by Dwight Garner

“On Eating, Reading, Reading about Eating, & Eating While Reading.” Shut up and take my money! This book was so awesome – eating and reading in one place, by someone who truly savors both. “I go to bed thinking about what’s for breakfast.” OMG, I’d be ashamed to agree if I weren’t emboldened by him putting it in print; it’s often the only thing that motivates me to get up off the couch and go to bed (“Only 8 hours till oatmeal…”).

“People who grow up with too much good taste miss out. They don’t get to make discoveries on their own.” Yes, this was why I warmed to Dwight Garner and not to his wife, who was groomed from birth to prefer Annie’s macaroni & cheese to Kraft.

Those were quotes from him; a huge proportion of the book, though, is given over to quotations by others. He is a voracious reader, after all.

He divides his book into sections – “Breakfast, “Lunch,” a few interludes, and “Dinner.” I was nearing the end when I started to realize there would be no dessert. Indeed he admits to having no sweet tooth, and I struggled to think of a single place in the book I had read anything about something sweet. I part company here with the author. I do not understand people who have no interest in dessert – as he and I would agree that we feel like a different species from those who have no particular interest in food. Dessert is the BEST food. Other foods WISH they were dessert. It’s overwhelmingly men who don’t care for dessert; I’ve always wondered if it was just a matter of feeling too unmanly if you admitted, yes, you want some damn creme brulee.

(Yes, so it’s come to this – I picked up a book on menopause.)

This was a disappointment. I thought that “Mayo Clinic” would indicate something of more heft. I want to know why I am getting headaches. I want to know how estrogen affects the vascular system. What about the effects of long-term oral contraceptive use on menopause?

Instead, it’s mostly a 3000-foot view of things that might be happening to you, but little “why” or “how.” Lots of stuff about aging in general that you might find in a throwaway newspaper advice column. An entire weight loss chapter with things I’m sure you NEVER thought of, like eating more fiber and avoiding sugary drinks. For this I bought a book by the Mayo Clinic.

by Zeke Faux

I enjoyed it. It was a nice counterpoint to Michael Lewis’ Going Infinite – some of the details are identical, right down to the chickpea korma SBF apparently liked for lunch. But SBF wasn’t truly the focus. The focus was Tether. He kept waiting for Tether to self-destruct, and it never really did. Except, of course, that everything kinda did.

Epilogue: “The technology was as old as WhatsApp or Uber, which had long since wormed their way into our everyday lives so thoroughly their nanmes had become verbs. But no one had invented a mainstream use for cryptocurrency. So many smart people had spent so many thousands of hours working on crypto – and yet shockingly little use had come of it.” Count me among them, I guess, for those dreamlike 10 months I spent at TechLab.