It appears Conde Nast is shutting down Gourmet. My dad’s had a subscription for as long as I can remember, and the publication was instrumental to my love for journalism, food and a combination thereof.
Dad carefully clipped and photocopied Gourmet articles of note for decades. I took some with me to London when I worked there in the summer of 2005 and to Thailand when I backpacked up and down its coasts in the summer of 2006. They’ve essentially planned my parents’ vacations since long before I was born — including an epic monthlong trip to Italy while my mom was seven months’ pregnant with me. Later this month, they’re returning there for a week in Venice; it’s fitting that Gourmet is still playing an integral role in their itinerary.
Anyhow, I can see why a food magazine with a focus on writing vs. recipes would be abandoned. My girlfriend got me a subscription to Conde Nast’s other title, Bon Appetit (which will remain in print), for my birthday, and I find it pretty useful as a home cook. But Gourmet’s meditations on fine food will be hard to replace. RIP.
It’s no secret that I think “The Wire” is the best television ever made. I’ve been rewatching it (again) as another one of my roommates has gotten hooked on the series. Which is why I was delighted to read about “Vancouver’s Radical New Approach To Drugs: Let Junkies Be Junkies.” Sounds awfully similar to Hamsterdam from “The Wire,” fictional areas of inner city West Baltimore filled with vacant houses where dealers were corralled away from the neighborhoods they were destroying and allowed to freely distribute drugs. All as long as they kept in the “free zones.”
In reality, what Vancouver is trying in response to drug addicts is far more groundbreaking and involved. Sure, they’ve decriminalized marijuana. But they’ve also set up sites where addicts can get free, clean paraphernalia, shoot up with the help of medical staff, and in some cases even get free drugs themselves. Any fan of “The Wire” has to respect an alternative approach to the war on drugs here in the U.S. Still, reading about the Vancouver police’s role in all this, I couldn’t help but think of Bunny Colvin getting chewed out at Comstat after telling his bosses he had effectively legalized drugs.
Let’s hope Vancouver’s plan doesn’t descend into chaos like Hamsterdam.
BONUS COVERAGE: Check out another link from the Ideas blog to the New Scientist, which explains why our tendency to go to war, and why males tend to form bonds together to hate other groups of males, might be an evolutionary response. This explains why all my college buddies and I hate Duke and Carolina so much.
And look how cool Shanghai (maybe) will look by then! I’ve always been a sucker for maps of all kinds and, by extension, cool scale models like the one seen above. Neatorama pulls together some Flickr snapshots of this cooler than cool scale projection of what the Shanghai Urban Planning Museum believes China’s largest city will look like in 2020.
Any time I see one of these cool scale models I stop and stare for entirely too much time. Wake Forest has one (I think it’s in Benson University Center now?), and so does the library at the University of Hartford, where I taught this spring. And who could forget that cool model of Revolutionary Boston that lit up and made noises that they had up in the sadly now-defunct observation deck at the John Hancock Tower?
