It’s been a pretty hectic month with lots going on. Consequently, I haven’t had much time to do much cooking and baking, which has been especially challenging since a few of the new cookbooks (above) that have recently come out have been sitting on my kitchen table, bookmarked with recipes that I’m excited to try. So I thought maybe we could have an open forum here, and let’s discuss: What cookbooks have you been excited about lately?

With the baseball season starting in earnest on Thursday (Seoul Series notwithstanding), I thought it would be fun to revive an exercise I did last year — using Out of the Park Baseball to simulate a bunch of MLB seasons and tracking how the game tends to think each team will do in 2024. For the uninitiated, OOTP is a baseball simulation game (now in its 25th year) which puts you in charge of any team you want, both in 2024 or throughout history.

For one thing, she was fun to hate. She was vain, spoiled, and secretly, we felt sure, full of malice. She mistook self-interest for moral righteousness, casting the pursuit of profit as feminism and conspicuous consumption as “self-care.” I’m talking, of course, about the girlboss, that much-maligned figure of female status and success. The girlboss, can be roughly defined as a stereotype—usually millennial, white, and straight—that represented women’s professional ambition. She rose to fraught prominence from 2016 to 2020, after Hilary Clinton’s election loss and before the pandemic.

I am reading Grace Paley again. Why? Because I am sad—for reasons both self and world — or maybe sad is not quite the right word. I am feeling somewhat dead, as in, the opposite of feeling alive, and Grace Paley is full of delight and precision and life. Such as, this section from her story “Wants”: A nice thing I do remember is breakfast, my ex-husband said. I was surprised.

Many songs are written to be taken at face value with no alternate meaning except what the artists are trying to say, but some songs have that much deeper meaning that one may or may not realize after listening to it. Today we will explore my favorite song and its not-so-subtle meanings. Author’s Note: These are my opinions and are not considered fact by the group or other Dead Heads.