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The list is the origin of culture. It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order—not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries.
UMBERTO ECO
My friend Luz made this and served it on roasted potatoes and roasted peppers with kale.
A creamy, high-protein basil dressing is made by blending 1 cup of cottage cheese, 1 cup packed fresh basil, 2-3 tbsp lemon juice, 1-5 (cored) fresh garlic cloves, and 2 tbsp cider vinegar or wine vinegar (or water). Combine all ingredients in a high-speed blender or food processor, until the dressing is completely smooth.
It serves as a healthy, low-fat alternative to mayo-based dressings, perfect for salads, dips, sandwiches or spreads.
For a thinner dressing, add 1-2 tbsp of water or olive oil. Enhance with 1/2 tsp onion powder, 1 tsp Dijon mustard, or extra fresh herbs like parsley or chives. You can also add more oil for emulsion.
Plain Greek yogurt can be used in place of cottage cheese.
Store in an airtight container in the refrigerator for up to 4 or 5 days.
President Donald Trump has the power to end a civilization. But it’s not Iran’s. It’s America’s.
As an Iranian American born and raised in the United States, I love both my homelands equally and unreservedly. But I’ve never worried more about America or less about Persian civilization.
Because even if Trump demolished every building in all of Iran and killed every living Iranian, he couldn’t come close to destroying Persian civilization. Not just because it’s thousands of years older than these disturbingly divided United States I call home, but because Iranians don’t take pride in buildings or big, beautiful bills. We take pride in the whole of Persian architecture and the Cyrus Cylinder. We are not impressed by Dr. Phil or Kid Rock or Trump for that matter. We are the descendants of the poets Rumi, Hafez, Saadi and Ferdowsi. We have no interest in being timely; we’re perfectly happy being timeless. So we don’t think in years or decades or even centuries. We think in millennia. And that’s why I’m not even remotely worried about the survival of Persian civilization.
American civilization, however, is another story. For I worry about it every day. Because I see our greatest asset as a nation of immigrants slipping away.
Like countless American immigrants, my parents came to the United States for a better life, and they succeeded spectacularly. Living embodiments of the American dream and Iran’s post-revolutionary brain drain, they both practiced medicine in Ohio for decades while raising two daughters to believe that anything was possible in America. And we did.
My sister, the smartest, became a doctor and a mother. I, the loudest, became a lawyer and a writer. By all accounts, our family is proof that America is an extraordinary country, full of freedoms and opportunities that evade so many around the world. But Trump’s America has not been kind to immigrant families like ours, who have worked hard to better this country only to feel increasingly isolated within it.
For families like ours, Trump’s bombast is ominously reminiscent of the autocracies we fled. Every time he demeans or deports our fellow Americans in service of his white, pseudo-Christian, nationalist agenda, our country and our people suffer. As eerily familiar as it feels to see the U.S. flirt so shamelessly with theocracy and dictatorship, I know this is different.
For unlike Iran, America doesn’t have thousands of years of history to reassure us that our civilization will survive. Because we are building it as we go. As a country born of genocide and built by slavery, the true patriots among us know that our greatest strength and salvation lie in our diversity. Trump’s refusal to acknowledge our history or celebrate our diversity represents nothing short of the greatest threat to American civilization since the Civil War. And his insistence on cutting funding for pretty much everything that creates and sustains a civilization — including the arts and sciences, the humanities and health care, the environment and education — doesn’t bode well for our nascent nation.
Ultimately, for American civilization to last even a tenth as long as Persian civilization, Americans must elect leaders who truly put America first. Not as some collection of embezzled real estate holdings meant to boost the egos and pockets of tyrants, but as one of the most diverse and vibrant civilizations this side of the 21st century.
For we are the descendants of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Audre Lorde, Paul Laurence Dunbar and Edgar Allan Poe, Henry David Thoreau and Maya Angelou. These poets alone have given us more than enough upon which to sustain a civilization. But only if we can pull away from our screens long enough to quit thinking in seconds and 24-hour news cycles. Because to survive, Americans must stop surrendering to political hubris and cultural amnesia. To survive, we must start thinking in millennia.
Melody Moezzi, a Chicago native, is an author, attorney and activist. Her latest book is “The Rumi Prescription,” and her forthcoming book is “Maybe Let’s Not: Adventures in Deleting Delusions, Refreshing Reality, and Living Life in Real Life.”
You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL
My carrot salad became a basmati brown rice salad with steamed kale. Delicious. The dressing was cilantro sauce olive oil, vinegar and leftover BBQ sauce sesame oil and soy sauce. I added some home cooked chick peas and cranberries for sweetness. It came out so good I am doing it again.
“Picaresque” is an eely tag. The Spanish word picaresca came from picaro, first used in the early 1600s and which in English can mean rogue, bohemian, adventurer, rapscallion. We took picaron, the augmentative of picaro, and made the accusatory-sounding “picaroon,” a lovely synonym for “picaro” that Merriam-Webster will tell you also means “pirate,” although Picaroons of the Caribbean doesn’t have the ring it should. The picaresque novel—the term wasn’t coined in English until the early nineteenth century—has shape-shifted since its first known incarnation in Spain, the anonymously authored Lazarillo de Tormes, published in 1553. But most picaresque novels incorporate several defining characteristics: satire, comedy, sarcasm, acerbic social criticism; first-person narration with an autobiographical ease of telling; an outsider protagonist-seeker on an episodic and often pointless quest for renewal or justice.
We added this to dinner last night at it was fantastic. I had home cooked chick peas and home cooked brown basmati rice and we added my home made cilantro sauce on top (cilantro garlic oil vinegar blended). It was out of this world.
“Beautiful things grow out of shit. Nobody ever believes that.
Everyone thinks that Beethoven had his string quartets completely in his
head—they somehow appeared there and formed in his head—and all he had
to do was write them down and they would be manifest to the world. But
what I think is so interesting, and would really be a lesson that
everybody should learn, is that things come out of nothing. Things
evolve out of nothing. You know, the tiniest seed in the right situation
turns into the most beautiful forest. And then the most promising seed
in the wrong situation turns into nothing. I think this would be
important for people to understand, because it gives people confidence
in their own lives to know that’s how things work. If you walk around
with the idea that there are some people who are so gifted—they have
these wonderful things in their head but and you’re not one of them,
you’re just sort of a normal person, you could never do anything like
that—then you live a different kind of life. You could have another kind
of life where you could say, well, I know that things come from nothing
very much, start from unpromising beginnings, and I’m an unpromising
beginning, and I could start something.”
