You don’t need heirloom tomatoes

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Oh, man. The past week has been a strange one for me: I only sent you guys one email! Normally, I can bang out two or three, no problem. Just plop myself down in front of the computer and the words just flow. But in this case: Nope!

This isn’t some case of writer’s block. In fact, it’s the opposite—it’s reporter’s block. I have a bunch of what I hope are great pieces coming along, the kind of stories where you can’t tell if you’re supposed to laugh or supposed to cry so instead find yourself unable to stop screaming, but they are requiring me to do actual work before I can complete them. Reporting, research, silent contemplation. Because believe it or not, I’m not just talking out of my ass here!

So in the meantime, as I put the effort into these other, more ambitious pieces, I wanted to hit you up with the polar opposite: Trying! mini-essays. Here we go!

You don’t need heirloom tomatoes

Twenty years ago, heirloom tomatoes were a revelation: What, you mean tomatoes don’t need to be big, hard, flavorless spaldeens? Heirloom tomatoes—green-striped and tart, black and pasty, as sweet and yellow as pineapples—became my obsession, everyone’s obsession. Lately, however, I got over them. Too often they were fragile, watery, disappointing; rarely did they justify an extra two to four dollars per pound. Now the good ol’ beefsteak tomato has become my standby: The farmers’ market version (of course) is juicy and affordable, and it doesn’t turn to mush with the slightest pressure. It’s all I need these days, except when I need an extra hit of sugar, in which case I buy cherry tomatoes—Sungold, grape, whatever. Don’t fall for the heirloom trap! Buy the Seiko of tomatoes and be happy.

Dear Afrikaner refugees

Welcome to America! We all assume you are Nazis. Maybe you aren’t, but we assume you are. Considering how you’ve wound up here, can you blame us? Anyway, if you’re not a Nazi, you’re really going to have to prove it. At your earliest convenience, please start donating to NPR, driving a hybrid, and shopping at farmers’ markets (though not for heirloom tomatoes). Also, get ready for a broken healthcare “system,” inconsistent educational efforts, overpaid and overzealous police, and even more political clowns than you expected. When you’re ready to give up and move back to the veldt, come and talk to me—I’ll give you some reasons to stick around.

The opposite of storytelling

Do you remember a few years ago, when every (🤮) thought leader in America was blathering on about storytelling? For a good long while, the simple concept of “telling a story” was the key to success in this country. It was how you became a powerful marketer, how you conveyed complex ideas, how you won strangers to your side. For people like me—i.e., journalists and other writers who’d actually devoted our careers to telling stories in myriad ways and formats—it always smacked of superficiality: the glossed-over trendification of a skill that is both obvious and difficult to master. It bothered the fuck out of me. Well, nowadays you don’t hear much about it: Instead, we hear about AI and its ability to summarize everything—to boil those expertly crafted stories, with their careful characterization and slow-building dramatic arcs, down to a handful of easy-to-digest bullet points. Who needs suspense, climaxes, wit, structure, irony, when you can have an LLM tell you what you could have learned had you bothered to submit yourself to the tale? If there’s anything good about the AI bullshit we’re all currently enduring, it’s that it makes clear that the previous trend was equally full of crap. If only I could figure out which paradigm the thought leaders will glom onto next, I’d … Hm, honestly, I’m not sure what I’d do. Complain about that, too?

The three-celebrity theory

Across the span of our lives, we each resemble three celebrities: one in our youth, the first we’re compared to; one in adulthood; and one in our final years. My friend MD started off as Morrissey, but now he’s Ed Norton. Me, I was once Martin Short, and now I have for years been Jude Law (who is, thank goodness, balding, too). But who will I be when I’m old? Will I be Michael Caine, as my own father sort of has been? Or will I just become old Martin Short? We can’t know, but we can hope. I’m hoping for old Steve Carell.

Engagement bait alert: Which three celebrities are you, have you been, will you be?

Writing isn’t therapy—except when it is

You should never set out to write anything in order to make yourself feel better. The best writing comes from careful thought, an attention to words and structure, a devotion to story and character, a willingness to revise viciously, and, of course, ineffable inspiration. You create because you want to create, you need to create, and while you may have demons to exorcise, you set them aside in order to do what’s necessary for the work itself. The reader, whoever that may be, is not your therapist (though they may be your confidant). At times, this means you must become someone else—someone who lives across town from your own emotional shit—to get the writing done the way it needs to be done. And then, once it is finally done, once you’ve got the letters arranged just so, you may find that the house across town is suddenly more comfortable, and that you can leave the psychologically troubling clutter on the curb for Sanitation, and that actually you do feel better about things now, even though that wasn’t the goal. Ignore the elephants, and focus on the zoo; the elephants will take care of themselves. 🪨🪨🪨

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