A few good reads in my absence

Plus: strawberry summer cake, '30 Rock' remains perfect, and more

Good morning! It’s Wednesday, and as I mentioned last month, I’m taking this week off for vacation. (We are traveling by train to a historic hotel; it’s all very exciting.) However, I do have some reading recs for you in my absence. Find them below, and I’ll be back next week with a paid post.

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(via)

• “70 miles in hell,” by Caitlin Dickerson for The Atlantic

• “The evangelical diploma divide,” by Daniel K. Williams for CT

• “Racked by pain and enraptured by a right-wing miracle cure,” by Eli Saslow for The New York Times

• “Natalism, NIMBYism, and JD Vance,” by

  Addison Del Mastro
  for
  Discourse

• “Jerry’s apartment,” by

  Ryan Puzycki
  for
  City of Yes

• “I reviewed restaurants for 12 years. They’ve changed, and not for the better,” by Pete Wells for The New York Times.

In my first few years on the job, I thought of restaurants as one of the few places left where our experiences were completely human. We might work silently in our cubicles, rearranging and transmitting zeros and ones. We might walk around with speakers in our ears that played digital music files chosen by an algorithm. We might buy our books and sweaters and toothpaste with a click and wait until they showed up at our door. We might flirt, fight and make up by text. But when we went out to eat, we were people again.

No machine could drink rosé for us, or chew lamb chops, or flirt, fight and make up. And at every critical point in the meal, there were people there to guide us. From the moment we walked in, we talked with hosts, bartenders, captains, runners and bussers. Being served in a restaurant wasn’t passive. We had to participate.

Many of the little routines of dining that we used to handle by talking to a person now happen on a screen.

• Strawberry summer cake recipe from Smitten Kitchen

And a tiny little take for you, as a treat:

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