Good evening and Happy May Day! This is the second of my new Friday extra emails that consist of stuff I’ve been reading, watching, cooking, and thinking about each week.
This will be the last free one: from next week, only paid subscribers will receive these weekly emails. Subscriptions are just US$5/month (I wish it could be less but that’s Substack’s minimum!) or much cheaper at US$40/year.
Don’t worry: the regular fortnightly wrap-ups will remain free.
Thank you for reading!
It’s one of our cats’ birthdays around about now! Thorina is two years old. I rescued her near our house in Jakarta and she became our third cat. Here are her before and after photos. She got a bit chonky recently after we got her desexed and apparently her new favourite hobby is knocking all of my partners’ pens off the desk while he’s teaching from home.
I love Bon Appetit’s videos and especially their fermentation series called It’s Alive. The host, Brad Leone, is a chaotic mess and I love him. I watched this one on making ginger beer the other night and spent most of it in hysterics.
I’m a little bit obsessed with Chinese farmer Li Ziqi and her videos of farmlife (albeit clearly not a struggling farmlife). I don’t know what her story is but the videos are relaxing and make me want to spend more time cooking, like this one about ginger in winter.
Speaking of cooking, I cooked bo kho (Vietnamese beef stew/soup) for the first time last week and it was phenomenal. Especially good in this good weather (it’s 6 degrees Celsius in Canberra today and I hate it).
When I lived in Nepal for six months in 2011, we had scheduled rolling blackouts all the time because there wasn’t enough electricity to go around. It turns out they’ve solved it now!
Arundhati Roy wrote about COVID-19, how it threatens India (and the rest of the world), and what we need to do next.
Apparently people have been suggesting that migrant workers in Singapore basically shut up and be thankful for what meagre support they’ve been getting during the pandemic. Kirsten Han wrote a great piece for her newsletter We, The Citizens about how this is utter rubbish.
This one’s been doing the social media rounds but if you haven’t read it yet, this NYT article written by a restaurateur basically asking whether her restaurant is even necessary anymore in the post-coronavirus world is worthwhile.
Truly an inspiration: Jane Fonda the activist.
Finally, please read Andrew Stafford’s incredibly moving and thoughtful Griffith Review essay about dementia, dying wishes, and his mum.