The award-winning food writer chooses the books that have most affected her. Her audiobook, “Around the Table, 52 Essays on Food and Life” is on Audible and Spotify now, and published by Mitchell Beazley in October.
Revolutionary Road
Richard Yates, 1961 I would need to live several lives before I’d have the insight to write this. A collapsing marriage – the resentment, the longing for more, the imagined conversations – and the shattering of the American Dream in 1950s suburbia. This shook my soul.
Foster
Claire Keegan, 2010 Claire Keegan’s writing is spare, small scale. She leads you into what you think is a small world – a young girl is taken to stay with a childless couple while her mother has another baby – but it’s a huge world where love brings hope and disappointments are made bearable. A perfect novel.
A Thousand Acres
Jane Smiley, 1991 Sisters in Iowa fight over the inheritance of their father’s farm when he decides to retire. A brutal story about what families are capable of, with more than an echo of “King Lear”. I read it in one sitting.
Say Nothing
Patrick Radden Keefe, 2018 An account of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, with the actions of IRA volunteer Dolours Price (she tried to blow up the Old Bailey) and the kidnap and murder of mother Jean McConville at its centre. The structure of such a complex narrative is breathtaking, as is the way Radden Keefe inhabits the minds of those involved. I grew up in the Troubles and could almost smell the Northern Irish countryside.
A Well-Seasoned Appetite
Molly O’Neill, 1995 Molly O’Neill writes about food better than anyone else. It’s not her recipes but her prose. A granita is a “shale of glassy crystals”, and her first taste of aubergines is like a short story: she eats the smoky flesh while listening to the local radio station and news of Watergate.
Las fuerzas del orden encontraron un cadáver en Oxnard que coincide con la descripción de un niño de 13 años que no regresó a casa en el Valle de San Fernando de un viaje a Lancaster, dice la policía.
One morning in 1991, I prayed with the fervor that only a tween can muster for one thing above all others: cold Diet Mountain Dew. But all of the cans in my mom’s stash were warm. So I tossed one in the freezer, forgot about it, and hours later retrieved the frozen-solid mass. Then I decided to pop it in the microwave. You can imagine what ensued.
After extinguishing the flames, my mom asked us kids what we thought had happened. I stepped forward as if approaching the gallows—and she lavished me with praise. For telling the truth. For taking responsibility. Her response might seem surprising, but we’re Quakers, and avoiding judgment is pretty on-brand.
From where I stand now, I can see that her decision to use positive reinforcement aligns with research on motivating kids, something I’ve become quite familiar with as a journalist covering parenting and education. Still, for years, I didn’t recognize the connection between my faith and the child-development studies I frequently combed through at work. Then, when the coronavirus pandemic temporarily left our public school without enough adults to meet my son’s needs, we switched him to a Quaker school. The school is organized around an acronym I’d never heard before—SPICES—that stands for principles I know well: simplicity, peace, integrity, community, equality, and stewardship. Those aren’t the only pillars of Quakerism, but they’re big ones, and seeing them all together got me thinking. Sitting in the meetinghouse one Sunday morning, after nearly an hour of silent worship, I had a Queen’s Gambit moment. Whereas the chess champ saw pawns moving across a phantom board, I saw each child-rearing best practice I’d been writing about line up with a principle of Quakerism.
The Religious Society of Friends—“Quaker” being a derogatory term, reclaimed—is a hard faith to explain, because it tries to eschew dogma. It’s now possible to be a Muslim Quaker or a Hindu one, or to not believe in any god at all. That said, Quakers all over the world tend to talk about the same principles and take part in some of the same practices. For example, in place of rules, Quakers publish “advices and queries,” which prompt individuals to make good, considered choices. Attendees of Quaker meetings near me were recently asked to ponder: “Do I make my home a place of friendliness, joy, and peace, where residents and visitors feel God’s presence?” The children’s version read: “In what ways am I kind to people in my home?” Certain expectations underlie these questions—that one should try to be kind, for example—but so do curiosity and an openness to differing answers.
As it turns out, leading with questions is a great way for parents to talk to children. Encouraging kids to come up with their own solutions grants them autonomy. And as Emily Edlynn, a psychologist and the author of Autonomy-Supportive Parenting, told me, kids who feel like they have control over their life experience betteremotional health, including less depression and anxiety. Fostering kids’ autonomy has also been tied to children building stronger self-regulation skills, doing better in school, and navigating social situations more effectively. Best of all, once kids get used to the self-discipline that comes with exercising autonomy, it can become habitual. Give your kids agency in one area, and they tend to “develop internal motivation even for things that they do not want to do,” Edlynn said, “because they’re integrating the understanding of the ‘why’ those things are so important.”
It can be scary to trust children with independence. But kids are better problem-solvers than some people might think. When my son, at age 10, asked me if he could play laser tag with friends, I asked him how he could avoid pulling a trigger (in deference to the Quaker value of pacifism). He decided to serve as referee. I was proud of him for exercising “discernment,” another Quaker value, all on his own, for listening to his “still, small voice within” and letting it guide him to a solution that satisfied his need for belonging. He is now 13 and recently couldn’t decide whether to accept a babysitting job or relax at home. I asked him, “What do you think tomorrow-you will wish today-you had done?” He picked out stuffed animals to give his charges, spent the evening feeling needed, and had cash the next day when he wanted to buy boba for a friend.
Obviously, real damage could come from giving kids complete autonomy, and Quakerism recognizes this. Early Quaker epistles inveigh against permissiveness, and a 1939 text, Children & Quakerism, quotes William Penn, the Quaker who founded Pennsylvania, saying, “If God give you children, love them with wisdom, correct them with affection.” In other words, pacifism doesn’t mean that parents can’t set boundaries. As a 1967 book about Quaker education, Friends and Their Children, put it, “There is a difference in principle between setting an army on the march and carrying a tired and hysterical child up to bed.” So when my son used to leave toys out, I wouldn’t clean up for him. I’d prompt him to do so: “I see blocks still sitting on the floor.” That was usually enough. When it wasn’t, I would stage a mini sit-in, and we wouldn’t go on with our evening until the blocks were put away—the type of consequence that’s crucial for raising considerate kids. If he hollered, I would “bear witness” to his suffering and “be with” him, silent but unwavering.
Two children work together at Friends Select School, in Philadelphia, as part of a 1945 American Junior Red Cross program on race relations. (Bettman Archive / Getty)
In addition to sit-ins, both civic and domestic, Quakers have a tradition known as “spiritual gifts.” That involves treating individual talents as assets that belong to the community and ought to be developed in ourselves and encouraged in others. For parents, this means focusing on what our children choose to do, are good at, and enjoy. You can’t ignore your kids’ weaknesses—but you can spend less energy on them. For my youngest’s terrible handwriting, that meant aiming for legibility and saving the time that could have gone toward cursive lessons for activities that animate her, such as building boats and airplanes from the contents of the recycling bin. Research backs up this approach. According to Lea Waters, a psychology professor at the University of Melbourne and the author of The Strength Switch, focusing on children’s strengths “has been shown to increase self-esteem, build resilience, decrease stress, and make kids more healthy, happy, and engaged in school.”
But perhaps the most important element of Quaker parenting is the edict to “let your life speak.” In practice, that looks like apologizing to your kids freely, saying please and thank you, and, yes, trying not to shout at them. It means acting in accordance with your values, such as when my grandma took me to pack toothbrushes and soap into “kits for Kosovo,” and when my kids make PB&Js for our unhoused neighbors or bring games to a family shelter. The idea, supported by common sense and reams of research, is that kids develop empathy by living it alongside their caregivers. What’s more, another study establishes that knowing that their parents value kindness above achievement protects kids’ well-being.
Infused in all of these practices is the conviction that children are not lesser proto-adults, but fellow beings worthy of respect and agency regardless of their behavior. The closest that Quakers come to dogma is the belief, first expressed by the religion’s founder, that there is “that of God” in every person, children very much included. That’s why, as Friends and Their Children notes, Quakers try to make children feel “welcome at the very centre of life”—a concept quite similar to the “unconditional positive regard” that psychologists today know leads to secure kids. Children who feel valued in this way, and who believe that what they do adds value, generally come to understand that they matter. And a sense of mattering makes kids more likely to be happy, resilient, academically high-achieving, and satisfied with their life, as well as less likely to struggle with perfectionism or addiction, Gordon Flett, the author of the American Psychological Association’s Mattering as a Core Need in Children and Adolescents, told me.
So here I am, nearly 375 years after Quakerism’s founding, asking my kids questions, giving them bounded autonomy, and nudging them to invest in their strengths and be stewards of their community—all while communicating that their worth is in no way contingent. Put together, these Quaker practices result in a parenting style considered ideal by psychologists: authoritative parenting. As Judith Smetana, a University of Rochester psychology professor whose work focuses on parent-adolescent interactions, explained to me, authoritative parenting is characterized by the effort to warmly and responsively set limits, and to support kids rather than punish them harshly when they overstep those limits.
Some people might argue that Quaker parents aren’t doing anything special. What is free-range parenting if not oodles of agency? When Quaker parents try to stay calm and acknowledge their kids’ feelings when they act out, aren’t we just doing what the so-called Millennial parenting whisperer Dr. Becky recommends? In telling my teenage son that I see the packaging from his graphing calculator lying on the table rather than in the trash, am I not just following “Say What You See” coaching?
But pop parenting philosophies can be unhelpful, especially because parents not infrequently misinterpret them. Take gentle parenting. At its best, it encourages parents to give kids the respect and empathy they need to thrive. But gentle parenting, at least as it’s presented in Instagram reels, can result in children doing as they please. “What it really leaves out,” Smetana told me, “is the importance of structure and being clear about where the boundaries are.” Many parents are left feeling helpless—a common experience among pop-parenting adherents. In the aughts, a friend of mine tried attachment parenting, an approach centered on enhancing the bond between mother and child with, among other practices, maximum physical proximity. She ended up feeling like a failure each time she put her baby down to use the restroom.
For new parents, sorting through the good and bad of each of these schools of thought can feel not just bewildering, but impossible. “These terms come and go so quickly,” Smetana told me, “and fads in the popular audience don’t intersect very well, necessarily, with the research.” It’s taken me more than 15 years, during which I’ve read hundreds of parenting books and academic papers, to piece together which bits of each philosophy are relevant to me. According to Smetana, even authoritative parenting can be of limited use for caregivers, because its advice is so broad. There are lots of ways to be an authoritative parent, which can leave moms and dads (but mostly moms) feeling rudderless.
That’s where Quaker parenting has stepped in for me, providing a simple way to separate the wheat from the child-development chaff. It gives me plenty to cling to, but its guiding principles are also flexible enough to allow leeway. This isn’t to say the religion is perfect. Its past is filled with failures. Many Quakers worked to abolish slavery, but many did not; some were themselves enslavers. The Society of Friends was the first religion to officially condemn that horror, but some meetinghouses—which are known for having benches arranged in egalitarian formations—featured segregated seating for Black members. Quakers also participated in forced assimilation of Indigenous peoples, including boarding schools that stripped children of dignity, culture, and health. Although not exclusively white, Quaker membership in the U.S. is still predominantly so.
But even in these shortcomings lies an essential Quaker parenting lesson. We favor queries over strictures because of a concept known as “continuing revelation,” or the idea that we cannot know all there is to know, and we will always later realize that we were wrong. The principle has helped me cultivate humility and compassion for myself after missteps. Because there can be no one best way in Quaker parenting, I’m freed from feeling like every detail of every decision will lead only to perfect success or abject defeat.
Looking back at the Diet Mountain Dew incident, I bet my mom wanted to rail at me. She’d warned again and again that metal in the microwave would spark. But Quaker values urged restraint then, just as they did decades later, when two of my daughters enrolled at schools with grade portals. With just four clicks, I can see how many points they’ve missed on each test and which assignments they haven’t turned in. Snowplow parenting tells me to lean into snooping and send emails to their teachers requesting retakes and extensions. It’s sorely tempting. But Quaker principles remind me not just about the value of autonomy, but also that kids need stillness and peace of mind, that pestering them isn’t likely to lead to the “nonviolent communications” that improve connection, and that the goal is for teens to develop a purpose-based identity rather than a performance-based one. So I resist the urge to monitor and intervene—just as research on anxiety suggests I should.
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Key foreign stock markets continued their slide after opening on Friday morning amid the shockwaves of President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs.
When search-and-rescue teams deploy to any of the numerous natural or man-made disasters around the world, they bring along their own teams of highly trained dogs to help discover victims in need. When these dogs are not in the field, they frequently take part in training sessions simulating events such as earthquakes, wildfires, and water or avalanche rescues. Gathered below are images of some of these rescue dogs and their handlers, on the job and in training, from the past several years.
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Three adults were charged with assault and disorderly conduct after throwing punches in the middle of a youth hockey game in Egg Harbor Township, New Jersey.
Is the U.S. in a second Gilded Age? Many in the news media seem to think so: You’ll find the claim in The New Yorker, NPR, Politico, and these pages. The White House, for its part, seems to think that would be a good thing: “We were at our richest from 1870 to 1913,” Donald Trump said days into his second presidential term, a period that covers—that’s right—the Gilded Age. Although the claim was factually lacking, it was politically prophetic. Trump has governed like a late-19th-century president, with his penchant for tariffs, his unusual relationship with a major industrial titan, and his bald-faced corruption.
It’s widely understood that the late 19th century was an age of technological splendor and economic consolidation, and this is true enough. Thomas Scott and Cornelius Vanderbilt and Jay Gould dominated the railroads. John D. Rockefeller dominated oil. Andrew Carnegie dominated steel. J. P. Morgan dominated finance. We can see echoes here in the titans of modern industry: Jeff Bezos and the Waltons in commerce; Tim Cook and smartphones; Mark Zuckerberg and our attention; Elon Musk in space.
But some of the most interesting echoes of the Gilded Age involve the government’s relationship to business. In March, TheWall Street Journal reported that the Trump family held talks to pardon a major crypto executive who had pleaded guilty to money laundering. In exchange, they would secure a stake in his company, Binance. Similarly, in the late 19th century, which was an era of unusual grift, a range of public servants—from White House Cabinet members to local deputy sheriffs—were unembarrassed about skimming fees and taking bribes.
To understand what made the late 19th century gilded, I spoke with Richard White, the historian and author of The Republic for Which It Stands, a mammoth history of America between the end of the Civil War and the end of the 19th century. This conversation, which originally appeared on the podcast Plain English, has been truncated and edited.
Derek Thompson: The driving of the golden spike at Promontory Point in 1869 marked the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad. The Gilded Age begins just after and extends into the early 1900s. How did the transcontinental rail system set the stage for the Gilded Age?
Richard White: At the end of the Civil War, the United States was a country of vast ambitions and relatively little money. What it wanted to do was build an infrastructure to connect California to the rest of the United States. It didn’t have the money to do that, so it resorted to a series of subsidies and cooperation with private capital. The railroads were the great corporations of the United States at the core of the American economy. But the railroads depended on a system of insider dealing, corruption, and stock manipulation, in which people who accrued great wealth accrued great influence over the course of the United States. This system went on to define the Gilded Age.
Thompson: In the introduction of The Republic for Which It Stands, you write: “The Gilded Age was corrupt and corruption in government and business mattered. Corruption suffused government and the economy.” How?
White: People described each other as “friends.” They weren’t friendly in any colloquial sense that we understand. Friendship in the 19th-century sense was a relationship devoid of any affection in which people pursued common ends by scratching each other’s back. The railroad businessmen were friends with politicians, friends with newspapermen, friends with bankers. It was an age of dishonest cooperation.
Thompson: There are so many incredible characters from this period of American history: Rockefeller, Carnegie, J. P. Morgan. Who was John Rockefeller, and how did his style of cooperation typify this era of corrupt monopoly?
White: Rockefeller created what became the model corporation: Standard Oil. What he wanted to do was to organize a system he saw as too competitive and wildly inefficient. Rockefeller realized that there was just too much oil. He realized that if you were going to get profit, you had to eliminate the number of refineries. So Rockefeller went to the railroads and said, “I will give you all of my oil, but you have to kick back money to me—and don’t do it for my competitors.” Competitors soon found they couldn’t compete with Rockefeller, and so he came in and bought them out. By the 1890s, he was saying, “This is a new age, an age of cooperation.” And what he called cooperation, his opponents called monopoly.
Thompson: The U.S. government protected the monopolies in several ways. Steel tariffs helped Andrew Carnegie build his business, and in exchange Carnegie fed information to politicians. The government also quashed labor when it threatened big businesses in the late 19th century. Why does the state side with the monopolies again and again in this period?
White: Very often, the people in office were corrupt. The big industrialists would tell congressmen and senators: “When this is done, you’re going to serve a term or two, then come to work for us.” Or: “I’ll loan you a few thousand dollars to invest it in this.” Or: “I got a land grant from you, and in return, I’ll use part of the land grant to kick back to you under a fake trustee.” I mean, the industrialist Cosby Huntington wrote a letter to his associates that said: “I just bought 1,000 wheels from Senator Barnum from Connecticut, because he does pretty much what I want.”
Thompson: What was it about the character of government or the rules and customs of the time that you think made the late 19th century so corrupt as far as government goes?
White: The United States was becoming a major industrial country and a continent-spanning country. At the same time, it was incredibly averse to taxes and would not fund its necessary infrastructure and services. So it came to what scholars have called “fee-based governance.” In the 19th century, to get something done, you’d subsidize a corporation to do it, and that’s one source of corruption. The other thing is you take things like collecting the tariffs: Somebody has got to collect it, and that’s why the customs house becomes one of the plum appointments you can get. The head of the customs house in New York City makes more than the president of the United States because he gets to keep a certain amount of the customs he collects. You make sheriffs and deputy marshals tax collectors, and they keep a certain proportion of the taxes. That means that there’s going to be corruption from the post office all the way up to the sheriffs, to the customs houses, to people who are appointed offices. Everywhere in this system is going to get a fee, a bounty, and opportunity, which allows private profit to perform a public service. The result is corruption that is rampant throughout the whole system.
Thompson: One paradox of this era is that it was an astonishing time for material progress and also a decrepit time for human welfare. You write that men and women in this era suffered “the decline of virtually every measure of physical well-being.”
White: By 1880, in the middle of the Gilded Age, if you lived to be 10 years old, you would die at 48, if you’re an American white male, and you would be 5 feet 5 inches tall. You would lead a briefer life and be shorter than your Revolutionary ancestor. And you were one of the lucky ones, because on average, 20 percent of infants would die before age 5. You’re living in an environment where, as America urbanizes, there’s no reliable sewage system. There’s no pure water. There’s no public health.
Thompson: What did the Gilded Age build that’s most worth remembering?
White: It began to build public infrastructure—which allowed Americans to live better and to be in better health—and transportation infrastructure. The United States, unlike Europe, is this single country without tariff barriers between states, which can use the resources of the entire country. Did we do it efficiently? No. But we did it. And in the end, it became the basic source for much of the growth that followed.
The other thing we started to do, at Edison’s lab and at the Gilded Age universities, is build a way to create useful knowledge. We’d always been a nation of tinkerers and inventors, but then we began to systematize it for the public good. The final thing, and it’s not so popular anymore, is we begin to create a set of experts and expert organizations, which begin to take that kind of knowledge and to put it to public use.
Thompson: How did the excesses of the Gilded Age set the stage for the next era of American history and government, which was the Progressive era?
White: I think that the best way to understand the Progressive era is that the Progressives saw society as a machine. You don’t let a machine evolve. You design a machine. When a machine breaks down, you repair the machine. When you can get a better machine, you build a better machine. So Progressives begin to think civil society is something which is going to have to be managed all the time.
The great advantage of Progressivism is what it did in terms of distribution and equity. But the major drawback of Progressivism, which we struggle with still today, is that in essence, it becomes undemocratic. There’s tension in a democracy between rule of experts and having a country which ostensibly is under the control of people through their votes and setting the goals. That tension appears in the Progressive era, and it has never, ever gone away.
