Good morning!
I know today’s the 15th (aka the middle of the month) but because it’s Friday, I don’t want to overload people before the weekend, so the regular Solidaritas newsletter will be out on Monday with the last two weeks' gender and women's rights news from Asia & the Pacific.
Today is the weekly wrap-up of other things I've been reading, watching, listening to, and cooking!
Posts remain free but paid subscription options are available for US$5/month or sooo much cheaper at US$40/year. You don’t really get anything extra right now except for my appreciation and the knowledge that you’re helping feed the approximately 50 street cats that live in our neighbourhood in Jakarta (the responsibility of feeding said cats has been taken over by my partner since I was deported. Thanks James!).
Read
Two articles really captured my fascination this week. The first was this history of sayur lodeh (mild Javanese coconut curry with seven vegetables) and how the Yogyakartan sultan once ordered his kingdom to eat sayur lodeh and quarantine themselves for 49 days to halt a plague.
The second was one I read just this morning about the Keralan health minister, KK Shailaja, and how she has deftly handled and essentially defeated coronavirus in her state. She’s a former teacher whose deputy health ministers are all medically-trained, and who acted fast (way back in January!) to stop COVID-19 from devastating Kerala.
Author Min Jin Lee writes about what she wants the woman behind the counter of a Korean noodle joint to know. A short and sweet tale of growing up as the child of shopkeepers.
My friend Antonia Timmerman wrote about what the 1998 May riots in Indonesia mean to young Chinese-Indonesians in 2020.
Africa is not waiting to be saved from the coronavirus. It is already trying to save itself, but the stories are not being told.
Arundhati Roy on what we have to do next: “Pre-corona, if we were sleepwalking into the Surveillance State, now we are panic-running into the arms of a super-surveillance state in which we are being asked to give up everything—our privacy and our dignity, our independence—and allow ourselves to be controlled and micromanaged. Even after the lockdowns are lifted, unless we move fast, we will be incarcerated forever. How do we disable this engine? That is our task.”
The Twitter debate of the week was about Alison Roman and her attacks on Chrissy Teigen and Marie Kondo. This piece - entitled ‘Alison Roman, the Colonization of Spices, and the Exhausting Prevalence of Ethnic Erasure in Popular Food Culture’ - summed up by feelings pretty well.
Naomi Klein is not willing to give up the fight.
Watch/listen to
I’ve been listening to Rabbit Hole, a new podcast from The New York Times about one man’s fall into the right wing via YouTube recommendations and how he got back out of it. It’s fascinating and brilliantly told.
My partner and I have been Zoom-watching Travel Man, in which Richard Ayoade takes weekend trips to European cities with random comedians and celebrities like Noel Fielding (to Copenhagen), Aisling Bea (to Budapest), Rob Delaney (to Seville), and Paul Rudd (to Helsinki). It’s hilarious.
Cook
Keralan vegetable istoo (a corruption of the word ‘stew’) from Meera Sodha’s Fresh India, which has been my favourite cookbook of the past few years. The recipe isn’t online but here’s a similar istoo of hers using just potato and beans.
I’ve literally never baked anything in my life until the last month (we don’t have an oven in Jakarta and never have), so I was dubious about how these cinnamon buns would turn out, but they worked fabulously and I’ve since replicated them once more. Delicious. Make a simple icing using this recipe.