The Majesty of the Law

If a committee were assembled whose purpose was to simultaneously impede commerce, stifle innovation and discourage local food production, it might come up with something like this: Subpart B – Requirements for Specific Standardized Fruit Butters, Jellies, Preserves, and Related Products Sec. 150.110 Fruit butter. (a) The fruit butters for which definitions and standards of…

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The World Turned Upside Down

David Graeber’s last book, co-authored with archeologist David Wengrow, is a glorious trampling of conventional discourse about what makes us human and what makes human societies work. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity takes on the conventional controversies about these questions and plies the annals of anthropology and the most recent findings…

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Cooking for the Long Haul: Or, The Kindness of Friends, Bits and Scraps, and Chaotic Invention Our friend Pooba – music promoter, clown, and avid fisherman – had brought us another sink full of steelhead trout and I was casting about for ways to cook up the last and biggest of them. Sara suggested I…

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The Power of Craft

The Power of Craft Alexander Langlands, Cræft: An Inquiry Into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2017. Alexander Langlands is a working archaeologist who has spent the last few decades relearning, and in some cases recreating the old handicrafts that sustained traditional farming societies in England and…

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