After I wrote a few weeks ago about the allure of the travel cake, Genevieve Ko, an editor at New York Times Cooking, got in touch. She shared some of her favorite recipes for cakes that hold up well when ferried via train, plane or automobile. Consider one-bowl molasses-chocolate cake, carrot-orange olive oil cake, a swirly marble cake or a lemon-spice visiting cake (visiting cake!). And also consider the additional good things below.
On this week’s list:
1. Where and when is this art from?
2. Make it a club
3. Teen angst revisited
4. In a theater, laughing
5. Wikipedia collage
6. Naming the moon
1.
Where and when is this art from?
I’m hopelessly bad at Anthropeum, a game that presents you with 10 artifacts from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and asks you to identify their place of origin and time period. If you paid close attention in art history class, this is your opportunity to shine. If you, like me, sure-as-heck can’t tell if that ink-on-watercolor came from the second quarter of the 16th century or the third, it’s a satisfyingly illuminating little seminar.
2.
Make it a club
My friend Avi and I have a semiregular date to go out to dinner on Saturday nights. I call this a tradition, but he calls it “Restaurant Club,” which I always found cute but confusing, since we are but two friends out to eat, hardly the organized collective I associated with clubdom. The more I think about it, however, the more sense it makes.
Rituals, traditions and standing dates are the infrastructure of a particular kind of ongoing intimacy. Institutionalizing a regular dinner date as the convening of a “club” imbues it with ceremony, elevates it and makes it a little bit sacred. “Restaurant Club” has more gravitas as an event in my calendar than “Dinner with Avi” does. We’d eat together regardless, but the label confers some majesty to the occasion.
Occasionally Avi tacks on “club” to another outing — if we’re going to the store, he might call it “Shopping Club.” It’s a joke between us now, but implicit in our clubs is a celebration of our nearly 30-year friendship. See what happens if you label your next outing with a friend or family “Outing Club.” In time, you might transform a casual hang into a tradition.
Robert Smith, the lead singer of the English rock band The Cure, has a new track with the pop artist Olivia Rodrigo. I’d never have predicted this when, at 15 years old, I was clad in all black, holed up in my bedroom, wailing along to Smith singing, “For how much longer can I howl into this wind? For how much longer can I cry like this?” If you’d told me then that he’d one day be onstage with an artist like Rodrigo, whose commercially successful song lyrics run along the lines of “Car rides to Malibu, strawberry ice cream, one spoon for two,” I’d have said he was too punk rock for that. But upon further reflection, I can see that Rodrigo’s version of suburban girlhood is just as accurate an articulation of my own youthful angst as The Cure’s was.
I was charmed to see Smith talking about his experience being onstage with Rodrigo, his awe at the ease with which she performs. “She is genuinely fantastic,” he gushes. Watching him enthuse, I’m reminded that one gift that comes with adulthood is no longer needing to declare a particular taste in music as a means of forming an identity. How interesting and rewarding to be a person who isn’t a persona, who can love gloomy dirges as much as pop anthems, The Cure as much as Olivia Rodrigo. Check out their song, “What’s Wrong With Me.” Even your broodingest teenage self has to admit it’s pretty good.
“If you long for the days of sitting in the theater and laughing, then this is for you.” It sounds like a generic pitch for a movie. It’s in fact Seth Rogen’s specific pitch for his new movie, “The Invite,” and it reflects what I found so remarkable about that movie. Rogan and Olivia Wilde play a couple whose marriage is full of so much resentment that their every interaction devolves into a fight. The film unspools over one evening, when their sexy and apparently in-love upstairs neighbors (Penelope Cruz and Edward Norton) come to visit. Each of the four is so funny, the script by Will McCormack and Rashida Jones is so specific and surprising, that I became conscious of how much I was laughing out loud watching it. I actually thought to myself, “I’m having such a good time.”
It makes me wistful to realize that “sitting in the theater and laughing” has become something rare. I confess I’ve watched far more movies on my iPad when I can’t sleep than I have on a big screen these last years. And I’m struck by how infrequently I actually laugh out loud when I’m alone. The French philosopher Henri Bergson wrote, “To understand laughter, we must put it back into its natural environment, which is society, and above all must we determine the utility of its function, which is a social one.” I loved “The Invite,” but I don’t think I’d have loved it as much had I watched it at home, forgoing the social experience of being in an audience of people, laughing together.
You know how Wikipedia is this terrifically vast repository of information whose multitudes it seems impossible to fully fathom? Now imagine if that massive trove of information was a visual collage, and you get a sense of Wiki Spy, the latest delight from Neal Agrawal, whose work you may remember from the previous Good List item, Cursor Camp.
When you search for something on Wiki Spy — an object, a place, an idea — you get a crazy quilt of related images. Roll over each image to find out more about it, click it for a further dizzying collage of related images, forever and ever, until you forget who you are and why you’re here and you walk away shaking your head, oh the wonder of it all.
6.
Naming the moon
The first full moon of summer appears on Monday. Peak illumination: 7:56 p.m. Eastern, quoth the Old Farmer’s Almanac. The June full moon is known as the Strawberry Moon, so named by Native Americans because it represents the moment when strawberries in the northeast are ripe and ready for picking.
I watched a video of the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson telling Stephen Colbert about how these “special” moons are not special at all, as many moons have nicknames in different cultures. But I’m not swayed. The poetic possibilities of a named moon are so evocative, I’ll never tire of learning them.
We use the moon as a calendar, assigning it names based on the season’s developments on Earth: strawberry harvest here on our planet, Strawberry Moon. Next month, when deer grow new antlers, the Buck Moon. The poet Galways Kinnell has a lovely poem for his daughter called “Under the Maud-Moon.” What if we named the moon for the seasons of our lives: Graduation Moon, Indecision Moon, First Kiss Moon?
One more thing: Chloe Ivanoff, a reader from Kodiak, Alaska, writes of an inconstant landform:
I live on an island among many other islands — an archipelago to be exact. Near my house there is a small island called Sometimes Island because sometimes it is an island and sometimes it isn’t. When the tide is high it is disconnected from the “mainland” island, and on low tide it is connected by a sandy, rocky bar you can walk across and visit the small island. I learned a few years ago that this strip of sandy/rocky land that connects Sometimes Island to the mainland is called a tombolo, which I think is a really great word!
Is there a disappearing island where you live? Want to share what you’ve named the moon for this season of your life? Leave a comment, or send me an email. And you can check out past editions of The Good List anytime. If you want to get The Good List in your inbox, sign up here. I’ll see you next week. — Melissa
The editor of The Good List is Jodi Rudoren. Eli Cohen handles the photos.
