⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ What to Do If Your Recently Divorced Friend Starts Singing Sondheim at a Bar
Alright, I think a breezier follow-up here after the weekend. First up - MARRIAGE STORY is out and streamable. So is THE IRISHMAN. This probably isn’t late breaking news for any of you, but geez - had the thought halfway through Irishman… did ANY of you watch Friday Night Lights and think Landry was going to be the breakaway post-series star? All Jesse Plemons does is cash prestige checks. And all Adam Driver does these days… I mean, seriously - the Wallin Household was very here for Girls but I never once spent a Sunday night thinking that guy is a year or two away from potentially Best Actor-ing his way through a possible Best Picture. Get em Ben Solo.
While we’re at it, what *do* you do if your recently divorced friend starts singing Sondheim at the bar?
Picture this: You’re at a bar with your friends, one of whom is going through a difficult divorce. Maybe this person is Adam Driver, and both of you are characters in one of the last scenes of Noah Baumbach’s new movie Marriage Story, where Adam plays a theater director going through a divorce. Or maybe it’s a real-life friend of yours who is going through a real-life divorce and happens to have recently watched Noah Baumbach’s new movie Marriage Story.
Anyway, there you all are, sipping your last dregs of red wine in a leather banquette at a bar, when they — Adam, or your real-life friend — starts singing “Being Alive” from the Stephen Sondheim musical Company. Uh-oh. They’re good, better than you expected even, but also, like, you’re in a bar full of strangers. Is this a healthy musical outpouring of emotion, or a cry for help? Do they expect you to join in or is this more of a solo journey? Here are some tips for how to navigate this tricky situation.
The tips are not terrible.
🍲 Issue 1: Hello, Roberto
I can’t vouch for the soup yet (I bet, delicious) but I’m 100% here for Helen Rosner’s newsletter. What a start:
For the last ten years, including the years I spent at that magazine, I've been in a relationship with a man named Jim, who is kind and handsome and extremely intelligent. Those details about his character aren't terribly relevant to the matter at hand, but I want to take a moment to brag about him, because he's one of those people who's so great that he makes me glow in his light, and it's a really fantastic flattering light that smooths my skin and fluffs my hair and generally makes me look like the sort of person who deserves to end up with such a top-notch human like Jim. This glow is a very nice externality of his greatness, and even though it's only Monday it's already been a long week, so this bit of preening is something I'm not embarrassed to indulge in right now. Jim is also really funny, and he has a nice singing voice.
He isn't perfect, thank the good lord. One of his most charming shortcomings is that as a cook, he's more enthusiastic than he is experienced. The tight, military-precise recipes that I zealously believed in do him absolutely no good. In fact, I've realized, they don't do much good for most people. Not only that, but my magazine's endless push for ever more concise recipes hadn't actually been the holy quest for crystalline perfection I'd told myself it was; it was just a morphemic belt-tightening intended to keep the recipes-per-issue number shored up against ever-shrinking page counts. (The situation was dire: We used the word "doughnut" so many times in one issue that an official downgrade of our house style to "donut" bought enough space for a whole extra story.)
Back to Jim: When he wants to cook something, which is often but not too often, I'll sometimes take whatever recipe he plans to make, and rewrite it for him in extremely detailed language, anticipating what his questions might be and trying to include descriptions that will help him understand not just what needs to be done, but why they're done that way. The flour added to the mixer gradually so it doesn't poof out all over the counter, the salt in the pasta water to deepen the flavor, the chicken cooked skin-side down first so the fat will render out, and then you can cook the skin-up side in the chicken fat!
It turns out that this is a great way to write a recipe. It forces you to really think about what you're asking someone to do, to put your eyes behind their eyes and your hands on top of their hands and make sure you're taking care of them. That's the real point of a recipe, anyway: you want it to serve the person making it, not serve some maximally efficient, minimal-expressive-character Platonic ideal of a chicken piccata.
Enter Roberto. It's a lot like other sausage and bean and kale soups. But it's different from them in one key way, which is that it's better than all of them. I couldn't tell you why — maybe it's the tomato, which adds some zingy acidity to the backbone — but I suspect the name might have a lot to do with it. I first made it probably five or six years ago, a hacked-together recipe based on a vague desire for something really hearty and savory and warming and, okay, plausibly low-carb. It turned out to be so perfect and so wonderful that we started having it for dinner three or four times a week. After maybe the fifteenth or sixteenth batch we realized it needed a name — not just "sausage and bean and kale soup" but a proper name. So Jim (who have I mentioned is a genius?) looked down at his bowl of sausage and bean and kale soup and said "Roberto. Your name is Roberto."
Click through for the recipe and consider subscribing here.
🦹🏾♀️ HBO's "Watchmen" Is The Best Show On TV Right Now
It really, reallllllly is!
👕 He’s Never Going to Put Away That Shirt
BM & I were chatting today about how consistently great the Modern Love column is, and I realized I still had this link waiting in queue. I’m sure it won’t be the last but for now:
I would not let the shirt defeat me.
It had been sitting on top of a cabinet in our upstairs hallway, just outside of our bedroom, for days. There must have been a reason it landed there. Perhaps my husband, Doug, was about to wear it one day and changed his mind. Maybe he was rushing to work and didn’t have the time to put it away. We have two small children; mornings are hectic.
Why it ended up in the hallway, a mere seven steps from his actual closet in our bedroom, was a mystery. It’s not as if the hallway is his normal changing room.
After a week, I grabbed the shirt and brought it to his closet, but I was angry as I walked those seven steps, because by doing so I was essentially teaching him that if he left things out long enough, I’d take care of them. All day long I picked up after our sons, who were 9 and 7. Should I have to pick up after my husband as well?
Reader, you won’t believe it… but the ending lives up.
🏅 Failure Found to Be an “Essential Prerequisite” for Success
And finally… it sounds obvious but:
“Every winner begins as a loser,” says Dashun Wang, associate professor of management and organizations at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, who conceived and led the study.
But not every failure leads to success, he adds. And what ultimately separates the winners from the losers, the research shows, certainly is not persistence. One of the more intriguing findings in the paper, published this week in Nature is that the people who eventually succeeded and the people who eventually failed tried basically the same number of times to achieve their goals.
It turns out that trying again and again only works if you learn from your previous failures. The idea is to work smart, not hard. “You have to figure out what worked and what didn’t, and then focus on what needs to be improved instead of thrashing around and changing everything,” says Wang. “The people who failed didn’t necessarily work less [than those who succeeded]. They could actually have worked more; it’s just that they made more unnecessary changes.”
Alright, take care everyone! A reminder for your day: