Yolked

When I was a kid, my mother was obsessed with food safety. Handle raw chicken, and you were in need of full-body disinfecting. Cook burgers, and you’d best crisp them to a germ-free, well-done briquet. And when sushi first hit the San Francisco scene? Forget about it. I mean, raw fish!

From that childhood, I’d been inculcated with a fear of runny egg yolks, presumably a salmonella-laden path to near-instant death. At the same time, I also hated the texture of hard-boiled egg yolks. So, between the two, I was sure I hated runny eggs.

A few years ago, however, I fell in love with the spaghetti carbonara at Otto. And in trying to replicate the dish at home, I discovered that the secret to their version is egg yolks; lots and lots of egg yolks. (Like five yolks and one whole egg.)

Which, in turn, made me think that perhaps I didn’t dislike runny yolks after all. And, in fact, it turns out I don’t. At age 34, I tried eggs Benadict for the first time, and suddenly understood why the dish is so perennially popular. At Landmarc, one of my go-to breakfast meeting spots, I’ve switched to ordering my eggs poached, which smush together particularly well with their diner-style hash browns. (Side note: why does NYC serve breakfast potatoes everywhere instead of real hash browns? Terrible.)

I know I’ve previously observed that simply doing things the way you always do things isn’t a particularly good life strategy, that it makes sense to question our assumptions and look for better ways. But, as with most pieces of life wisdom, it’s easier said than lived.

So perhaps it’s a good reminder of that to discover that I’ve cheated myself out of decades of enjoying a now favorite food. As they say, looks like the yolks on me.

June 9, 2014

Phoney

They say that, for entrepreneurs, being early is often a bigger problem than being wrong.

Three years back, I suggested that Verizon’s iPhone launch would cripple the Verizon network – an incoming exodus of unhappy AT&T customers eating up Verizon’s network capacity – while in turn leaving AT&T’s network relatively fast and problem-free for the customers who stayed behind.

A year later, however, AT&T was still slow and regularly dropped our calls, so Jess and I headed over to Verizon with everyone else.

In the beginning, it seemed a great move. But, in the time since, my 4G connection speeds in NYC have increasingly ground to a halt.

Now, Verizon is admitting that it can’t keep up with their increased LTE demand, while several friends still on AT&T have expressed joy in their connections zipping along.

It appears my predictions were just a bit ahead of their time. I may not be able to check my email, but I can at least take solace in knowing I was right.

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November 22, 2013

Carny

I’ve always been fascinated by ancillary skills – those you acquire unintentionally as part of some other, unrelated pursuit. Running CrossFit NYC, for example, I’ve developed a startlingly accurate ability to guess people’s weight just by looking at them.

At the gym, this comes in handy in a slew of ways. In the outside world, not so much, unless you’re looking for a job in a ‘guess your weight’ booth.

Over drinks, however, it does make a fairly good parlor game. But in that context, after you nail the guess for a guy or two, a girl will inevitably jump in, too.

Obviously, guessing a woman’s weight is fraught with peril. Because, does she want you to guess what she actually weighs? Or what she wants the group to think she weighs? Or what she weighed in college and still thinks of as her ‘actual weight’ even if she’s ‘temporarily’ padded up a bit?

Basically, you can’t win. So, each time, I size the girl up, and guess 108 pounds. And I stick to that guess. Even if – perhaps especially if – she’s nearing two bills. As they say, with great power comes great responsibility.

*[Related pro tip for single dudes: if a girl asks you how many people you’ve slept with, the answer is six. Always six.]*

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September 29, 2013

Give it a Minute

*[or, Happy Birthday to Me]*

Apparently patience is on my mind these days.

I know [I blogged about it this weekend](https://www.joshuanewman.com/2013/07/give-it-a-minute/), but while reviewing notes from the past year, I also re-discovered this clip from the great [New York *Times* interview of Louis C.K a few months back](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/07/arts/for-louis-c-k-the-jokes-on-him.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&):

>*Does it matter that what you’ve achieved, with your online special and your tour can’t be replicated by other performers who don’t have the visibility or fan base that you do?*

>Why do you think those people don’t have the same resources that I have, the same visibility or relationship? What’s different between me and them?

>*You have the platform. You have the level of recognition.*

>So why do I have the platform and the recognition?

>*At this point you’ve put in the time.*

>There you go. There’s no way around that. There’s people that say: “It’s not fair. You have all that stuff.” I wasn’t born with it. It was a horrible process to get to this. It took me my whole life. If you’re new at this — and by “new at it,” I mean 15 years in, or even 20 — you’re just starting to get traction. Young musicians believe they should be able to throw a band together and be famous, and anything that’s in their way is unfair and evil. What are you, in your 20s, you picked up a guitar? Give it a minute.

Today, turning 34 (officially my ‘mid-thirties’), I’m finally old enough to start appreciating Louis’ advice. I’ve spent most of my life thus far in a hell of a hurry. And boy have I screwed up a bunch of things along the way as a result. I’m still setting right any number of those messes. But I’m also, slowly but surely, putting to use the lessons learned, doing things better and smarter and wiser than I would have in my brasher youth.

A third of a century down, and, on balance, I feel pretty great about where I am. I couldn’t be happier with Jess and Gemelli, with my family and friends, with Outlier and CrossFit NYC, with my life here in New York.

At this rate, in just another third of a century, I should be really cooking. Which, I’m starting to think, sounds about right.

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July 16, 2013

Paradox

Recently, I stumbled across [Dance in a Year](http://danceinayear.com), an awesome single-page site from designer Karen Cheng. Atop the page, a video chronicles Karen’s dance skill progress over the course of a single year, from “embarrassing even alone in your room” to “ready to hit the club”.

Below the video, Karen shares her secret: practice every day, setting small goals along the way.

Or, in other words, the same advice that pretty much everyone ever gives on learning or doing anything at all.

Still, obvious isn’t the same as easy. Incremental progress is, by definition, slow. And daily hard work takes, well, daily hard work. So, instead, we Tweet and Facebook and Foursquare and Instagram our way through the day, chasing minor instant gratification, the sudden small changes that yield immediate inconsequential results.

And it seems we’re getting great at doing that! Problem is, it’s precisely the opposite of what it takes to actually be or do the things most of us really want out of life.

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July 14, 2013

Complements to the Chef

[Ed. note: yes, friends and family who wrote in to correct, I know that the phrase is ‘compliments to the chef’ with an ‘i’. This was an attempt at cleverness – entrepreneurship being a complement to cheffing – that apparently wasn’t so clever after all. Tough crowd.]

Recently, I’ve started to notice how many entrepreneurs are interested in both cooking and photography. Which makes a lot of sense.

Entrepreneurship is basically the art of slogging daily through nebulous victories and vague defeats, for years and years at a time. Successful startups are those where the victories at least slightly outpace the defeats, consistently enough for the edge to compound gradually. Even in today’s world of lean startups, of building minimal viable products and iterating fast and always shipping, the process of slogging and compounding moves excruciatingly slowly. It takes a long time to see anything happen, and an even longer time to see anything incontrovertibly significant – anything big enough to impress your mom or your non-entrepreneur friends.

Like entrepreneurship, cooking and photography are about making something from scratch, and about sharing it with others. Unlike entrepreneurship, they also let you do so exceedingly quickly. Over the course of an afternoon, you can create something that never existed before, yet that’s still good enough to be appreciated by family, friends or the broader world. And it’s not just the immediate validation – that appreciation (or lack thereof) also provides fast and clear feedback to quickly guide iterative improvement.

After a long day of slow slog, it’s hard to explain how very gratifying that can be.

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April 8, 2013

Munchausen by Canis Proxy

Here’s an easy recipe for becoming a hypochondriac: start as a physician’s child, to absorb medical knowledge by osmosis. Get an undergraduate degree in something like neuroscience, so you have just enough academic health knowledge to be dangerous. Factor in general neuroticism and a vivid imagination. And then, through years working in tech, get extremely good at Googling up obscure yet painfully fatal diseases that all begin with innocuous flu-like symptoms. (A few weeks after I’ve helped clean out a dusty storage closet, I’m certain that a mild headache is an early symptom of Hantavirus.)

But if I’m good, Jess is even better. Because not only is she able to convince herself, she can often convince me, too. A few years back, for example, while I was out in Los Angeles for work, Jess decided that her stiff neck was actually the onset of meningococcal meningitis. I spent much of the afternoon responding to her worried calls and texts from New York, to say that, no, I was pretty sure she didn’t have meningitis. But I spent most of the night staring at the ceiling above my hotel bed, trying to think of how I would explain to family and friends that I had poopooed Jess’ concerns the very day before she died in her sleep.

(Spoiler: Jess is still very much alive. Though she did discover that spending hours on a couch with your laptop, head propped up sharply on a stack of pillows, is a pretty reliable route to a sore neck.)

Impressive, I know. But if you think that’s good, you should see what we can do with our powers combined, and focused on a six-pound puppy.

Of course, Gem has actually been totally healthy. But that doesn’t stop us, at least a few times a week, from Googling up crazy strings like “puppy choking sounds sleeping”. If he walks by his water bowl one time too many without drinking, we’re just a couple of clicks away from diagnosis: OH NO HE’S GOT PARVOVIRUS AND HOLY CRAP MORTALITY RATE FROM THAT AS A PUPPY IS LIKE 90%!! Gemelli, we barely even knew you!

As a result, we’ve basically been helicopter-parenting this poor dog: putting his favorite fleece blanket on him when we find him asleep on the floor; cutting his high-end food into smaller, bite-sized pieces. All the ridiculous and overbearing behaviors I’ve long mocked in New York dog owners.

I’ve been joking for a while that Gem is a pretty good pre-child warmup lap. Perhaps that’s true. But if nothing else, he’s a good chance for us to tone down our overprotective mania. Because if we don’t, I fear our future children will be in for the life of therapy bills inevitably caused by having to wear helmets and water-wings whenever they leave the house.

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November 28, 2012

IRL

This morning, on the way to work, I passed [Bob Balaban](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000837/) helping an elderly homeless man on the corner.

And, really, I wasn’t surprised. It seems like something the characters he plays would be likely to do.

That, in turn, reinforces my belief about actors, honed during my years running Cyan Pictures: an actor’s personality ‘in real life’ is usually the average of the characters he or she plays.

That may not hold true in the theater world, where people are willing to suspend disbelief, and actors can further diverge from their actual selves. In a play, if a black guy and a white guy are brothers, we write it off to creative casting; if someone ‘opens a door’ by miming turning and pulling an invisible doorknob, we call it minimalist staging.

But if that happens in a movie, we assume that one of the brothers must be adopted, and that the guy miming opening a door must be nuts. In movies, we’re simply less willing to believe, to diverge from reality. That, I think, constrains much further the range of characters an actor can believably take on. (Unless you’re Meryl Streep.)

Which is all to say, most characters end up only a standard deviation or so away from who an actor actually is.  Average those characters out, and, in my experience, you’ve got a pretty good sense of the real person beneath them all.

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October 23, 2012

Continental

Old parable:

A mother is teaching her daughter how to make pot roast.

“Before we put the roast into the pan,” says the mother, “we cut an inch or two off either end.”

“But why, mommy?” the daughter asks.

“Well,” admits the mother, “I don’t really know. That’s what your grandmother taught me.”

A few months later, the grandmother comes to town.

“Ma,” asks the mother, “when we cook pot roast, why do we cut the ends off the roast? Does it help the roast cook more quickly?”

“No,” the grandmother laughs. “When you were young, I only owned a small pan; I had to cut the ends off a roast to make it fit.”

++

I thought of that hackneyed story recently, when I stumbled across this odd bit of history: in 1630, Governor Winthrop of Massachusetts Bay Colony owned the only fork in colonial America. While the fork fad had quickly spread throughout Europe, it hadn’t yet hopped the pond stateside. So while Europeans began to master a fork-driven cutlery style – keeping the fork always in the left hand, and the knife in the right – the Americans, eating with knife and spoon, instead adopted the zig-zag – switching spoon from left hand (to steady the food while cutting) to right (to scoop up the food; impossible with a spoon when held upside-down in the left).

Just shy of four-hundred years later, my kitchen drawer is full of forks. Yet, all my life, I’d eaten in that same zig-zag, spoon-inspired style.

A month or so back, thinking of Governor Wintrop and 1600’s era utensil innovation, I switched to European style, fork held unchangingly in my left hand. And while, at first, the change felt exceedingly strange, soon I started to see the advantages. It made eating more elegant and efficient. And, if I’m ever stuck with a small pan, it would be way more effective when cutting the ends off a pot roast.

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August 15, 2012