Being racist is still real.

Two girls walk onto a train, talking quietly amongst themselves.

As they sit down, a woman leans out from the row behind them. “This is the quiet car.” The girls stop, taken aback.

“You don’t need to tell me that,” says one of them.

“Well you were talking …”

“We were talking to get on the train.” *Looks incredulous. I, also, felt incredulous.* They pick up their things which they’d just set down and head back out of the car.

“I was just trying to be nice!” Fruitlessly. But were you?

Pop quiz: who in this story is white, and who is black?

Pheasants & Barley: idealized Nordic cuisine, it’s what’s for dinner

Tonight’s dinner menu is brought to you by this beautiful coffee table decoration that doubles as a cookbook:

Upon hearing that dinner was going to be a frittata (boring — I love breakfast for dinner as much as the next gal but when you eat an egg sandwich almost every morning, doing it again ten hours later just seems uninspired), I opened cookbook nearest my hand for some more out-of-the-ordinary inspiration. That cookbook happened to be Fire and Ice, a cloth-covered photo-essay-cum-“home-cooking”-expedition through the Great White North.

We stand by: a Thanksgiving meditation

There has never been anything, nor will there ever be anything, which so frightens those in power as a great demographic shift among the powerless.

Because the powerless, when they see themselves in the powerful, can delude themselves into thinking they share in the power. After all, they have the same interests, the same concerns, the same ideology. But when the powerless look up and see something that looks so unfamiliar, they begin to feel restless. They clamor for change. They know that these strangers, who purport to speak for them, in no way have their best interests at heart. Ultimately, they threaten the powerful — not overtly (necessarily), but covertly. Not with conflict and protest, with guns and violence, but with that most subversive act of all. With their vote.