Hi Friends,
First, if you observe the Jewish New Year of Rosh Hashanah, I wish you a happy and healthy new year.
You’ll never make money betting on New York versus Los Angeles. Just when I finished defending New York City from the obituary writers, the West Coast inferno gets magnified and even more biblical.
I am still in California, at the end of my month-long visit with the #Exhibits ™. I am very happy to be here, to get a sense of what their lives are like, and have more than a few days to luxuriate in our relationships. And to tell you the truth, I haven’t even minded the driving. I can drive to and from the baby’s house without using GPS.
But to get back to the true issues at hand, the West Coast is burning. Until this president took office, I always had the sense that America did things right. Our brilliant founders planned for every contingency and our Constitution served us well.
It was my American privilege, and I took it for granted.
Now, by disdaining and flouting science, this president and his team (his bodyguard, his son-in-law, and other untrained and unprepared donors) are playing the most dangerous game of Russian Roulette ever. You burn if you’re blue, and if you’re red you get to join a superspreading rally instead. This is the bad dream I wake up to and go to bed to every single day.
Conversations on the East and West coasts now include, “Where can we go?” Haze from the fires has traveled to the Atlantic coast – including Palm Beach -- and beyond. Even We are all suffering, no matter where we are. This president is harming the entire planet.
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Lisa Birnbach and Amelia Nierenberg
What occasionally makes me hopeful is listening to and talking with the younger generation of doers. My admiration for the Parkland survivors, Greta Thunberg, Malala, and their peers knows no bounds. My guest this week is Amelia Nierenberg, the co-writer of the New York Times’ Coronavirus Schools Briefing newsletter. A member of the first class of New York Times fellows, she wrote on the Food Desk. After graduating from Yale with a BA and MA in Intellectual History, Amelia worked for the AP in Dakar, Senegal, in their West Africa Bureau.
Please listen to the interview with Amelia Nierenberg (click in the audio player above), in the meantime, here are this week’s five things that make my life better.
Enjoying the fruits and vegetables from one’s garden. I don’t have a garden or a green thumb, but there is a nice lemon tree in the backyard of our rented house in Los Angeles. What a pleasure to hop out of the kitchen at dinner time to pull of lemon for salad dressing from that tree. What a feeling of self-sufficiency! Having a small garden is on my wishlist for my next chapter, whether it’s a terrace in New York or a cottage in California.
2. The Citizen App. I downloaded it per my stepdaughter to learn more about what was going on in my neighborhood in New York. In Los Angeles, with countless helicopters flying overhead, and twice finding myself rerouted by blocks being blocked by police cars, I feel a little more empowered. (And it’s not polite or prudent to ask a cop who they are looking for during a stake-out.)
3. Vegan and Gluten Free bakeries. #ExhibitB must avoid gluten; #ExhibitsA&A1 are trying to skip dairy. There are many places that bake beautiful breads and pastries that they can all eat. Good for you, Los Angeles.
4. Reading. Overwhelmed by the offerings of streaming series, rerun series that I never watched, old and new movies, and yes, am I ever going to watch “Breaking Bad”? I turn to books. We are watching documentaries frequently, but many nights I read instead.
5. Science. Take it from me, a person who hated going to science class in school. Science is behind the fires, the pandemic, global warming. Ignoring science has put the planet in peril. We need a president who believes in science. (Empirically, how do you disbelieve what is provable?). Please vote early.
AMELIA NIERENBERG’S 5 THINGS:
1. Crunchy Garlic with Chile Oil from H-Mart
2. Negative Underwear's Sieve Non-Wire Bra ... first wire-less bra for big boobs that works!
3. Rapid turnaround Covid testing ... my friends and I got tested and went away to Vermont for the week. It's almost Jan 2020 over here.
4. The movie Manto, which I'd never seen before. Just a really beautiful film, and a really helpful introduction to history that I don't know anything about.
5. Spending the first half-hour or so reading and drinking tea and just letting myself wake up slowly and languidly.
MORE ABOUT AMELIA NIERENBERG
Amelia Nierenberg is a newsletter writer for The New York Times on the Coronavirus Schools Briefing.
Instagram: @amelia.nierenberg
Twitter: @AJNierenberg
Facebook: @amelia.nierenberg
Website: www.AmeliaNierenberg.com
The 5 Things That Make Life Better podcast is recorded and produced at The Field in NYC https://thefieldtv.com
My team is Shpresa Oruci, Michael Porte, Sam Haft and Boco Haft.