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This is me quietly launching a newsletter. If you've been following me over on my blog (eatchofood.com) for the last many years, then this newsletter will feel somewhat familiar to you. If you’re new, I’m Kristina and I’m a cookbook author who also shares recipes on the internet (@eatchofood). I wrote a cookbook called Mooncakes and Milk Bread in 2021 and still processing the impacts that book has had on my life.

As part of the Booksmart Studios family, we here at Lexicon Valley strive for brainy, quirky and — because we wish to hold your attention — entertaining. And in case you stumbled here in the dark, we’re all about language. We cover everything from grammar to etymology to usage. Which means we ask questions like: Most of us speak, sign or write just about every day. We have our individual preferences and pet peeves and our exceedingly strong opinions about the way other people use language — which is, after all, an arbitrary collection of sounds and gestures that is part science, part sentiment and all the more impressive for being largely crowdsourced.

“A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order.” – Jean-Luc Godard, film director Here is one of the stories my father liked to tell his friends: “Salman was born on June 19th, 1947, and exactly eight weeks later to the day, the British ran away.” Ha ha, right? I guess it was funny the first time I heard it, less funny the one hundred and first time.

I had forgotten all about Vulgaria. Perhaps you have too—the fictional Old World microstate in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, ruled by Baron and Baroness Bomburst, in which children are outlawed.  I have returned to Vulgaria in recent weeks, however. My mother took my five year old daughter to a stage production of Chitty not long ago, and since then I have been repeatedly asked the same question: “Daddy, why does the Queen hate children?

For the past few years, my newsletter has been a simple way for y'all to keep up with new posts. When I write new articles, I just send out a quick note so you never miss a thing. Don't worry, that's not going away...but I'm hoping to give you a little bit more each month. There is always so much going on at our Homestead, and believe it or not, I only share a tiny bit of it on the blog.

We’ve renamed the show. Weekly is no more. It’s called Search Engine now. Why the new name? Well, we found out, as we made the show, that that is the right title for the thing we ended up making.   Search Engine is a show where we try to answer the kinds of questions that you might normally ask the internet. Questions that might be too potentially dumb-sounding, or too personal, or too hard to answer otherwise.

The title of this newsletter is from Antonio Gramsci, an Italian journalist and political leader. While imprisoned by Mussolini in 1930, Gramsci wrote in his notebook, “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” The philosopher Slavoj Zizek has rendered this sentence in looser and more suggestive phrasing: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.

Glad to see this concise analysis has broken away from the confines of Twitter. The persistence (or lack thereof) of this trend will be something to watch, especially since America shows less willingness to pump the cultural brakes on "gender ideology" as much as the more "TERF-y" countries like the U.K. Expand full comment ncG1vNJzZmismJqxorXLsqqcqp%2BhuW%2B%2F1JuqrZmToHuku8xop2ivlaGwsLnEZquoZaSeuLW7yqxkmqaknnqnscyipaKrpGSwsLnMnqWtqw%3D%3D

Year in, year out, the Los Angeles Lakers’ Grammy road trip goes a long way in summarizing the season to that point and previewing what that team might be capable of. It’s pretty fitting that on this trip, LeBron James had this quote: In the matter of a week, the Lakers have been rolled by the Houston Rockets and Atlanta Hawks to the tune of 32 combined points — and those games weren’t nearly that competitive, if we’re being honest.