Sound Bites: William Carlos Williams
“To be hungry is to be great”–William Carlos Williams “To be hungry is to be great” is the name of a poem from a collection called An Early Martyr and […]
Category Archives: Food in the City
Eastern State Series: What inmates ate in the 20th Century
[This October, I am giving nighttime tours at Eastern State Penitentiary. Inspired by the rich and fascinating history of this abandoned prison, I have used approved sources to compile a […]
Eastern State Series: How inmates ate in the 20th Century
[This October, I am giving nighttime tours at Eastern State Penitentiary. Inspired by the rich and fascinating history of this abandoned prison, I have used approved sources to compile a […]
Eastern State Series: What inmates ate in the 19th Century
[This October, I am giving nighttime tours at Eastern State Penitentiary. Inspired by the rich and fascinating history of this abandoned prison, I have used approved sources to compile a […]
Eastern State Series: How inmates ate in the 19th Century
[This October, I am giving nighttime tours at Eastern State Penitentiary. Inspired by the rich and fascinating history of this abandoned prison, I have used approved sources to compile a […]
Link Buffet: Classics for a reason
In Guernica, Helen Rosner rhapsodizes about the blank beauty of chicken tenders. Nothing is more nothing than a chicken tender. A roast chicken has a certain dinner-party elegance to it, […]
Link Buffet: False spring
Philly folk often say that we don’t get much of a spring. Most years, the snow has barely melted when summer blasts in, leaving just a week or two of […]
Why Pennsylvania Has State Stores
When I first moved from New Orleans to Philadelphia, I was more than a little stymied by the liquor laws. Coming from the South, I thought I understood bizarre alcohol […]
The Secret Language of Yelp Reviews
I recently picked up The Language of Food by Dan Jurafsky, which turned out to be an entirely enjoyable, accessible collection of essays about food nouns and adjectives. A little more than half […]
Winter chestnuts and other literary comforts
I’ve been reading Lolly Willowes, a 1926 novel by Sylvia Townsend Warner set at the turn of the 20th century. The story reminds me a lot of the pastoral 19th century novels […]
