulsively, I’d smoke a cigarette. Inside. I didn’t yet know what a “meme” was. I became passing acquaintances with the guys from TV on the Radio, but I didn’t feel the irrepressible need to share such information with everyone, because social networking hadn’t yet transformed us all into greedy approval-seekers. When I began face-to-face conversations with “I know the guys from TV on the Radio,” people looked impressed, and that was enough for me.

My neighborhood has changed, too. As I occasionally glanced away from my glowing screen to avoid bumping into the twenty-five-year-old hedge funders moving in, I noticed the local color of the place draining out like an Instagram filter. Bobby’s, the mom-and-pop pharmacy that was frequently out of toilet paper but nonetheless charming, was forced to move to Jersey City after its rapacious landlords jacked up the rent a hundred and thirty thousand percent. (The Walgreens that moved in always has toilet paper.) And Zgliewzki, the Polish diner everyone loved (though nobody I know had ever been there) shuttered to make way for Polski, a modern take on Slavic cuisine featuring a forty-two-dollar ramen kielbasa stuffed with sustainably farmed foie gras.

More importantly, my wife and I wanted a family, and thanks to my crippling addiction to Zillow and the Styles section, I knew all too well that a two-bedroom apartment was way out of reach. Friends who had once shuddered at the thought of leaving the city spoke of a happier, healthier lifestyle elsewhere. Some of them even moved to Los Angeles, which they reported didn’t suck after all. During the fifteen-month winter, I became so consumed with jealousy over California Instagram feeds that I deleted the app for seven minutes. The last straw came in February, when, while waiting in a Trader Joe’s line that snaked around the block twice to buy conflict-free hummus, I learned via Periscope that my co-worker Steve had been selected for Amazon drone-delivery beta testing. I teared up and then stepped directly in a giant slush puddle to get into my one-dollar UberPool ride from Chelsea to Eastern East Williamsburg.

That night, my wife and I began scouring real estate listings, and almost immediately warmed to Satchel-on-Hudson, a lovely village two hours north of the city. For a quarter million, which would have gotten us a bed bug-infested closet in the city, we purchased a ramshackle fourteen-bedroom house with a pool, a tennis court, a bridle path, and even former butler quarters, which we could rent out on Airbnb. We have two Priuses, two washers and dryers, a dishwasher, and total peace of mind. Life out here is placid and wonderful, and has afforded me the time and space for things I could never do in the city, like jarring my own salsa and not living in New York. Our Japanese garden is actually planted with the books I told myself I didn’t have time to read. I’m most proud of the War and Peace cacti, which is flourishing.

The same week we closed the sale on our place in Williamsburg, I announced my plan to leap off the grid to everyone I knew, posting lengthy farewells on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Sina Weibo, WhatsApp, GroupMe, Adult Friend Finder, and John Wick message boards. I explained that I wouldn’t be responding to any electronic communication for an indeterminate period of time, so anyone who wanted to get in touch with me would have to pick up the phone and call, or better yet, send me an old-fashioned letter, since they’re inherently more special than emails.

I thought my craving for instant gratification and the big city would be unbearable. And for the first week, it really was. I desperately missed the convenience of email, the immediacy of Twitter, the diversity of the different kind of white gentrifiers on my block, the pizza. And I admit to relapsing once or twice — one Saturday I just took off for New York with nothing but a selfie stick in my hand and the wind at my back before pulling myself together just ahead of the George Washington Bridge. But something funny happened around ten days into my experiment: I slowed down and stopped caring so much. I began not to miss the pinging and the bleeping and the blooping of life in the twenty-four-hour information cycle. Gradually, I even became more attuned to the rhythms of everyday life. In the old days, I’d automatically reach for my phone as soon as I woke up. Now, I meditate for fifteen minutes, then do some recreational roof-thatching while chipping away at Emoji Dick. I feel in tune with my surroundings in new and unexpected ways. Case in point: as I was writing this, a red bird sat on a tree branch outside my office window (I actually have three offices in this house) and I really looked at it. I think it was a robin.

My friends haven’t abandoned me because I’m offline. Just a day after signing off, I got a phone call from my buddy Nick. I had mostly kept up with his life through social networks, so it was nice to actually hear his voice. He told me that his marriage is on the rocks, and that he feels unappreciated at work. Now that’s the kind of thing you don’t get from a status update. My marriage has changed, too. Instead of arguing about what to watch on Netflix, my wife and I argue about which obscure Italian neorealist film to rent from the adorable local video store (we finally settled on The Rock), or which beautiful hiking trail to conquer, or whether to have kids now that we need to fill up so many rooms in our house.

It’s now been a month since I left New York and quit the Internet, and I don’t regret what I did for a second. In fact, I want people to know everything about my life now, but it’s hard since I lost all my followers and nobody gives a shit what some piece of shit from upstate has to say. That’s why I’m writing this letter on parchment paper, and that’s why I’m having it hand-delivered to every major media outlet in America. Because you can quit the city and you can quit the Internet, but you can never quit telling people how much better you are than them.

Photo by Andy Atzert

Jay Kang’s tight narrative of “the nation’s first 21st-century civil rights movement” is vital reading:

Since Aug. 9, 2014, when Officer Darren Wilson of the Ferguson Police Department shot and killed Michael Brown, Mckesson and a core group of other activists have built the most formidable American protest movement of the 21st century to date. Their innovation has been to marry the strengths of social media — the swift, morally blunt consensus that can be created by hashtags; the personal connection that a charismatic online persona can make with followers; the broad networks that allow for the easy distribution of documentary photos and videos — with an effort to quickly mobilize protests in each new city where a police shooting occurs.

We often think of online activism as a shallow bid for fleeting attention, but the movement that Mckesson is helping to lead has been able to sustain the country’s focus and reach millions of people. Among many black Americans, long accustomed to mistreatment or worse at the hands of the police, the past year has brought on an incalculable sense of anger and despair. For the nation as a whole, we have come to learn the names of the victims — Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Tony Robinson, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray — because the activists have linked their fates together in our minds, despite their separation by many weeks and thousands of miles.

In the process, the movement has managed to activate a sense of red alert around a chronic problem that, until now, has remained mostly invisible outside the communities that suffer from it. Statistics on the subject are notoriously poor, but evidence does not suggest that shootings of black men by police officers have been significantly on the rise. Nevertheless, police killings have become front-page news and a political flash point, entirely because of the sense of emergency that the movement has sustained.

Left unconsidered — in favor of issues like if and how the movement work should through the existing power structures of the current legal and political system — is the vexing question of whether the movement should rely so heavily on Twitter to publicly organize, engage, and spread its message. Twitter isn’t merely a profit-seeking corporation — it’s one that is, of late, in disarray, meaning that with each passing day it grows more beholden to anxious shareholders. The shift toward revenue generation has already produced some profound effects in the shape and flow of the network as it turns inward to more effectively capitalize on its existing users while it desperately attempts to acquire new ones. Beyond the loftier questions of like, what it means for the movement with respect to political economy and the media and whatever, in time, there could be practical consequences for using Twitter to sustain a social movement. If Twitter becomes no longer amenable to these kinds of voices, where can they go next?

★★★★★ Tulips lit up orange on the Broadway media. “What’s that white stuff over there?” the three-year-old asked on the subway platform, pointing to the sunbeams on the downtown express tracks. Everyone was out and chattering. The train car had the hubbub of a restaurant; more hubbub carried across the bare sunstruck space of Union Square. Bicycles clogged the train for the ride back uptown. Breeze smoothed the long fur on the face of a terrier and sent a white-haired man’s hat rolling away at a pace for a leisurely walking pursuit. Treetops, half-leafed, were lacy in the late daylight.

by Douglas Bleggi

20. Stephanie Mills

About as real as you’re going to get rolling down the frozen aisle or waiting in a doctor’s office, which is likely the only place you will hear it, ever.

19. Lisa Stansfield

Real, but not nearly as real as “All Around the World.”

18. Slaughter

When your birth name is Slaughter, I have to take you for your word when you’re talking about the realness of anything.

17. Beautiful Machines

Pretty legit love.

16. Lil Cuete

Sounds sort of like Zapp’s “Computer Love,” which I think is valid love.

15. David Gray

If you’ve seen his video for “Babylon,” you know the man knows a thing or two about real love.

14. Clean Bandit featuring Jess Glynne

The realness is in the drop.

13. Skyy

The realest of the slow jam variety.

12. Swans

Proof that real love can be really scary.

11. Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers

Things are always pretty real when these two get together.

10. The Smashing Pumpkins

A fairly underrated latter-day single, if only for the realness.

9. Doobie Brothers

The authenticity of Michael McDonald’s realness can not be disputed.

8. El Debarge

DeBarge is pretty real — I mean, check out those moves.

7. Muddy Waters

I feel like we should take his word on knowing when real love is indeed real. (Hint: It’s when you make it to him).

6. Rootkit featuring Danyka Nadeau

Norwegian producer Rootkit has real love on lock with a dancefloor jam that you could slip in comfortably between “When a Fire Starts to Burn” and Robin S.’s “Show Me Love.”

5. Delorean

The realness is in the sheer bliss of the tune — all lush synths, chopping percussion, ecstatic house pianos, and that crazy vocal sample that weaves in and out.

4. Jody Watley

The David Fincher-directed video was so real that it made MTV history in picking up six nominations at that year’s VMAs.

3. John Lennon

This “Real Love” is “really real” simply for how much the track is really loved, considering how many times it’s been covered.

2. Beach House

It’s hard to get any realer, except of course for…

1. Mary J. Blige

…the realest real love of all.

The Awl’s real estate columnist recently visited that perhaps unfairly maligned apartment with a shower in the kitchen, which just might be a good deal in the current market. Or at least that’s what the broker argues (and she’s mayyyyybe not wrong?):

The apartment had originally been listed, in January, at $1,995. “It was on the market for over a month, and nobody called,” Dippolito said. Even when the rent went down two hundred dollars, he received only one application. After local media picked up on the listing and poked fun at the shower-kitchen situation, that applicant tried to negotiate. Dippolito recalled, “The guy e-mailed me and said, ‘We really don’t want to pay more than sixteen-fifty.’ And I said, ‘Guys, I can’t get you an apartment in Queens for sixteen-fifty!’”

by Matthew J.X. Malady

just fyi a ticket for running a red light on a bike is $278 dollars

— Dan Nosowitz (@dannosowitz) August 4, 2014

Dan! So what happened here?

Oh boy. So, last August, I was riding my bike to go feed a friend’s cats while he was on vacation, which I only mention because I am about to become pretty unsympathetic and I want to start things off on a good note. I am a pretty safe cyclist; I always wear a helmet, I only bike in bike lanes, I never go the wrong way up a one-way street. I do, or did, at least, routinely run red lights, though. Not in a particularly unsafe way, just in the same way a pedestrian does. Look both ways, etc, etc. Anyway I was running a red light while on Washington, crossing from the south to the north side of Fulton, and there was a cop parked on the north side of Fulton, behind a van so I couldn’t see her.

She whooped her siren and for whatever reason I decided I would try to make it as difficult as possible for her to write me a ticket. The first thing I did was pretend I didn’t hear the siren and turned right onto Gates, through another red light, which was out of the way to my friend’s house but looked like a pretty good escape route. The cop was not fooled and chased me down, at which point I couldn’t really pretend I didn’t hear the siren anymore, so I stopped. The cop yelled at me for a while about running two red lights (I wanted to, but did not, mention that I only ran the second red light because she caught me running the first red light).

At some point, she asked me for ID. Ah ha, I thought, this is another good way for me to make it hard enough for her to write me a ticket that she’ll let me off with a warning. “I don’t have my ID,” I said, making sure to angle myself so she couldn’t see my wallet’s bulge in my back pocket. She informed me that it’s illegal to ride a bike in New York City without ID, but that she’d let that slide if I could call someone who could verify my identity.

I tried to think of someone who would be around to answer a truly weird phone call at like 1 p.m. on a Tuesday, and decided to call my friend, because he was probably just looking at pictures of German short-haired pointer puppies at that time of day. So I call my friend, who answers, and without thinking I just say, “Hey John, it’s Dan,” at which point the cop yells “YOU WEREN’T SUPPOSED TO SAY YOUR NAME, THAT’S THE WHOLE POINT OF THIS.” I say, “Oh, sorry, I’m giving the phone to this police officer,” because I heard somewhere that cops don’t like being called cops. My friend is very confused at this point.

The cop demands to know my full name, and then my age. My friend is a year or two younger than me so he kind of guesses my age, but he gets it right. The cop, barely satisfied, goes back to her car to write me a ticket. My friend asks me if I’m okay. I am totally okay. At one point an older guy sees what’s happening and yells at the cop: “I run red lights all day every day!” The cop informs him this is illegal. The guy says he’s not going to stop.

Anyway, the cop writes me a ticket for two hundred and seventy-eight dollars, which is the same fine as if I was driving a car through that red light — which strikes me as sort of insane, but I am also definitely guilty, so I can’t complain too much — and tells me that since it’s my first offense the judge will probably throw it out.

I continue on to my friend’s house, stopping at every red light on the way, to feed the cats.

We talked about this when it happened but decided to delay publishing until after the legal process had run its course. Now that it has, what can you tell us? Did you beat the rap?

Haha okay, so, I have to plead either guilty or not guilty, and I was really hoping the judge would, as the cop suggested, just throw out my case because I’m a good guy overall, and the only way to even SEE a judge is to plead not guilty, which makes me uncomfortable because, as I said before, I am very much guilty. Anyway, I plead not guilty and the city assigns me a court date on 4/20. Of the next year.

Months and months go by. Eventually it’s 4/20. I ask my friends what I’m supposed to wear to a traffic violation hearing. Either nobody knows or they just prefer to make fun of me for even asking. I end up wearing a dress shirt tucked into a pair of khakis like I’m going to a bar mitzvah. I keep a tie rolled up in my bag in case I walk in and everyone else is wearing a tie.

The traffic violation bureau is in the Atlantic Mall, close enough to an Auntie Anne’s Pretzels that you can smell them. I am easily the most formally dressed person in the entire place, including the judges. Anyway, I get there early because I’m nervous, but there’s really nothing to do, so I sit on an uncomfortable bench and read for a while. Eventually, it’s time for court.

Traffic court is amazing because there are so many violations that they can’t really see people privately. Instead it’s like a small shitty classroom-type setup, and the judge calls you and the cop — if the cop shows up — to her podium thing, and you argue your cases while maybe twenty-five other people pretend like they’re not listening. If the cop doesn’t show up, which happens a lot, the case is thrown out. I was hoping this would happen, but my cop showed up right on time. I thought about making up some story but decide I’m guilty enough already.

I’m the second person called, which is kind of shitty because I couldn’t see how other people did stuff. The cop has a sheet of paper on which her version of things (“the truth”) is printed in all capital letters. She reads her story. I say nothing. The judge interrupts the cop halfway through and says: “So you were sitting on the north side of the intersection, yes? And the defendant was on the south side?” I say nothing, again. The cop says yes. “How do you know that his light was actually red? What if there was a delayed green on that side?” I think, very cool question, very The Good Wife, but there definitely is no delayed green on that light, and I bet there’s a sweet cop app that can confirm that. Anyway, I continue to say nothing.

The cop is stymied. She admits she didn’t check to see if there was a delayed green. While she’s stammering, the judge says “NOT GUILTY” and stamps a piece of paper, very authoritative. Then the judge tells me I can go but that the cop should stay for a second. I say “thank you ma’am,” the first words I’ve said all day, and get the fuck out of there. I do not get an Auntie Anne’s pretzel on the way out, but I sort of want one.

Lesson learned (if any)?

After reading a lot about traffic laws for bikers it became pretty clear that I did exactly the wrong thing; if I’d stopped right when the cop first pulled me over, and was contrite, she probably would have let me off with a warning. Another cool lesson: Always plead not guilty! It turns out, legally speaking, you don’t have to actually be not guilty to plead not guilty. Sometimes guilty people go free! For example, me!

Just one more thing.

I actually do stop at red lights now. It turns out to not really make my biking trip all that much slower. Also, most bikers are assholes. Myself included.

Disclosures: Dan’s “friend” and accomplice was one of the editors of this website. He regrets his part in not having Dan sent directly to jail.

Photo by Savio Sebastian