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Interviewer: In preparing for our talk, I read all of the interviews you’ve given about the Index, and I noticed that sometimes you get questions about your beauty routine, your workout routine, or your diet. And as we know, social-media algorithms are written to privilege certain kinds of content – such as selfies – over others. So how do we navigate that while identifying as cyberfeminists?

Mindy Seu: Either way, it feels like a performance. When you have these interviews that focus solely on the work, you’re performing an intellectualized identity. And when interviewers ask about very personal things, it’s like they’re trying to humanize or make more accessible this intellectualized person. I don’t mind those sorts of questions – we can talk in depth about media theory, then pivot just as quickly to reality TV. I also think that if someone reads an interview that asks about skincare, and that leads them to our book and makes them question how they use Instagram, that’s kind of a win: There are all sorts of different entry points into this space. Again, it’s a matter of the intended function or behavior, versus ways we can subvert that towards some other call to action. And if those invitations come from glitches or breaking points, that’s even better.

(via Spike Magazine)

A perfect spinster date on a Friday night.

I journeyed up to West 75th street to have the restaurant week prix-fixe at Pepperdella. The last time I was here was close to a decade ago. I was with my mom and we’d just come from visiting the butterfly conservatory at the Natural History Museum. It was the first time I’d had pappardelle pasta and anything with truffle in it. That same dish is still on the menu, but I didn’t get it this time.

The food was just right. I relished the white chocolate brioche pudding with amarena cherries and fiore de latte gelato.

And then I walked down to Lincoln Center and saw Vertigo with the NY Philharmonic’s live score accompaniment. It was my first time sitting in tier 3, which I actually highly recommend. I almost shelled out big $$$ for floor seats, and I’m so glad I didn’t. If you sit on the far sides of the top tier, you won’t have anyone sitting next to you, and aside from a partial obstruction of the screen in one corner, you’ll have a perfect overhead view.

Appreciated the film’s gorgeous set design, costumes, and of course, the music. What a treat.

We’re not even a full month in, and this is, I’m telling you right now, the best book I’ll read all year.

What did you do on the night that Melanie died?

I was in the East Village, being spontaneous and agreeing to a change in plans. Waiting for Marie to travel from work, I ate dinner at Veselka (mushroom + sauerkraut pierogis w/ matzo ball soup ofc), and then took myself for a drink at The Immigrant.

No photos of this place, but I highly recommend. Great “waiting for a friend” or just “sitting alone with my thoughts” spot. It opened in 2009, so it’s been here almost as long as I have. No loud music. Bustling, but not busy. Good twinkly-light atmosphere. Would return.

Marie arrived, and we decamped to the Holiday Cocktail Lounge.

I was totally crashing this event, which was a meetup that her colleague was throwing for photographers and visual creatives. But it was SO FUN. Any networking event that includes the hostess sabering a bottle of Moet, then pouring it into a champagne tower is one that I’d gleefully attend.

More of this in 2024.

I left much later than I’d planned to, and I was tired for the next two days because being awake way past 10pm threw my sleep off, but I felt so happy. I will always love how nights out in the East Village place me back into timeless, ageless joy.

There was a feeling I had often in my early/mid-twenties that I called “the cusp of life,” and I felt it that night. This is why I live in New York.

Fab night & morning spent with a favorite friend. She brought me an epic bouquet, and I baked her a cake.

I made Yossy Arefi’s Simple Sesame Cake (which is a standard for me at this point) and I was going to top it with her freeze-dried strawberry icing —  but I learned, unfortunately, that freeze-dried fruit goes bad! I had an old bag in my pantry that I hadn’t touched since early 2022. Wow.

So I riffed up a different icing: 95g confectioner’s sugar, 1 tbsp whole milk, ¼ tsp pumpkin pie spice, 1 tbsp Skrewball peanut-butter whiskey (yes really).

Reader, it was a triumph. This cake may not last another 48 hours because of it, I am DEAD serious.

WQXR fan mail from TV haters in the 1950s. My favorite sentence: “I find your station eminently satisfactory for my pleasure hours.”

Found via this send of WQXR’s History Notes newsletter, which are “slices of curious, eclectic, and fascinating WNYC/WQXR history in text and sound links.”

I made another blobby chocolate cookie!

Actually, I messed up this recipe. This was supposed to be Yossy Arefi’s “Rocky Road Brownie Cookie” from Snacking Bakes, but I put in three times more marshmallows than the recipe called for. (I had a bag of them I wanted to get rid of.)

What could possibly go wrong? Now I know! The marshmallows (of course) melted and essentially turned the cookies into pools of lava goo.

The verdict is that these still taste really good, but they are impossibly crumbly. The cookie pictured is the only one that remained intact from the drop-cookie batch — after seeing this, I switched gears and baked the other batch in a loaf pan for 15 mins, and they came out much better as bars.

The rest of the crumbly bits are all in my freezer, and I’ll be using them as future ice cream toppings. We learn!

January coping: In a world in which I am unable to hibernate, I seek solace by waking up in the dark, leaving the house as the sun rises, running or lifting heavy things for the better part of an hour, working in a quiet space all by myself, punctuating the day with snacks and meals, going on one long walk if weather permits, then returning home.

I have seen such beautiful sunrises and sunsets in this first week of 2024.

These are all the books I read in 2023! Sadly, I did not continue my streak of randomly reading 37 books as I had in previous years. Possibly because I was more “outside” this year than the last few.

My favorite book of 2023 by a long shot is Wrong Way by Joanne McNeil. For someone who is extremely picky about fiction, I found this one enjoyable on every level. Cerebral, sharp, a little off-kilter. An incisive commentary on our current tech-y times without ever feeling heavy-handed. The perfect length at 288 pages. I recommend to all!

O Caledonia, A Terrible Country, and The Book of Difficult Fruit were also fantastic. Good fall, winter, and spring books, respectively.

Some of the others here have aged interestingly.

le-corbustier