The tea was a case where I have a hard time separating my own bad decisions, my cooking equipment, and the recipes themselves. But I’m pretty sure the former two are more responsible for the non-optimal results.
I ended up making an orange-almond flourless cake, a lemon-blueberry tart, a ricotta-chocolate tart, a pecan pie tart, and a version of a pissaladiere—caramelized onions on baked dough, usually with tomatoes and olives.
Bad decision here was just making too much—too many preps to attend to thoughtfully, and it had me feeling frazzled as I worked. I tend to do this if I’m trying out a book that I haven’t ever used, but also if I’m setting a table that is supposed to involve sampling from a set of things. It isn’t really the tea I’d serve if I were not working from a cookbook: my ideal mix of savory and sweet at a tea includes some kind of curry tea sandwich, for example.
The far more potent problem, however, was the little tart pans that I used. I remembered that I had them somewhere in a drawer and pulled them out. There was a vague sense of foreboding as I looked at them, a sort of “why haven’t I been using these? They’re really cute. But I kind of remember…”
Afterwards, I remembered: no matter how much you butter or coat these babies, whatever you cook in them sticks. I think I’ve done that four times with them and then stuck them away in some forgotten corner in disgust. I’ve owned them for about thirty-five years, which is just long enough to take them out about once a decade and fail again. Not this time: the cookbook survives but these pans must die.
The orange-almond cake I simply undercooked by about five minutes, so a few didn’t make it out of the (works just fine) muffin tin I used, but others did well. I probably should have made a pizza or savory tart dough for the pissaladiere, which tasted great but which was underserved a bit by the puff pastry I put it on. (I should probably have adapted it by enclosing the onions and tomatoes inside puff pastry, as a filling. Easier to eat and the pastry would have cooked better. The pecan pie was good, though—the recipe relied on maple syrup for its sweetness, which worked well.
I mentioned a while back that Eric Lach’s January 14th investigation of Lamor Whitehead, an associate of New York mayor Eric Adams, had me thinking a lot. Lach’s reporting is careful and thorough, so part of my own engagement was simply respect for this kind of long-form work. It’s the main reason I subscribe to the New Yorker: right now they’re the best out there in this respect, publishing work that has more craft and intelligence and purpose than any American newspaper and that isn’t just hunting for clicks or provocation the way that the Atlantic and other surviving magazines focused on public affairs often seem to be.
But I struggled too against my own first reaction, which is to reinforce a feeling I already have about Adams, which is that he’s got a lot of dubious associations and ethical blindspots. Why do I struggle with that conclusion, considering that it seems indisputably true? Whitehead is not the first person with serious issues of criminal or ethical misconduct to be closely tied to Adams.
I suppose it is because I often do a certain amount of “whataboutery” in my own mind, to my own thoughts. The complaint against whataboutery in social media has become so generalized that it represents a form of fallacious distraction in its own right. E.g., sometimes you have got to think comparatively and situationally at the same time about a critique you have of a public figure, where to complain you have to ask yourself if you’re being honest and consistent about the problem you see—and whether the information that has triggered your critique comes to you in a consistent way. It’s not whataboutery to calibrate through comparison in a rigorous and self-reflective way—it only is when you’re insincerely trying to get somebody to stop looking at a flagrant transgression by someone in your own political camp by pointing to something far less flagrant elsewhere.
So in this case, I ask myself: how much of Adams is just the way that municipal politics works in the United States now? For that matter, how it has worked in more machine-dominated political eras in the recent past? Is there any mayor of a large American city who doesn’t have these kinds of entanglements with dubious businessmen, flawed community leaders and disappointing mentees? Who represents the gold standard that I’d prefer, and if they exist, how did they get into office (and govern) so immaculately?
And the other question I ask myself is whether I pay more attention—and reach conclusions more quickly—if the mayor or local leader is Black. More to the point, I wonder if it is easier for reporters to investigate dubious connections for Black leaders. And if so, whether that isn’t exactly what motivates Adams to refuse to get people like Lamor Whitehead out of his world, because he knows that the white establishment makes demands of Black leaders that it doesn’t make of white leaders? Lach’s reporting suggests that this is part of it: Whitehead is a kind of ‘fuck you’ to the white establishment, an icon of Adams’ refusal to do what he’s supposed to do.
Take that line of thought too far and it starts to have a kind of racism in and of itself—a refusal to judge that amounts to saying “I won’t apply standards that I normally would because Blackness”. But understanding why a leader does the things that he or she does is always important, and I get why Adams might dig in stubbornly without necessarily being involved in the same dubious activities as some of his associates. When I compare the mayors I’ve seen, I have to admit that I begin to realize that my preference has often been for more ‘honest’ and somewhat technocratic figures like Kurt Schmoke and Mike Nutter who have won by positioning themselves as reformers (often at least vaguely against predecessors deemed to have been not just establishment figures but machine politicians with a vague air of corruption) and yet I wonder sometimes whether their associations have been examined with this kind of intensity—and whether their relative inability to have their reforms or initiatives really stick is related to those associations. Reformist mayors and district attorneys, it seems to me, sometimes don’t make headway in their goals because they have none of those more dubious associations to call upon, nothing that will let them get inside of a crooked mess and crack it wide open. I’m also aware that the story on some mayors and other leaders could be, should be about dubious associations and corrupt networks and it just never seems to get there. Back when Giuliani hadn’t completely destroyed his reputation, he got a pass for having appointed Bernard Kerik as police commissioner—nobody even looked into Kerik very closely until later on, whereupon a whole host of criminal activity became evident.
In the end, I suppose I’m where I sort of took Lach to be, which is wondering why Adams isn’t at least more careful for the sake of his supporters. That is the easiest thing to think about a politician who is being at the very least careless about their actions and associations: that they’re not respecting the fact that they are someone that other people rely upon and that they are standing in for whole communities of people. That’s what being public means. If you want to value friendships and associations more than appearances and ethical norms, don’t become a public figure.
I also wrestled a bit with a similar feeling on reading another New Yorker piece over the weekend, this one about the philosopher Agnes Callard.
I hadn’t ever come across Callard’s work before, despite the fact that the article lays out her fairly public profile as a philosopher and intellectual. The essay is an exploration of Callard’s marriages, which she has made an explicit subject of her own philosophical inquiry—indeed, the article frames one of those marriages as something of a philosophical experiment on her part.
What I wanted to check in myself is the instant inclination to judge Callard negatively in a variety of ways, because I think in general in profiles of married intellectuals and artists it is very easy to see misbehavior by women as more blameworthy as than men. (I think that even many women feel that way fall into that feeling.) I was reminded a bit of reading a recent review of the new book Lives of the Wives as well as Phyllis Rose’s Five Victorian Marriages, mentioned by the reviewer: in the history of notable literary and scholarly marriages, awful behavior by husbands is by far the dominant trend.
But it’s also not as if Callard has behaved badly in that judgment-inviting way. Or not exactly. And yet I read the article with a mixture of dread and incredulity. You fell in love with a graduate student in your seminar and he with you? You divorced your first husband even though you both agreed it was a good marriage with no problems (and two young children) in order to marry your new love because you convinced yourself that you were feeling real love for the first time and needed to respect and investigate that feeling? Your first husband eventually moved back in with you both and all three of you raised kids together (one by the new husband, two by the old)? You’ve given lectures about your marriage? You’re sticking in the second marriage in part because you’re working on getting your second husband to be more aspirational?
I read some of it aloud to my wife and daughter and my daughter’s astute response was “Geez, if you want to be a poly, be a poly—just call it a throuple and be done with it.” Except that’s the thing: there’s no hint of eros or passion in any of it, and not really of what I would think of as love—not of feeling. It’s all thinking, all the way down.
I sometimes have joked—slightly earnestly—that it’s interesting that moral philosophers don’t often try to apply their own moral philosophy to their lives. But now that I’ve seen it, I take it back. Do Not Want.
I found it hard to precisely identify what I disliked about Callard’s thinking in this article, beyond a certain kind of “oh great, this is exactly what people think about humanist intellectuals, that they’re all brain and no common sense, so this isn’t good for the brand at least”. But the Cornell philosopher Kate Manne put it perfectly in an Substack essay titled, “Your Partner Is Not a Project”. It’s the unholy mix of “self-conscious value acquisition” and the treatment of other people and relationships with them as a canvas for such a project. (Mann ealso notes the WTF aspect of Callard envisioning herself as the first person to really investigate love in a focused philosophical way.) Like Manne, I start from the perspective that life is for living. It’s not a project as such, even if I might aim to get better or do better in various ways over time. Maybe the unexamined life isn’t worth living, but the over-examined one is just as bad.
Adams: better or worse than Lincoln Steffens' Martin Lomasney?