Family Friendly Journal

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/05/announcing-3-days-9-months-27-years/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57185

This November, you know, after you’ve picked up The Shattering Peace and enjoyed the heck out of it, I’ll have another new thing for you: A short story called “3 Days, 9 Months, 27 Years,” which will be part of The Time Traveler’s Passport, an anthology of stories about time and/or travel, edited by John Joseph Adams, which in addition to my story will feature stories by R.F. Kuang, Peng Shepard, Kaliane Bradley, Olivie Blake and P. Djèlí Clark. That is a hell of a line-up, if I do say so myself. These stories will also feature audio narration, and they will be for sale individually, but if you are an Amazon Prime member, you’ll get to read them for free, because Amazon is publishing this anthology, and that’s how Amazon do.

And what is “3 Days, 9 Months, 27 Years” about? Here’s the pitch:

Time travel is real—and used for high-end tourism. Every moment of the past is open to visitors, and no matter what they do then, everything now waits for them, thanks to the sure hand of an experienced time travel technician. Come spend a day behind the controls of the time machine, and discover why, this day of all days, it’s time for this technician to make a change. Because sometimes, time travel is more than just an adventure. Sometimes, it’s a moral imperative.

Oooooh! Moral imperatives!

It’s a very good story, if I do say so myself (as are the other stories in this collection, no surprise given the line-up), and I’m looking forward to sharing it with you all in November. That’s not long now, and worth the wait.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/05/announcing-3-days-9-months-27-years/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57185

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/05/being-introduced-to-zaynab-issas-third-culture-cooking-by-cultflav/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57171

I have followed CultFlav on Tik Tok for a while now, enjoying their thorough reviews of cooking products as well as cookbooks. For all the reviews of theirs I’ve seen, I’ve never really been tempted to buy anything before. Most of what I have seen are things like pan reviews, a comparison of knives, talking about stand-mixers, basically a bunch of stuff I already have and don’t need to replace any time soon. So while I like their content, I have never felt compelled to buy anything they’ve talked about.

About a month ago, I watched a twenty minute video on Tik Tok where they reviewed Zaynab Issa’s cookbook, Third Culture Cooking. That’s right, I watched an entire twenty minute Tik Tok video. I have never done that before, to be honest. But for this video, I was sat. They had my attention from the start, and kept it all the way through. Here’s the Tik Tok video:

@cultflav

9.2: Third Culture Cooking by @Zaynab Issa cookbook review! This book is special without being fussy. It takes freezer ingredients and takes them from getting food on the table to taking care of yourself. Hope you enjoy the review! Check out our website for Gyoza recipe(s): cultflav.com

♬ original sound – Cult Flav

CultFlav’s video sold me completely on buying this cookbook. I had to place a special order to get it because I bought it through my local independent bookstore, but it was worth the wait.

I have always had this awful tendency to buy a cookbook and then never cook anything from it. It is a problem that extends into other areas of my life, too, such as buying a ton of video games on Steam and never playing any. I’m sure many of you can relate. Yeah, I see your TBR pile of fantasy novels on your nightstand there, don’t try to hide it, we’re all friends here.

For Third Culture Cooking, I was determined to cook something from it. I had bought it because CultFlav’s video had made me excited about the book, and eager to try the recipes, and by golly I was going to do it.

I decided to follow in CultFlav’s footsteps and sit down and read the whole thing first. I’m glad I did, because Zaynab Issa has some very interesting things to say on “American” food and how being a woman impacts how we view the act of cooking.

All the praise I’m about to give the book are exactly what CultFlav has said in their videos, but I’m going to do it anyway.

I love the look of the book. It’s a really well made, nice looking book that is going to look great on any shelf, or even displayed on a coffee table. It’s well-shot and well-organized. I like the textured lettering on the cover.

I love the accessibility aspect of the ingredients. It can be daunting to try to cook a dish that has ingredients you’ve never used before, or is a very different cuisine than what you’re used to, but Issa makes a point to include tons of substitutions in every single recipe. I find her recipes to be very approachable, and if you read through the recipes as well as her section on “pantry and fridge staples”, you’ll find that once you buy something for one of her recipes, chances are very high that you will use it again in about a dozen others. This is especially true of things like spices. Everyone knows the feeling of buying a whole jar of spice just to use 1/4 tsp of it in a recipe, and then never touch it again. I can guarantee that if you buy a spice she uses in a recipe, you’re going to see it again and again throughout the book.

Issa has a section in the beginning of the book that lists a handful of moods, and then tells you some recipes to cook for that mood. If you’re in the mood for something cozy, she recommends her udon carbonara, or her banana cake with tahini fudge. If you’re in the mood to celebrate, why not try her biryani, or chocolate cake with chai buttercream? I think this is a really unique and fun thing to have in your cookbook.

In the couple weeks of having this book, I’ve made four things from it. French Onion Ramen, Super Savory Chicken Soup, Red Curry Orzotto, and Coffee Cake Muffins. Everything has been really good so far, and has been pretty easy!

For the French Onion Ramen, it mostly consisted of caramelizing onions, adding things like white miso paste and rice vinegar for flavor along with beef broth, and boiling noodles. I loved the inclusion of fresh grated parmesan on top. I even managed to make pretty perfect soft-boiled eggs that were nice and jammy. I couldn’t find ramen noodles at the store, so I used yakisoba noodles instead, and I think it turned out really well. I would like to make it with actual ramen noodles in the future, I think it would be even better that way.

When I made the Super Savory Chicken Soup, it was because my mom was sick, and I wanted to make her a soup that really packed a punch. This soup has tons of garlic and ginger in it that I was sure would help her feel better. The noodles in this dish are also ramen noodles, which I did manage to get ahold of this time. In the recipe, she says to cook the chicken thighs in the broth, but I didn’t have time to actually cook the chicken and shred it and all that, so I used a rotisserie chicken and shredded it up before adding it in, and I think it turned out pretty amazing. It was super flavorful and full of good stuff. I will say, you can’t skimp on the fresh lime juice, it really brightens the soup up and adds some excellent acidity to the hearty broth.

The Red Curry Orzotto is probably my favorite out of all these recipes so far, even though everything else was really good, this dish just turned out so delicious and cozy and I can’t wait to make it a regular in my rotation of dinners. The recipe calls to include mushrooms and peas in it, but also says that if you want to include a protein, she recommends shrimp or chicken. I picked shrimp and I think it was an absolutely amazing addition. I’m kind of biased because shrimp is my favorite protein in general, but honestly the flavors are just perfect together. I used a mild red curry paste for this dish but you could easily use a spicier one for some extra kick.

Lastly, the Coffee Cake Muffins. The dessert section of this book is the one that interests me the most, with recipes like Coconut and Cardamom Cake, Almond Mocha Blondies, Melon Sorbet, and Salted Brown Butter Pecan Shortbread. The Coffee Cake Muffins had a really simple ingredient list and were pretty easy to make, and they tasted really good, but oh my goodness they were so crumbly. The streusel on top was so crumbly you couldn’t eat one of these bad boys without hovering over a plate or the kitchen sink. I felt like I had done something wrong to make them turn out this way, so I actually emailed Issa and asked her if there was something I might’ve done to cause the seemingly-extreme-crumbliness. I was very surprised she actually responded to my email the next day!

Everything I’ve made so far has been pretty great, and nothing yet has been too difficult or daunting! I really like this cookbook, and I like that it has made me genuinely excited to get in the kitchen and cook something yummy. It’s a nice feeling, and I owe it to CultFlav for so very thoroughly reading, testing, and recommending Third Culture Cooking.

If you want to see their full, hour long review over the book, rather than the twenty minute Tik Tok version, here’s the YouTube video:

I will say my one critique of the cookbook is that sometimes (rarely, but honestly once is more than enough) Issa opts to put a photo of an empty plate to accompany the recipe, rather than a photo of the food before it was eaten. The empty plate might have a spoonful or two of remnants of the dish, or smears of sauce here and there, but we don’t get an actual photo of the dish. That is definitely not my favorite, but it happens so sparingly that I can get over it. It was actually that way for the Red Curry Orzotto, where there’s just a little tiny bit of orzo left on a sauce-smeared plate. Wouldn’t be what I do, but, it’s not my cookbook.

Overall, I highly recommend giving this cookbook a shot, it has been so fun to read and look through, and I’m so excited to try more recipes from it. I’m really loving it so far!

Don’t forget to check out Zaynab Issa’s Instagram and Tik Tok, as well as CultFlav’s Instagram and Tik Tok, so you can see tons of awesome cooking-related reviews.

Which dish sounds the most yummy to you? Do you have any cookbooks you’ve been loving lately? Let me know in the comments, and have a great day!

-AMS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/05/being-introduced-to-zaynab-issas-third-culture-cooking-by-cultflav/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57171

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/04/the-big-idea-gary-jackson/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57156

Move over, Shakespeare in the Park, today we’ve got poet Gary Jackson and the Big Idea for his newest collection of poetry. Follow along to see how small lives speaks to the reader in an unprecedented way.

GARY JACKSON:

It’s no secret that I love persona poems. When I teach my intro to poetry students about voice and speaker, I routinely ask: Who is talking to whom about what? I pose the question hoping to prompt them to consider how a poet employs pronouns, point of view, and psychic distance to not only render a speaker, but also address an audience—both inside and outside the world of the poem—often creating simultaneous meanings that can even contradict.

All of my books engage with persona in different ways, including the poems in small lives, which began as a handful of disparate persona poems in the voices of superhumans. Some of the first pieces I wrote for this collection, like “fly” and “The Telepath quits her day job,” feature two different speakers navigating the extraordinary in our contemporary moment. Both poems use the first-person point of view because I like to bring the reader closer into the world I’m creating. Third person tends to put more psychic distance between speaker and reader than I want, and the voice can teeter toward the omniscient, which I’m not usually after. But as I wrote more of these superhuman voices, I realized two things: 1) I was juggling a lot of speakers, and 2) a few main characters were emerging to form the core of the story I was telling: The Invincible Woman, The Willpower Man, and The Telepath.

Having multiple speakers populate a collection wasn’t new to me—my previous books also employed multiple personas. The easiest way to handle persona in the speculative world of small lives was simply to name the poem after the speaker, which gives you titles like “The Heartless Boy,” “The Never-Ending Man,” and “The Precog” (though that last one is interesting because it’s not the Precog speaking to us, but her granddaughter). The title, while relatively simple, does a great deal of work introducing the speaker before the reader even enters the poem.

It was clear early on that The Willpower Man, The Telepath, and The Invincible Woman would be the three recurring speakers throughout the collection. And though many of their poems include their names in the titles, several do not. And several challenges emerged: when they interact with one another, what’s the best way to handle those crossovers? Without always relying on the first-person point of view, how can I make it clear who is speaking to whom? That’s when I realized I had been leaving out one pronoun almost entirely when it came to identifying the subject position of the speaker: you.

Like most poets, I frequently use the second person to signify an absence, a placeholder for some recipient, or a presence implied by the you—a finger pointing outward to implicate the reader or directly address them. But what about conflating speaker and reader, bringing them directly into the difficult and impossible choices these characters face? What if I collapsed that psychic and narrative distance even further?

Looking back through my drafts, one of the first poems featuring you was an early piece for The Invincible Woman, simply titled “The Invincible Woman,” which served as her introduction. It would eventually become “The Invincible Woman has a one-night stand,” but in that first draft there was a line (that’s no longer in the published version): “And the world, like all things that grow up, forgot you.” Maybe that’s why I chose the second person for her voice—I wanted a persona that implicated the reader, myself, and anyone who encountered the poem. That fear of being forgotten became a touchpoint not just for the superhumans in the collection, but for something universally human: how value can be cruelly assigned to a life based on who remembers you, or how important you’re deemed to be in the eyes of a cultural or social group, a country, a world.

Eventually, I found a cleaner way to manage multiple speakers: assign each a primary pronoun. The Willpower Man was easy—his poems had always been in the first-person I. Since The Invincible Woman began in the second-person you, I kept her there. The Telepath was trickier; early drafts and even some published versions alternated between first and second person. It wasn’t until I knew these characters would inhabit the same book that I realized she needed a distinct pronoun to avoid confusion. I settled on the third-person she, which worked well since the book was already rich with first- and second-person voices that pulled the reader directly into the world of small lives. Any psychic distance created by third person was offset by the other perspectives—and, because she is a telepath who can inhabit other minds, that slightly more omniscient lens felt fitting.

I also included a brief “cast of characters” meta-poem to further clarify and avoid confusion, which gave me an opportunity to acknowledge the fluidity of all three pronouns, as well as the collective we and us of the first-person plural that appears throughout the collection. At times, these voices conflate reader, character, speaker, and self, sometimes intentionally contradicting each other in the ways only poetry can.

small lives: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Kobo|UNM Press

Author socials: Website

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/04/the-big-idea-gary-jackson/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57156

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/03/20-years-of-being-poor/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57118

I was reminded via a recent Metafilter post that this year marks the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, and consequently, the 20th anniversary of me writing my “Being Poor” post about it, which was my way of answering the question, sometimes asked sincerely and sometimes less so, why some of New Orleans’ poorest citizens did not leave the city when a massive storm was bearing down on it. The piece was written in anger and sorrow and frustration, and was in many ways was a life-changing piece of writing for me. It remains one of the best things I’ve ever written.

Ten years ago I wrote a long retrospective on the piece, why I wrote it and what it’s meant to me and others. Nearly all of what I wrote there still stands, so I’m not going to repeat the content of that post here.

What I am going to add today is just the observation that the horrors that caused me to write “Being Poor” twenty years ago have not been avoided in the current day; if anything, things are now worse. Most prominently at the moment, we have a government that neither cares about the poor among us, nor is much interested in helping those of us who need help, whatever help that might be. It is an intentionally cruel and contemptuous government, which is echoed down on state and local levels in many places. It’s harder now to climb out of poverty than it was twenty years ago, and easier to slide into it.

The cruel and contemptuous, in government and out of it, will tell you that poverty is about the choices you make, and I am here to tell you, from experience, that far more than that, it is about the choices we make. We have chosen, in the aggregate, to make things difficult, well beyond that ability of most individuals in poverty to make useful choices much of the time, or to make those choices stick without luck or other outside intervention. You can’t tell people to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps when we’ve designed a world where boots cost more than what they have, are hard to find, and will fall apart when they use them. You can’t harangue them for not climbing the social ladder when the ladder we’ve provided is greased and the rungs are broken or missing. You can’t blame them for not improving their lot when we’ve given them so few tools to do so, and are working to take away what tools they manage to have. You can’t sell them the American Dream when we’ve put that dream behind a wall, for the pleasure of the few.

The cruel and contemptuous know this, and it doesn’t matter to them. At all. And they are in power.

And so, we will have more poverty and more disasters and more people wondering, some sincerely and some rather less so, why people just didn’t leave whatever it is that will need leaving. We know the answer to that. We’ve known now for decades. But we refuse to change. And so here we are, again, and still.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/03/20-years-of-being-poor/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57118

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/02/further-thoughts-on-the-m4-mac-air-and-pixel-10-pro/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57112

First the M4 Mac Air and then the Pixel 10 Pro, because, I don’t know, we’re going from largest to smallest.

M4 Mac Air: The first thing I note is that I think I forgot how much I enjoy this particular form factor for a laptop. Don’t get me wrong, I really am happy with my MacBook Pro, but it is an actual beast of a machine, big and heavy and kind of a pain in the ass to take places. Again, I bought it more or less as a desktop replacement, so I’m not faulting it for these facts; it’s doing what I intended it to do. But it is a lug to carry, and not a computer you can comfortably one hand as you move about the house.

The Mac Air, on the other hand, I’m happily carrying around all over the place, and I’m genuinely looking forward to traveling with it when I head out to Portland this weekend and on tour later in the month. It is literally no problem just to pick up and move around. It’s a pleasure to type on (which is what it has over my iPad Pro with the Magic Keyboard), and everything else about it just works: The screen is pretty nice, it’s loud enough when I play something through its speakers, and the battery efficiency is such that I’ve been running it unplugged for a couple of days, writing, scrolling social media and watching YouTube, and haven’t gotten close to draining the thing. It’s basically a perfect portable computer, or at least a close to perfect one for me.

This is not entirely surprising as the various reviews I’ve read and watched have pretty much said the same thing; the general consensus is that for the non-power user (which is nearly everyone who is not a coder, a serious PC gamer and/or someone working with tons of video), the M4 Mac Air is probably as much computer as you need. I’m inclined to agree with this. My use case of writing, browsing and some light photoediting does not come close to maxing out the capabilities of this chip, and while I chipped out a little bit extra for more RAM and SSD space (which also got me a slightly better-specced processor), the base model with 16 gigs of RAM would not exactly be hurting doing what I’m doing, either. Spec snobs will note that the screen on the Air is not OLED and only refreshes 60 times a second (unlike iPad Pro, which has the OLED, or the screen on the MacBook Pro, which has variable refresh rates up to 120 times a second). However, having a recent Mac Pro to compare, allow me to say: I literally don’t care. The screen is perfectly good. I don’t notice the lack of OLED or high refresh rates when I’m using it, and I’m not running it next to the MacBook Pro to notice the supposed deficiency. It’s fine.

In the real world, the drawbacks I’ve noticed on this Mac Air are thus: Having both USB-C/Thunderbolt ports on the same side of the computer is a very minor annoyance, and the small size of the computer means that when I am sitting in my office Eames Chair, the cats choose to pretend they don’t see me working on the Air and want to sit in my lap. Which is cute! But makes it hard to work. I would also say, with respect to the Sky Blue color of my particular laptop, that what Marques Brownlee said about it is correct: This is homeopathic blue, like Apple made a silver laptop and then whispered “blue” to it as it was being put into its packaging. Dear Apple: Don’t be afraid of actual color.

(Oh, and: apparently this M4 is optimized for “AI” but nothing I use it for needs it to run AI, and if the computer or the programs I use offer to run AI, I usually just shut off that capability because I already have a work flow established, so, meh?)

But, yeah. Great little computer, it’s doing everything I wanted it to, and can do considerably more than that if I ever need it to. Good purchase, A+++, would buy again.

Pixel 10 Pro: So far, I’m using this almost exactly like I used the Pixel 9 Pro before it and the Pixel 8 Pro before that; honestly, on a day-to-day basis the way I know that I actually switched phones is that this new one has a slightly different color. Now, Google just downloaded Material Design 3 into my phone so all my on-screen buttons and some of my apps look different, so I guess there is that. But that doesn’t really change how I use the phone all that much.

But what about all the new “AI “stuff they packed in the latest Pixels, that are supposed to be the big market differentiators to everything else out there? I hear you ask. Well, I already talked about the most prominent example of that, being the “Pro-Res Zoom” AI which kicks in when you zoom the camera above 30x, and you may recall I was not hugely impressed with that. I am more impressed with the “AI Enhance” photo function, which does not redraw your entire photo but rather adjusts color/brightness/etc automatically. I’m not sure it really qualifies as “AI,” it’s just applying tweaks, but it’s generally pretty good at it. There’s now also a function where you can edit a picture by talking to your phone rather than moving sliders around and such; you can ask the Pixel 10 to remove someone from a photo, or brighten the sky, or, say, remove the background entirely and replace it with an “AI” generated image. The former is cool, I suppose; the latter once again gets us to the point where your photo is no longer a photo and is instead just an image based on a photo you once took. Whether this is something you want, I leave you to consider. I don’t have much use for it personally.

The other “AI” stuff I haven’t really encountered yet, mostly because none of it is really useful for someone staying at home and doing not a whole lot of nothing. I’m not speaking to people who don’t share my language, so an auto-translate that speaks a different language in a voice similar to my own is not a priority, and when I’m spending time in my home office I’m not needing my phone to surface my flight information while I’m texting. I’m traveling this week so maybe it’ll come in handy then. But right now? Yeah, it’s not doing much for me. For the moment, at least, none of the new “AI” features of the Pixel 10 Pro are ones that I have much use for.

Which is not to say I don’t like this phone. I do; as a smartphone, doing all the things I want it to do, it’s great. The cameras are very good just as cameras, the phone is snappy enough opening apps and doing the stuff I need it to do, and I still very much appreciate having the stock Android experience on the Pixel, without all the crap other manufacturers or carriers add on to their phones. Pixel still has the best iteration of Android, if you ask me.

I don’t regret getting the Pixel 10 Pro (especially as my old phone was showing real wifi connectivity issues). It’s an excellent phone I would highly recommend to any Android phone user, if they are in the market for a new phone. But if you already have a phone you’re happy with, and you’re not someone who cares about “AI” to any great extent, there’s nothing here that would make you want to exchange the phone you already have. It’s a good phone! Just not necessarily in the ways Google is selling it as.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/02/further-thoughts-on-the-m4-mac-air-and-pixel-10-pro/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57112