ESSAYS AND CRITICISM
“Seeing Double” in the New Yorker (May 16, 2016 Innovations issue)
An essay on uninventing mirrors. “Living in a world full of reflections has helped us know ourselves better, in a skin-deep sense, but it has also bred dissociation, obsession. By transforming our faces into images for scrutiny, the mirror has made us more careful about ourselves as objects, at the expense of caring for ourselves as whole beings.”
“Letter of Recommendation: How It’s Made” in the NY Times Magazine (July 2016)
“When you turn on a TV set and immerse yourself in images of human beings doing human activities — looking for unusually small houses, awaiting elimination on a reality show, solving murders in a procedural — it’s easy to forget that what you’re watching is not people but a machine, its network of pixels, subpixels, liquid crystals and transistors working silently in the background, allowing us to dwell in a bustling kingdom of our own design. But “How It’s Made,” a show devoted to the manufacturing processes that yield our most mundane and treasured human creations, reminds the viewer that time spent watching TV is time spent not with people but in the company of an incredible object.”
“Cooking with Chef Watson” in the New Yorker (November 2016 Tech Issue)
“The recipe also calls for “sixty-seven medium trimmed Easter-egg radishes,” black beans, cinnamon, curly parsley, marjoram, and Calvados. Cook, salt to taste, then top with Jack cheese, olive oil, and the grapes, “for squeezing over.” And there you have it: the computer-assisted future of cuisine, in the form of a pile of sweet-smelling, mud-colored radishes.”
“Letter of Recommendation: Cultured Butter” in the New York Times Magazine (August 2020)
“The palpable satisfaction of butter making would inhere at any moment. It’s great fun to play with a substance that gives so easily and takes form so generously. But the special comfort I took from it in the spring had to do with the disintegration of the tactile world. Everywhere I went, I was wary of contaminated surfaces: I wore winter gloves in the grocery store and tried to gauge the ripeness of a peach by staring at it. Family and friends were reduced to flat, intangible ovals in the frame of a Zoom window; stiff, distanced waves replaced hugs; and the only creatures I could touch were my husband and dog, both members of my “infection unit,” a term that is, quite frankly, a downer.”
“On Taryn Simon’s A Cold Hole” in GARAGE (2018)
“In the pocket-size video filmed as my body fell into the column of near-freezing water, it looks startlingly easy: The figure makes her way around the perimeter of the room, one foot in front of the other, walking with her arms out like a child, preserving a wavery sense of balance. Colors look different in the cold light, the skin pale and clinical, the body exposed in a sage green slip dress and overpowered by the surrounding white, like a soundless vote of no confidence. At the edge of the hole she stops, looks down and up again slowly, the picture of someone who could change their mind. Suddenly then, without warning, the figure jumps into the air, tucks its knees up close to the body, and falls in. The figure vanishes into the ground. There is no trace of me at all.”