Maybe there isn’t a perfect answer to this question. Maybe the sandwich was really the friends we made along the way.
Can we convince you to apply to Jeopardy?
The great thing about this job is that I don’t need to know the answer to everything. I just need to know how to find who could answer it. And I don’t think Ken Jennings will let me use Google during filming.
How does AI intersect with or influence your current work?
AI is a powerful tool that can synthesize large volumes of data. But in the world of factual accuracy, there are all sorts of caveats and concerns with the content it generates. It’s still too early to safely adopt blanket applications of AI, but there are ways that it can be useful. Early in my career, when I was the bottom rung of the editorial team, I was often asked to transcribe other reporters’ interview recordings. An hour-long interview could easily take two or three times as long to transcribe by hand with my amateur skills. AI transcription services are far from perfect—and I still need to listen to the recording while reading to verify and fix portions—but it is a huge time saver.
What kitchen tool (or gadget or appliance) are you obsessed with right now?
I love my immersion blender! It can deal with so many tasks in my lovely but small NYC kitchen without needing any valuable countertop real estate. Pasta sauce, soups, salsa, smoothies, it pureés it all and doesn’t even risk any spillage when trying to move things from pot to pitcher and back to pot again.
Special shout out to chef Frank Proto’s tip to use a pair of tongs to juice citrus fruits too. Used this one recently while on vacation in the rental home’s bare-bones kitchen. From marinades to margaritas, we needed a lot of fresh squeezed juice and this trick really made things easier.
The movie or TV show you’d rewatch until the end of time?
One of my favorite shows is Happy Endings, a modestly successful sit-com that ran on ABC from 2011–2013. It’s a Seinfeld template of a group of friends navigating urban young adulthood. And like Seinfeld, it has characters that are acutely aware of the social games that they must struggle through to be a part of a functioning society.
I actually wrote an academic paper discussing how Happy Endings explores food and gender through its use (and sometimes subversion) of the big eater trope. It is performed across two characters of different genders and sexuality and represents a convergent idea of exactly that—performance. Society has expectations that can seem limiting or at least arbitrary. But when we see these characters act in ways that challenge these social conventions, it is encouragement for us to be able to do so as well.
It’s also really fricking funny.
Make Ryan’s favorite recipe
With a generous layer of caramelized onions and plenty of sharp Gruyère cheese, this party-ready tart packs the rich depth of French onion soup into every bite.
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