Hello everyone! I loved reading your responses to last week's letter, and thank you to
for including it in <3If you’re new here, my newsletter typically explores a bunch of topics using the acronym ADHOC, which is Latin for improvised. This week’s categories are A Good American Mirror, Discourse on Discourse, Hibachi, One Man Job, and Connections.
Thank you Paola for taking the first one, you’re the writer of my dreams.
A: A Good American Mirror (Paola Santos)
Last week, after the Northeastern earthquake but before the North American eclipse, I went to Lenox, Massachusetts for a night. Plopped in the purple mountain Berkshires, it’s a place for the theater and symphony-loving. It’s quaint, lake-filled, and easy on the eyes. The town holds a frosty median age of 61.5 — it’s no wonder the waitress at the bistro asked to see my ID twice before agreeing to bring back the wine. Lenox is not a town that’s used to “fresh faces,” as she called mine.
Eli drove us over in a Buick whose lease is almost up. We joked it couldn’t get more American than that. That is, until we stumbled into the Norman Rockwell Museum on Glendale Road. Smack dab in the middle of a parking lot, this structure’s an unassuming treasure. It’s got works from across the artist’s life that paint the modern and evolving American Dream. It was easy to be charmed, and we were. Between diner counters, freedom fighters, and JFK’s side profile, Rockwell seemed to have captured it all.
But his quiet winter scene won out. Home for Christmas (Stockbridge Main Street at Christmas), 1967, said the object label. Oil on board. He’d painted a panorama of the New England main street we’d just driven through, one that matched this spring day’s snowy conditions.
The work’s got a hazy, glowing tint to it. Barren branches, kids running amuck, and a thousand little happenings scatter across this holiday card. It’s positioned on the far left of one of the museum’s central rooms. And everyone’s staring. I laugh as someone’s grandma and someone’s seven-year-old tend to different corners of the rectangle.
Everything seems to be happening all at once, yet this picture leaves you lonely. It zooms too far out to know quite anything about its characters. It’s steeped in hopeful assumptions. That Christmas Day, Rockwell hoped the town of Stockbridge was happy. So he painted it as such.
I found out that Rockwell moved to Stockbridge to be near his psychoanalyst. He moved there not for peace and quiet, but for treatment. Autobiographer Deborah Solomon, who’s thought through his life much longer than I have, calls his quest to imagine a happier reality than the one he was living in an “American Mirror.” Rockwell agreed. He expressed his desire to depict moments of goodness amidst the mundane, although “our world is not the happy place these days.” He griped that he’d never have enough time to paint all the pictures he wished he could (although he’d paint very many).
I’m not a painter, nor an American philosopher, but I bought the gift shop’s 500-piece puzzle of Home for Christmas thinking I’d like this quiet Christmas scene near me this spring. It’s not quite my New England, but it’s a mirror I’d like to look at.
D: Discourse on Discourse
On a plane ride, I listened to sixteen minutes of a podcast where two men discuss the best strategies for conducting interviews. The "Expert" says that he's stopped asking questions entirely—they make him seem needy and inferior. Instead, he's begun to "direct" his conversation partner, with phrases like tell me. Listening to this man share his tips straight out of his manipulation textbook (he actually does keep a Google Doc of all his techniques), to extract valuable information out of people, was gross. The Expert advises his audience to ask themselves, before they enter a conversation, “What do I need?”
I have been thinking about the Masculine Voice in general—sharp, straightforward, dripping with a level of assuredness that would register in a woman as narcissistic. I think the subject is especially relevant in the aftermath of all that Andrew Huberman drama—his authoritative influence on thousands of people’s sleep schedules and health regimens contrasted with his infidelity. I've seen "male podcasters" on a few 2024 “out” lists, but I think the voice persists beyond that narrow genre, into literature, movies, journalism, reality. The way boys speak in class. The networking emails they send. The orders they give the freshman pledging their fraternities…
I think I learned the most about conversation during my freshman year at Yale. We were all strangers (so there was no gossip to fall back on), and we wanted to like each other so we could feel less lonely. We ate lunch outside, in small circles, and compared high schools, music tastes, and class schedules. We asked questions because we were curious, and we listened to the answers with care.
H: Hibachi
On Friday, I went to a Hibachi restaurant with four of my friends. I had only been once before, to Benihana, and didn’t remember anything besides the flaming onion tower. Kumo in New Haven is a bit of a walk away, but boasts this massive space with seats around wide silver grills.
The chef spun his cleavers in the air and lit the grill on fire and squirted an unidentifiable liquid into our mouths. The food was okay and kind of gave me a stomach ache, but the whole experience made me think about food as performance. In the TikTok era of cooking and eating, so much of what we see is visually appealing, but it doesn’t really matter if it actually tastes good. After that viral torched-marshmallow hot chocolate blew up, a once-empty gluten free cafe down my street in NYC had a line wrapped around the block for months. I can’t imagine any hot chocolate is worth waiting hours in the cold for.
But there was no wait to get seated at Kumo. None of the patrons were recording (except us), and the staff seemed well-practiced and comfortable. We oohed and ahed at the sputtering oil, the knife tricks, and the flames. Before the explosion of food on the internet, hibachi has been combining food and entertainment into a single experience for decades. It’s like eating at Disneyland. It might not be the best thing you’ve ever eaten, but the pretzels are Mickey-shaped and the pickles are ginormous and you are surrounded by magic.
O: One Man Job
A professor asked my class if we knew the name of the man singularly responsible for saving the most lives. None of us did. Apparently it’s Michael Bloomberg, because when he was the mayor of NYC he banned smoking in restaurants and bars. Big Tobacco freaked out, and tried to argue that no one would go out to eat if they couldn’t smoke a cigarette during their meal. But the dining scene stayed the exact same. The only change was that people smoked less, which improved their health and saved their lives.
Bloomberg’s initiative to reduce tobacco has implemented control policies in 59 countries and saved an estimated 30 million lives. I hate the smell of cigarettes, and we learned in school that secondhand smoke is terrible for you. It’s crazy to see how mass patterns of behavior can change (for the better) because of a single rule that doesn’t even prohibit people from smoking—it just makes it less convenient.
C: Connections
Last October, I went to Maine with a bunch of my friends and we projected New York Times games on the TV in our little cabin to play them together. I loved doing the crossword, but I hated connections. I found it too difficult to guess the correct categories, and I didn’t like being bad at something. After the trip, I started playing on my own, and I only solved it half the time. Eventually I got better, and the patterns began to reveal themselves to me.
Doing the connections now feels like a little treat. It’s quick, it’s satisfying, it’s just hard enough. I can go on instinct, and sometimes when I get it right, I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding.
See you next week! Thank you x100000 for being here.
Loved this, Arden! That interview advice is so blech, and it's crazy to me that so many people see that as a good way to approach a conversation. I always thought conversations were about sharing and learning...apparently I should have been viewing them more like drive-throughs. If you decide you want to do more long form pieces, I think this would make excellent fodder. I'd certainly eat it up :)