Episode 1428
Kazakhstan's Oyan protest movement / Paolo Sorbello
Jan 20
The monarch migration means a lot to a lot of people. It has meant a lot to me. I was with a girlfriend up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan back in the 1980s. We were camping near a place I’d gone once before and enjoyed, it was part of Great Lakes maritime history, and we were also in search of a small green wooden booth called Clyde’s Hamburgers, which we found no longer existed, but the camping and swimming were excellent, and we were treated to a majestic squall line rumbling over the lake, over us, flashing its lightning, dragging behind it a heavy thunderstorm. And in the morning, as we were walking out of the woods, millions of orange, white, and black stained-glass butterflies were floating around us like autumn leaves.
In a Moment of Truth, Jeff Dorchen surrenders to his happy place.
Read the transcript here
Nick Buxton
Nov 3 2021
Rich nations are building national border walls around the global climate crisis.
Follow
Weekly Mailing List
New interviews every Monday
Posted by Alexander Jerri
Welcome to the Moment of Truth: the curse that is the drink.
I’ve been feeling pressure to be optimistic lately. My friends encourage. A listener, a communist mailman in New Jersey, insists. Henry Giroux opines. My mother sent me a book by Jane Goodall called, “Hope.” It’s a lot of heat.
I have no choice but to go to my happy places to seek out this elusive optimism. The happy places in my mind, of course. I can’t bring you to my happy places in the material world. I could so endeavor with words, but those words would be the product of the experiences of my happy places cycling through my mind as I compose them. So, one way or the other, you’re stuck with the happy places in my mind.
Here’s an amusement: a friend told me, “People can now eat pig hearts or get them as transplants, but they must choose only one of the above.”
I replied, “What if you get the transplant, dine for a couple years on aromatic herbs, truffles, and oils, and then have it removed, prepared, and served to you?”
He suggested that some scientists, more hungry than ethical, have been urging pig-hearted transplantees to eat a lot of basil and to be sure to leave their organs to science. He also said that the restaurant he’s creating the new menu for wanted to do a pig heart dish, but due to the new demand for pig hearts the price has skyrocketed.
Hearts are notoriously rubbery and full of cartilage. He and I once made calf’s heart soup in a medieval convent converted to a residence for social workers in Kilkenny, Ireland, and that sucker took hours and barely became remotely chewable. As for his restaurant menu, I told him he’d be better off with a softer organ. “Although that’s not what she said,” I quipped at the end.
Speaking of tender organs, recently a friend of ours, an old writer almost exactly twenty years my senior, by the name of Jay Wolpert, passed away. He wrote the 2002 version of “The Count of Monte Cristo,” and “Pirates of the Caribbean, the Curse of the Black Pearl.” He loved cinematic sword fights in a swashbuckling vein. He was a big fan of Stewart Granger in 1952’s “Scaramouche,” which he screened for us back when he still could remember who I was. I don’t know what a swashbuckle is, and I don’t think he ever told me.
I met him in the last few years of his life. We... read more