Sep 22, 2020
In Defense of the Worst Cooks in America
The soundstage’s kitchen didn’t have a dishwasher, so he was forced to make dishwasher salmon in the oven instead—like some kind of hack.
The soundstage’s kitchen didn’t have a dishwasher, so he was forced to make dishwasher salmon in the oven instead—like some kind of hack.
I learned to reevaluate the meaning of ‘normal’ in relationships, and also my habit of reflexively turning to data.
I love my parents because they are in me, but I wonder if, when they look at me, they see those parts or instead a shapeshifter who’s slowly taken over the person they thought they’d raised.
Disability ruins everything, these stories tell us: disability itself is tragedy. These people’s lives are over, apparently, even though they are palpably still here.
Yes, I dared to eat a peach. And I had to live, so I could eat another.
I couldn’t help but wonder: Of all the self-chroniclers I’d gone to like a moth in my early twenties, why were so few brown, and Black?
It’s hard to articulate what it feels like to spend a lifetime being told that you are not allowed. Not always in so many words, but in gestures, in spaces, in thoughtlessness.
Perhaps the certainty that you are not the monster—that no matter what you do, you will never become the monster—is what gives rise to monstrous behavior.
Through myth-making and symbolism, the natural world comes to stand in for potent human ideals.
The satisfaction people take in free will comes not from their ability to choose, but from their ability to feel like they’ve chosen.
Black women have been killed for our beliefs for as long as Black people have been demanding the right to breathe.
Sure, the food is delicious, but it’s that sense of community that makes Korean barbeque what it is.
Transition begins by insisting that you can want more. It’s a dream in the sense that it reveals the version of you that wants, above all, to be here.
Visiting a beloved bar is less about the bar itself and more an attempt to re-inhabit happy memories, to open a door that leads to them.
His mother said to me, “French mothers can be wild. That one in particular is a monster.”
A white girl’s refusal to live by the dominant narrative gets to be glamorous, whereas I cannot imagine how a Black girl’s refusing the terms of society ever could be.
In my family, race itself did not exist. If I wanted to be real, I could not experience what was not real.
When your back is against the wall, dumping your loved ones in the president’s front yard can seem like the only rational response.
Columnist Noah Cho on pandemic food cravings, home cooking adventures, and much-missed restaurants.
