On 9 things from last week

Watch

1. Top Chef. Season 13. A lesser season of the great cooking competition show.
2. “How to Get Good at Small Talk, and Even Enjoy It.” Harvard Business Review. YouTube. White flag rule: tell the person that you need to close the conversation, but ask them one more question.
3. “How to Start a Speech.” Conor Neill. YouTube. Don’t introduce yourself and don’t waste time checking if “everyone can hear you.” Pose a question, offer a startling fact, or tell a story.
4. City of Gold. dir. Laura Gabbert. Wonderful insights into how food can serve as the connective thread between different people and cultures.
5. “Chomsky-Foucault Debate on Power vs. Justice.” YouTube. Fascinating 50-year-old of a debate between two big thinkers. Foucault is a paragon of deconstructionism, insisting that we must “attack and critique” existing institutions to unmask the ways in which they leverage political power. Chomsky doesn’t disagree—he just thinks this project can, and should happen in tandem with another: the project of considering what a more just society looks like.

Read

1. Killers of the Flower Moon. David Grann. A book that lives up to the hype. The true story of how greedy white people in the early 20th century targeted the oil-rich Osage for their mineral rights, and how the nascent FBI got involved and half-solved the case.
2. Whiteout: Lost in Aspen. Ted Conover. A semi-journalistic, semi-autobiographical account of a few strange seasons living in the glitz, glamor, squalor, New-Age-iness of 1980s Aspen.

Listen

1. Songs for Swingin’ Lovers. Frank Sinatra.
2. King & Queen. Otis Redding & Carla Thomas.