PicoBlog

If you’d like to support Micro-Chop please consider making a one-time $3 contribution. Memphis MC La Chat started rapping in third grade by reciting her poem about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during Black History Month. In seventh grade her principal read her “Peace in the Middle East” rap over the school intercom and she decided to hand out physical copies of her lyrics to her admirers afterwards. “I was pressing them up and passing them out and letting people read them, giving them to teachers and lots of different people,” she told Tyrone in a 2012 So Many Shrimpinterview.

The June 1985 cover of National Geographic, photographed by Steve McCurry, and the August 9, 2010, cover of TIME, photographed by Jodi Bieber, are two of the most well-known magazine covers in history — instantly recognizable, highly controversial, and forever connected. Little else can be said on McCurry’s photo of Sharbat Gula, the Afghan girl with the “piercing eyes” and a “penetrative gaze” who has captivated the world for decades.

It is no question that laab is one of the most popular Thai dishes (unfortunately it’s more commonly known as larb, as I previously explained). It is offered at most Thai restaurants in N. America, and even made a cameo in one of the Spider Man movies! But most people, and even many Thai people, do not know that there are 2 types of laab. The more popular one, the hot and sour salad made of ground meat, is laab isaan from the northeast.

Recently, my wife Mary Kate and I became season ticket holders at Theatre for a New Audience, the Brooklyn nonprofit theater. This was a great development for us for the usual reasons—more live theater, supporting a local cultural institution, etc.—but also dealt us the side benefit of more frequent visits to Rockwell Place. Rockwell Place is a cocktail bar named after a gritty, two-block-long street that has nothing of note on it but Rockwell Place.

About midway through Take Out, a 2004 film co-directed by Sean Baker and Shih-Ching Tsou that’s receiving a new home video release via the Criterion Collection, Ming Ding (Charles Jang) runs into a problem that could make a day that began with him being awakened and assaulted by some toughs working for a loan shark even worse. An undocumented Chinese immigrant working as a deliveryman for a Manhattan Chinese restaurant (the kind of place that serves fried rice and french fries), Ming discovers that his bicycle has developed a flat tire while returning from a delivery.

Declaring any single film out of Martin Scorsese’s vast oeuvre to be his best is a fool’s errand, but if forced to pick a personal favourite, on some days it’s one of his most neglected, overlooked masterpieces: The Age of Innocence (1993). I’m not here to argue against the validity of Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and Goodfellas as worthy classics, but rather to make a case for a reading of Scorsese that takes in the breadth of his work instead of reducing him to one thing.

In studying Jewish law for a course I taught on legal systems very different from ours, later converted to a book, I came across the story of the oven of Akhnai. It starts with a dispute of the sort only legal scholars indulge in. An object of clay such as an oven that had been rendered impure, polluted through some agency such as contact with a corpse, could be purified by being broken up.

Starting with the Sundance Film Festival in January—which, at the time, was still two years away from officially transitioning its branding from The US Film Festival—1989 was a true watershed moment for American independent cinema. It was the year when Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies and videotape stormed the festival circuit and proved that indie films turn a massive profit. That’s not to say that independents were not thriving in the margins in years past, but you can look back and see the scaffolding erected for a lucrative business model, starting with sex, lies and Miramax and growing to the point where every major studio would have its own specialized divisions, some with hilariously contradictory names like Warner Independent Pictures.

Now, I don’t usually go on Instagram very much (as would surprise probably nobody on this list, given that I wrote a book called How to Break Up With Your Phone — or, for that matter, any of my Instagram followers, since to this day I do not fully understand how to use it, and refuse to learn). HOWEVER, I did venture on there at some point in the past month, and its algorithm showed me a picture that demonstrated that, while it appears to not know that I have Type 1 diabetes, it does know that I like a whimsical project.