Later On

Got some photos, but I think I’ll post them tomorrow. I’m sort of pooped: first the weights (with increases in just about all the weights) and then the walk (1 block farther, running a total time of just over 24 minutes—getting to be a real walk).

I must say that I enjoy the weight training.

Meghan O’Rourke in the New Yorker:

One autumn day in 1964, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, a Swiss-born psychiatrist, was working in her garden and fretting about a lecture she had to give. Earlier that week, a mentor of hers, who taught psychiatry at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, had asked her to speak to a large group of medical students on a topic of her choice. Kübler-Ross was nervous about public speaking, and couldn’t think of a subject that would hold the students’ attention. But, as she raked fallen leaves, her thoughts turned to death: Many of her plants, she reflected, would probably die in the coming frost. Her own father had died in the fall, three years earlier, at home in Switzerland, peaceful and aware of what was taking place. Kübler-Ross had found her topic. She would talk about how American doctors—who, in her experience, were skittish around seriously ill patients—should approach death and dying.

Kübler-Ross prepared a two-part lecture. The first part looked at how various cultures approach death. For the second, she brought a dying patient to class to talk with the students. Asking around at the hospital, she found Linda, a sixteen-year-old girl with incurable leukemia. Linda’s mother had just taken out an ad in a local newspaper asking readers to send Linda get-well and sweet-sixteen cards. Linda was disgusted by the pretense that her health would improve. She agreed to visit the class, where she spoke openly about how she felt. The students, Kübler-Ross observed, were rapt but nervous. They avoided dealing with the source of their discomfort—the shock of seeing an articulate, lovely young woman on the verge of death—by asking an abundance of clinical questions about her symptoms.

Soon afterward, as her biographer, Derek Gill, relates, Kübler-Ross took a job as an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Chicago. Four students from the Chicago Theological Seminary learned that she was interested in terminal illness and asked if she might help them study dying people’s needs. Kübler-Ross agreed to try. At Chicago’s Billings Hospital, she began a series of seminars, interviewing patients about what it felt like to die. The interviews took place in front of a one-way mirror, with students observing on the other side. This way, Kübler-Ross gave the patients some privacy while accommodating the growing number of students who wanted to watch.

Read the rest of this entry »

Interesting post by Andrew Sullivan:

Conor Friedersdorf disagrees with Joe Carter’s dismissal of the Gitmo “suicides” and acceptance of the official investigations. Carter has a spirited back and forth in the American Scene comment section. Carter:

Let’s be clear: [The guards Scott Horton talked to] can’t prove: (a) the existence of any CIA black site, (b) that any prisoners were moved at all that night, (c ) that the prisoners who died that night were the prisoners they claimed to have seen, (d) that the prisoners were not carried to the medical facility.

The fact is that they have no firsthand knowledge of any of the events that deal directly with the prisoners. They also did not feel it worth coming forward for three years to claim that the official narrative was wrong.

In contrast, 52 guards and medical personnel gave sworn statements within days of the deaths. These statements are quite detailed about what occurred that night (the Seton Hall reports agrees that there is no question the dead prisoners were transported from the cells to the medical facility).

What motive would these 52 men and women have for lying? And assuming they were, how were they able to get their stories so similar to pull off such a massive cover-up?

From commenter “Chet,” who refutes Carter repeatedly:

[L]et’s take a look at the report in the light of your claim that “52 guards and medical staff were eyewitnesses to the suicide.” (One wonders how so many people could have personally eyewitnessed the discovery of these hanging corpses. Did they sell tickets?)

Let’s start with the first interviewee: “b3b6 advised that he was not present at Camp Delta when these suicides took place. b3b6 stated that he had no information to provide…b3b6 stated that he learned of the hangings by talking to people.” Oops! Not an eyewitness, then. (51 “eyewitnesses” left!) The next interviewee? The nurse who found the suicide note explains that on the night in question, he was “wrapping up the body of ISN 0093 for shipment” in the Detainee Acute Care Unit and “felt something he assumed was paper in the inside shirt pocket.” This was the suicide note, but notice that it was found on the body, not at the scene of the hanging. So scratch another eyewitness; the bodies had already been “cut down” when this individual discovered the note. (50).

Next (I’m just going down the pages until I find the next interviewee report), the Master Chief at Arms, who testifies that after hearing the alarm raised over radio, ran to Alpha block and saw “two guards holding 0093’s hands and feet. 0093 was lying on the deck in his cell and his eyes were rolled back.” Later, when the second body (588) was discovered, he arrived at that cell, only to find the body already lying on the deck as well. As well, when he arrived at the cell of 693, that body was also lying on the deck, not hanging from the noose.

So, another one of Joe’s “eyewitnesses” proves to never have actually seen any of the victims hanging from a noose. He did, however, see the first one with the rag stuffed down his throat. (49!)

The next interviewee? Informed that one of the detainees had “tried” to hang himself, didn’t actually observe the bodies until they were being carried out of the cell. (48!) The next is finally the first individual who personally testifies to the discovery of 0093 actually hanging by his neck, and the very next page after the record of his testimony is his notification of his legal rights and that he is “suspected of False Official Statements, UCMJ Article 107.) That’s pages 188-189, if you’re trying to follow my work. On the next page, apparently in response to suspicion of perjury, he amends his testimony to note that he at first did not see the detainee in the cell, but when another guard shouted “he’s hanging”, came into the cell to find that guard and the hanging body, with a surgical mask over the mouth and a rag in the throat. (How would a detainee get a surgical mask? How would a hands-bound man stuff a rag down his own throat and don a surgical mask, and why would a suicide need to do so?)

The next testimony is of another guard who only saw the bodies after they had been “cut down.” (47.) The next, the same. (46.) The next observed the bodies being carried out. (45.) The next concerns a guard not on duty at the time of the deaths who searched Alpha block and found nothing in the cells a detainee could hang himself with. (44.)

I’d go on all the way down the list but I think I’ve made my point. Joe’s disingenuous “52 eyewitnesses” claim is nothing but a mirage that evaporates on any kind of inspection. At the end of the day you have a great many guards and medical staff who were told that the detainees had hung themselves, and only 2 or 3 who actually testify to that fact, all of whom were notified of being under suspicion of giving false statements to investigators.

I imagine that Eric Holder and President Obama are already meeting on how to cover this up. They certainly won’t investigate: this occurred in the past, and they are looking to the future.

Interesting — and what is interesting is that climate change denialists are terribly sensitive to any sort of misbehavior by scientists (e.g., the sarcastic remarks found when the British lab’s computers were hacked, or the admission that the fate of the Himalayan glaciers was hyped), but seem totally accepting of any number of outright lies from those who are trying to deny the reality of global warming. Odd, isn’t it?

Source: Allianz, January 22, 2010

James Hoggan, the director of the James Hoggan & Associates public relations firm, has authored a book titled Climate Cover Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming, in which he describes PR techniques that industry groups use to create the impression of a scientific controversy about climate change.

Industries set up front groups, Hoggan says, like the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, which tried to convince Americans in electoral swing states that coal is clean. Front groups like Americans for Prosperity, which organized the disruptive August, 2009 town hall meeting protests, started out by paying for protestors.

Hoggan reports seeing documents that show PR firms charged $1800 per protestor. “Companies can buy protestors, and if you are clever with your framing of the issue, these paid protestors attract real protestors,” Hoggan explains.

His book also reveals the strategy of framing global warming as a United Nations scheme, or a scam by international scientists, to appeal to people who “don’t like being told what to do by the UN or some foreigners.”

The most powerful tools used to manipulate public opinion, Hoggan says, are focus groups, which help PR companies understand how people think on certain issues. Another is the creation of “echo chambers,” that involve generating favorable news reports that are repeated over and over by media outlets until the public finally starts repeating it back.

“Get Dick Cheney and George Bush and Fox News and the Competitive Enterprise Institute to talk and then just keep repeating what they say — ‘the science is not settled, the science is not settled, the science is not settled’—  until the public starts repeating it back. It’s a frightening phenomenon,” Hogan says.

Tom Ricks at The Best Defense:

The commander of the 2^nd Battalion, 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment, was relieved in Afghanistan, where the unit has been deployed since August. Both he and his command sergeant major were shipped home, reports the observant John Ramsey of the Fayetteville Observer.

Two things interest me about this. First, relieving a battalion commander in combat used to be pretty common, but has become increasingly rare in recent wars. Even General James Gavin, who thought relief was used too often during World War II, once gave an order to a battalion commander, who questioned it, so Gavin turned to the XO and told him he now had command of the unit. In my research on World War II, I have been struck at how swift relief was, but also how it wasn’t necessarily terminal. Off the top of my head I can think of two division commanders who were relieved in combat (Allen and Ward) only to get command of other divisions later in the war. What’s more, Brig. Gen. “Hanging” Sam Williams was not only relieved as an assistant division commander but also reduced to colonel—only to stay in the Army and eventually retire as a three star.

Second, the relieved battalion commander in question, Lt. Col. Frank Jenio, declined to comment to Mr. Ramsey, except to say that he is looking for a lawyer. Yow. I can’t imagine litigating command decisions like this one.

Brilliant. Via Andrew Sullivan.

Tina has a useful post at MakeUseOf.com. It begins:

To write a successful research paper, you should provide thorough information and tie it together into a conclusive story. While obtaining conclusive information tends to be rather difficult in itself, writing a convincing manuscript appears to be an even bigger hurdle. So what is the problem?

It seems that many authors don’t realize that a good research manuscript requires more than consistent and complete data. The central challenge of everything you ever write is to capture the reader’s interest and convincingly tell your story. In other words, you must understand your audience, what they expect, what they already know or where you need to fill them in. When writing a research manuscript, however, you must also follow a standard structure and apply the principles of scientific writing.

The following sites explain how to write a research paper. They reveal the rules of scientific writing, give practical examples, and guide you through the entire process of preparing a successful research manuscript…

Continue reading.

I have long advocated public financing of political campaigns, and now corporations are joining in the call. From the Center for American Progress in an email:

Last Thursday, “all five of the [Supreme] Court’s conservatives joined together … to invalidate a sixty-three year-old ban on corporate money in federal elections,” a move that Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) said “opens the floodgates for the purchases and sale of the law” by big corporations. On Friday, in response to the Court’s decision, “dozens of current and former corporate executives” from corporations, including Delta, Ben & Jerry’s, and Crate & Barrel, sent a letter to Congress asking it to immediately pass the Fair Elections Now Act, which would publicly finance all congressional campaigns out of a special fund created by a fee levied on TV broadcasters. Even before the Court’s recent ruling, corporate special interest money was making a huge impact on the legislative process. From 1998 to 2009, the financial, insurance, and real estate lobbies spent nearly $3.8 billion in Washington, which helped deregulate Wall Street, pass huge tax cuts for the wealthy, bar Medicare from negotiating for lower drug prices, kill mortgage cramdown legislation, and weaken financial and health reforms. According to polling done in November 2008, 69 percent of Americans support publicly financing all campaigns, including the majority of self-identified Democrats, Republicans, and independents. The bipartisan Fair Elections Now Act currently has six Senate co-sponsors and 125 co-sponsors in the House (President Obama was a co-sponsor when he was a senator).

Click here to sign the Fair Elections Now Act petition.

Its most significant use was in blocking civil-rights legislation. It has done little good and much harm. Time to kill it, if not the Senate. An email from the Center for American Progress:

While it is now taken for granted than any major piece of legislation needs 60 votes to pass the Senate, this has not always been the case. Use of the filibuster — the minority’s tactic to halt action on a bill through endless debate — has skyrocketed in the past two decades, creating a de facto need for 60 votes to get anything done. It only requires 51 votes to pass any bill, but it takes 60 votes to invoke cloture to end debate and pass the bill. There are now double the number of cloture votes as there were a decade ago, and triple the numbers of 20 years ago. As evidenced by the ongoing health care reform debate, the filibuster cripples the Senate’s ability to make progress. The filibuster also gives a undue amount of power to individual senators and allows them to exploit the process for their narrow interests, dictating policy outcomes. For instance, Sen. Joe Lieberman’s (I-CT) threat to filibuster health care reform forced the removal of the public option and the Medicare buy-in, despite their tremendous popularity. Moreover, as Rep. Jay Inslee (D-WA) noted, the filibuster removes electoral accountability by giving the losing party the ability to obstruct the winning party’s agenda. "It’s a system in which the minority benefits if the government fails, and the minority has the power to ensure failure," Center for American Progress Action Fund fellow Matt Yglesias noted. Under President Obama, the Republican minority has repeatedly used and abused the practice of filibusters to obstruct the progressive agenda. The House was able to pass a health care reform bill with a robust public option, a clean energy and greenhouse gas pollution reduction bill to fight climate change, and a comprehensive financial regulatory reform bill with majority votes. However, because of the filibuster, each bill has languished in the Senate.

Read the rest of this entry »

The above sentiment has even been expressed in comments on this blog—but it’s fallacious. Here’s a good post by Daniel De Groot debunking the distinction, and he includes this quote from a commenter:

Basic familiarity with the terms of discussion might help.   (4.00 / 9)

‘The founders intended the country to be a republic’ is not incompatible with: ‘The founders intended the country to be a democracy.’

Because republics are not some different kind of government from democracies, in the way that dictatorships are.

‘Republic’ comes from ‘res publica’ which is Latin for the ‘public thing’. For something to be a republic all that is necessary is for the government to count as being owned or controlled by the public at large.

‘Democracy’ comes from ‘demos’ which is Greek for ‘people’ or ‘tribe’ and ‘kratia’ which is Greek for ‘power’. A democracy is literally a government in which the people have the power. There have been democratic republics. There have been aristocratic republics. There is no natural tension between something’s being a republic and something’s being a democracy. In fact you might think that the most natural way for a government to count as a republic is for it to be a democracy. After all the best way to insure that the government belongs to the people as a whole is to let the people as a whole run it.

So no, the founders did not, in setting up a republic, decide not to create a democracy. Is it true that the founders explicitly put up barriers to the public will expressing itself? Yes. Should we in any way respect that choice? No! That choice was made to keep the poor in their place. This is explicit in the federalist papers. And even if you want to engage in this founding fathers fetish, where you refuse to think and behave outside of the parameters a handful of old, dead, racist, sexist plutocrats set up for you, then you should keep in mind that the filibuster is not one of the constitutionally provided for barriers to the public will being done. So Madison isn’t going to be mad at you if you agree to getting rid of it. He will however be mad that you have acquiesced in the public selection of senators, since he didn’t think you should have that right.

by: PTM @ Thu Jan 21, 2010 at 02:18

Read the whole post.

Lynn Harris, writing in Salon:

Some girls came back from this past winter break with Christmas loot, ski tans, still more to say about "Twilight: New Moon." But others, women’s health experts suspect, came back with deep, and literal, wounds to heal. According to human rights advocates and service providers, families in the U.S. who have immigrated from countries where female genital mutilation (FGM) is practiced often take their daughters home, when school is out, to be cut.

Yes, FGM is practiced — or at least planned — on U.S. soil, on girls in immigrant families who were born and/or raised here. Perhaps even among people you know: Not long ago, a concerned mother posted on my Brooklyn-area parenting list-serv that she believed an eight-year-old friend of her daughter’s had undergone some form of the procedure in her home country in the Middle East (and appeared to be markedly traumatized). Archana Pyati, an asylum attorney for Sanctuary for Families in New York, has encountered dozens of FGM cases just in the past six months. "The majority of our African clients have been through it, and most often, they are fighting to protect their daughters," she says. (Older relatives with "seniority" often push for the procedure.) "It is our hope that by recognizing that FGM may be occurring under our noses we will become better able to respond to it, just as we would any other form of violence against children," she says.

Right now, though, that’s not happening. While numerous countries, cities,and villages on other continents have made significant strides toward prohibiting and preventing the procedure — and while it’s been outlawed by U.S. federal law since 1996 and is also illegal in 17 states — its practice by immigrant families here is, by all anecdotal reports, only increasing. Yet there remains practically no way to address it any way other than case by brutal, heartbreaking case. "The silence hasn’t been broken here," says Taina Bien-Aime, executive director of Equality Now. "It’s an issue that affects thousands of [U.S.] girls, some of whom were born here, and yet no one is really paying attention."

FGM refers to several different traditional rite-of-passage practices in parts of Africa, Asia and the Middle East that involve …

Continue reading. I think it’s legitimate to fight cultural practices that result in harm to people—e.g., the ritual cannibalism in New Guinea that results in the disease kuru.

Interesting article by Ronald Bailey, published in Reason in July, 1997:

Darwinism is on the way out. At least, that’s what Irving Kristol announced to a gathering at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington not long ago. Darwinian evolution, according to the godfather of neoconservatism, "is really no longer accepted so easily by [many] biologists and scientists." Why? Because, Kristol explained, scientifically minded Darwin doubters are once again focusing on "the old-fashioned argument from design." That is to say, life in all its apparently ordered complexity cannot be understood in terms of chance mutation and the competition for survival. There must, after all, be a designer. So, exit Darwin; enter–or re-enter–God.

This may seem to some readers to be a personal quirk of Kristol’s. Perhaps as he approaches Eternity (he’s 77), he may want some grand company there. But Kristol’s friend and colleague Robert Bork is claiming the same thing: Charles Darwin and his theories are finished. In his new work, Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline, Bork pins his own anti-evolutionary attack on Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, a recent book by biochemist Michael Behe. Bork declares that Behe "has shown that Darwinism cannot explain life as we know it." He adds approvingly that the book "may be read as the modern, scientific version of the argument from design to the existence of a designer." Bork triumphantly concludes: "Religion will no longer have to fight scientific atheism with unsupported faith. The presumption has shifted, and naturalist atheism and secular humanism are on the defensive."

Are these merely two isolated intellectual voices preaching that old-time design? Hardly. Last summer, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a think tank devoted to studying the role of religion in public policy, and now headed by neoconservative Elliott Abrams, called together a group of conservative intellectuals, including Kristol, his wife, Gertrude Himmelfarb, and Hoover Institution fellow Tom Bethell, to listen to anti-Darwin presentations by Behe and Michael Denton, author of Evolution: A Theory in Crisis. Himmelfarb has told at least one colleague that she, too, thinks the Behe book "excellent."

There’s yet more. The neoconservative journal Commentary, of all periodicals, joined this attack last June with a cover essay, "The Deniable Darwin," written by mathematician David Berlinski.

"An act of intelligence is required to bring even a thimble into being," wrote Berlinski, "why should the artifacts of life be different?" Berlinski warmly endorsed Behe’s book, praising it as "an extraordinary piece of work that will come to be regarded as one of the most important books ever written about Darwinian theory. No one can propose to defend Darwin without meeting the challenges set out in this superbly written and compelling book." Commentary Editor Neal Kozodoy says he was "delighted" that his magazine served as a "forum for airing this issue." Berlinski "hit a nerve," according to Kozodoy, not only among the scientists he criticized, but "out there, among general readers, many of whom seem preoccupied with the issues he raised."

What’s going on here? …

Continue reading. And for the likely origin of life on earth (by natural processes), see this article.

Very interesting article by Nicholas Xenos:

A very curious piece appeared on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times on June 7, 2003. Its author was Jenny Strauss Clay, a professor of classics at the University of Virginia, and the title was, “The Real Leo Strauss.” Highlighted in a box midway down the page were the words, “My father was a teacher, not a right-wing guru.” Clay wrote,

Recent news articles have portrayed my father, Leo Strauss, as the mastermind behind the neoconservative ideologues who control United States foreign policy. He reaches out from his 30-year-old grave, we are told, to direct a ‘cabal’ (a word with distinct anti-Semitic overtones) of Bush administration figures hoping to subject the American people to rule by a ruthless elite. I do not recognize the Leo Strauss presented in these articles.

The “recent articles” had appeared in an array of magazines and newspapers, including the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the International Herald Tribune, and The New Yorker. In only one of these does the term “cabal” appear. That one was Seymour Hersh’s New Yorker article, the opening line of which is, “They call themselves, self-mockingly, ‘The Cabal,’ a small cluster of policy advisers and analysts now based in the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans.” Abram Schulsky, “a scholarly expert in the works of the political philosopher Leo Strauss,” directs this self-identified cabal, according to Hersh.

In Clay’s apologia on behalf of her father, she wrote, “My father was not a politician. He taught political theory, primarily at the University of Chicago.” It is not incidental that Leo Strauss rarely, if ever, referred to what he taught as political theory, but that is another thing that I will come back to. “He was a conservative insofar as he did not think that change is necessarily for the better,” which is a rather bland description of a conservative. “Leo Strauss believed,” she wrote,

In the intrinsic dignity of the political. He believed in and defended liberal democracy, although he was not blind to its flaws. He felt it was the best form of government that could be realize, ‘the last best hope.’ He was an enemy of any regime that aspired to global domination. He despised utopianism, in our time Nazism and communism, which is predicated on a denial of a fundamental and even noble feature of human nature, love of one’s own. His heroes were Churchill and Lincoln.

Keep in mind a few of the things that come up in this paragraph. Among these is the notion of the “dignity of political.” We still need to know exactly what Leo Strauss thought the political was, as well as what he thought liberal democracy was and in what sense he was a defender of it. The use of the word “regime” on the part of his daughter is not entirely innocent, as we will see later on, and the notion that Churchill and Lincoln were his heroes and on the other hand that Nazism and communism were the things that he abhorred—I am going to come back to all of those things in due course.

Prof. Clay went on to say, “The fact is that Leo Strauss”—and this is very important and is the reason why the issue here is ultimately of much more than academic interest—

Also recognized a multiplicity of readers, but he had enough faith in his author to assume that they, too, recognized that they would have a diverse readership. Some of their readers, the ancients realized, would want only to find their own views and prejudices confirmed. Others might be willing to open themselves to new, perhaps unconventional or unpopular, ideas. I personally think my father’s rediscovery of the art of writing for different kinds of readers will be his most lasting legacy.

Strauss’ students are aware of the impression their admiration for him makes on outsiders. Allen Bloom was the best known of those students thanks to his best-selling 1987 anti-egalitarian diatribe The Closing of the American Mind, and more recently to his having been “outed” by his old friend Saul Bellow in Bellow’s novel, Ravelstein. In his tribute to his former teacher, published after Strauss’s death, Bloom observed that “those of us who know him saw in him such a power of mind, such a unity and purpose of life, such a rare mixture of the human elements resulting in a harmonious expression of the virtues, moral and intellectual, that our account of him is likely to evoke disbelief or ridicule from those who have never experienced a man of this quality.”[i] Bloom’s rhetorical strategy here of appropriating a projected criticism—the fawning admiration Straussians have for their teacher/founder and turning it around—also has the effect of demarcating an “out-group” that does not understand from an in-group that has experienced the truth, which is another characteristic feature of the style and substance of what makes a Straussian.

It is partly the aura that emanates from Strauss that gives credence to the claims of conspiracy when Straussians are involved in something, if that is in fact the claim that people make. More particularly, the prominence given to the notion of a charismatic founder within the Straussian fold means that it quickly begins to look like a cult.

Who was Leo Strauss? …

Continue reading.

The Eldest is a great fan of pressure cookers. Paula Crossfield, writing in Mark Bittman’s blog:

I received a great gift this year for Christmas: a pressure cooker. Popular in Europe, India and many other parts of the world, pressure cookers have become quite modern: my five-quart Swiss-made Kuhn Rikon has a lid that is simple to close, a lock inside which prevents me from opening the lid until the pressure is released, and a pressure indicator so I know when to turn down the heat. No more soup on the ceiling.

With it, I can cook most dried beans in twenty minutes or less. Some, like lentils or split peas, can be done in less than ten. Most vegetables need five minutes or less in a pressure cooker, and grains cook in a third of the time it would take in an ordinary pot. You can be endlessly creative: combine them in soups like a black-eyed pea chili or in Indian-style curries.

Lorna Sass, the author of the re-released cookbook “Cooking Under Pressure,” says that the pressure cooker “makes possible a healthy, new definition of fast food.” She continued, “I’m an impatient cook. If I have an appliance that allows me to eat a delicious lentil soup about 15 minutes after the idea comes to mind, that’s my idea of a great appliance.”

The key to pressure cooking is in the liquid you add to your grains, beans, veggies and meat. Liquids heat fast, and the steam produced helps build pressure in the sealed pot, quickly tenderizing the fibers of the food inside. The result of that contained cooking holds other surprises: intense flavor, and more nutrients maintained in the food.

Risotto, says Lorna Sass, is an impressive dish that has succeeded in converting many people to pressure cookers. I decided to make a basic broccoli risotto, based on her recipe. I chopped an onion, …

Continue reading.

Monday shaves are always great: Two-Day Stubble v. The Slant Bar. It’s always no contest, and even with a much used Astra Superior Platinum blade, the shave was still wonderfully easy and smooth. Of course the fine Irisch Moos lather, ginned up by the Sabini brush, helped a lot. And New York is always a great finish.