lululu

I could not be more excited for, and proud of, my friend Matt as he launches into the next, entrepreneurial part of his life. After more than a year of planning and prepping and hustling (the good kind), he, his brother, and another partner have purchased an east-side coffee shop that will become The Brew [...]

News to no one who knows me: I took an upholstery class last fall, from a local studio that used to operate the program at Austin Community College before budget cuts forced them to go private. I had a ball and have enjoyed adopting it as a new hobby. But there was also a specific [...]

I have loved this essay, “The Bone Garden of Desire,” since I first read it in college, in an anthology of 2001′s best, that I picked up on a whim from the discount table at Barnes and Noble by the UT campus—the way you do before you’re carting 7 tons of books around with you [...]

The New York Times issued a call a few weeks ago for essays making an ethical case for eating meat. I couldn’t think of a single ethical justification myself, so I’ve looked forward to the results. Out of thousands of submissions, the panel of judges (including Michael Pollan, Peter Singer, and others) selected six finalists—all [...]

Johanna took me to a library book sale a month or two ago, and I have been delighting in the half-dozen scruffy yet functional books I brought home for 50 cents apiece. At that price, I don’t mind that the spine cracks in half when I open a paperback as old as I am, and [...]

The New York Times review of Thomas Keller’s Per Se is actually a great description of our French Laundry experience. The dishes described differ, with the exception of a few signatures like the oysters and pearls and the end-of-meal doughnuts, but the experience sounds exactly the same. “No restaurant…does a better job than Per Se [...]

Is the New York Times spying on us?

Bryan and I got it together enough on Friday to make it out to the beach, but aside from that we’ve just been at home, bouncing from one lazy activity to the next: dabbling in low-commitment home improvement projects, shucking a few oysters, catching up on blogs, experimenting with beer cocktails (3 parts hefeweizen + [...]

Last week we ventured out into the city on a weeknight (!) for an event called “Porkapalooza.” Really, how could we resist? The hook was that you watched a butchering demonstration while you ate fingerfoods made from that very pig. (A couple of my friends misunderstood and thought for most of a week that we’d [...]

The only poetry I read anymore is email spam. Like this: the accommodation at mall, yadgar chah, the observing in itself, but the computing of however, was shrewd enough to see that this carelessness, that listless manner burst out in a paroxysm of spectacles. So far i was well on the way to proving too [...]