 Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, via Wikimedia Commons
Today: Diana Moskovitz, investigations editor, writer, and co-owner of Defector; Emily Flake, cartoonist, writer, performer, illustrator, and proprietress of St. Nell’s Humor Writing Residency for Ladies in Williamsport, PA; and Sam Thielman, a reporter, critic, essayist, and editor, and graphic novel columnist for the New York Times.
Issue No. 153Knife Skills
Diana Moskovitz Death Becomes Sam
Sam Thielman and Emily Flake
Knife SkillsMy knives are a motley collection pulled together over the years through the circumstances of life: eight steak knives from a friend who got too many at her wedding and passed them along to me; approximately two dozen various stainless steel dinner knives from my grandmother, given to me when she moved into an assisted-living facility; a pair of serrated bread knives, a holiday gift from my mother-in-law; plus one large knife that I bought for myself at a big-box store because, it seemed, how could I be an adult without one? None of them is from the same collection, nothing matches or even looks remotely like it rolled off the same manufacturing belt. Collectively, they tell the story of the phases of my life—little notches in the fabric of my adulthood, all jangled together in a kitchen drawer. But there is just one knife that I use every day: my tiny knife, aka the paring knife. I got a pair, also a gift from my mother-in-law, one holiday season. In the morning, it cuts the fruit for my oatmeal; in the afternoon, the vegetables for my snacks. In the evening, it pries two slices of frozen bread apart. It stabs open plastic bags of kale and cuts slits atop the film of a frozen dinner. It is not just my workhorse, but perhaps the closest thing to an extension of my hand in the kitchen. You do not need to be a culinary master to see that every knife has a purpose, and I have blown right past that. Steak knives are for steak! Bread knives are for bread! On any given day, I will use up to three different pens to write on at least three different types of paper and yet my knife game is basic almost beyond the power of words to tell, to which I can only say that I have small hands and find that the small handle and blade of the paring knife feel correct to me. Larger knives feel unreliable and imprecise. This feels like a confession, writing this, because Los Angeles, like many U.S. cities of a certain size, fancies itself the type of place where people are smart about their food. To be a proper Angeleno is to know all the best taquerias in East L.A., all the yummiest Sichuan spots in the San Gabriel Valley, and the most authentic Armenian food in Glendale. And, of course, you must have a recipe for homemade kale chips. Or parrillada. Or both! Except all this belies that mainly, people need food to live. It’s divine when it can give us pleasure, and the process of preparing it can also provide entertainment (see: an entire TV station devoted to food, one of many TikTok tags devoted to food, an endless stream of websites devoted to food), but that is by no means where it begins. It begins with us trying to not die. The actual process of cooking is sometimes slow, at times tedious, and often messy. It would be nice to have the knife-wielding skills of Auguste Escoffier, dicing and julienning a camera-ready feast, but most of us get by just fine without them, and certainly, nobody is filming my every blade-chop. But even I knew, for most of my life, to keep these feelings to myself. For years, I never told anyone but my closest confidants about my little kitchen secret. But my mind underwent a subtle change two years ago, during a visit to my extended family. Standing in my aunt’s kitchen, helping her with the cooking, she asked me what knife I wanted to use for cutting the scallions. Sheepishly, I confessed: a paring knife. I did my hosannas—I know I should be better, next time I will do better, please forgive me for this horror—but she just laughed. Your grandmother, she told me, was the same way. She always used a paring knife. How had I not noticed? (The answer being I was a child and usually fixated on the results of her handiwork: the juicy chicken paprikash, the flavorful chicken soup, and her exquisite stuffed cabbage.) If it’s what you like, my aunt told me, it’s what you like, and she handed me a paring knife of her own. The very large knife, I admit, does come in handy to cut summer melons, and the bread knife gets called into action after the occasional splurge on thick, crusty, uncut loaves. But it is the paring knife that still goes in my hand every day, and my feeling about that has changed. My shame is gone. I tell friends about this. I am telling you about this. Whatever worry or fear I once had about using the wrong knife—about being the wrong type of cook—transformed into a little moment, each morning, for remembering my grandmother.
At Hydra Jonathan M. Katz’s The Racket you will find a spectacular post about the Nazis posting on Substack not only with impunity, but with the outright encouragement of management. The ownership and management of media matters a lot.
Death Becomes Sam Illustration by Emily Flake I have a problem: I love comics and I am also a horrible luddite who reads them in paper form almost exclusively. Like anyone who collects comics for more than a few years I am already in danger of using stacks of them as furniture. So when, in 2018, I saw that Matt Bors, the editor of The Nib, would be launching his site as a print magazine, I leapt for joy and then said goodbye to as much money as I felt I could reasonably part with during the company's fundraiser, and as a thank-you I got an original gag cartoon by Niblet-and-later-Hydra-to-be Emily Flake based on my responses to to the prompt "How I Want to Die" (I'd said I hoped Emily would freestyle but would be pleased if she could work in tentacles somewhere). I love Emily's work and I love original comic art, which is somehow even paper-er than paper comics, and I asked her if we could run the cartoon in FH this week. The Nib is no more but I still have a lot of fondness for it and try to follow its contributors (the new arc of Bors and Ben Clarkson's new sci-fi political satire, Justice Warriors: Vote Harder, is terrific). So it felt right to run an old piece of Nib-iana. Anyway, here I am being eaten by a tentacle monster emerging from my toilet. When you gotta go, you gotta go.
—Sam Thielman
Thanks for another brilliant week, everybody. See ya Monday. p.s. The MR. WRONG column over at Indignity has a wonderful photo of a refrigerator.
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