Recent recs, books & otherwise

What I've been reading etc.

Hello, I’m Kyle Chayka, a staff writer for The New Yorker, a guy on Twitter (for now), and author of the forthcoming book Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture. This is my personal newsletter, where I share my columns and publish original essays. Subscribe here.

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Work

How Social Media Abdicated Responsibility for the News: In the first days of the Hamas-Israel attacks and conflict, it was impossible to navigate the morass of mislabeled videos, duplicitous tweets, and propaganda online. This New Yorker column is on how recent changes in social networks have made it even harder to consume news — which was once the core selling point of Twitter.

Recent Recommendations

Sigrid Nunez’s novel The Vulnerables: Nunez’s most famous novel, The Friend, was what you get when you take autofiction from a well-established NYC writer and add a big, friendly dog. As we all know, dogs sell books. This new one is the same vibe — mellifluous writer-narrator in Manhattan describing her thoughts and experiences — but during pandemic quarantine, and with a parrot instead of a dog. Something about Nunez’s voice makes her books addictive to me. Their softness and slightness belies their sharpness; Nunez gets in daggers about art, life, and the literary industry that few others would have the confidence to attempt.

Bryan Washington’s novel Family Meal: Bryan is the great millennial fiction writer of food, among many other talents. His descriptions of cooking and meals are fantastically rich, as much for the food itself as for the social and emotional exchange involved. Bryan’s books are building him into the kind of novelist you follow like a film director: You just want to know what he’ll cast his vision on next. The vibe is immaculate, and immaculately him. This one is about a childhood, a tragedy, a couple, other couples, a family bakery, bars, Houston. That’s all you really need to know.

Hua Hsu’s memoir Stay True: This book is now out in paperback, and you probably don’t need me recommending it (it won a Pulitzer), but it is fantastic. An elegy for a friend whose life was cut short in college, it’s a portrait of the self in a transitional phase, a person establishing their own identity through cultivating music taste, making zines, growing friendships, and reading books. In some respects, it’s about the pain of gaining self-awareness as an adult. Memoirs promise to depict the specific, the unique experiences of a life. But the trick is allowing every reader to recognize themselves, too, and Stay True succeeds perfectly. The dénouement is incredible.

Low Power Mode shortcut: My iPhone is basically always on Low Power Mode because I’m terrible at charging it. I’ve always switched it on by searching for “low power mode” in the settings, which is really annoying. Now I’ve added it as a shortcut on that menu you get when you swipe down, next to the flashlight! So much easier.

Rice cooker Hainan chicken recipe: I’m trying to be a faster home cook, or at least not make everything as complicated as possible. This is an easy dinner that tastes like you put a lot of time into it. I’ll write it out in prose:

• First, marinate 4 boneless skinless chicken thighs in soy sauce, vinegar, hoisin sauce, Chinese cooking wine, tiny bit of baking soda, and whatever chili oil / paste.

• Then buzz up 2-3 scallions, two garlic cloves, and some slices of ginger in a food processor with 2-3 tbsps of neutral oil. When that looks saucy, slice up some more scallions and mix them in with the sauce.

• Wash your rice. If you want to, mix or toast your rice with some of the scallion sauce. Then put it in the rice cooker, and fill to the normal water level with half water and half chicken stock (from a box duh). Take the chicken thighs out of the marinade and pile them on top of the rice in an even layer. They will mostly be covered by liquid, but it doesn’t have to be perfect.

• Turn on the rice cooker for normal or quick cooking (I have a Zojirushi, either setting works). The chicken will steam in the broth and get cooked through by the time the rice is done. Slice the thighs and pile them on top of the chicken-y rice when you serve. (Boneless skinless makes it much faster to slice.) Then put more scallion sauce, soy sauce, chili oil on top. Done!

• Next time, I might start the rice cooking on its own and then put the chicken in 10 min later (for normal cooking setting at least), it could have been slightly less done.

Let me know if you try any of these recs! And if you have recs, email them to me and I’ll put them in the next batch. Social media is fucked, all we can do is recommend things to each other with our human words.