Maggie Harrison’s War on Wine
The New York Times Magazine, July 9, 2023.
➽ Nominated for a 2024 James Beard Award
“The lists of flavors you see in typical tasting notes amount to a kind of bragging about the acuity of the writer’s palate, and they are also banal and dishonest — far more than pencil lead, marmalade or saddle leather, wine tastes like itself. What matters are the things it makes you perceive, feel and think about and how it lives in your memory. Tasting any great wine can be as immersive as watching a film. But Antikythera took me somewhere beyond that. First, it made me see colors: the inkiest indigos and the bluest blacks, streaked with fissures of silver. Then I pictured something lurching out of a cave on a moonless night during a thunderstorm, which made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.”
Cooking Isn’t Creative, and Isn’t Easy
The New York Times Magazine, October 11, 2012.
➽ Nominated for a 2013 James Beard Award
➽ Named a Must Read Profile of the Year by The Columbia Journalism Review
“For every mention of turkey fatigue or homemade soda bread, Kimball’s editorials conjure enough mountain-road auto wrecks, equine tramplings and corn-chopper dismemberments to max out a police blotter. Much of the rest is just weird. Kimball considers dog-powered washing machines, describes a cave where locals take children for some kind of homegrown Meso-American initiation rite and rewards the patient reader with epigrammatic gems like, ‘If you had walked across this country a hundred years ago, you probably wouldn’t have eaten the same biscuit twice’ and ‘When it comes to eating out, I have grown quite fond of church suppers’ and ‘squirrel is mild and lean.’”
The Transformational Power of the Right Spice
The New York Times Magazine, April 4, 2013.
➽ Nominated for a 2014 James Beard Award
“As I ate, my brain began to regurgitate childhood memories. First there was my mother’s beef flank, simmered in gravy to a punishing doneness; then the smell of a sweet clear brew, dispensed from Moscow store counters, called birch juice; and finally I recalled mushrooms. My great-grandmother and I foraged for them around the polluted lake in the village where she rented a cabin in the summers, and afterward we combed the woods that ran along the wheat fields of the collective farm. She showed me how to pickle and jar them, and in the fall I presented the results to my parents and assembled kin, who congratulated me and bit into the mushrooms with an exaggerated relish, at least until the food poisoning set in.”
Zoo Animals and Their Discontents
The New York Times Magazine, July 3, 2014
“Here is the thing about people who work at zoos, by which I mean the people who actually work with animals. Nearly to a one, they like animals, and dote on them, and enjoy their company to an almost unseemly degree. To be an animal keeper, you pretty much have to be aflame with a desire to do it and possess an attraction to animals that is probably inborn. Without it, it would be difficult to enjoy extracting treats from a log of horse meat, or manually probing the clammy underside of a 120-pound giant anteater for lumps, or having a crouton-size chunk of your thigh pecked out by a king vulture named Nubs with serious boundary issues, a nonstandard number of toes and the exact facial coloring of ’80s hair-metal frontman Dee Snider.”
Letter of Recommendation: Rodney Dangerfield
The New York Times Magazine, January 26, 2018.
“Imagine having no talent. Imagine being no good at all at something and doing it anyway. Then, after nine years, failing at it and giving it up in disgust and moving to Englewood, N.J., and selling aluminum siding. And then, years later, trying the thing again, though it wrecks your marriage, and failing again. And eventually making a meticulous study of the thing and figuring out that, by eliminating every extraneous element, you could isolate what makes it work and just do that. And then, after becoming better at it than anyone who had ever done it, realizing that maybe you didn’t need the talent. That maybe its absence was a gift.”
Unforseen Calamities
MoMA Magazine, May 20, 2020
“All That Heaven Allows—along with Polyester and Safe—exemplifies what are sometimes called women’s films. The genre established itself in mid-20th-century Hollywood; it’s built around a female protagonist, concerns itself with the home, motherhood, or romantic love, and is marketed to women. Scholars and critics often refer to these films as melodramas, a term spoiled by its whiff of condescension. I prefer to think of them as domestic operas.”
Can Kyoto's Buddhist Cuisine Teach Us All to Eat Better?
Saveur, November 29, 2017
➽ Anthologized in The Best American Food Writing 2018
“Sitting meditation, called zazen, is the heart of Buddhist practice, but Murase taught that this was unnecessary. Her radical teaching was that the profound mindfulness required to cook with all of one’s being was enough to attain enlightenment. For her disciple, this meant cooking from morning till night. “No one made sesame paste from scratch,” Tanahashi told me, but every week he spent hours in a lotus position on the floor of Murase’s temple, grinding sesame in a mortar. He seeded eggplants (picture for a moment the number of seeds in an eggplant), peeled daikon, grated mountains of lotus root. The whole time Murase’s promise stirred at the back of his mind—cooking could make you a Buddha.”
August Sander’s Life Studies
MoMA Magazine, October 23, 2019
“Today, looking at Sander’s portrait of Lou and Jimmy, it remains difficult to disentangle these facts from the image itself. Photography is often said to document physical reality, yet photographs rely nearly as much on what’s not in the picture—everything that has already happened, and has yet to. Where does the image end and biography begin? Is it possible to locate the boundary? In the end, this may be Sander’s main subject—things that photography can and cannot accomplish.”
Letter of Recommendation: Cheddar and Sour Cream Ruffles
The New York Times Magazine, August 17, 2016
“The chips’ magnificently artificial flavoring is not a simulacrum of nature but an improvement on it, as fantastical and engineered as an unmanned satellite. They are perfect, fully realized objects, requiring no context or elucidation. They promise nothing except sensory gratification, and I like that about them. They embody what William Carlos Williams wrote that poems should aspire to—‘no ideas but in things.’”
Out of the Woods
The New York Times Magazine, August 6, 2015
“‘The thing I miss is the specialness of being gay,’ the playwright Lisa Kron remarked in an interview with The New York Times. I wondered whether the gay residents of rural Tennessee shared this lament. I wanted to see how the encounter between gays and straights was unfolding far from the coastal cities, among two of the most culturally divergent constituencies I could think of — rural anti-assimilationist queers and their evangelical conservative neighbors, both of whom happen to oppose same-sex marriage, though for vastly different reasons.”
Next Stage: Kim Gordon Goes Solo
The New Yorker, June 3, 2013
“Gordon’s terse manner can appear standoffish. She doesn’t flatter or console needlessly, or smile when she’s not amused. She doesn’t mind the tension that arises from protracted silences. Julie Cafritz suggested that Gordon’s reticence is a by-product of hundreds of interviews with rock journalists, who tend to want to know (1) what it’s like to be a woman in a rock band, (2) the literal meaning of her lyrics, and (3) details about her gear, a subject that doesn’t interest her. Once, when a writer asked Gordon to name a favorite piece of equipment, she replied, ‘Electricity.’”
Dominique Ansel: The Leading Light of Pastry
Food & Wine, January 16, 2014
➽ Anthologized in Best Food Writing 2014
“Ansel—who is 36 but looks 28, with milk-chocolate eyes and a forehead of professorial elevation—sleeps barely five hours a night and is happiest tracing precise vectors with a bag of ginger-infused crème anglaise. He is soft-spoken and mild and organically averse to notoriety. Which is why there exists considerable irony in Ansel becoming the custodian of the world's most viral dessert, a situation that has forced him to hire Johann, a security guard shaped like a Coke machine, to discourage line-cutting, peddling and scalping outside the shop. The Cronut™ has impelled him to submit to thousands of personal questions, and to be photographed surreptitiously on the premises of Manhattan dry cleaners, and to be told by glucose-addled strangers, on an almost hourly basis, that he has changed their life.”
A Prisoner’s Reading List
The New Yorker, June 7, 2014
“The younger Genis and I talked. It came out that our parents knew each other slightly, and we had gone to the same high school, and after a while I wondered out loud why we hadn’t met. The reason, he confided, was that some weeks earlier he had been released from prison, where he spent ten years and three months after pleading guilty to five charges of armed robbery. He also remarked, offhandedly, that his authentic education as a reader began not while he was a history major at N.Y.U. or working at a literary agency in Manhattan, but at the Green Haven Correctional Facility, in Stormville, New York. There, he offered, he had read a thousand and forty-six books.”