Heathers, Minneapolis, Minnesota

I was in (and have been in) Minneapolis for work, and the silver lining for that has been that I have been able to dine with some co-workers who I rarely get to see in real life. So the upside is huge, and it is less important exactly where wwe eat, but this was such a charming place it would have been fun to eat at even if I was by myself. The inside space is ecclectic and cool, with limited seating and would definitely recommend reservations for that. There is an ourside patio that is enormous and there were fleece blankets available to stave off the chill--later in the season they have heaters as well, but the night we were there I was just under dressed, but was quite confortable with the blanket. I had the Cuban sandwich with a side salad--I was tempted by the description of it which included: Roast Pork Loin, Ham, Gruyere,Pickled Onions, Pickled Jalepeno Peppers, Green Chilis, Sweet Mustard Sauce, on a French Roll--all the components that you would hope for and oh my, it was delicious. The pork was perfect, and all the accoutrements made it an excellent version of this classic sandwich. The bonus was that it was enormous, and I had the other half for lunch the next day. I accompanied it with a very nice white sangria and was very happy. My dining companion had the Teryaki Salmon Bowl, which included Edamame, Pickled Onions, Peppers and Onions, Avocado, Rice and Broccoli, which looked great as well. The source for the delicious pork in the Cuban is where they get their bacon, which I suspect is also delicious, and they do source locally, which I always appreciate--especially when you can taste the difference.

Enlightenment by Sarah Perry

The plot for this combines astronomy and a 19th-century mystery to propel a deeply thoughtful plot forward. Thomas Hart, a 50-year-old columnist for the Essex Chronicle in the small English town of Aldleigh and a dedicated star gazer, makes furtive trips to London for secret trists, even though he belongs to a Strict and Particular Baptist sect that basically forbids it. He might well have left his small town behind years ago except for his devotion to Grace Macaulay. Much like him, 17-year-old Grace also finds herself torn between her religion and her desires when she falls in love with Nathan, a local boy not a member of her church. Meanwhile, Thomas becomes intrigued by some letters found during the renovation of decrepit Lowlands House—and by James Bower, the handsome museum employee who calls them to his attention. The letters were written by Maria Văduva, who lived at Lowlands but vanished mysteriously sometime around 1887. An assignment to write about the Hale-Bopp comet passing overhead leads Thomas to figure out that Maria was an astronomer who may have made an important discovery, and Grace’s chance encounter with an enigmatic homeless man supplies an important missing piece of Maria’s puzzle. As they pursue a series of expertly dropped clues about Maria’s intent and ultimate fate, things go a bit asunder for the two, and while we have a pretty good idea about Maria, it is less clear where things will land between the two of them. This was longlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize and as is true of many in that category, it is thoughtful, sensitive, and beautifully written.

Paper Crane, Iowa City, Iowa

Wow, wow, wow. There is just so much to love about this newly opened dining experience in Iowa City. First and foremost, I love the owners. They opened The Webster just as COVID was being tamed by a vaccine, which was both very brave and a much needed injection of excellence into the Iowa City dining scene. I love everything about their first restaurant--the small plates, the pastas, and the mains, all designed to share in a place that feels like a celebration each and every timne I walk in. This place is both different and lovely to behold, and it benefits from their attention to detail--the decor is lush, it immediately creates an atmosphere, but this one is more casual, more fun, but no less beautiful. The most important thing for me, though, is the food, and they knock that out of the park--days after my first meal I am dwelling on the dishes I had and thinking "Is it woo soon to go back?" and "I don't think it is possible to get enough of it". It is that good. There are two separate spaces with two different menus. You might have to do one of each. The ramen shop is spectacular--the ramen is perfect, both the broth and the noodles. Second to none. But on top of that there are small bites, meal options for someone who doesn't want ramen but wants to eat with you, and for me, the ability to have a good salad is such a plus. Then there is the cocktail lounge with its Japanese Izakaya cuisine--do not miss the grilled squid! You cannot take anything from one to the other, so you do have to choose, but the whole experience is fresh and fun and delicious, and the change is welcome--do not miss trying it all out and hope to see you there!

Wild Houses by Colin Barrett

I had a three 2024 Booker Prize long list nominee vacation over Labor Day and this was one of them. It did not make it to the shortlist, but as is so often the case for me, I am glad that I read it, I would not have been likely to find this one on my own, and I often like some of the long list more than those that make the cut to the short list. This is a short and ruthless story--apparently the author's first full length novel, and maybe it's sparseness is a result of a story teller who does so succinctly. What happens is that Donal's brother Cillian falls in with some drug smugglers to make a bit of cash on the side, and gets into trouble when his stash is below the water line and it literally dissolves away. To pressure him into paying them back, Gabe and Sketch Ferdia, kidnap Donal and stash him in a gigantic loner's house. The Feria's are thuggish, unpredictable, prone to sudden bursts of rage and violence, and yet capable of tenderness and camaraderie between themselves. The story alternates between what is happening to Donal with the slow realization of his family as to what has become of him, leading up to a dramatic finale.

His Three Daughters (2023)

This is a bit of a departure from my usual solo travel work movie watching fare--it is a serious movie about a serious--and universal00life experience of having a parent die. True, some dodge it, but that is usually a tragedy of a different sort. The movie opens in a New York City apartment where we meet we meet Katie (Carrie Coon), Christina (Elizabeth Olsen) and Rachel (Natasha Lyonne). The scene is painful to watch and yet as the movie rolls out over the next hour and a half, it also is a scene that doesn’t really capture who they are. Yes, they are sisters and daughters (and two are mothers). But in the days leading up to their father’s death, they’re reminded of the complexity of human emotion, behavior, and understanding. There is a lot that the daughters do not agree upon, and are left to grapple with as their father dwindles away, and it is a microcosm of the things that happen all too often for families that leave a lot unsaid and for whom there are misunderstandings, resentments, tensions, piled on top of the challenges of everyday life. When you don't communicate, you don't communicate and grappling with death does not make it any better. The script is pitch perfect, and while it was painful to watch, it felt very real. Grief tears down what we think of ourselves. It’s cruel. It’s harsh. It’s inevitable. It shatters the walls we put up around our personalities that so often reduce us to easy descriptions like sister, daughter, and mother, and none of that helps to get through to the place you need to get to move on.

Noise by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass Sunstein

This is a book that takes a deep dive into unconscious bias, and tries on a number of different levels to point it out, and to help the reader to see that no one escapes this one, we all succumb to it to a greater or lesser extent, and the trick is to constantly be on the look out for it and to try to counterbalance it. This scattergun variability in judgments of all kinds, from court sentencing to insurance underwriting to medical diagnosis, is what the authors call, well, noise. Like its more famous cousin, bias, noise is an error in judgment. The authors distinguish between the two using a shooting-range metaphor. If all the shots land systematically off-target in the same direction, that’s bias; by contrast, noise is all over the place. Some of the shots might even be on target, because the issue here is not missing the target but a lack of consistency. Given the same facts, one criminal gets life and another who is equally guilty gets off. Which brings us to the other significant distinction between bias and noise: to detect bias, you have to know what the right answer is, or to use the book’s metaphor, you have to be standing at the front of the target, so you can see the bullseye. Noise requires no such particulars. It is detectable no matter which side of the target you’re standing on, since all you need to know is whether or not there is variability. One insurance company executive estimated the annual cost of noise in underwriting in the hundreds of millions of dollars. And you should want to detect noise, the authors argue, because it is not only unfair, it can be hugely costly--in money, in opportunity, and in human capital.

Happy Halloween! An estimated 67% of Americans will give out candy today, according to the National Retail Federation. Tomorrow is the day that those who celebrate will venerate their dead, followed by turning our clocks back an hour on Sunday, and voting on Tuesday, where hopefully we will not turn the damn country back a 100 years or more. 1. Election countdown With five days until Election Day, former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris both have viable paths to the White House. Polls show the race is neck and neck — and could be decided by small numbers of voters in a single battleground state. The candidates are focusing on seven key states in their final campaign sprint: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina and Georgia. Trump was in Wisconsin on Wednesday, where he broke out the props and seized on a garbled remark by President Joe Biden that seemed to insult Trump voters as “garbage.” Biden has denied calling Trump supporters “garbage,” saying his comment on a call Tuesday had been misinterpreted. 2. It's The Economy Several economists and officials have told CNN the economy has finally pulled off a soft landing, in which inflation is tamed without a recession — an exceptionally rare achievement. Gross domestic product, which measures all the goods and services produced in the economy, expanded at an annualized rate of 2.8% in the third quarter, the Commerce Department said Wednesday. That’s a slightly weaker pace than the second quarter’s 3% rate and above the 2.6% rate economists projected in a FactSet poll. Wednesday’s report comes after earlier data showed the economy added a whopping 254,000 jobs in September, inflation is a whisper away from the Federal Reserve’s 2% target and consumer confidence jumped this month by the fastest clip since March of 2021 — all signs of a robust economy. The bad news is that this doesn't seem to sway voters, but it will make the initial path for the next president easier. 3. Extreme weather At least 95 people have been killed by severe flash floods in Spain, according to authorities on Wednesday, as emergency responders scramble to find dozens of missing people. In the worst-affected region of Valencia, 92 people were killed and around 1,200 are thought to still be trapped, local officials said. Separately, Taiwan’s largest storm since 1996 made landfall today with heavy rains and damaging winds equivalent to a Category 3 Atlantic hurricane. The storm, known as Typhoon Kong-rey, has killed at least one person and injured dozens of others. This will be a task for the next administration to face--will they be up to it? So have fun today because the next week gets very scary indeed.

Secondhand Time by Svetlana Alexievich

This is a devastating book to read. It goes a long way to explaining why Russia invaded Ukraine, why Crimea just wasn't enough, and why even when Putin is gone the problem will remain. This is the first book that I have read by this author, but this is her fifth book about what it is to be Russian, the last in her series of investigations of the psychological make-up of the Soviet people, which she shows was conditioned by perpetual war. She has written about the Second World War as remembered by female veterans and by orphaned children, about the Afghanistan war, and about the traumatic Chernobyl disaster, combated in a war-like manner. The finale deals with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, inducing multiple civil wars in the former Soviet republics, military stand-offs in the constitutional crises of 1991 and 1993, and the war-like criminality and terrorist attacks of today. This book stands out for its wide historical scope: We hear the voices of people who survived the Stalinist labor camps of the 1930s, lived through the Second World War, and experienced postwar Soviet and then post-Soviet history, up to the present. Alexievich arranges this vast material so as to yield a unique insight into the failure of the post-Soviet democratization. shows that above all they were psychologically misguided. From 1985, under the auspices of glasnost’, the newspapers were abruptly filled with photographs of anonymous mass graves, vivid testimonies to the horrible crimes committed by the Soviet regime. The avalanche of historical revelations in the press was so jarringly at odds with official historiography that in 1988 my high school’s graduation exam in contemporary history was cancelled. No one knew any more how to evaluate and grade students’ knowledge of Soviet history. This is the backdrop against which modern Russia was crafted, and Ukraine is the first to suffer the consequences, but perhaps not the last.

A Family Affair (2023)

I have been trying to watch romantic comedies that have accomplished actors in them in order to sift through what might be acceptable and what might be painful, and the cast here includes two Academy Award winners (Nicole Kidman and Kathy Bates) as well as Zac Efron--so the acting is reasonable, but the script is weak, and the overall result is less than the sum of its parts. Kidman plays a successful writer who's husband dies years ago and she has not had a significant relationship since then. Her daughter, Zara, has creative aspirations, but is afraid of the shadow her mother's shadow casts, is working as a gopher for a successful but untalented actor who is emotionally immature and not at all nice. So when her mother and he start a pretty torrid affair, Zara has a lot of issues with it. That is essentially the plot, and it plays out more or less predictable across a 90 minute story line. My recommendation is to skip it, unless you really love one of the actors (I think Kidman is pretty spectacular, but even so, she really couldn't prop this up), or your bar for enjoyment of romantic comedies is very low (again, I think I fall int his category, and yet I struglled with this one).

The Fetishist by Katherine Min

I did not realize that the author had died before this book was published and that it was published posthumously. I hope she is happy with it as it turned out, a work of raging against the machine, a fantasy about striking back at the white patriarchy that takes what they want when they want it, and then spit it back out. The vision of control that JD Vance and his cohorts yearn to return to, where women stay at home, do as they are told, and are inevitably crushed under the weight of male ineptitude. There are three stories of three larger-than-life characters woven loosely together. Alma Soon Ja Lee is a woman of South Korean heritage and a world-renowned cellist, but when we meet her she is struggling with MS. She falls into a coma and in her coma relives her love story with her former fiancé Daniel Karmody. Daniel is a violinist and the fetishist of the novel who has damaged Alma and countless other Asian women through his objectification of them; when he re-experiences his love for Alma he also experiences deep regret for how badly he treated her. And finally there is Kyoko Tokugawa, a young Japanese-American punk rocker who blames Daniel for her mother Emi’s suicide and kidnaps him with the help of her partner Kornell; she plans on killing Daniel in her late mother’s basement by forcing him to eat the poisonous Japanese fish Fugu, or pufferfish. Well, it doesn't quite go that way, but a girl can dream.