Perennial nerd

The heat’s been brutal this summer but we still gotta eat! If you’re like me, heat might suppress your appetite, and the last thing any of us want is to sweat over a hot stove and oven when it’s already boiling outside. Here are some of my favorite hot-weather recipes to keep hydrated and fed with when the weather is unbearable! (All recipes should be un-paywalled).

NYT’s best gazpacho (lives up to its name!!)

Persian cold cucumber soup (if you like tzatziki you will like this!)

Eric Kim’s cold noodles with tomato (infinitely riffable Korean flavor profile — for a creamier and less brothy take, try these cold sesame noodles too)

Vietnamese chicken and herb salad (this is an excellent time to get a rotisserie chicken so you don’t have to turn the oven on)

Radish sandwiches with butter and salt (and in a similar vein, if you dig this flavor combo you should try this Polish cottage cheese dip on some good rye bread or even crackers)

It’s still a little early in the season, but you can never go wrong with a BLT (or, if you don’t eat bacon, try this tomato furikake sandwich in its place)

Infinite iterations of pasta salad! You can use anything you got but here is a template I like.

Assorted dense bean salads. This back pocket canned salad is a weird combo of jarred ingredients but it slaps, this hoagie-inspired one is super satisfying, and cowboy caviar is a classic for a reason.

Poke bowls! Canned tuna mixed with some kewpie mayo and sriracha is a budget-friendly riff on the usual ahi and makes everything taste like a spicy tuna roll, but use whatever proteins you like, this is more of a loose template.

You may need to learn how to set up your paints and such… but this is what people did, live, while the show aired. That’s what the show was for. I had family members create lovely works of art they enjoyed, which I still have on my walls, because William Alexander and Bob Ross both said:

SCREW METICULOUS CLASSICAL ART PRACTICES — JUST GRAB A PALETTE KNIFE AND BIG OLD BRUSH AND PAINT!

They freed a whole generation of people who were taught to paint detail and realism and exact representation of reality — people who largely gave up this kind of thing because it got tedious.

I watched the joy of family members as they rediscovered art as a messy fun spontaneous half hour activity.

Look over there. There’s a Catergory 3 Kaiju. Biggest one yet. 

Jesus Felix

In 1914, armed Texas Rangers rode up to a Laredo newspaper to silence a Mexican American woman.

She didn't run. She stood in the doorway and refused to move.

Her name was Jovita Idar — and she was one of the bravest women in Mexican American history.

Jovita grew up in Laredo, Texas, the daughter of Nicasio Idar, who founded La Crónica — a Spanish-language newspaper that exposed the lynchings, segregation, and injustices facing Mexican Americans at a time when signs reading "No Mexicans, No Negroes, No Dogs" hung in shop windows across Texas.

Following her father's footsteps, Jovita became a journalist, a teacher, a nurse, and a civil rights fighter — all at once.

In 1914, she was writing for a newspaper called El Progreso when it published an editorial criticizing President Woodrow Wilson's military occupation of Veracruz, Mexico. The Texas Rangers — notorious for their brutal violence against Mexican Americans — were sent by the state governor to destroy the printing press.

When they arrived, they found Jovita Idar standing in the doorway.

She argued that the newspaper was protected by the First Amendment. She refused to move. The Rangers, facing this small woman who would not back down, left.

But they came back the next morning when she wasn't there — and destroyed the press.

Jovita didn't stop. She helped build a new newspaper. She crossed the border to serve as a nurse during the Mexican Revolution with La Cruz Blanca (White Cross). She organized the First Mexicanist Congress in 1911 — a landmark gathering that tackled racism and the lynching of Mexican Americans and helped spark the Mexican American civil rights movement.

She spent her entire life fighting — through words, through action, through sheer courage.

In 2023, Jovita Idar was honored on a U.S. quarter as part of the American Women series.

A woman who once stood alone against armed state police is now on American currency.

The Winding Road , Village   -    Alice Brasser , 2015.

Dutch, b. 1965 -