Hello, my name is Elder Carter, and I would like to share with you the most amazing post.
Food: Soup Dumplings
Soup is good food. Dumplings are great. Dumpling soup is great. But some magnificent bastard in a Shanghai suburb a century and a half ago found the ultimate final form of these foods - the soup dumpling.
Soup dumplings are a tricky beast. Overcook them and the broth spills out. Eat them too fast and you’ll lose the top layer of your mouth to the escaping steam. Eat them too slow and the broth spills out.
Eating a soup dumpling at the perfect moment is akin to achieving Mushi-dokugo, or “awakening alone, without a master” in Zen. Colors are brighter. Sound is clearer. Broth tastes better.
Don’t waste your time on freezer section soup dumplings - while they can be ok, they’re never close to the real deal from a good restaurant. Find your nearest Chinatown and eat some today!
Politics: The Scourge of Journalists Conducting Interviews
Tucker Carlson is Moscow-bound, and talking heads across the world are very, very displeased. Carlson argues that he’s a journalist, that no Western journalists have interviewed Putin since the start of the Iraq war, and that he’s trying to give the American audience the Russian point of view. There seem to be three main objections:
Carlson’s not a journalist, he’s a propagandist and he’s going to do propaganda
Western journalists try very hard to do interviews with Putin, but he says no, and only said yes to Carlson because of #1
Some real journalists are currently in prison for reporting on the Putin regime, so until Carlson is imprisoned see #1
This whole situation has overtones of Schroedinger’s cat - we can’t know if Carlson is going to do a softball propaganda interview until the interview is published. Right now, the interview exists in a superstate of “propaganda/not propaganda,” and we can’t close the state vector until we see the interview.
But the vibes are strong this day, and before we even know the content of the yet-to-be-conducted interview. People are suggesting that Carlson be sanctioned for the crime of scheduling an interview with the leader of a large country.
History is not particularly kind to the idea that you shouldn’t interview Bad Men - the New York Times has given column inches to Hitler, and printed propaganda for Stalin, and Western journalists interviewed most of the 20th Century’s greatest butchers. Walter Duranty did great harm in whitewashing Stalin’s crimes, but that was as an embedded reporter who misled the public about a secretive foreign regime over a decade. He didn’t just pop in and ask Stalin, “So Communism - is it great, or the greatest?”
As with so many things that get people talking, the only way to live in reality and avoid flying into the realms of confirmation bias fantasy is to wait and see what actually happens. Until then, I’ll be on the sidelines while the people who already know everything duke it out with each other.
Music: Finally, A Cultural Reference To Delaware That Isn’t Wayne’s World
I can’t remember when I first heard this tune by The Promise Ring, but I loved it right away. This may sound odd, but I spent more than a few hours in my teens and 20s driving around while blasting somewhat obscure post-rock, punk, and metal bands, somehow hoping deep down that someone would look my way, throw a thumbs up, and smile in the shared knowledge of musical greatness. “Delaware, are you aware of the Air Supply and Television?” is something that almost certainly coursed through my subconscious at some point while driving around Middletown or Smyrna. So this one’s for everyone who’s ever blasted a tune hoping that it would connect with someone else within earshot.