My new favorite pan

Long-time readers will be all too familiar with my favorite pan, which has been touted as such since Episode 2 of UaKS. The pan was a 4-quart Calphalon saucier, since discontinued, gifted to me by my buddy Ed. Alas, the Calphalon saucier is not induction-compatible, so it has been sacrificed to the God of New Kitchens, no doubt to be snapped up by one of you after the appropriate amount of genuflection.

 

I searched far and wide for its replacement before landing on this 5-quart Made In saucier. I knew everything would be okay when I saw that it is "Made in Italy." It has a lid, cooks like a dream, and the extra capacity is welcome. It's more than I've ever spent on a single pan before, but you gotta do what you gotta do when replacing a beloved family heirloom. Let the cooking commence.

 

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Doing rather than having

Long-time readers will no doubt recall, and wisely continue to use, the UaKS guide to better holiday gift giving through science, in which we discussed a few principles for giving better gifts so as to avoid the "deadweight loss of Christmas." Although it was not one of the three numbered principles in the UaKS guide, we did mention that "recipients actually tend to derive more happiness from experiential gifts (like UVA basketball tickets or a dinner out), which have the added benefit of anticipating the event as well as experiencing it."

 

I recently read a terrific review paper from 2022 by Amit Kumar which goes into more detail as to why experiential purchases (for yourself and others) provide a "brighter path."[1] Essentially, experiential purchases give greater satisfaction than buying material goods before, during, and after the event/purchase.

Smell-o-Vision

 

 

You know how much I love to quote Emeril Lagasse whenever I find a dish that's so flavorful "you could put it on a bumper and it would taste good," or that some dishes are a "food of love thing." One Emerilism I haven't gotten to yet is how he would complain about the limitations of a TV cooking show: “Oooh! I can’t wait till we get Smell-o-Vision so you can smell this at home!”

Episode 500: Back where it all began

There is a well-named handmade pasta shop in the Wedgewood neighborhood of Seattle called, simply, La Pasta: “The Pasta.” 

Inside the shop there is another, equally beautiful, sign next to which is hand lettered in chalk “CHI MANGIA BENE VIVE BENE.” This is the Italian philosophy of life summarized in five words: “Who eats well lives well.”

A talking-to-strangers tale

For all my trumpeting the work of Nick Epley at the University of Chicago, I was surprised to find that I haven't actually mentioned on UaKS his 2014 study "Mistakenly Seeking Solitude,"[1] which I see and hear cited and discussed all the time. That's the one where Epley and his colleague Juliana Schroeder instructed commuters on Chicago trains and buses to (1) connect with a stranger near them, (2) remain disconnected, or (3) commute as normal. The study participants reported a more positive experience when they connected with their fellow commuters than when they did not. (Leave those earbuds out!) But that was the opposite of what participants had expected to find, when the researchers asked them beforehand how they thought it would go. The authors' conclusion: "Human beings are social animals. Those who misunderstand the consequences of social interactions may not, in at least some contexts, be social enough for their own well-being," that is, they are "undersocial."[2] I've listened to various conversations with Epley where he talks about putting this idea into practice in his own life by constantly chatting up the people he meets everyday (including every psychologist's favorite, the barista).

Fart walk

I stumbled across an episode of NPR's Life Kit podcast called “Why you should take a ‘fart walk’ after a meal.” Despite the edgy (for NPR) title, it ended up being stuff that Mom has been advocating for a while now: take a short walk after a meal to jump start your digestive process and help regulate your blood sugar. Another side benefit is to help you sleep better. The guidelines for a post-meal fart walk are simple and inviting—

• You don't need much: 5 minutes is enough, 15 minutes is great if you have the time.
• A casual (walking the dog) pace is okay; if you want to get in some cardio too, then you can up the pace to brisk.
• Start walking within 30 minutes after a meal.
• Walking is great after any meal but especially helpful after your biggest meal of the day, so usually dinner in the US. 

Photo by Marco Antonio Casique Reyes on Unsplash

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Attention is love

One of my favorite quotes conveying a principle to live by is from The Power of Fun by Catherine Price: "Our lives are what we pay attention to." She has explained elsewhere that what she means by this is that "when we decide what to pay attention to in the moment, we are making a broader decision about how we want to spend our time alive."

 

After I responded to this idea, I started seeing variations on the theme all over. In How To Know a Person, David Brooks wrote that "[t]he quality of your life depends quite a bit on the quality of attention you project out onto the world." In The Good Life, Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz quote the French philosopher Simone Weil as saying, "Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity."

 

Fast food, episode XV

It's been too long since my last installment in the "fast food" franchise, even though I have posted other under-30-minute recipes since then. As quick and easy go, they don't get much quicker and easier than this, an Indian-style variation on a rice-and-beans dish using only pantry staples (if you go with canned over fresh tomatoes). This one is definitely worth keeping in mind for when you're home late from work and don't know what to make but don't want to order in or go out. We all thought it was really tasty, especially given the small amount of time and work involved. Stock up on black-eyed peas next time you're at the grocery — they're delicious and have a great texture compared to some other beans. (They're great in the Four "Pea" Usal, too.)

 

My 2024 reading

A favorite year-end activity is looking through the books I read in the preceding year. According to StoryGraph, I read 73 books in 2024, totaling 21,622 pages. The genre I spent the most time with in 2024 was, not surprisingly, psychology (20 titles), followed by memoir (15), self-help (11), and "literary" (9), whatever that means. Looking through the picture of all the books I read last year, I see that there were a fair number I slogged through, even though they weren't all that enjoyable. 

Yet another thing that made me cry

This is Mom's new favorite anecdote, so I'm just going to get it out there myself to control the narrative. You all already know some of the things that make me cry, most reliably the concluding scenes from sappy movies. Mom and I watched "CODA" recently, which I wouldn't classify as a sappy movie and was, in fact, good enough to win the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2022 (along with Best Supporting Actor and Best Adapted Screenplay). But I also didn't just tear up at the climactic scene; I was pretty much sobbing, to the point where Mom felt like she had to comfort me even though she was crying too. I don't know why I was so wrecked.

A day to be thankful for

Photo by Madison Oren on Unsplash

 

At the heart of celebration is a kind of mathematical paradox: the more we share joy, the more it grows. The implication of this is that we should manage joy in the exact opposite way that we manage money. We should spend it all, at every chance we get. What celebration does, with music and fireworks, giant balloons and glitter, is broadcast our joy far and wide so that others can join in. Because the more generous we are with our joy, the more we have for ourselves.

Ingrid Fetell Lee, Joyful (2018)

 

Yesterday was an awesome day, from start to finish. The hard rain overnight cleared out in the morning, just in time for me to run to the MHS track and do a virtual turkey trot. A few laps in, a magnificent hawk swooped in and perched on the fence at the south end of the track, and then watched over me as I circled the track. I felt lighter, like I was taking flight myself, every time I glimpsed the raptor upon completing another circuit. I ended up running my fastest 5K time in six years.

 

Seven marriage strategies from social science

One of my latest reads was about using social science findings to shore up your marriage. The book is For Better: The Science of a Good Marriage (2010) by Tara Parker-Pope, who has been a journalist at the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. There are lots of interesting findings cited in the book, toward the end of which Parker-Pope sums up that "[g]ood marriages require daily maintenance and positive feedback to help couples stay connected." She then provides seven strategies that studies have shown "successful couples use to stay happy and bolster the strength of their marriage," some of which I've already discussed here. The seven strategies are:

A perfect Friday evening

This is very geeky but yesterday we had the perfect Friday evening. Driving over to the semiannual Friends of the Library book sale, Mom, Brad, and I listened to a hilarious new episode ("Georgetown Massacre Part 1") of the Revisionist History podcast dealing with the "Varsity Blues" college admissions scandal. Then we lined up for the book sale, all the way by Aldi's there were so many people. It was a banner year at the book sale, from my perspective: 

This is the stack of books that $32 buys you at the book sale.

I found all that in an hour, after which Mom and Brad were ready to go, because it was a pretty warm and humid day yesterday, and it was hot, crowded, and stinky in the book sale. There are always professional book sellers in there using b.o. to clear a wide berth around themselves while they take all the best books to resell at marked-up prices in their bookstores. Brad deployed countermeasures by farting near a particularly malodorous offender.

After the book sale, we made our traditional beeline for takeout dinner from Bodo's. It's getting harder to argue with Brad that Bodo's is the best thing going: we picked up two Cleo salads, three sandwiches, and six more bagels to get us through the weekend, all for only $32! No wonder we were customer # 1367 for the day.

 

We ate dinner while watching an episode of Abbott Elementary, then we all did the big reveal of what treasures we picked up at the book sale. (One of my big divvies was a hardback copy, in pristine condition, of maybe the greatest running book ever: Haruki Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.) It doesn't get any better than that.

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Wahoowa, episode III: The worm has turned

One of the great pleasures of the last decade or so of my relationship with Mom has been her discovery of UVA men's basketball, the only sport she has ever willingly sat down and watched with me, without having to be coaxed into it with a back rub. Mom's fandom reached its acme on April 8, 2019, when UVA beat Texas Tech in overtime to win its first and only national championship. Since then, well, we haven't won a single NCAA tournament game, culminating in our First Four pantsing this week by a mediocre Colorado State team, in a game in which they shot 55% and we shot 25%, including missing 19 consecutive shots at one point. In the wake of that fiasco, ESPN loudmouth Stephen A. Smith (you can insert what you're thinking of for the "A") called for Coach Tony Bennett to be fired "strictly because of being boring." Once again, I say I missed my calling in life if you can get paid the big bucks for quality takes like that.

 

Even before that game, UVA pissed down their leg in blowing a six-point lead in the final minute of regulation in their semifinal game in the ACC tournament by, among other things, going 1 for 5 from the free-throw line (also known as the "charity stripe," though not so much when this year's UVA team was shooting foul shots), and fouling former UVA player Casey Morsell while he was shooting a three-pointer. For context, Morsell shot 123 three-pointers while he was here and made 25 of them, which is 20%. Morsell, of course, drained all three free throws, while UVA was clanking theirs at the other end of the floor.

 

Smile when your partner walks into a room

I recently read You Could Make This Place Beautiful, the poet Maggie Smith's 2023 memoir. (The title is essentially the last line from her as-famous-as-poems-get poem "Good Bones.") Lesson #1 from this book: Unless you're 100% certain that you'll never get divorced, do not marry a writer—you will not come off looking too good when they write their memoir.

 

At one point, Smith muses about the qualities she's looking for in her post-divorce "dream partner," but what she wants is "so basic, so low-bar, I’m almost ashamed to say it out loud: Someone who’s happy to see me. Someone who smiles when I walk into a room. Someone who can be happy with me and for me[.]" It may be basic and low-bar, but it's a great lesson #2 from this book: When your partner walks into a room, smile and let them know you're happy to see them. And while you're at it, give them a hug too, if you haven't seen them for a while. It's hard to imagine a simpler way to keep the fire burning.

 

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The holy song of thanksgiving

And speaking of those butter-loving Danes....

 

This is a fabulous video of the Danish String Quartet playing what is, in my opinion, the most beautiful 15 to 20 minutes of classical music ever written: the middle movement of Beethoven's String Quartet No. 15, Op. 132. Beethoven took the very rare, for him, step of giving this movement a title, translated into English as the "Holy song of thanksgiving of a convalescent to the Deity, in the Lydian mode." Beethoven composed the quartet in 1825, two years before his death in 1827. But Beethoven was sure he was dying of a severe intestinal illness in 1825; when he miraculously recovered, he wrote this piece, dedicating it to his conception of the "Deity," who it sounds like the fiddles are reaching heavenward to carry Beethoven's message of thanks directly to, especially at the end of the movement.

 

I am most partial to the classic recording of this piece by the Quartetto Italiano, and not just because they're the Quartetto Italiano. But I have to admit to taking special pleasure in seeing these black-clad, stern-looking Danish mfs sawing away on their fiddles in the most emotive piece ever written:

 

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Toothbutter

I learned a great new word recently: tandsmør, which translates literally from the Danish as “toothbutter” (tand = tooth, smør = butter). The Danes use it to describe butter that it is spread so thickly on a slice of bread as to reveal teeth marks when bitten. If you've ever eaten a meal with Grandma and Pop-pop with bread and butter present, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about.

 

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That time of year

 

The fall version of the biannual JMRL Friends of the Library Book Sale came and went last week. My stack of books purchased gets smaller every time, but I still found some books I'd had on my list of things to look for, as well as some things that weren't on my list but seemed interesting. The former category included a pair of books by New Yorker staff writers—The Wager by David Grann and The Real Work by Adam Gopnik, both of whom I'd heard recently on podcasts discussing their books. Also, Why Fish Don't Exist by Lulu Miller, who notes in her bio that her favorite place in the world is Humpback Rocks (the site of the legendary "Offing the flatlanders" episode of UaKS), so who can resist that? Despite the author's C-ville connection (mentioned elsewhere in the book), I'd actually first heard about Why Fish Don't Exist from one of those employee recommendation cards attached to some of the books at Third Place Books, that awesome little independent book shop near Dylan and Moriah's house. Of course, I couldn't resist a couple of social psychology books like Happier and How Pleasure Works.

 

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Happy 'Ville

Not for the first time, C-ville was recently listed as one of the happiest places to live in America by a national publication. This time it was in Outside magazine's list of the "15 Happiest Places to Live in the U.S." The methodology considered factors such as overall well-being (using the Sharecare Community Well-Being Index), percentage of public land, affordability, how climate change is affecting towns, and the level of inclusivity demonstrated to people of color and LGBTQ+ residents.

 

As for C-ville, Outside noted the favorable work-life balance, with lots of UVA jobs and one of the lowest unemployment rates in the country on one side of the ledger; on the fun side, the magazine specifically mentioned the 20-mile Rivanna Trail, kayaking trips led by the Rivanna River Company, hiking and camping in Shenandoah National Park, and the high density of great local cuisine, particularly in the "trendy" Belmont neighborhood. Alas, no mention of Bodo's, which won't score any points with Brad in terms of establishing credibility.

 

Other cities of note on the list based on some proximity to you all are Frederick, Maryland, and Tacoma, Washington.  

 

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Happiness hacks gone awry

When The Happiness Lab pisses you off, where is there to go? To begin, happiness "strategies" and "practices" are okay, but can we all agree to lose the ubiquitous "hacks" [1] for a while?