summer reading + cooking recs

This weekend was the first weekend since early June where I actually had a chance to sit still. That’s not a complaint — we’ve had a great summer doing all the summer things — travel, beaches, pools, road trips, ice cream, quality time with family and friends. (On that note, I also am really proud of this Vox travel guide we launched in early July. It also includes a piece from me on the gear you need to travel with a baby.)

But this weekend, it was nice to stay close to home and just have no plans at all. I did three loads of laundry, acquired a new plant, and finally wrote a long-overdue newsletter. So here are a bunch of things I’ve been reading and cooking the past few months.

Good things to read

How Larry Gagosian Reshaped the Art World | The New Yorker

Love in the time of sickle cell disease | Harper’s

The vanishing family | New York Times

We Should Be Ambitious About Our Friendships | ELLE Magazine

Samantha Irby Says It’s OK to Hate Your Body | The New York Times

What is ‘vacation’ when you have young kids? | The Cut

Young People Have No Idea What We Used to Do After Work. Let Me Regale You. | Slate

The catfished terrorist | New York Magazine

The Case Against Travel | The New Yorker

What Happens When You Get So Influential That You’re Bored by Your Own Aesthetic? | The New York Times

French Parents Don’t Know What They’re Doing, Either | The New Yorker

‘Perfection Is the Goal, and That’s Intoxicating’ Grub Street

Barbie Goes to the Movies | Bloomberg

What Did People Do Before Smartphones? | The Atlantic

The First Social-Media Babies Are Growing Up—And They’re Horrified | The Atlantic

After “Barbie,” Mattel Is Raiding Its Entire Toybox | The New Yorker

How media heiress Gillian Hearst's BFF infiltrated NYC society with a bunch of fake Birkins | Business Insider

The Parent of a Teen-Ager Is an Emotional-Garbage Collector | The New Yorker

How Allbirds Lost Its Way | The Wall Street Journal

“Orange Is the New Black” Signalled the Rot Inside the Streaming Economy | The New Yorker

Boundary Issues | Parapraxis

Good things to cook

Some of my favorite summer recipes that I’ve cooked so far this season:

Any fruit crisp. Esquites. Grilled corn and avocado salad with feta dressing. Greek pasta salad on repeat. Rhubarb coffee cake. Guacamole steak salad. Grilled steak salad with beets and scallions (I recommend adding blue cheese crumbles to this). Zucchini pizza casserole. Gochujang burgers with spicy slaw (I did a riff on this with ground chicken and it was so good). Korean spicy cucumber salad.

Recommendations

Summer reading: A few books I’ve read this summer and loved: Jenny Jackson’s Pineapple Street and Emma Cline’s The Guest are both juicy reads that are great if you love rich people drama. On the other end of the spectrum but just as juicy, in nonfiction I read James B. Stewart’s DisneyWar, on the corporate battles at Disney, and Tina Brown’s Vanity Fair Diaries, on her time running Vanity Fair in the ‘80s; both were fully of juicy media drama if you like that sort of thing.