Era Oopsed

“For well over a decade, Google has maintained one of the internet’s most important historical archives — a collection of over 800 million messages from discussion groups dating back to 1981. And much to the chagrin of online researchers, the company has been doing a really bad job.

In December, users discovered they could no longer search for posts across the archive by date. Google, a search engine, had made its archive impossible to search.”

Pickling is utterly twee, from start to finish. This is a technique that, in some forms, actually requires a mason jar. It conjures images of grandmothers preserving the year’s harvest for the hard winter ahead, and what could be more authentic and shitty than that? Pickling is tailor-made for Pinterest, is what I’m saying. But you should not let that count against it. Pickles are delicious. And, in the form I prefer, pickling is an extremely easy and quick technique to bring a ton of intense flavor to a variety of plant items.

Pickling is a pretty vague term; it can refer to any of several preservation techniques involving salt, vinegar, or both. Some involve heat, some do not. The main branches of the pickle tree (this metaphor works because pickles do not grow on trees) are the salt branch and the vinegar branch. The salt branch is probably the oldest and still feels the most primal: A vegetable or fruit is placed in a salt and water solution, usually at room temperature, which causes various anaerobic bacteria to begin to eat the plant. They die and let loose with gaseous byproducts, which changes the flavor and sometimes the texture of the plant. A classic, ultra-traditional New York City deli pickle is an example of this; the most ornery of deli pickle recipes rely on no vinegar whatsoever. This method requires a long period of time and can also be sort of gross; the byproducts are often referred to as “scum,” because that is a good way to refer to a mass of white fungus-y stuff.

A vinegar brine is easier and quicker. Vinegar is not as excellent of a preservative as salt, which means a vinegar pickle won’t last as long, but if you’re just looking for that pickle-y flavor, which I am, vinegar takes the place of the natural byproducts of bacteria that a salt pickle takes so long to force out. But because we don’t really care about a vinegar pickle remaining shelf-stable for months, we don’t mess with the rigamarole of sterilizing jars and boiling them to seal them. A vinegar pickle is more like an XXX-TREME marinade (with some mild preservative properties) than the ancient mystical bacterial forces that turn cucumbers into deli pickles or cabbage (or whatever) into kimchi. But that doesn’t make it a lesser pickle; it’s merely easier.

Quick pickling takes like fifteen minutes and requires no specialized equipment or knowledge. The ratio of apparent difficulty to actual difficulty is EXTREMELY HIGH — the kind of ratio I like because I am very lazy. The basic formula is: Slice a fruit or vegetable thinly. Place it in a glass container of some sort. In a pot, bring vinegar and sugar to a boil. Pour it over the over sliced plant matter. Cover and let it cool.

The shorter brining period necessitates a thinly sliced pickle; you don’t have enough time for the vinegar to penetrate a thick cucumber or a whole daikon or even a whole beet. That means that quick pickles tend to find their best uses as ingredients, rather than as snacks by themselves. Where you might munch on a dill pickle, it’s not quite as satisfying to eat a thin sliver of quick-pickled red onion. But I like that. All my favorite dishes are studies in balance: savory, sweet, spicy, sour, bitter, herbal, salty, fatty. So a quick pickled vegetable becomes one of those finishing touches that can bring balance to a dish, like a last drizzle of oil, a pinch of salt, or a splash of hot sauce.

There is no iron-clad recipe for quick pickles, because you need to adjust the vinegar solution depending, mostly, on how sweet the thing you’re pickling is. A carrot, being very sweet, needs less sugar than a radish. But a general starting point is three quarters of a cup of vinegar to one tablespoon of sugar, with a pinch of salt. You need enough liquid to cover the vegetables; you want the vegetables to hang out in a soothing bath of vinegar solution. You can use them right away, or put them in the fridge and use them for around two weeks, keeping them in their solution, along with whatever aromatics (chiles, peppercorns, herbs) you like. The flavor will get more and more intense the longer you wait, but these aren’t shelf-stable like some more intensive pickles, so they need to stay cold, and won’t last much longer than a couple weeks.

Red Onions

Shopping list: Red onions, apple cider vinegar, black peppercorns, dried bay leaves, sweetener (either brown sugar, white sugar, or honey)

With a sharp knife, slice off the top of a red onion, opposite the root. Stand it on the newly flat edge and slice downward through the root, giving you two halves. Peel off the shitty papery outer skin. (Save it if you’re the kind of weirdo that makes stock from those things; I am.) With a mandoline, slice these halves into very thin half-rounds. Place them in a nonreactive container, like a Pyrex tupperware or a mason jar if you live in Brooklyn or wish you lived in Brooklyn. In a small saucepan on the stove, pour in three quarters of a cup of apple cider vinegar and a tablespoon of whatever sweetener you like. Add in a few peppercorns and two bay leaves, and bring the mixture to a boil while stirring to dissolve the sugar. As soon as it boils, turn the heat off and pour the vinegar mixture over the onions. The onions should be just covered; if not, go make some more brine. Cover and let it come down to room temperature, which will take about thirty minutes.

Uses: On top of anything fatty, especially tacos like carnitas or on rice and beans. Put them into any sandwiches; they are especially excellent with grilled cheese and falafel. Add to a traditional egg salad, along with a little bit of the brine. The brine, by the way, doesn’t go bad and is delicious by itself. Try it on french fries instead of ketchup!

Carrot and Radish

Shopping list: Carrots, radishes, rice wine vinegar, white sugar, dried chile flakes

Because you’re mixing carrots (very sweet) and radishes (not very sweet), you can pretty much keep the same ratio as you did with the onions: three quarters cup of vinegar to one tablespoon sugar. You can use any kind of carrot and any kind of radish, though I’d recommend against darkly colored vegetables; red onions turn gloriously pink when pickled, but purple carrots and colored radishes just look sort of miscolored. Anyway, do as before: slice vegetables thinly, put them in container, bring liquid to a boil and pour over vegetables.

Uses: This is a modified version of the pickles used for a banh mi, so it’s great in, well, a banh mi, or anything with those flavors. My favorite is a noodle salad. Cook ramen (instant is fine, maybe even better) and cool; toss with pickled carrots and radishes, crushed peanuts, and fresh mint and basil and cilantro. For a sauce, use the ginger vinaigrette from this post.

Raisins

Shopping list: Golden raisins, white wine vinegar, white sugar, dried chile flakes, mustard seeds, sprig of fresh rosemary

I know I’ve already talked about pickled grapes, but this is a little different. Golden raisins are one of my favorite ingredients to go with savory dishes, and usually you need to rehydrate them in hot water. But what if we used a deliciously spicy liquid instead of water? Throw a handful of raisins in a glass container, adding in the sprig of fresh rosemary. In a pan on the stove, bring three-fourths cup of white wine vinegar, a half-tablespoon of sugar, a pinch of chile flakes, and a few mustard seeds to a boil. Pour the liquid over the raisins, cover, and let cool.

Uses: These are POWERFUL pickles, intensely sweet and sour and spicy. They’re great on rich meats, like duck or pork, but I like them in a couscous salad. Cook couscous the usual way (1:1 ratio of couscous to boiling water, cover and let sit for a few minutes, uncover and fluff with fork), add in toasted walnuts or pine nuts, chopped cucumber and any other fresh vegetables you have around (anything green works, really). Top with olive oil, salt, and a squeeze of lemon juice.

You can pickle pretty much anything, though generally I like to stick with things that are crunchy. Cucumbers can work well in a quick pickle, though they’ll never get that deep dark funk of a fermented pickle. Fennel pickles really well, as do raw beets or kohlrabi or pretty much any other winter root vegetable. (Stay away from cabbage, though; I love cabbage, but with a quick pickle I tend to think they get a little farty.)

I like quick pickles because they are delicious and easy to make, but also because having them on hand encourages you to balance flavors more than you might have otherwise. Think of, say, a sandwich. The world’s great sandwiches — the banh mi, the Cuban, the reuben — have a hit of acidity from a pickle. The pickle is what makes them. And they’re not hard to make.

Photo by timlewisnm

Crop Chef is a column about the correct ways to prepare and consume plant matter.

Thanksgiving happened so late last year that ever since then I have felt like I am chronically behind and every holiday sneaks up on me. Which is to say it did not occur to me until very very recently that today is the most obese of Tuesdays. Happy Mardi Gras! Here’s what’s happening down in New Orleans, and here’s what people of a certain vintage like to listen to today:

And here is your annual reminder to not be alarmed tomorrow when you see people walking around with ash on their foreheads. It’s a thing.

The Nation has a review of Ben Lerner’s 10:04 that contrasts the American “novel of detachment” (think writers in Brooklyn obsessing over how strange it is to be a writer in Brooklyn, how strange it is to be anything at all) with the international “novel of engagement” (think Europeans and Canadians who are equally self-absorbed but a lot more hopeful about it). If you can stand to see one more story with the names Heti, Kunkel, Knausgaard and Waldman in it (and if just reading them in this sentence was tough to take you have both my sympathies and apologies) you should give it a go: Even if you are someone whose opinion of contemporary fiction is that it shows the logical result of awarding advanced degrees for professionalized navel gazing to people whose fragile, precious gift precludes them from doing any other kind of work, you will find that it gives you something to think, or at the very least roll your eyes, about.

As southeast Brazil grapples with its worst drought in nearly a century, a problem worsened by polluted rivers, deforestation and population growth, the largest reservoir system serving São Paulo is near depletion. Many residents are already enduring sporadic water cutoffs, some going days without it. Officials say that drastic rationing may be needed, with water service provided only two days a week.

Behind closed doors, the views are grimmer. In a meeting recorded secretly and leaked to the local news media, Paulo Massato, a senior official at São Paulo’s water utility, said that residents might have to be warned to flee because “there’s not enough water, there won’t be water to bathe, to clean” homes.

“We’re witnessing an unprecedented water crisis in one of the world’s great industrial cities,” said Marússia Whately, a water specialist at Instituto Socioambiental, a Brazilian environmental group. “Because of environmental degradation and political cowardice, millions of people in São Paulo are now wondering when the water will run out.”

Keeping Austin weird — along with the rest of Texas and California — will be really easy when the water runs out, like it’s about to in São Paulo, and everybody has to leave.

★ Wind shrieked against the building and played its music in the bathroom ductwork. The light was surprisingly non-astringent — dry filth, blown aloft, produced a falsely mellow scattering haze. The three-year-old’s weeklong cold had developed a secondary infection of raging cabin fever, requiring the use of the upper deadbolt to contain it. The boiling pasta water in the kitchen fogged the windows in the children’s bedroom. A gust threw clouds of dust into the air beside the taxi, as it squeaked and rattled through Hell’s Kitchen. The wind in the night sounded like trucks driving over steel plates.

by Michael Patrick Welch

A couple of weeks ago, on a moist, chilly morning, I was drinking the day’s first coffee when a text arrived from my wife. “Someone murdered one of the goats.”

We’d recently moved to New Orleans’ slightly more suburban West Bank, where we could have more space, enough for my wife to keep goats. The plan had been to use the goats to help fight the post-Katrina blight that everyone complains about — tangled jungle that takes teams of men, gasoline, and garbage bags to clear away, our goats would devour. The city agreed to pay my wife to keep eighteen goats at a neighborhood park that had fallen into disrepair. For most of the last year, the goats had lived safely in a giant, beautiful, wooded area not far from the Mississippi River.

I sped off to the park, four miles away. As I rolled down the park’s main paved road, then across a verdant baseball field to the goats’ red mobile barn, I passed no one. Locked inside, sixteen goats pressed their noses against windows, watching me step over the waist-high electric fence that encircled their barn and about an acre of unkempt brush; whenever the animals ate one area bare, we’d move the barn and fence to a new feral plot. I walked over to where Calvin lay, on the edge of the stripped bare forest, his head missing. “Jack is missing too,” my wife told me. Calvin and Jack were the sons of our extra-small miniature pygmy goat, Wille. We thought he was too short to mount any of the female goats until one day, Caldonia popped out two tiny miracle babies that, four months later, still resembled kittens.

I trudged into the woods that the goats had cleared, looking for Jack’s body or Calvin’s tiny head. The electric fence, disconnected now, had been humming when my wife arrived earlier — a human intruder would have turned it off before entering. Back where our electric fence ended, the park’s chain-mail fence had been bent upwards, perhaps to accommodate passage. Farther down, an animal had dug under the fence recently. Otherwise, scouring our fenced-in acre, I found nothing.

Back at the barn, the police officer we had called, plus a lady from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, had arrived and were talking to my wife. She’d let her favorite goat out of the barn; tall, skinny Jesse is so well-mannered and loving that someone must have bottle-fed him from birth and let him sleep in their bed. The cop, who seemed polite and genuinely concerned, brought up “devil worshippers,” which seemed so absurd it forced my mind in the other direction. “Any dog with a particularly strong jaw could have grabbed Calvin’s head in its mouth like a tennis ball,” I said, “then given it a couple casual shakes and popped it off clean.” Everyone else shook their heads in disagreement as they marveled over the clean cut — no tearing, and somehow, no blood.

I didn’t want to mention the teens. But without much else to say, I grudgingly described six preppy white boys and girls who I’d encountered a few days ago. Though I’d rarely seen a goat get shocked, the herd could somehow discern whenever the fence’s battery had died, and escape. That time, they’d stayed just outside the fence, browsing around the baseball field. The teens had gathered to feed leaves to the goats and pet them. One of the boys held tiny Calvin upside down on his back — a position very uncomfortable for goats, whose many stomachs can crush their lungs. I warned the kids about all of this, nicely, and told them they were welcome to feed the goats leaves, but added, “They’re not yours. You shouldn’t really pick up strange animals you know nothing about.” Realizing I sounded like a dick, I added: “You could all help me lead the goats back into their fence? I’d appreciate y’all’s help. It’s easier to get them to follow a big group of people.”

The teens helped happily, except for the boy who’d held Calvin upside down. He stomped off in another direction, shouting back at his friends, “Hey! Fuck that guy! Don’t fucking help that asshole!” In an instant, I was alone with the goats.

By the end of this story, the authorities were convinced of the teens’ guilt.

The SPCA lady must have typed the press release on her iPhone from the park; by the time I arrived back at our house, my inbox had filled with mail from local journalists wanting my response to the SPCA’s “$1,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person responsible for this felony act of animal cruelty.” The press release, which incorrectly listed me as the goats’ owner, read:

The owner of the baby goat believes that an altercation with a group of teenagers this past weekend could be the root of this terrible act. The owner stated that the teenagers were trying to “mess with the goats” behind the fence and he told them to stop… the owner believes one of the teenagers involved in the altercation could be responsible for the goat’s death.

Every local television station took the bait and traveled out to the park with cameras. In a press conference, my sad-looking wife gave them her thoughts upon finding Calvin’s body: “It looked like it was left there on purpose for me to find.” WDSU’s and Fox 8’s stories made more mentions of the teens than of Calvin’s missing brother; WWLTV dreamt up a narrative scenario in which, “a nanny goat ran to the forest area and continuously called for her kid goats”; and WGNO expanded on that: “It’s a heartbreaking moment when you hear the mother goat cry out for her children.” A park visitor told WGNO’s reporter, “There’s a lot of really sick people in the world. It just makes you sad because you kind of have ownership of those goats because you see them every day.” The segment ended with the reporter stating solemnly, “The animals hold a special place in the hearts of families, now a mother’s heart is broken, as she searches for her babies.”

Within hours, the Associated Press picked up the beheading story, which spread across Louisiana to Baton Rouge, and Tibideaux, whose Daily Comet reported, incorrectly, that Calvin had been one of four goats, and that my name was Michael King. After that, the TV station KSLA ran the story in Shreveport, Louisiana, as well as Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas. Within twelve hours, it spread to papers and stations in Virginia, New Jersey, North Carolina, Arizona, and more. Texts streamed in from friends all over the country as if one of our daughters had died: “I can’t imagine how you all feel”; “We are here if you need anything,”; “Thinking of you during this tragic time.”

By evening, our non-story had gone national: ABC and Huffington Post ran a video of our herd and discussed the beheading, but didn’t mention the teens. Fox News reported, “SPCA spokeswoman Alicia Haefele (HAY-fuh-lee) says King’s husband, Michael King, told investigators the culprits might be teenagers he argued with over the weekend because they were trying to ‘mess with the goats.’”

On Sunday, the media storm ended when Calvin’s official obituary ran in New Orleans’s paper of record, The Times-Picayune, and the New Orleans Advocate printed a 1A above-the-fold story that my wife felt was the least sensational and most balanced of them all. “I’m not surprised that something happened to them, but I’m surprised that this is what happened,” my wife had admitted to the reporter. “I had been nervous about leaving them over here because somebody might just think they’re so cute and want to take them. But that’s not what happened.”

The next morning, I woke to a follow-up message from the cop. He said me that he was still waiting on the autopsy, but “in the meantime, I’d like to get a better description of these teens you had an altercation with.” I tried to change the subject: “Why do you think this story has gotten so much traction?” I asked him. He hadn’t read the Daily Mail story, but said that, since a vacationing Irish cop was shot while removing two hundred dollars from an ATM at 5 a.m. outside the French Quarter, many UK publications had begun following the NOPD on Twitter, looking for more strange New Orleans stories. “Like y’all’s,” he said. We discussed the possibility that the word “beheaded” transformed our story into fodder for algorithms in the age of ISIS. But the officer kept pushing me back to the teens until I told finally him that the mean boy had “Beiber hair.” But, I had to add, “I hope you aren’t putting all your eggs in this one basket.”

“I think it’s better, for y’all’s sake,” he said, “that we take this case up, and try to solve it, rather than just saying ‘Oh it was an animal,’ and dropping it. Don’t you think?”

The media had moved on from us by the time the autopsy finally came back. A knife had been used to behead Calvin. On February 4th, The New Orleans Advocate reported that the SPCA raised its reward to three thousand dollars.

Last week, we chose a new green area farther back into the park, a smaller plot, to maximize the fence’s shock, and added another, seven-foot-high fence made of barely visible deer mesh. The animals definitely won’t escape, though we can never totally keep people out. The goats had been smart enough to put themselves away each night in the barn, but I can sense them wondering why we now come at sunset, trick them into the barn with food, then lock the door behind them.

by Matthew J.X. Malady

People drop things on the Internet and run all the time. So we have to ask. In this edition, ESPN The Magazine Senior Writer Mina Kimes tells us more about what it was like to play Janine in a pint-sized crew of Ghostbusters back in the day.

an all-female Ghostbusters cast is awesome. it means girls no longer have to dress up as the secretary (like I did)pic.twitter.com/kerxI83jKe

 — @minakimes

Mina! So what happened here?

I’m about five years old in this picture, which means it was taken shortly after Ghostbusters II came out. I wasn’t allowed to see it in the theater, but I did watch the original Ghostbusters on VHS, and it gave me horrible nightmares. I was especially afraid of the villain, the woman who looked like zombie David Bowie. I wouldn’t even say her name aloud (notice that I’m not typing it here). My brother and I also watched The Real Ghostbusters, which was an animated series that aired after school. He always controlled the remote, so we only watched his favorite shows: Transformers, He-Man, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Darkwing Duck . . . .

My brother is the kid with the crescent-moon eyes pedaling in front of me. If you look closely, you can see that the patch on his chest says Stantz, as in Ray. People used to think we were twins. When we were little, I was jealous of him because he looked more Asian (we’re half-Korean). We were living on an Air Force base in Long Beach, Calif., back then, and my mom bought Isaac’s jumpsuit and my hot pink sweater/skirt set at the BX, or Base Exchange, which is a sort of subsidized department store for military families. She made the Ghostbusters patches out of cloth and fabric paint. We tried to dye my hair red, but only the baby hairs in my part picked up the color.

I don’t remember the names of the boys in the skeleton suits. I asked my mom if she knew who they were, and all she could recall was that that they were “wealthy neighbors.” That seems correct — they’re so blonde and scornful, they look like the bratty rich dudes in an eighties movie. The grinning bowl cut riding next to me is my brother’s friend Sean, or as we called him, Peter Venkman. Because we only lived at that Air Force base for a few years, we lost touch with him. Many years later, my mother told me that she had heard from a friend that Sean was “playing a lot of guitar in California,” which is probably a euphemism in Korean mom–speak.

That look on your face! Could you try and describe what you might have been thinking while this was going on. And do you remember if this crew ever busted any ghosts?

I don’t think I was pissed about dressing up as Janine; it didn’t occur to me that I could be anyone else. She was the only girl. I wasn’t a huge fan of the character — Venkman was my favorite — but I wanted to be part of the gang. I was obsessed with my brother. He was my idol, even though he used to trap his farts in jars and leave them in my bedroom.

So why do I look like I just smelled one of those farts? Honestly, I’ve never had a pleasant resting face. I even look disgruntled in my baby pictures — my parents say I popped out of the womb with a grimace, seemingly unimpressed with my surroundings (which is to say, the world). Once, when I was in elementary school, a bus driver stopped me and told me I “would look prettier with a smile.” I didn’t have a good comeback — I was like 8 years old — but from that point on, I never smiled on the bus.

I was a little jealous of my brother and his friends. For one, they got to wear jumpsuits (I still love a good jumpsuit). They also had plastic proton packs, which they hooked up to Nerf guns. They used to run around our house shooting ghosts, and I would chase after them lugging a stuffed Slimer doll. In The Real Ghostbusters, Janine and Slimer spend most of their time kicking it at Ghostbusters HQ. They’re kind of corny and ineffectual.

Lesson learned (if any)?

When I posted the picture on Twitter, some guy told me I shouldn’t blame “Hollywood” for not letting me dress up as a Ghostbuster, because it was my parents’ fault for not empowering me. That made me angry. I didn’t ask to dress up as a Ghostbuster because it didn’t seem like an option. I was five years old, man! I emulated what I saw, and the secretary was the only character that looked like me.

So I guess I learned that . . . that sucks. We should change that.

Just one more thing.

I still wear costumes on Halloween. Only now, I dress as the hero of my favorite show.

A sort of dream pop conceptual stress test: as woozy and gentle as possible, with video to match.

At the same time that Ford engineers were developing the sports car for the real world, software engineers were working to build a digital version of the GT to star in the latest version of the Xbox racing video game, Forza Motorsport. While video game developers have worked with automakers for years, it is rare for the two to partner from the start of a car’s development — and it meant that Ford had to invite the game developers into its inner circle at a time when few people, even at Ford, knew of the GT’s existence. A digital version of the Ford GT stars in the latest version of the Xbox racing video game, Forza Motorsport. The goal was to create a halo effect of a different sort, to woo elusive younger buyers who these days are less likely than their predecessors to drive. “We can start building that connection at a young age,” said Henry Ford III, who heads the automaker’s performance marketing unit and oversees the project.

There was once a time, not so long ago, when marketing expensive objects that make you look extremely cool but are environmentally unsound and liable to kill you directly to children was illegal. Fortunately, that time has passed.