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Hi and welcome to Susanality, a newsletter by me, Susan Spungen, that celebrates seasonal cooking. If you enjoy today’s recipe, please help spread the word by forwarding this email to others who may like it too. And if you want additional recipes, technique + styling tips, and video tutorials to land in your inbox, consider investing in a paid subscription (for less than the cost of a latte per month!). Either way—thank you so much for being here.

I follow my nose when it comes to covering pop culture: I write about what I consume, and I just so happen to be consuming the latest season of Call the Midwife… again. Have a particular poetry & pop culture intersection you’d like to see covered on PopPoetry? Let me know! I’m also open to guest-writer pitches year-round. I’d love to hear from you! Contact Me Actress Judy Parfitt’s legendary Call the Midwife character, Sister Monica Joan, is both the oldest in age and youngest at heart of all the residents of Nonnatus house.

“It was there, so I shot it.” That’s how 21-year-old Jack Aeby described photographing the beginning of the end of the world — the first-ever detonation of a nuclear weapon. Aeby was a civilian employee on the Manhattan Project, working under Nobel Prize-winning physicist Emilio Segrè. “I wasn’t a photographer, that wasn’t my job, except I did carry a camera ever since high school almost daily and of course I couldn’t anywhere around Los Alamos,” Aeby told the Voices of the Manhattan Project.

I know, I know. If one more person writes a commentary on the Barbie movie you are going to gouge your eyes out. I know this, friend. I am this. But here I am writing one anyway because I have yet to read one godforsaken critique about the line that dampened (not ruined, because I still liked it, but yes dampened) the entire film for me. At the very end, when Barbie feels — really, truly feels — what it is to be human under the gentle tutelage of her creator, Ruth Handler, the audience is feeling a little verklempt.

Every week, I write an article, and every week, I am pretty sure it will be my last. After all, I don’t have that much to say. After my sister hits the "publish" button, I give myself a day, and then I think, “Oh, crap. I have no ideas left for next week.” Then, every new week, I go through all the same emotions: despair, confusion, inspiration, then… satisfaction. A week later, I do it all over again.

So much thought and effort is put into how you and your staff greet customers, but do you have a procedure in place for how to talk to them during and after the sale? While you are processing the purchase, it’s a perfect time to ask if they follow you on social media and point to a sign at checkout with your social media information. Remind the customer that they achieved what they wanted when they came in the store.

Okay, this thing is getting pretty weird now. If you haven’t seen the “God Made Trump” ad above, you absolutely must. I thought it was a joke at first—a parody ad you might see on Saturday Night Live. But it’s not. Trump’s campaign is responsible for this satanic heresy. It represents a new level of craziness—the Orange Jesus thing made manifest. Trump is embracing his inner messiah. And it represents a certain reality in the Republican Party: I watched a clip of a Trump voter in Iowa the other day, a woman, who said—calmly, with the utter conviction of a mind-snatched cultist—that the legal cases against Big Orange were a sign from God that Trump had been sent to suffer for our sins.

Ask a loved-one to pass you an orange. A simple enough task. Do they deliver the delicious fruit? If they do, how do they deliver it? With the peel firmly intact? Or the outer layer removed, so that it's ready to enjoy? This is the Orange Peel Test. If the fruit is delivered sans peel, per a now viral meme, you know your partner is a keeper. The sagacity of basing the complexities of a relationship on peeling a citrus fruit is fraught… But there is one case where the orange peel test is not only an important test: It’s the reason raison d'être.

In the annals of crime, few tales are as dramatic as the rise and fall of the Shower Posse.  From humble beginnings in the ghettos of Kingston, the Shower Posse rose to become the most feared drug gang in Jamaica, creating a sprawling international crime network with outposts in Miami, New York and London.  They were hungry. They were brutal. And they didn’t care how many innocent bystanders they shot. Overwhelming firepower unleashed in public spaces was the gang’s calling card.