“It is possible to long for a place you’ve never visited — to spend a lifetime nostalgic for a life you’ve never lived,” Catherine Chung writes. For Chung, that place was the famed Wudang Mountains in central China, a place that filled her childhood fantasies. To apply the first part of Chung’s idea — “a place you’ve never visited” — to how I feel about Beijing seems inaccurate. I have been to Beijing; in fact, I moved there for a year after I graduated from college and I loved saying that I lived there. But the nostalgia that Chung describes is still relevant to my relationship with Beijing — “nostalgic for a life you’ve never lived” — because I left the city.
America has a food waste problem. But I’ve rarely been clear on how that translates to how I actually treat the food in my refrigerator. Because what can you do, right? When the date says it’s done, it’s done, right?
Apparently, very wrong. Researchers have found that “expiration” dates — which rarely correspond to food actually expiring or spoiling — are mostly well-intentioned, but haphazard and confusing. Put another way, they’re not expiration dates at all. And the broader public’s misunderstanding about them is a major contributor in every single one of the factors I named above: wasted food, wasted revenue, wasted household income, and food insecurity.
While Garibaldi's military victories immortalized him, his reputation was largely built on how he handled defeat in 1849. Following the loss of Rome to the French fighting on behalf of Pope Pius IX (remember, complicated), Garibaldi refused to surrender and instead led a monthlong, 400-mile retreat to Ravenna.
In 2019, exactly "a hundred and seventy years and twenty-three days" after Garibaldi fled Rome with his pregnant wife, Anita, and 4,000 volunteer troops, English writer Tim Parks and his partner Eleonora walked the same route, yielding "The Hero's Way," part history, part travelogue.
My mother is calling at midnight again.
I’ve lost her house. I wore it under a dress. I wore it