Exhaling Life

In Thai and Lao kitchens, Pad Mee points broadly to stir-fried noodles: rice noodles loosened in a hot pan, glossed with sauce, sharpened by aromatics, and adjusted according to region, household, occasion, and whoever is standing closest to the wok. Ceramic bowl was wheel-thrown and glazed by me. Its history does not arrive with one neat origin story, which is part of its charm. Like many Southeast Asian noodle dishes, Pad Mee sits at the intersection of local rice culture, Chinese-influenced noodle cookery, and the everyday reality of feeding people quickly and well. Before a dish becomes famous enough to acquire fandom, it is usually just a meal. That is where Pad Mee is most interesting. It exists in variations: some sweeter, some darker, some spicier, some closer to Lao-style caramelized noodles served at gatherings, others tied to Thai regional cooking. Pad Mee Korat, from Nakhon Ratchasima, is one well-known branch of the family, but it is not the whole tree. Pad Mee’s real gl...

Before the clutch became the red-carpet punctuation mark of a gown, it had a more domestic ancestor: the reticule, a small handheld drawstring bag that emerged when women’s hidden tie-on pockets began losing their usefulness beneath slimmer, sheerer late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century dresses. What had once been tucked under petticoats was suddenly carried in public, and privacy became ornament: silk, velvet, beadwork, embroidery, a little theater of necessity held in the hand. The bag was never only a container; it was a social adjustment, a concession to fashion’s old habit of taking away utility and selling it back as elegance. Yoko Ono: Music of Mind at The Broad The modern clutch came into its own in the 1920s and 1930s, when evening moved faster, dresses grew sleeker, and women needed only the glamorous minimum: powder, mirror, lipstick, perhaps money, perhaps not. Tiny dance purses, Art Deco shapes, celluloid and Bakelite, metalwork and beading turned the bag into an o...

When Dr. Moon, a pain management specialist, told me about Dad’s wish, it was not the first time I had heard it. A few days earlier, Mom had told me that Dad wanted to be transferred from the hospital to hospice. I did not quite understand what hospice meant at the time. Between that conversation with Mom and the one with Dr. Moon, I had watched Dad take about twenty steps with the support of a walker and the assistance of a physical therapist. After seeing him come out of critical condition, I took those steps as a sign of recovery. So I was surprised when Dr. Moon told me that Dad had expressed his wish to end all medical treatments and go peacefully. I had been struggling with the continuation of his medical treatment. Three days after I wrote Will Love Give Us the Courage to Let Our Dad Go? , Dad passed away peacefully, as though he had simply fallen asleep, with a morphine drip erasing the pain that had once dominated him. He was eighty years old and had spent the last six years o...

I believe the cruelest thing a human can experience is burying their child. While the only thing guaranteed in life, from the moment we take our first breath to our last, is death, for a parent to bury a child is not the natural progression of life. For more than six years, I have watched my Dad go through rounds of chemotherapy, years of dialysis, emergency room visits, and hospitalizations where doctors advised against further medical treatment—until my brother vehemently fought for it. If you ever need a medical advocate, you should hire him. Perhaps it is the lawyer in him that convinces doctors to shift their medical opinions. My Dad asked, and my brother passionately advocated for him for days so he could receive his first round of chemotherapy more than six years ago, which the doctor at first refused to administer since it was an unusual treatment for his autoimmune disease. He would have passed away within a matter of months without it. He did squats after his first chemothera...

There are days when I feel utterly disconnected from the world. It took an IG feed from Diet Prada for me to learn that Gwyneth Paltrow had starred in an ad for 51 Park, a luxury residential development in Herzliya, Israel. Herzliya is an affluent coastal city north of Tel Aviv, and the project is being marketed as a luxury residential development there. To be clear, 51 Park is not in Gaza. It is in Israel. But precision does not make the geography innocent: parts of present-day Herzliya overlap with or sit near the land of al-Haram, also known as Sidna Ali, a Palestinian Arab village depopulated in 1948. Lisbon, Portugal There is misinformation about where the 51 Park residential development is located, and the distinction matters. If our beating of Gwyneth Paltrow is going to be effective, it should at least be accurate. I have never liked her. I have never hated her. Even before the 51 Park ad controversy broke, I felt she was irrelevant. Her acting skills are not impressive. Would ...

Although this delicious soy sauce-based brine can certainly be used to make the once-viral Mayak Eggs, I prefer the eggs for this particular banchan fully cooked rather than jammy. Partly out of familiarity from childhood and partly for food safety, fully cooked eggs keep longer in the refrigerator. Typically, jammy-yolk eggs are good for two to three days, while fully cooked eggs are safe for four to five days. INGREDIENTS six eggs three celery sticks, cut in thirds [for the soy sauce-based brine] five Thai chilies, sliced four garlic cloves, peeled and roughly chopped two green onions, finely chopped a half cup of soy sauce one and a half tablespoons of sugar a tablespoon of sesame oil three-quarters of a teaspoon of honey For perfectly boiled eggs, place the eggs in a pot with plenty of room at the bottom. Do not stack the eggs. Add enough room-temperature water to submerge the eggs and a handful of salt to clog leakage in case shells crack. All ceramic bowls were wheel-thrown and g...

In my late thirties, I wore a mini knitted dress as a mini knitted dress, which felt perfectly reasonable until my fifties arrived and I found myself styling it differently. Now, the same dress has been reassigned as a long top because a very short hemline eventually starts to feel less like a fashion choice and more like a risk-management exercise, with increasing odds of revealing far more than was ever intended. This is the peculiar elegance of getting older: the skirt may lengthen, the styling may sharpen, and the reveal becomes less about inches and more about instinct. Brunch at Coastal Kitchen Monterey I kept that in mind as my curation for summer dresses began. Mini dresses were not exiled from the curation, but I shifted the focus toward those of us who have reached expert-level proficiency in risk assessment, even as our sense of style has only sharpened. UTCOCO Lapel Shirt Dress JavaScript is currently disabled in this browser. Reactivate it to view this content. ROMANTICTOU...