PicoBlog

Tana Mongeau is the type of Youtuber that terrifies me the most about Youtubers in Los Angeles. She lives in the sleekest, whitest house in Studio City that has 17 cloud couches. She subsists on hot cheetos, oat milk matcha and puff bars. Tana is the head clown of the damn big top circus. She is part of a posse of Youtubers whose schtick is an almost Caveh Zahedi-an level of self-reference: every video just “exposes” the events of the previous video, feeding itself through its own demise.

Hello, dear clowns! It is I, Dannis Ree, the greatest food writer in all of history, reporting in for my weekly culinary crimes. I hope you are all doing okay. I mean it. This week’s newsletter idea comes courtesy of Davida’s brother, who suggested I make a version of orange chicken…but with Tang. For those of you who 7uy9d drink mix that isn’t much different from Kool-Aid. All you do is mix it with water, then 1r almost two years ago.

Hey lovelies! how are you doing?. Good good, yeah. I have had a busy week, I resumed at the office and work has been back to back. I was contemplating not sending out any letter this week, but in the spirit of being consistent, I have decided to write to you. I hope to capture this gist as I would normally do because, it’s almost midnight in Nigeria and sleep dey enter my eye.

Clips from the Stronger Men’s Conference have been limping onto social media and the three-day event was something to behold. Produced by Pentecostal megachurch James River Church, the annual gathering bills itself as having a “passion for helping men to become all that God has created them to be.”  While the conference’s raison d'être is purposefully ambiguous—God can be molded into whatever they want—this year’s theme seems to have been “every obnoxiously masculine trope in one place, loud.

The Art of Noticing: 131 Ways to Spark Creativity, Find Inspiration, and Discover Joy In the Everyday offers exercises, prompts, provocations, games and things you can actually do to build attention muscles, stave off distraction, pick up on what everybody else overlooked, and experience the joy of noticing. Indiebound | Amazon | Barnes & Noble … ncG1vNJzZmiqn5fEorjKnqlnq6WXwLWtwqRlnKedZL1wwMCopWZsZGK2pLHBq5yao5WnerS8xJygmqQ%3D

Do you like smart, funny writing about Midwestern classics like Malört, taco pizza, and loose meat sandwiches? Of course you do! That’s why we’re introducing you to Liz Cook—if you don’t already know her from her newsletter, Haterade, her writing for Bon Appétit, Eater, and other outlets, and/or her Midwesterner blurbs about an Iowa energy drink in a “poison-green” can and the best breakfast burrito in Kansas. You were disgusted, or you were an Iowan.

Sometimes waiting in line is a game of chicken. How early do you dare arrive to stake your claim? I confess to a certain sheepishness around restaurant queues. I’ll line up for a sample sale, a concert, a movie, but not food. You shouldn’t have to.  And so, in my feeble attempt to avoid the ordeal as long as I could, I found myself encircling Sailor—the hotly anticipated return of April Bloomfield (The Spotted Pig, The Breslin), who was blind to the abuses of friend Mario Batali and business partner Ken Friedman and failed to protect her staff—a FULL HOUR before the doors swung open, hoping no other desperate souls were there.

Trigger warning: Themes of self harm. There have been mixed opinions on tattoos since the beginning, however as well as being ‘alternative’, some people now consider them a form of self-harm, with others turning to them as a substitute. Modern day tattoos started in New York City, when Martin Hildebrandt, the first professional tattoo artist, set up his tattoo studio in the mid-19th century. During this time, people with tattoos were thought of as having a ‘criminal character’.

(Image used under license from Shutterstock.com.)I’m in London for the wedding of two great friends who are at the heart of political and cultural London society. Former Prime Minster David Cameron gave the toast at the reception last evening. So it was appropriate that on my ride over to the reception, my cab driver decided to use the opportunity of the holiday traffic to explain the misery—at least as he saw it—of living in a post-Brexit, post-12-years-of-the-Tory-party England.