One way to reckon with John Darnielle’s catalog, which is at this point unapproachably large, is to think of it as a set of standards, revisited and revised over the years. Here is a new one, about luchadores, from Category 5B [STORYTELLING] Section 3 [UPBEAT/WISTFUL].

Palantir is a sort-of evil data mining company co-founded by the sort-of evil billionaire Peter Thiel. It is being used by the value-neutral New York City Mayor’s Office of Special Enforcement to locate “illegal hotels” being run by definitely evil* commercial hosts on Airbnb. Sort-of evil Peter Thiel is also in Airbnb. This may look like a venture capital ouroboros, but it is less one end of a snake preying on the other than time-honored synergy: One company cleans up the bad actors in the other company, making the first look attractive and the second at least palatable to government agencies. It’s so beautiful it looks like money.

* (Why are commercial Airbnb hosts definitely evil? Well, consider that the state attorney’s office found that six percent of hosts did thirty-six percent of private apartment bookings, for thirty-seven percent of the revenue, and that more than four-and-a-half thousand apartments listed on Airbnb were booked for short-term rentals for three months of the year or more — meaning somebody could and should have been living in those apartments. Instead, that somebody just outbid you on the perfect apartment you just had your eye on in Ridgewood.)

(via)

★★ A reprieve written up but left unstamped in the outgoing mail. The wind was trying to make up for the relative warmth, biting as hard as it could with blunted teeth. The sky was blurrily mottled, unresolved between brightness and dimness. Over time the clouds came into focus, piled up more thickly. In the middle of a meeting, there was what looked like expansive blue sky in a window reflected in a glass wall. But outside afterward there were only tiny glimpses of blue, in widely separated regions of the heavens. The burned-out trunk of a Christmas tree, needles and branches consumed, lay by a blackened patch of sidewalk. The blue parts grew more distinct and lovelier, limned in white gold, shedding a pink aura on the surrounding gray.

At the end of the day, outside of a nursery school, a young boy wanders away from his teachers and classmates and buries himself beneath a mound of leaves that have accumulated in the circular driveway. When cars begin to arrive to pick up the other kids, he lays flat on his back with and holds his breath as they pass over him, over his fort of leaves, tires on either side.

Ten, twenty, thirty years from now, the boy will dream of the sensation: a claustrophiliac rush, the rumbling of engines overhead, the smell of the oil, the heat of the metal so close to his body. He remembers feeling safely enveloped, every time, in the cocoon of soft crunchy feathers.

He hears his teacher calling his name, and other voices. People are looking for him.

He pops up and out from under the pile. “Hi,” he calls out, laughing, and sees that there are not many of his classmates left. It’s just his teacher, and now a couple of other teachers, and three or four other children standing in front of the school. His teacher’s face goes white and she and her colleagues run to him and grab him and pull him roughly by his arms.

They’re angry, shouting, and he doesn’t know why. There’s chaos and then worry and soft talking before his mother arrives and drives him home.

Could this really have happened?

He will be wondering for the rest of his life.

(Previously.)

One of the best parts about winter is that you have an excuse for eating heavy, hot, filling food, even if that excuse isn’t so appropriate anymore, what with reasonably efficient heating and 24-hour gyms and Uniqlo’s newest probably-snake-oil-but-possibly-just-kooky-and-Japanese insulation technology. But still! It’s great to eat soups and roasts and braises and chili and, I don’t know, lasagna, because it all tastes great and warming and filling. That said, sometimes eating warm and soft/liquid things constantly can feel a little leaden, and you long for the warm days of summer when you would eat crisp, fresh produce (do other people long for that? I long for that, like, constantly) and feel better about your life choices, if only for an hour.

Luckily there are lots of ways to do that in the wintertime. One of the easiest is to eat a whole lot of citrus, because it’s in season. Vegetables might seem harder; the freshest vegetables in the winter are usually not prepared in a crisp, fresh way. The hardier brassicas, like kale and collards, are best when cooked low and slow to break down their fibers (I am aware that every restaurant in every city with a population above 20,000 serves a kale salad, and am further convinced that 99% of these are tough, fibrous, stringy, and unpleasant). Root vegetables and some squash varieties are either in season or store well through the winter, but are usually roasted. Ah, but what if we…don’t roast them? What if we eat them raw?

Most root vegetables can be eaten raw, and have a very different flavor than they do when cooked: sometimes spicy, usually sweet, and always kind of cruciferous and herbaceous and fresh. Cooking tends to mellow out the flavors of any vegetable, which is sometimes necessary, but root vegetables like turnips and rutabaga are so mild to begin with that eating them raw is the best way to wrangle the most flavor out of them. One difference: when eating raw, you want the freshest, firmest, smallest ones you can find. Those enormous celeriac roots are fine for soup, but served raw they’re woody and tasteless.

There are a few basic ways to prepare a raw root vegetable. They are uniformly very crunchy, so you don’t want big chunks or cubes, the way you’d want them for a roast. And the skin, unfortunately, is not always palatable. Your primary tools for dealing with winter vegetables are: a very sharp knife, and possibly a grater.

Your knife needs to be extremely sharp for this task; dull knives are a lot more dangerous than sharp knives, because dull knives slip, especially off of moist vegetables. A peeler will work for some of these vegetables but not for others, and I prefer using a knife anyway; it’s a good way to practice your knife skills and I don’t really think it’s much slower. To peel, cut off the top and bottom of the vegetable, sit it down on its newly flat end, and kind of run your knife from top to bottom. Here’s a video, because it’s hard to describe (but easy to do!).

As for a grater, the best option is an attachment for your food processor (it’ll be a disc, probably) or stand mixer. A box grater tends to make thin, flat strips, which are a little flimsy and can get soggy. I haven’t used too many of those dedicated shredders, but I have used this one, and it is awful awful: difficult to use, end product is inconsistent and there’s lots of waste.

So! The different kinds of winter vegetables that are good for eating raw:

Carrot: You are probably familiar with the carrot. The peel is perfectly edible, though you’ll want to wash it well. One of the sweetest root vegetables, it’s often paired with other sweet things, like dried fruit, which I don’t really agree with. I think it’s better as the sweet component to more savory things, especially spices; ginger, cumin, and dried chile are my favorites.

Beet: Really, really good raw. About the same texture as carrot, pretty light as far as root vegetables go and doesn’t require marinating (though you certainly can). The peel is not very palatable, so get it off with a sharp knife. All varieties of beet can be eaten raw, and all are prettier when raw than cooked (especially the candy-striped chioggia beet). Like carrots, beets are extremely sweet and pair well with dairy, herbs, and vinegars.

Celeriac: One of the toughest and most intimidating of the root vegetables, celeriac is a variety of celery (not the root of your normal supermarket celery, but similar) cultivated for its root. It looks like it should be sitting on the shelf of a dusty apothecary. Cut off the entire gnarled bottom — don’t worry too much about waste, celeriac is really cheap — and then peel with a knife the same way you did the beet. Celeriac is a weird magic vegetable, with a distinct delicate celery-ish flavor that’s somehow sweeter and more aromatic than celery. Usually found raw in a classic French salad with mayonnaise.

Kohlrabi: Looks like an alien pancreas. It’s in the brassica family, along with broccoli and cabbage and like pretty much every other vegetable, and tastes like it. Available in a few different colors but it’s sort of misleading because the skin is extremely fibrous and not very palatable. Peel the same way you would a beet or celeriac, but don’t discard the stems and leaves; the whole thing is edible and the stems and leaves are really good in a stir-fry. Tastes basically like broccoli stems.

Sunchoke: Also known as the Jerusalem artichoke, this little guy looks kind of like ginger, but it’s actually a relative of the sunflower that’s native to the Northeast. One of the most flavorful roots on this list, it’s kind of nutty and very crisp, almost like an apple. It can cause farts, which is fun. One English farmer, upon coming to America, said: “which way soever they be dressed and eaten, they stir and cause a filthy loathsome stinking wind within the body, thereby causing the belly to be pained and tormented, and are a meat more fit for swine than men.” Haha! But also I don’t find them to be that farty. And they’re delicious.

Turnip: One of my least favorite vegetables to roast but one of my favorites to serve raw. It’s somewhere between a radish and a carrot: sweet, mild, with a touch of spiciness. Goes well with cured meats and mustards.

Winter squash: It’s rarely done and I have no idea why! Butternut squash is one of my least favorite vegetables when roasted, but raw, it has a fruit-level (I know it’s technically a fruit but you get what I mean) amount of sweetness, and a really nice crisp texture, though softer than the root vegetables on this list. Goes especially well with nuts and seeds, I think.

Rutabaga: Like a turnip but tougher. I also have a hard time finding young, fresh rutabagas; usually they’re enormous mature ones, which are not very good raw.

Parsnip: Honestly? Don’t bother. The parsnip is edible when raw but is starchy and flavorless unless you get the smallest, most delicate ones. Even then it tastes like a carrot that’s had the flavor vampired out of it.

Potatoes/Sweet Potatoes: Potatoes are not actually related to sweet potatoes at all but my advice in this case is the same for both: do not eat raw. Both have various chemicals that make eating them raw unpleasant or even unhealthy.

Now: some recipes.

Raw Beet Salad With Ricotta Cheese

Shopping list: Beets, sunflower seeds (roasted), ricotta cheese (full fat), arugula, fresh lemon, olive oil, mustard, shallots.

Chop a shallot finely and put in a little Tupperware container. Squeeze lemon over it to cover and let sit while you make the rest of the salad. Peel and slice a couple of beets into very thin rounds (a mandoline is helpful here) and slice those to form matchsticks. Toss with a handful or two of arugula. Mix about two tablespoons of sunflower seeds into an eighth of a cup of ricotta, adding salt and pepper to taste. Add a little squeeze of mustard into your lemon/shallot cup, then pour in some olive oil. Cover and shake vigorously to combine, tasting to make sure you have the right balance of lemon and oil, then pour over the arugula and beets and toss. Put onto a plate and kind of squeeze some of the sunflower/ricotta mixture into little clumps and scatter them across the salad.

Raw Root Vegetables With Avocado And Ginger Vinaigrette

Shopping list: Carrots (multicolored if you can get them), sunchokes, turnips, avocado, pistachios, ginger (fresh or frozen), rice wine vinegar, brown sugar, chile paste.

Shave all the root vegetables into thin strips. The best way to do this is with a mandoline, and because the mandoline is possibly the most dangerous tool in your kitchen, use either a hand-guard (the little plastic thing that came with your mandoline) or a kevlar glove, which costs 12 bucks on Amazon and basically makes you an X-Man. These will be different shapes, and that’s good, because these vegetables grow in different shapes and who are we to manhandle them into uniformity? The carrots will be long strips, the sunchokes will be short, the turnips will be rounds. Good. Shave a few of each thinly and put in a big bowl. Scatter in some pistachios. (Do I have to tell you to shell the pistachios? Shell the pistachios. You can’t eat pistachio shells.) Dice an avocado. Now make the vinaigrette: take your fresh or frozen knob of ginger, about the size of your thumb (frozen is easier for this) and, using a microplane, grate it into a Tupperware. Add in rice wine vinegar to cover, then some brown sugar, more than you think you need, and a small blob of chile paste (I use sambal oelek, usually). Cover and shake thoroughly to combine. Taste and see if it needs anything, adding more of the ingredients to balance. Throw vinaigrette into salad bowl and toss.

Raw Kohlrabi And Citrus Salad

Shopping list: Kohlrabi (any color), grapefruit, pretty orange (cara cara or blood), goat cheese, fresh mint, rice wine vinegar, walnut oil.

Peel and slice kohlrabi into thin rounds, then in half, forming half-moons. Supreme all the citrus (more info on how to do that here). Toss this all together in a bowl and crumble the goat cheese on top. Mix together rice wine vinegar with just a touch of the walnut oil; walnut oil is extremely strong and also will go rancid, so keep it in the fridge. Salt and pepper to taste, and let it sit for at least an hour, overnight would be better. Slice the mint into chiffonade: stack all the leaves of mint on top of each other, then roll it tightly like a sleeping bag. Slice thinly across the roll of mint leaves, forming very narrow strips. Scatter the mint onto the salad just before serving.

I still tend to overload on soups and stews and roasts and bakes in the wintertime, and there’s nothing wrong with that! But sometimes you really just want something crisp and fresh, and all the cucumbers are watery and waxy, the tomatoes are from god knows where and taste like a tomato as imagined by someone who’s always hated tomatoes, the zucchini is squishy and the greens are all sprayed and bagged. Root vegetables are in season, at the peak of their flavor, and eating them raw can be a way to get the most out of them while at the same time soothing our hunger for real produce.

Also when is summer again.

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

Photo by Ted Major

by Matthew J.X. Malady

People drop things on the Internet and run all the time. So we have to ask. In this edition, writer Roberto Baldwin tells us more about living in a state of Uber confusion — which is to say, California.

Pulled over to text wife. Someone got in my car thinking it was an uber. Le sigh

— Roberto Baldwin (@strngwys) January 3, 2015

Roberto! So what happened here?

At some point every car in San Francisco will be an Uber and every citizen, a driver, so I shouldn’t have been surprised when a random stranger walked up to my car, opened the passenger door, and started to take a seat. Actually, it’s really my fault. I pulled over to respond to a text from my wife a few yards from the famous-for-charging-too-much-for-toast coffee shop, The Mill. If you’re a car near The Mill, you’re probably picking up or dropping off a very important startup founder or VC.

Still it was a bit surprising when a gentleman who was on the phone started to get into my car. Before he actually took a seat, he peered into the vehicle and I asked, “Can I help you?” His response, “Oh shit!” He then quickly closed the door and ran off. I mean ran in the literal sense. He actually ran away from the car.

As he ran off (actually running) he mumbled something to the mysterious person on the other end of his phone call. Maybe he told the person he almost got into a private passenger vehicle thinking it was his Uber. I like to think he told the person that he was almost kidnapped and it was only his quick thinking and sprinting that saved him from a life of basement bondage.

The weirdest part is that I drive a Fiat — the small one with only two doors. Not exactly a car made for driving random strangers around (or kidnapping them), and yet this has happened before.

Wait, this has happened to you in the past? Does it always go down in the exact same way? And have you thought about running some sort of prearranged bit the next time this occurs?

Not only has it happened before, but other people are telling me that this happens pretty often in San Francisco. The last time it happened to me it was about 10 p.m. at night and I was South of Market. I had just gotten into my car and started it up. I was selecting music on my iPhone when a guy walked up, opened the door and began to sit in the passenger seat. I just looked at him iPhone in hand, The Smiths blaring out of the speakers, thinking it was someone I knew hopping in the car to say hi. Nope, just some random dude who decided that getting into a stranger’s car in the middle of the night without first making sure it was his ride was a smart idea. He quickly realized his mistake, apologized, and got out of the car.

I’ve decided that next time this happens I’ll just drive off with the person and start asking if they have the money for the “stuff.” As they stutter that they’re not sure what I’m talking about and that they must have gotten into the wrong car, I’ll tell them: “Yeah, I bet Dave told you to say that. You know what? You can tell Dave he’s not getting his pets back until he pays what’s due. In fact, I want you to put that fancy-ass phone to your ear right now, call Dave, and tell him I said that.” At that point I’m pretty sure they’ll just jump out of the vehicle. Or, they’ll call Dave and tell him what I said.

Another option is to treat it like a car-jacking and scream at the individual that I have a wife and kids and that they can have my car, just please don’t hurt me.

Lesson learned (if any)?

I suppose I should start locking my car doors while I drive. People will still try to get in the car, but a locked door will hopefully snap them out of their trance and allow them to see that this Fiat isn’t their ride to the Battery or startup party or wherever the hell they’re going.

Just one more thing.

The next iteration of this is someone knocking at my front door because they think I’m in their Airbnb. There’ll be confusion and phones will be double checked because “I’m sure this is the address.” Eventually they’ll leave. Well, hopefully.

This is just a symptom of everyone in San Francisco walking around in a smartphone-induced haze. Sure it happens in other places, but this is the birthplace of the technology that begs for our attention. And because we can never be unconnected or bored, we gleefully give it over. So instead of paying attention to what’s going on around us, we jump into the car of a random stranger because an app said that’s where our ride would be located.

I’m just as bad as everyone else, with my face buried in Twitter as I walk past the bar I was supposed to meet friends at for the third time. How long until someone actually drives off with a confused Uber customer? I’m sure it’s happening right now. But at least they’re not being charged surge pricing or a safety fee.

Photo by Joakim Formo

Join the Tell Us More Street Team today! Have you spotted a tweet or some other web thing that you think would make for a perfect Tell Us More column?Get in touch through the Tell Us More tip line.

by The Awl

Even when Gucci’s in jail, he can still make or break a rapper’s career.

“We don’t have less time than ever; on the contrary, life expectancy has steadily increased. What we have, at this latest point so far in human history, is more of so much else — more people, more books, more cultural products of every kind, in addition to the staggering volume of online content. We feel ever more acutely the mismatch between available time and all the possible ways we could spend it…. And yet, despite the ostensible constant novelty — new information, new communication, new techno-toys — there is a numbing sameness to the experience of daily life for many of us. Too much of life is spent in the same essential way: clicking and typing and scrolling, liking and tweeting, assimilating the latest horrors from the news. And this relates back to the speed of time’s passage. True experiential variety, the social scientists tell us, is what gives life the feeling of passing more slowly — getting out of our routines, having adventures. It’s when the days pass by in a barely distinguishable blur that we look back and think, ‘Where did the time go?’”
 — Add this to your collection of theories about why everything is terrible and only getting worse.

by The Awl

Let’s ask Dillon Francis a lot of really personal questions.