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Flower truck by colorstalker on Flickr.
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'Guilt is My Subject. I've Taken Research to an Extreme Degree'

Nicholas Evans is a celebrated storyteller, and the story he tells me is a cracker. A man and his wife go to stay with her brother and sister-in-law, a titled couple who live on a beautiful estate in the wilds of the Scottish Highlands. On a balmy August evening, the man goes out and picks some mushrooms. He brings them back, fries them up in some butter, sprinkles parsley over them, and the family enjoy a relaxing evening meal.

The following morning all four awake feeling not quite right. By lunchtime they are seriously ill. They consult a book in the kitchen – a guide to wild mushrooms – and leaf through until they find a photograph. Anxiously they scan the text, and see the chilling words: deadly poisonous.

The local GP is called urgently. The four are rushed into the local Highland hospital in Elgin. Ambulances race them down to the renal unit at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary. On the journey the man begins to convulse, his body shuddering and shaking uncontrollably. He fears he is about to die.

The poison ravages their bodies, the violent vomiting of blood and bile remorseless as one by one all four go into kidney failure. Only the thought of his youngest son, just six years old, keeps the man clinging to life. To his horror, he realises that each couple's will grants the other couple custody of their children, in the event of the parents' death. All their children may soon be orphaned. Fearing the worst, he calls his solicitor from his sick bed and has a new will couriered up to Scotland, as the four fight for their lives.

They survive. But the man, his wife and her brother are left without functioning kidneys, and must endure five hours of dialysis every other day to keep them alive. All three need kidney donors. The search for suitable matches goes on for three years – until his grownup daughter eventually persuades him to accept one of her own, and saves his life. But his wife and brother-in-law remain on the transplant list, still sick and still waiting, leaving the family in a toxic tangle of illness, guilt and recrimination.

It is a classic Evans tale – intense family drama set in a cinematic backdrop of epic landscape – and would almost certainly be a bestseller. The author's 1995 debut novel, The Horse Whisperer, sold 15m copies, and his four subsequent books have sold many millions more. Unfortunately, however, this isn't a new plot dreamt up by Evans, but a horribly true story.

by Decca Aitkenhead, Guardian |  Continue reading: 
Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

Bruce McLean
Grass on Grass. 2009
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What Would Gabby Do?

After the shooting, Gabby Giffords needed help to be herself—and her astronaut husband led the team.

Some Sunday nights, Giffords looked at her schedule and complained, “I can’t do it all. It’s too much,” to which her staff’s response was, “But you tell them all ‘yes,’ and then we’re stuck.” The weekend of the shooting, though, she’d noticed a hole in her schedule. Her staff set up a Congress on Your Corner event, an impromptu chance for constituents to meet their representative. Jared Loughner, an unmedicated schizophrenic, was one of the people who took notice.

Sometime after 11 a.m. Houston time, Carusone called Kelly at his home, where he was lecturing a daughter about her texting habits. Carusone said she had a terrible message to deliver. “I don’t know how to tell you this, except to tell you,” Carusone began. “Gabby’s been shot.”

Kelly hung up and then stared at his phone—he thought he could have been dreaming. He phoned Carusone back. “Did you just call me? What did you say?”

Soon, Kelly was on a plane provided by his friend Tilman Fertitta, owner of several nationwide chain restaurants and one of the richest people in Texas.

To Giffords’s friends, the pair couldn’t have been more different. Giffords was a kind of Tucson aristocrat, cultured and well-to-do and with access to select circles—one grade-school friend ran against her for Congress, and a high-school buddy helped manage her campaign. (“She had multimillionaires she could’ve married,” her father boasted.) Kelly grew up a blue-collar kid in West Orange, New Jersey, the son of two cops. And there were other dissonances, too. Giffords was attractive and vivacious, constantly making new friends, while Kelly, bald, short, and wide, seemed pleasant and supportive but distant. On his occasional campaign visits, he stood patiently in the background as Giffords held forth. Her friends could see that he was smitten. “She had it all. Beautiful, smart, hardworking, balanced, fun to be with, and she laughed at my jokes,” he once said. It was touching, though these same friends found his jokes a bit old-fashioned: “Have you guys ever packed a suitcase for your wife for a trip?” began one joke. “It’s perhaps the riskiest thing I’ve ever done.”

But their differences were part of their chemistry. “Secretly I think she wanted a macho guy,” said a friend. Around the office she called him “my sexy astronaut.” When they were dating, he’d told Giffords to look in the sky at a certain time, according to Tom Zoellner’s forthcoming book, A Safeway in Arizona. He flew an A-10 Thunderbolt II jet over Tucson and dipped his wing.

by Steve Fishman, New York |  Continue reading: 
Paintings by Nick Lepard 

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Pat Dollard’s War on Hollywood

The day before Thanksgiving 2004, Pat Dollard, a Hollywood agent who represented Steven Soderbergh, sent an e-mail to just about everyone he knew containing one word: “Later.” Friends worried it was a suicide note. Dollard, 42, had spent nearly 20 years in the film business. On a good day he seemed little different than any other successful operator, a sort of hipper version of Entourage’s Ari Gold. But often in his turbulent career, bad days outnumbered the good. Once a rising star at William Morris, he was fired in the mid-90s for chronic absenteeism brought on by drinking and drug abuse. He attended 12-step meetings and bounced back, playing a critical role in getting Soderbergh’s Traffic made. Propaganda Films tapped him to head its management division, and in 2002 he produced Auto Focus, the Paul Schrader–directed biopic about the murder of Hogan’s Heroes star Bob Crane—a film in which Dollard has a cameo in drag. Dollard co-founded Relativity, a firm which would assist the Marvel Entertainment Group in its half-billion-dollar production deal and went on to produce, after Dollard’s exit, Talladega Nights. But by 2004, Dollard was bingeing again. His fourth wife left him, and his third wife was suing for sole custody of their daughter. News that his daughter would be spending Thanksgiving at the home of Robert Evans—for whom his ex-wife worked as a development executive—sent Dollard into a morbid depression. Late one night he phoned a friend and suggested that everyone might be better off if he were dead. Then he sent his good-bye e-mail.

But Dollard was not planning a suicide, at least not a quick one. Dressed in what he would later describe as his “scumbag hipster agent’s uniform”—Prada boots, jeans, and a black-leather jacket—he boarded a plane for New York, then Kuwait City. From there he hopped a military transport to Baghdad and embedded with U.S. Marines in order to make a “pro-war documentary.” Given the decades of substance abuse, the idea of the chain-smoking, middle-aged Hollywood agent accompanying Marines into battle was sort of like Keith Richards competing in an Ironman Triathlon. But Dollard thrived. “My first time in a combat zone, I felt like I had walked into some bizarre fucking ultra-expensive movie set,” he would later say. “I had this vivid clarity, like when I used to take LSD. I felt joy. I felt like I had a message from God, or whoever, that this is exactly what I should be doing with my life. I belong in war. I am a warrior.”

To those at home it seemed that Dollard had entered dangerous mental territory. Around the New Year in 2005, he e-mailed a photo of himself to friends. In it he is clutching a machine gun, surrounded by Marines. Dressed in combat gear, his hair in a Mohawk and the word “die” shaved into his chest hair, Dollard looks like the mascot of camp Lord of the Flies.

by Evan Wright, Vanity Fair (2007) |  Continue reading:

Open Letter to My Students: No, You Cannot be a Professor

In a way it is the greatest compliment a student can give. I ask them what they want to do with their history degree. They get all passionate and earnest and vulnerable as they answer, "I want your job. I am going to be a college professor!" Then they turn their smiling faces towards me, expectantly awaiting my validation and encouragement of their dreams. And I swallow hard, and I tell them....

No, my esteemed student, you are not going to be a history professor. It isn't going to happen. The sooner you accept this the better.

This is not because you are not bright enough. You are plenty bright. In any case, finishing a Ph.D. program is more a matter of persistence than intelligence. The reason you are not going to be a professor is because that job is going away, and yet doctoral programs continue to produce as many new Ph.D.s as ever. It is a simple calculation of odds--you are not going to win the lottery, you are not going to be struck by a meteorite, you are not going to be a professor. All of these things will happen to someone, somewhere, but none of them will happen to you.

First, let's look at the odds. Tenure track jobs are declining. The AHA recently reported that "The number of job openings in history plummeted last year, even as the number of new history PhDs soared. As a result, it appears the discipline is entering one of the most difficult academic job markets for historians in more than 15 years." And the job market was terrible 15 years ago. Very few of the people in history PhD programs right now are going to get teaching jobs--the Economist recently concluded that "doing a PhD is often a waste of time."

Not you.

Ah, but you say, I am special. I am a 4.0 student (except in your class where you gave me that 3.8 and ruined my life). Every teacher since kindergarten has told me how delightfully clever I am. I have interesting ideas and I really really love history. I know how hard it is to become a professor, but I am willing to work hard, so those odds do not apply to me.

Yes they do. The thing about grad school is that everyone else is at least as special as you, and most of them are more so. They all had 4.0 GPAs, they all have gone through life in the same insulating cocoon of praise, they all really, really love history. Hell, some of them shoot rainbows out of their butts and smell like a pine forest after a spring rain--and they mostly aren't going to get jobs either.

I know that some of your other professors are encouraging your dreams of an academic career. It is natural to turn to your professors for advice on becoming a professor, and it natural for them to want to see you succeed. Remember though that we 1) mostly have not been on the job market lately and 2) in any case are atypical Ph.D.s in that we did land tenure track positions. To return to the lottery analogy, it is like asking lottery winners if you should buy a ticket. For our part, there is a lot of professional satisfaction in mentoring some bright young person, encouraging their dreams, writing them letters of recommendation and bragging of their subsequent acceptance into a good doctoral program. Job market? What job market?

Your professors are the last generation of tenure track faculty. Every long-term educational trend points towards the end of the professoriate. States continue to slash funding for higher education. Retiring professors are not replaced, or replaced with part-time faculty. Technology promises to provide education with far fewer teachers--and whether you buy into this vision of the future or not, state legislators and administrators believe. The few faculty that remain will see increased service responsibilities (someone has to oversee those adjuncts!), deteriorating resources and facilities, and stagnant wages. After ten years of grad school you could make as much as the manager of a Hooters! But you won't be that lucky.

by Larry Cebula, Northwest History |  Continue reading:

by JenniPenni
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Late Night Alumni

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Barbara Bernrieder
ohne Titel. 2002
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Burger Queen

One night in March of last year, Jay-Z showed up at the Spotted Pig, on West Eleventh Street, with his wife, Beyoncé, and another couple. Jay-Z, an investor in the restaurant, and a frequent patron, wanted the smoked-trout salad, but the kitchen was out. He and his group settled on the house specialty—burgers, which the restaurant’s chef, April Bloomfield, serves one way: char-grilled, on a brioche bun, topped with crumbled Roquefort. Only Lou Reed, a fixture in the neighborhood, is allowed to have his burger with onions, and that is owing to precedent: an awestruck employee took his order one afternoon when Bloomfield was out. Mayonnaise is forbidden. The condiments policy has long been a subject of contention between Bloomfield and her business partner, Ken Friedman, who schmoozes while she cooks. He dispenses surreptitious dollops to favored customers from a jar of Hellman’s that he keeps hidden on a high shelf.

The Spotted Pig opened in February of 2004—New York’s first gastropub. It is a nookish place, crammed with all manner of porcine paraphernalia and presided over by offbeat waiters and bartenders. “If you’re going to spend an hour and a half with somebody, it should be somebody kooky,” Friedman says. New Yorkers didn’t quite know what to make of it. Was it a bar with good food? A restaurant that was fun? In any case, it was an immediate hit, a seat at one of its cramped tables so coveted that Frank Bruni, in a mostly admiring review in the Times, deemed the place a “gastromelee.” Message boards abounded with proudly masochistic anecdotes about what one blogger called the “hipster bloodsport” of trying to get in. (A pregnant woman told a waiter she couldn’t have the blue cheese, and, she wrote, “he promptly barked at me, ‘Yes you can, it’s ricotta you can’t have.’ ”)

Along with the food and the atmosphere, the restaurant’s clientele has helped to make it a success. By December, 2005, USA Today had published a story about the place headlined “WHERE STARS ARE SPOTTED.” Friedman recalled, “Every night there was some guy saying he was the biggest proctologist at Mount Sinai jabbing his finger in my chest.” A Chasen’s on the Hudson, by way of the Thames, the Spotted Pig is a place where normal people go to feel like celebrities and celebrities go to feel like normal people. Those who are not Jay-Z have been known to spend hours waiting to be granted a tartan-covered tuffet. Sometimes they want to be cool. Sometimes they want a really good cheeseburger.

One of Jay-Z’s friends wasn’t sure about the Roquefort. Bloomfield hates to leave the kitchen, but Friedman dragged her to the table, where she prevailed upon the friend to have the dish the way she had intended it.

“Who’s that golfer dude you made me meet?” Bloomfield asked Friedman later.

“He’s not a golfer,” Friedman replied. “He’s Kobe Bryant.”

“Oh. How did he like his burger?”

Bloomfield—five feet four, with a compact build and a pugnacious chin—is the food world’s oblivious savant. Her single-mindedness in the kitchen has propelled her from Birmingham, England, where she grew up on a diet of fried-egg sandwiches and steaks “that would come out a little gray,” to the apex of New York City’s restaurant scene, where she is renowned for her brawny menus, teeming with trotters and terrines. This summer, Saveur held a barbecue, to which prominent chefs contributed various dishes. Bloomfield’s was a chickpea-lentil-and-feta salad. “The Village Voice said something about ‘Why did the Queen of Meat do a salad?’ and she answered, ‘I like salad,’ ” Friedman recalled. “That was kind of a ‘Rain Man’ thing to say.” Bloomfield doesn’t swim; she doesn’t drive. She has a Michelin star for the Spotted Pig and one for the Breslin—a dark, boozy restaurant that she and Friedman opened last year in the Ace Hotel, on West Twenty-ninth Street—but she has never been to Paris. “It’s pretty lame,” she said one day. “But, you know, I’m a girl from Birmingham. What am I going to say, ‘I’ll have that right there’?” she said, in a jacked-up Brummie accent, pointing to an air menu.

Most days, Bloomfield wakes up around nine o’clock. She wallows in bed for an hour or two, with a cookbook, or a recipe she’s fiddling with, and a glass of PG tips. (She likes it milky, without sugar, and just hot enough to scorch the back of her throat.) Around noon, she arrives at the Pig or, more often, the Breslin, where she stays until midnight. On a sunny afternoon in late spring, Bloomfield was holed up in a plaid-curtained booth at the back of the Breslin’s dining room, rustling through a sheaf of papers stained with olive oil. She was dressed, as she usually is, in a black Pig T-shirt, black Dickies, and Birkenstock clogs. Her hair, the color of gingersnaps, was scraped into a bun. She was just back from Sydney, where she had appeared at a food-and-wine festival, but her skin was as pale as gooseflesh. I asked her how the trip had been. She pulled out her iPhone (apps: Epic Chef, zombies, vampires, ninjas, World War, iMobsters) and showed me a picture of her sous-chef sprawled on his back in the sand. Her cooks had surfed, she had watched.

Bloomfield was working on a fried-chicken special for the evening’s menu. The inspiration was some buffalo wings she had eaten at the Waterfront Ale House, a bar in Murray Hill. (It’s close to her apartment.) “Their chicken has a really great sort of fruity habañero taste,” Bloomfield said. Her take on the idea was intense, a concentration, rather than a refinement, of the original’s punch. She had chosen to fry a breast and a thigh in duck fat and serve them with a salad (blue-cheese dressing, red onion) and hot sauce (habañero, tomato, vinegar, butter). Someone brought a platter of the chicken for Bloomfield to test. It was delicious; the batter had an almost caramel flavor. Bloomfield could barely admit that she had anything to do with it. “These poussins, oh, my goodness,” she said. “They’re actually really hard to fuck up. They’re unfuckable. You can’t fuck them up.”

“What’s the most fuckable?” I asked.

“The simple stuff.”

by Lauren Collins, New Yorker |  Continue reading:
Photograph by Martin Schoeller

Defense Technology 56895 MK-9 Stream Pepper Spray

[ed.  THE gift to give this Christmas.  Read the reviews!]

Charley Harper
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