In the best possible sense, watching this scene feels like putting my own brain in a pastry oven, setting it to high, and letting it crisp. I especially enjoy it as someone who is deeply incompetent at cooking and baking and, for that matter, doing anything whatsoever while stoned, save for watching Nancy Meyers movies. Which is why when I was offered (read: begged for) the opportunity to do a Nancy Meyers Week here at Vulture dot com, one of the first ideas I presented was re-creating this scene as a self-punishing stunt. I wanted to know: Could a layperson make croissants high? Could an actual pastry chef even make croissants high? Or was this a skill bestowed exclusively upon Meryl Streep in It’s Complicated, inadvertently perpetuating a dangerous myth?
My mom was born on Christmas Eve, so her parents named her Carol. While I was growing up, she was, appropriately, synonymous with Christmas. I always loved baking Christmas cookies with her—especially the cut-out cookies, shaped like Santas, reindeer, and candy canes. I remember the way the dough felt pressed against the grain of our old wooden pastry board. How many cinnamon imperials were appropriate to put on one snowman cookie? My brother and I may have pushed the limits. Christmas music floated through the house from the kitchen radio. I would stand on a chair next to her to carefully observe what was happening on the stovetop, or clamor to pitch in stirring a bowl of dough, only to complain when my arm started to get tired a minute later. Licking the batter from the wire beaters was a highly anticipated peak of the baking day, and soon after, covered in flour, I’d be lost to whatever holiday specials were on TV in the living room. We’d enjoy a bounty of these homemade cookies well into the New Year, while just as many were delivered, along with her walnut fudge, in festive tins, to neighbors, colleagues, relatives, and friends.
Understanding Neanderthals’ place in history is important to show “how evolution didn’t follow an arrow-straight Hominin Highway leading to ourselves”, and to skewer white supremacist notions that sprang up around our early (mis)understanding of who different types of humans were.
We are in a crisis that seems capable of dissolving the bonds that hold global and national politics together. That might augur for a better, fairer world, with a new political settlement. But that is also what idealists thought at the turn of the 19th century. And yet, Bell warns, the Enlightenment appeared to many a “vision of war as potentially regenerative and sublime”. In that crisis, Men on Horseback shows, the contradictions and tensions of a fast-changing world emboldened autocrats, and moved the public not only to obey them, but to love them.
As useless as a sterile seed inside
a pod, the astronaut looks into space
while the dark side of the blue world passes.
My mother sliced the cucumbers on a plate
and sprinkled them with salt and lemon juice.
A dragon inked in blue, fat as a goose,
shone through their pale translucent flesh. We ate