There are few things I love more than a good shirt and after months of Edinburgh winter (and let’s be honest, summer), I am especially appreciative of a good Hawaiian shirt. This one, from Tombolo, is so nice I just want to wear it with bike shorts while I watch Call Me By Your Name for the 40th time slumped on my wooden floor with a big ol’ plate of pasta and no air conditioning. God, what I wouldn’t give to pay $20 for a plate of seafood pasta ouside a Mediterranean beach. But with COVID-19 cases surging juuuuust as I pack up my things to move to Seattle, it seems like all travel and delicious eating has been relegated to 2022. So until the barricades lift, I’ll be making all my own pasta dishes at home. Here are five I’d gobble up this summer.

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Pasta with Tomatoes, Brie, and Basil

A perfect summer dish for those of us who think pasta salad is up there with the U-Bomb on the abomination to all mankind list. This is especially good with swirly pasta like cavatappi.

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Pasta with Green Puttanesca

At last! An anchovy pasta that doesn’t have a single shallot in it.

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Risotto Nero with Squid

I know risotto isn’t pasta but also… isn’t it? Kind of? I am also always very impressed by squid ink on food, mostly because it looks kind of prestigious and like something Urusula might snack on while petting her lil pet eels. Facing the dame of the seas while wearing a Hawaiian shirt with an embroidered fork on it? Count me in!

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Amatriciana on the Fly

An easy, peasy amatriciana from lovely harmless white guy Sam Sifton.

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Spagetti alle Vongole

I can’t front, I have no idea what spaguetti alle vongole actually tastes like, but this shirt is named after it, so it’s gotta be good. Plus it has clams, and you know what they say about clams…

Tale a old as time
Song as old as rhyme
Pasta and the clam!

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Wash it all down with several glasses of Aperol Spritz. Better yet, make a pitcher. Maybe finish it off with a Strawberry Basil Shortcake? Why not? It’s not like you don’t have time!

Enjoy responsibly and please, for the love of god, wear a mask.

-M

One of the amazing things about 2020 is the euphoric, charmingly unexpected surprise that comes with receiving good news. Yes, the world is one giant trash can on fire, but neighbors are still buying each other groceries and SCOTUS is passing landmark rulings left and right(!!!). I’m so used to things going from bad to worse that when good things occasionally happen they stand out like little precious gemstones. Sure, you might have to dig deep for them, and probably get a wee spot of carbon monoxide poisoning in the process, but the returns are good!

Here’s a list of things I liked so far in June:

• Halloweens’s “Rock Bottom Rock” from their album “Morning Kiss at The Acropolis” is the undisputed quarantine anthem of 2020. The entire album is a banger, but lyrics like “Go running for an hour and then I take a shower / I moisturize before I face my demons” just really sum up the present moment. They are the moment.

• The Korean soap “Crash Landing Into You” I apologize if you’re my friend and I’ve spent the last week harassing you about watching this show but it is the best thing I have watched all month. The premise of this soap is so insane it belongs on the pedestal they reserve for bonkers shows like “Jane the Virgin”: a successful but vapid South Korean businesswoman goes paragliding in a storm and ends up in North Korea, where she has to take refuge in a soldier’s village to avoid capture by the literal North Korean secret police. This show is dramatic as hell, but somehow manages to portray every single romantic trope I love to watch? I’m talking multiple fake and arranged marriages. Star-crossed lovers (literally)! Succession-esque family squabbles! Surprisingly informative historical context on a complicated global dispute! A dude playing a piano by a lake! I cried twice!! Please cry with me!

• Speaking of dudes and lakes, I love a reimagined Arthurian legend. The trailer for A24’s The Green Knight, complete with a deranged Dev Patel making his way through medieval England, seems creepily designed just for me.

• Half the world is entering Yellow Phase even though the mere idea of eating at a restaurant right now makes me want to break out in hives. However, this piece from the New York Times about writers reflecting on their favorite meals out was strangely touching.

• Did you know John Berger’s Ways of Seeing is on YouTube? If you’re British, congratulations, but if you’re not: “Ways of Seeing” was this amazing art history BBC series led by Berger, an art historian who shows us how even centuries-old art reflects contemporary ideas of capitalism, colonialism, and gender to the light. John Berger is the coolest dude. I lost my mind at the publicity episode.

• I love Nicole Byer and I love Star Wars and the podcast Newcomers has both! Lucky me! Listen in as Nicole and Lauren Lapkus try to make sense of the entire Star Wars canon for the first time, with help from some professional Star Wards nerds. If you ever wondered what my two last brain cells sounded like when I watched Star Wars for the first time as a 26 year old, this podcast is basically it.

Good things are coming, I think.

-M

Most booksellers would say their favorite part of the job is recommending their favorite books unsuspecting customers, but I would argue it’s even better when customers recommend something to you. I first heard of James Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time” from a theater professor at the University of Edinburgh who had stumbled into our bookshop and was looking for a replacement copy. We spent a good thirty minutes looking for it (it’s a veeeery slim book and this was a big bookshop) and by the time we found it I couldn’t help wishing we had a second copy I could take home. A week later I bought my own copy at Libreria in London, and read the whole thing over a very noisy pub dinner in Shoreditch. Since then I must have pushed it into the hands of dozens of customers. My bookshop, like so many others, is closed, and I can’t give you a physical copy. But I can point you to a place where you can sit down, close your eyes, and listen, thanks to the magic of YouTube. I hope you do.

-M

Kara Walker Fons Americanus Tate Modern 2019. Photo: © Tate​ (Matt Greenwood)

The world is in flames and it feels stupid to talk about anything else. There’s been a lot of information to wade through on the internet about how we can best help others, which, ironically, has only made me feel more helpless about the state of the world. It’s insane the amount of work it takes to be a good person in 2020. Like so many of us, I don’t feel like my own life experience has given me the ability or tools to truly, perfectly show up in a movement that I haven’t spent that many years actively fighting for. But that’s not an excuse to not try. White supremacy does not go softly into the night; it’s a cancer that can only be dismantled from the inside. We start with ourselves and move into our communities. It is a lengthy and exhausting process, but it’s a necessary one. Would you rather let your guilt and anxiety paralize you into inaction? Or would you look deep inside you, find the bad things, and force them into the light?

My perspective is of a white Hispanic immigrant. Historically my country has not yet had to grapple with its own deeply racist history, which means I not only have a lot to catch up on in an American context but also in a white Argentinean context. Our first instinct is to prioritize the injustices we see done to our community rather than the injustices done unto others that we will never experience ourselves. The burnout, feed fatigue, and internal resistance we encounter within ourselves when we look at the staggering pile of work necessary just to become a good person is a good sign: it means that part of us is slowly dying inside. Hunt it down. Society is very quick to forgive racism and intolerance and hatred and it is a very easy thing to fall into the same patterns unless you make a conscious effort to kill that part of yourself every single day. No matter how exhausting it is to go against the current, the fact remains that it is a privilege to educate yourself on racism rather than experiencing it firsthand. From police brutality to the upcoming election, a new world is waiting for us after COVID-19. How are we preparing for it?

The wonderful thing about being quarantined is that we actually have time and resources to educate ourselves. Here’s a very tiny list of things that have helped me make sense of things in the last few days. Some of these I’ve been following for a very long time, some are new finds, all are part of a lifelong commitment to improve my understanding of the world we live in. It’s not meant to be a definitive list by any means, it’s just a place to start.

• A free PDF of Angela Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete? from my alma matter, Seven Stories Press (lots of good stuff in their catalog btw!).

• Films/TV/Documentaries: I Am Not Your Negro, 13th, When They See Us, Beyonce’s Homecoming, Insecure, Dear White People, BlacKKKlansman, Sorry to Bother You, The Get-Down, Bobby Kennedy for President, Explained: The Racial Wealth Gap, anything Amber Ruffin does on Seth Meyers.

• Writing: James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, The Good Immigrant U.S., Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Kimberly Drew’s This Is What I Know About Art, Kiley Reid’s Such a Fun Age, Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half, Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, Candice Carty-Williams’s Queenie, Tayari Jones’s An American Marriage, Martin Luther King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail (I recommend the Penguin Modern pocket edition but you can also get a free PDF here), Tomi Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone, James Baldwin: The Last Interview from Melville House, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Reni Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race. DON’T read “Heart of Darkness”. Three separate English lit seminars had it in their syllabus for some reason. Honestly, fuck that book. And DO NOT BUY FROM AMAZON: IndieBound or Bookshop.org support your local indies if you don’t already know who they are.

• Podcasts: Still Processing, 1619, The Read, this episode of The Daily.

• Articles: Kara Walker for the Gentlewoman, anything by Ta-Nehisi Coates for the Atlantic (but especially The First White President), Kim Drew for Teen Vogue (actually, anything from Teen Vogue).

• Police brutality stems from a deeply entrenched personal bias and racist history. Police departments also function within a fierce patriarchal fraternity that isn’t really visible in other spaces of public service outside the fire department (you don’t see National Park rangers running over campers). JJ Bola’s “Mask Off: Masculinity Redefined” is a good primer on why toxic masculinity sets men back instead of pushing them forward.

• Donations: Philly Community Bail Fund (text "GIVE" to (833)608-5511), Black Lives Matter Philly, Up Against the Law Legal Collective (Venmo: @upagainstthelaw), Fishtown’s black-owned Harriett’s Bookshop (they’re inundated with book orders right now but you can venmo them at $HARRIETTSBOOKSHOP). There are millions more places to help, just check your social media feeds.

• Argue. You know all those times you’ve ruined class discussions and first dates by playing devil’s advocate? Now you can do it for the betterment of the world!! There is nothing I can say about a black person’s experience that hasn’t already been said more eloquently by somebody else, and nobody should be looking at white people to validate black people’s perspectives in the first place. However, white supremacy is a white people problem, and we’re not going to heal until we recognize our own complicity. This is our mess to clean up. It is not up to the black community to save us from ourselves. I mean, Jesus, haven’t they suffered enough? The least we can do is argue with our racist family members at the dinner table so someone else doesn’t have to.

Note: This list may stand out because I don’t normally write a lot about activism or my own politics in this blog. This is in stark contrast with my personality, because if you talk to me in person you’ll probably hear 5 opinions in the first 5 seconds. The fact is I don’t really talk about personal things in my blog because I don’t like talking about my personal life on the internet. I also feel deeply uncomfortable with performative allyship, especially as I recognize that I myself have so much to learn and would rather clear the way for smarter voices to take over the conversation. But seeing as you’re here right now, I might as well show you who I’ve been learning from. It feels disingenuous to talk trash about Bernstein right now, and I want to respect that feeling.

-M

I think I speak for all of us when I say, *SCREAMS INTO THE VOID FOR AN ENTIRE MINUTE AND A HALF*

Unfortunately it doesn’t look like the time for screaming is going to end any time soon, and if there’s one thing I don’t want to get right now, it’s a sore throat. May I suggest instead a productive activity to pass the time, like taking up knitting, or diving into that foot-tall To Read pile that’s been collecting dust since you made that New Year’s resolution to read more, or…. I don’t know, binge-watching a show about the adventures of a giant felt bear?

Rilakkuma and Kaoru is a Netflix show based on Rilakkuma, a giant teddy bear with a huge head whose entire life revolves around eating pancakes and sleeping - a true social distancing king. He lives with Kaoru, a twenty-something office worker whose other roomates include a smaller felt bear and a lil yellow bird. I’m not sure who the intended audience is, because most of the show centers around Kaoru’s inability to get promoted or keep from going broke when she gets a crush on her Amazon delivery guy. I must then assume that the intended audience is me, a millennial in her late twenties who can’t stop covering her cellphone with pastel animal stickers.

It takes approximately 2 hours to binge the whole thing, and I plan on rewatching at least once a week because apparently it’s the only thing keeping me from staring out the window for 45 minutes a day. I know it’s not exactly the most heroic activity to indulge in during a pandemic. It’s hardly sewing face masks for the NHS or stocking grocery shelves. But since I lack sewing materials and health insurance, it’s the closest thing to medicine I’ve got.

Be well,

-M