Y'think?

“Posterity, who are to reap the blessings, will scarcely be able to conceive the hardships and sufferings of their ancestors.”

—Abigail Adams

Spaghetti with Bottarga

To get the obvious out of the way, yes, this guy is obviously doing a "Stepin Fetchitti" routine. I imagine that when the camera stops shooting, he unglues the moustache, removes the peddlar's hat, and puts on a stylish sport jacket, ducking into his tight little Fiat and smoking its tires a little as he roars into the toasty Italian sunset. But look at me, swapping in a stereotype for another stereotype…

Anyway, I'm a huge fan of impossibly simple recipes like this, which are devilishly hard to recreate because all the magic is super-subtle and sort of ineffable. I explored this very topic in a video I once made about a guy who made the greatest cookies I ever ate using (not kidding) the recipe on the Quaker Oatmeal Box, and did so with no cheats (I watched him like a hawk). It's about subtleties, many (all?) of them unrecognized by the chef, who instinctually integrates them. The power of iteration, among other things.

There are two points in this video where the magic tricks happen, and you'll only notice them if you watch very closely and can recognize when parts don't add up to the whole.

1. Water
When he takes the spaghetti out of the pot and sloppily slaps it into the plate, he doesn't really drain it. Neither does he not drain it, either, though! He finds a mid point so slippery that the mind breaks down trying to analyze it.

The plate, I'm quite sure, has a pool of water in it. But not too big a pool. Just the right amount.

Pasta water is everything. Not just an "emulsifying aid". Not just a backdoor method of adding more salt than a home chef ordinarily might feel comfortable with. No, it's everything. It creates the sheen.

What sheen? Have a look at this screen capture:

Whence sheen?

Neither the oil nor the spaghetti are magical, and the bottarga adds only its flavor and golden hue. Don't look there for the source of the heavenly sheen, which is from water artfully integrated. Several considerations here, all well-buried in the video:

1. As mentioned, you need an ample quantity of water. Surprisingly so. Enough so that if you just left it as a simple pool, you'd spoil your meal. Most chefs would deem a pools of water to be extremely unappealing (even, perhaps, anathema), but Italian chefs see it as ammo.

2. Pasta water doesn't only emulsify cheese and other fancy stuff. Here, it's certainly not emulsifying the bottarga, which stands alone as an essentially foreign substance. The water emulsifies the oil itself. Look again at that screen shot: no pool of water (though there's lots of water). And no pool of oil (though we saw him add lots of oil). Just sheen.

2. Mixing
The wet, seemingly sloppy, seemingly imprecise retrieval of spaghetti from the water is at odds with the rest of the video—where everything seems careful—except for one other part: the seemingly haphazard mixing of ingredients. He does a homely, un-slick little move with his fork when all ingredients are present, obstinately pushing stuff around a little. No biggie, you'd imagine.

He doesn't want to produce evenness of any sort; that's Olive Garden. He want to coax oil and water together and onto the pasta without manhandling the bottarga, i.e. emulsification with minimal effort. No swift fluent movements of a whisk or wooden spoon. Just pushing stuff around a little on a plate.

The bottarga absorbs some of the water, but it's mostly going into the oil. Into the sheen. And you do not, cannot, and will not spot the move. But that's the whole thing. One must develop the skill for oneself. It requires a combination of 1. iteration and 2. penetrating care. "Emulsify" those two things!

Other notes:

1. He says to look for blonde mullet. Any decent Sardinian mullet bottarga should fit the bill. I just ordered this from Spanish Amazon. Expensive, but not per serving. This is still a cheap dish.

2. He suggests olive oil that smells like thistle and tomatoes. That means some green astringent tannins plus some fruitiness. I can't find that easily in Portugal, so I intend to cheat. I have lots of fruity Portuguese galega olive oil to satisfy half that flavor requirement, and will try adding a subtle touch of lemon zest to fill in the thistle/tannin/astringent note....once I've gotten a feel for the balances and the sheen.

3. Also, down the road, saffron. Mostly just from whimsy, because the golden color gets me thinking about saffron. But it's a Sardinian touch, through and through. I'll steep a few crushed threads in a small amount of hot water for 20 mins, then add it in, recognizing that this represents more water needing to be transmogrified into sheen, so I'll adjust accordingly.

4. He's got relatively little water in that pot. The biggest lie told about Italian cookery is to use lots of water at a hearty rolling boil. Every great Italian chef I know uses relatively little water, and leaves it (after pasta's added) at more of a high simmer than a full boil. In this recipe, less water means more starch, which translates into greater emulsification properties. It's another trick.

5. Don't miss his warning to only lightly salt the pasta water. Bottarga is super salty!

A Rush to Perspective

"Perspective" is what we develop when, with the benefit of time, we're able to frame something more aptly than is possible from within the thick of it.

As his support collapses and oversight looms, why wait years? It's never too early to seek perspective. Here's mine:

He’s a 4. Maybe a 4-1/2.

If we ever had a 3 (Putin, Maduro, Orban, roughly), we’d feel as warmly nostalgic for Trump as dems now feel toward GWB. (Remember how just after 9/11 he visited a mosque to support our Muslim neighbors? Yeah, that guy!)

If we ever had a 2 (Kim, Saddam, Stalin, Mussolini), 2026 would seem like paradise lost.

If we ever had a 1 (Pol Pot, Hitler, Amin), we’d be too busy staying safe and finding food to even make comparisons.


Am I minimizing his horribleness? Am I advocating for complacency? God, no.

We've developed a conviction that everything bad is The Worst. This makes it very hard to perceive—much less aptly handle—worsening. And it leads to a dizzy, bitterly unpleasant society that's even less amenable to coalition and compromise than ever. We've lost all sense of proportionality. And the antidote is perspective.

"He's a ZERO!!!!" scream back a substantial number of readers with little patience for my fiddly nonsense.

And the fact that 1. they'd all concede that GWB looks pretty good right now, and 2. they'd have harshly screamed "He's a zero!!!!" at any such assertion back at the time, cannot be considered. Such uncontestable observations are irreconcilable with gut assumptions, and thus beyond reflection. The old "Daily Show" trick of catching people in flagrant hypocrisy no longer works. "My obvious self-contradiction is off the table."

Many of us are colicky children unwilling to seek, find, or appreciate perspective, which seems like shameful tolerance for the supreme evil of whatever rubs us the wrong way.

Prologue for the Singularity

There's an enormous, unimaginable cresting tidal movement happening in a very specific setting, and you almost surely don't know about it. It's complicated, so I'll just run you through the 30,000 foot view and you can take my word for it re: the significance.

Mac gaming has always been problematic. Hardly anything is written for Mac natively, so it's all about emulation. And the problem with emulation is that it takes computing assets, which in turn reduces resolution, smoothness, and responsiveness - i.e. the very things that make games good. So it's been very frustrating, though incremental progress is being made.

In the last month - maybe less, maybe three weeks - AI has been used by, like, kids, worldwide and separately, to reverse engineer, or recreate, or bit-by-bit rebuild games that are either completely unplayable (and un-emulatable) on Mac, or that had previously emulated poorly. In many cases, they look and play better than on their original platforms .

There are a few ways this magic trick can be done, and they're approaching it from every angle and it is entirely possible that every game will be playable on Mac within the next month (by which I probably mean week, or day, or, hell, hour...what time is it right now?). I have never seen the world change this fast (though it's entirely within the frame of this specific realm).

I've been watching the tide swell, and one day we're all astonished that a game is suddenly playable, albeit imperfectly, and on the following day it's perfect, and on the day after that we get an option for the monsters to optionally tap-dance (invented example, but you get the idea).

I realize similar things have happened on the fringes (e.g. did you know that Mathematics as a profession is now essentially obsolete?). But in this case, I've been watching it happen in real time. And the shocking acceleration and sense of dawning potential is beyond anything I'd previously observed. The calm, staid, implacable Andrew Tsai, YouTube high priest of Mac gaming, has been on the verge of tearing his hair out on-camera. He's been churning out dozens of vids per day, desperately trying to keep up, and we're all praying he doesn't stroke out by the weekend.

It's like seeing one's life flash before one's eyes, only without (at least so far) the death part. It kind of feels like the prologue for the Singularity. Like step four in a geometric progression.

Knowing Right from Wrong

My family is a perfect social experiment for this. None of them has ever felt wrong, while I’ve rarely felt confidently right. And our respective outcomes have diverged drastically, though we’re all working from the same genetic baseline.

Not at first, though. I started off more confident and more wrong, dutifully following my genome. But then, goddam it, I stumbled into doing something one must never do: I began to clock my wrongness. I noticed it everywhere. I was soaking in it.

Self-delusion requires fortitude I lack—so my way forward was obvious: diligently fill gaps, sharpen dull points, strip lazy bias, and extinguish brash know-it-all propensity—that last because someone requiring sustained and rigorous correction could hardly feel cocky. 

You can feel smart or you can be smart. One or the other. Smart-feelers are hilariously dumb (making them the perennial basis for comedy). Dumb-feelers are often right, but can't enjoy it because, alas, they know better.

So the question is: how badly do you want to be right? Do you want it badly enough to feel wrong? Like, forever? Will you pay that price?


Consider software testing. If you're certain that your app is indisputably perfect, contemptuously rejecting bug reports and complaints, imagine how your app will suck!

Everything starts out crude, but a properly diligent polishing stage—where all the good stuff happens!—is the exclusive domain of people capable of questioning their intrinsic majesty. Learning, growth, and change all require acknowledging that one is not a shining paragon of perfection. I realized only quite late in life how high a barrier of entry that is for practically everyone.

Puny Luxury

Felix Dennis wrote that "The transition from poverty to comfort is a massive leap in human happiness. The transition from comfort to wealth is an exercise in diminishing returns."

This reads quaintly in our era, where even the supposed "poor" live beyond previous notions of comfort and even wealth. But it's not quaint for me. I spent most of my adult life well short of comfort. In fact, I was the poorest person I knew—never earning more than a pittance while doing respected work in seven fields—before selling Chowhound.

Most people assumed I'd made a titanic windfall, but, no, it left me merely comfortable. And the discrepancy between reality and perception was less jarring for me because the jump from poverty to comfort really did feel titanic. To this day, I cackle with glee whenever I throw my car into a commercial parking garage. "Who's Mr. Zillionaire???"

Here's something I've never seen noted: money is only perceived while spending. It's like how you don't feel your clothes until they shift against your skin. If you're not spending, you will not and can not feel the least bit different even if you just won the Lotto. You can, however—and many people do—repeat a hypnotic suggestion to try to reestablish a sense of substantiality (remember "My name is Elmer J. Fudd, I own a mansion and a yacht! My name is Elmer J. Fudd, I own a mansion and a yacht!"?).

The creepy truth that money is only real while spending it explains the cliché of the nouveau riche spendthrift. And as you become locked into that cycle, you must keep raising the ante to maintain the same feeling. Spending alone is insufficient. You must feel acceleration. And feeding a sense of bashing through barriers gets expensive.

My mother blazed a different trail. She'd spent a few decades pinching pennies. Driving all over town to use her coupons and take advantages of sales. Once we had a bit more security, she let up on one single thing: gas. She chose a gas station close to home, and it was her gas station. I think it actually gave her satisfaction to notice other stations costing a couple pennies less per gallon. She got to indulge a preference.

I wasn't in a position to enter the spiral of compulsive spending. An interest in fancy watches, fountain pens, sports cars, or super hi-fi audio might lead me back to scraping. Camrys, not Porsches! And I never lost the dread. A glimpse of dwindling toilet paper supplies might trigger it until I patiently calmed myself down. Elmer Fudd no longer seems so shmucky. Dude was just trying to escape the dread. People raised comfortably don't get it.

If you're prone to cold sweats, but can't afford to fly First Class to endlessly re-stoke a sense of elevation, what do you do? You might simply act normal, changing nothing, but that leads back to coupons and compulsive price chasing. Those who avoid the spending loop often wind up rebounding in this way (so this reckoning explains them, too).

But I found a middle path. I call it "Puny Luxury."

I'm profligate with trifles. I've built up a library of second-hand DVDs and Blu-Rays, most costing under $20. Tons of them, most unavailable on streaming, because my tastes are not mainstream. The library feels like immense wealth. First, just all the quality I'm curating. But also the potential energy of it. Cracking open a snap case means hours of riveting fun...times hundreds. I could spend months watching great movies. Not just the banal chum of Netflix. Exactly the stuff I like, all of it hard to find.

And I allow myself infinite €15 lunches. And I'm free with a few other cheapo pursuits which bring me joy, and where my eye for quality insulates me from feeling ridiculous. The lunches are great. The movies are great. If it's not great, I don't grant the extravagance.

Are parking garages great? Yes, they are. In a far more genuine way than a $1500 fountain pen. If you once spent your life circling around seeking street parking, garages are the height of opulence. You can go anywhere and just leave your car right there. It still boggles my mind. I use them as often as seven or eight times per year.

I'm the billionaire of fifteen bucks. A wee wastrel. And, framed this way, there's an eagerness that never jades. No tolerance accumulates, and I avoid the accelerative loop. I still feel like lofty Mr. Zillionaire whenever I use a parking garage. I do not need an $800 coffee table. The cup sitting upon it (which cost €15) is awesome, as is the coffee itself.

I realize that my mother forged the Puny Luxury path, though she would not have articulated it quite this way...and she hardly branched out beyond gas.


$15 may not be your number. But establishing a realistic number is the key to the ingenious budgeting regime I devised at age seven.

Confessions of a Tap Dancer

This is a world where people stare blankly, waiting, in their boredom, for you to tap dance.

Here's the thing. I'll tap dance on a dime. I'll tap dance if you ask unrudely. In fact, I'll tap dance even when there's no one there at all, on the chance someone might pass by. Not to show off, or to accrue credit, but merely to add my piece to the puzzle—which, in my reckoning, is the entire point of this corroborative art project.

I tap dance just to tap dance. In fact, the only thing that can stop me from tap dancing is people staring blankly, waiting, in their boredom, for me to tap dance.

In that circumstance, I used to tap dance desperately, trying to rouse...something. The dancing would suck, and I'd chalk it up to my own inconsistency. Then I developed some restraint with age. Dead eyes and entitled attitudes not only creeped me out—they'd always creeped me out—but they made me more reluctant to tap dance. I'd occasionally give it a game go, but it never felt right.

Now, at 63, I'm tight as a drum. I'll still tap dance on a dime, or for an empty room, but the dead eyes—what Italians used to call the malocchio (though the term is less common now that this has become the rule, rather than the exception)—shut me down like a toggle switch. It's not emotional. Not some moral resolution. It's that I've stopped flailing against the inevitable. Interestingness cannot persist in the face of boredom. 

I've written a lot about boredom over the years (e.g. "Boredom", "Boredom, Certainty, and Frozen Perspective", and "Why Does Time Pass Quickly or Slowly?"), framing boredom as a dynamic property, rather than the vacant gap we imagine it to be:

Your boredom is God's kryptonite.

Bored outlooks ensure boring experiences

Nothing's more boring than boredom

Bored people spray boredom. It's the ultimate rebuke of Gandhi's exhortation to be the change you wish to see in the world

How do I know boredom works in this counterintuitive way? I'm interesting, and innately zestful, and have found, again and again, that the only thing in the universe that can thwart my irrepressibility is boredom. So I speak from direct experience.

This isn't about me, though. I write this as a minor envoy from Planet Interestingness, where motion, stimulation, and creativity abound. And this isn't my lament. It's my response to yours. As a light snippet of tap dancing, I offer this amiable explanation for your boredom.

Coaxing a Stuck Screw

Forgiving You For My Mistake
I once noted that when someone takes away a false impression of you, and you can make them recognize their misunderstanding, they may correct their false impression, but it will feel to them like forgiveness. They're forgiving you for their misunderstanding. And you'll be on probation going forward:

After all the explaining, you won't have cleared yourself. You'll have been given a reprieve. They'll frame it like forgiveness. They've forgiven your transgression...this time! So the next time you trigger another wrong conclusion, you’ll be treated as a repeat offender. No more benefit of the doubt for you, mister.

Amnesia and You
The amnesiac's friends and family perform all due sympathy, and they intellectually understand the situation. But more viscerally—they'd hardly admit it even to themselves—they take umbrage at having been forgotten.

Just Rehearsing
After 40 years and lots of pricey therapy, she still cannot accept that horrid thing she overheard her mother saying when she was a child.

Finally, she sat down with her mom for a coffee, and summoned the nerve to ask about it. Her mother explained that she was, at the time, rehearsing a script for a community theater production. And all that care and woe and burden dissipated instantly. Like magic!

Which seems like the most natural thing in the world. Why wouldn't it? Conditions changed! If there were any wider lesson to be learned, it would be "always learn the whole story." That seems like the grand takeaway. Profound. Satisfying. Sufficient.

She doesn't even begin to consider the easy release empowered by a minute shift of interpretation. The only change was interpretative, and it was comically minute. None of this is noticed.

Blithely Peeing
Lucid dreamers attest that dreams are 100% real-seeming, and only seem hazy and "dream-like" in recollection. And yet, every morning when we awaken, we sever cherished relationships and lose loved ones forever. How do we react? We blithely pad into the bathroom to pee.

The Banality of Existence
All these vignettes show shifts of perspective grandly torquing our interpretation of the world. And they also carry an odd sense of banality. We could coin the phrase "The Banality of Existence", but it would fall flat, because it's already so innately recognized.

And yet we persist in our fraughtness over this tumultuous world of our interpretation, wherein our contrived, performative suffering is very NON-banal, thank you very much.

Un-Priori

My physical therapist told me I'd need to ice my knee for a few days. I asked if it would need more than one icing per day. "More than once per day? I should hope so!" she chortled. It was ridiculous to imagine any therapeutic effect at all from a mere single application. I was told to ice three times.

I'm sure she was right, and I of course followed her direction, but here she was making an a priori argument in a situation that couldn't support it. If 5 icings were required, or 20 or 150, one might just as easily ridicule the notion of three daily icings.

Years earlier, a friend invited me along to a Wayne Shorter concert. He had an extra ticket. As we filed into our seats for the performance, I asked how much I owed him. "$100" he said. My mouth fell agape. "A hundred dollars? Really?" He looked at me like I was a boob. "It's Wayne Shorter! A legend! Would you really argue that Wayne Shorter isn't worth $100?"

"Why not $13,000?" I replied. Is Wayne Shorter not worth $13,000? Honestly, a mere thirteen grand sounds like a steal to hear one of the all-time greats!

Ice is therapeutic and Wayne Shorter is great. In these cases, they're indisputable assertions. But neither assertion, on its own, supports a particular numerical conclusion.

I hereby coin the term “Un-Priori Argument” for arguments where the conclusion is presumed to ride along on the self-evidence of an undisputed premise. It’s a form of non sequitur (where the conclusion doesn’t follow from the premise), in which the conclusion tries to borrow authority from the premise. And now that I've pointed it out, you'll see this everywhere.

Thank You

The rigidly taciturn manager-cashier at the one good Chinese grocery in town, who tersely speaks in minimal Portuguese, and who doesn't know a word of English....

One of the first signs of a newbie traveler is the expectation that Chinese people speak some English, like the oldsters in Chinatown back home.

...rigidly declines to show any indication that he recognizes me, though I know that I am a VIP customer, being the only one asking for holy Thai basil or fermented tofu or obscure Chinese versions of senbei.

It's the sign of a merely accomplished foodie to be surprised that Chinese know about Japanese senbei at all, when they've earned a firm and enduring spot on the Chinese snack pyramid.

But this time, he rang up my stuff, handed me the bag, and there was an almost imperceptible sotto voce "thank-you."

It was so quiet and bashful and slippery that I may have imagined it. And like with the Voice used, hypnotically, by the Bene Gesserit in "Dune," I felt restrained from remarking or reacting in any way. I could only walk out the door, making a loopy, asymmetrical face of utter disorientation.

Has he been working on it? Knowing a thing or two about taciturn Chinese cashiers, I know it is entirely possible he's been practicing for months.