Read Isabel Wilkerson!

These days, events crowd in on us—so close, so huge, so out-of-proportion that we can barely comprehend them. Each day, the news shoves them right up into our faces, and we can’t turn away or get perspective or even, it seems, take a breath.

This is where writers come in. The good ones do what our daily news feed can’t—help us to pause, step back, and consider events through a story or a historical account or a subject, seemingly unrelated, that provides an unexpected new lens.

Isabel Wilkerson does all those things. And she has written a new book.

Wilkerson won a Pulitzer Prize for her feature writing as the Chicago bureau chief the New York Times. Her first book, The Warmth of Other Suns, tells the monumental story of the Great Migration, in which six million African Americans, including her parents, migrated from the South to the Northeast, Midwest, and West during the twentieth century. Time Magazine named it one of the ten best nonfiction books of the decade. Read about it here.

Her second book, which Wilkerson has been researching and writing for ten years, is titled Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, and it will be published next week.

In the new book, she takes what sounds like a dry topic and uses it to illuminate what is now happening all around us, including both COVID and racism. An excerpt appeared recently in the New York Times Magazine, and it is brilliant.

Here are links to the article, the book, and an interview.

Notes from the Pandemic

A New Kind of Takeout

In our house, we’ve always had a happy division of labor: Yvonne cooks, and I clean up. You’d think that in quarantine we would be cooking more than ever, but in fact it’s been just the opposite. The reason: takeout from restaurants.

The takeout I’m referring to isn’t the usual burgers in a bag or Chinese in cardboard containers, though we love both. It’s fine dining on wheels, and it comes to our house once a week.

Nashville has been blessed in recent years with a spate of fine restaurants. One of these is Henrietta Red, run by chef Julia Sullivan and her business partner Allie Poindexter. Sullivan went to USN, our daughter Maggie’s school, and has just been nominated as Best Chef: Southeast by the James Beard Foundation.

Late last year, in an exceptional piece of good timing, Sullivan and her pastry chef, Caitlyn Jarvis, started a catering business called the Party Line. It was up and running just in time for the pandemic.

What began as high-end catering was adjusted for people stuck at home, and over the past weeks the program has settled into a sweet spot that I would describe as fine food for families—beautiful meats and vegetables, creative casseroles, chicken liver on homemade crackers, yogurt with marmelade and granola, wonderful salads, and on and on. The food is delicious, practical, and not at all snooty.

We get a box every week, in which we find foods that are new and different. We even get cocktails, premixed and served in small mason jars. Yvonne’s favorite is a spicy drink called a Bee Sting.

With Henrietta Red closed for now, the Party Line is helping to take up the slack, for Julia and her colleagues, and for Yvonne and me.