The perfect pecan pie will never exi—
Cutting a slice of longing
For all the divisions at our nation’s Thanksgiving tables this year, we can at least agree on these two things, per the recipe developers I follow on Instagram:
Pecan pies are a bit much.
They can be saved.
Claire Saffitz uses the form factor of a slab pie to give a higher proportion of topping and crust to filling, and tempers the flavors with notes of chocolate and coffee, all in an attempt to avoid a result that is “tooth achingly sweet.” Miso plays the role of sweetness mediator in Shuai Wang’s version, which takes inspiration from butter mochi cake. And Jesse Szewczyk tries to “convert pecan pie haters” by “[leaning] into the salt, the booze, and the nutty nut flavor” (Jesse himself admits not liking pecan pie).
Why bother fixing something that was never good enough to be broken? And why do we — the audience — devour the Sisyphean struggle? As someone who has always liked the idea of pecan pie more than pecan pie itself, I too fall straight into this attentional trap, tasting the novel flavor combinations with my eyes. And the pattern extends beyond pastry. I see it in our collective rush towards a buffet of Twitter replacements, and I see it in the democratic yearning that flutters amidst the mere hint of a taste of political progress. The hunger is almost anachronistic: an imaginary past projected onto an impossible future.
Perhaps this is what appeals to online engagement: the promise of a perfect bite, a perfect life. Or perhaps the need is deeper, more ancient, more innately human.
In Jewish midrashic folklore, God originally created the sun and moon as twin celestial bodies, equal in both size and luminosity. God eventually asked the moon to diminish itself, and upon seeing that the moon could not be comforted, marked the diminishment as a mistake requiring atonement.
Each lunar month, there is a ritual of going outside and gazing upon the first signs of the new moon, and praying for the reversal of this original sin. “May the light of the moon be as the light of the sun… as it was before it was diminished.”
The moon will never become as big as the sun. But I guess what I’m saying is that there is beauty in longing, that perhaps, the longing is the only thing that matters at all. It’s a mass delusion that binds us like the Karo-brand corn syrup for which we forever seek substitutions. Time after time, we’ll gaze at caramelized slivers — in the pie or in the sky, we aren’t sure — and goad them into wholeness. Time after time, we may find that the only thing that will be goaded is our appetites.
🏃 Escape attempts
Acts of algorithmic resistance
(Bluesky omnibus edition)
Firehose: Every post, emoji, swear, I am verb, and image (NSFW) uploaded to Bluesky.
Quiet posters is a feed that features posts from your quieter follows (this is what unlocked the power of decentralized social media platforms for me).
And a few feeds of my own:
cyansky is posts without the letter ‘e’
nobody liked this is posts with no likes or reposts
chamber of echoes is just posts about echo chambers
📜 Finite scroll
Ripples beneath the interface
Surveilling babies. Pinterest clones and the death of the artist. AI and the death of the folk artist. Threads and the death of the posting middle class. How the New York Times beat the algorithm. Translating PDFs to Brainrot, animal to human, and the dark forest internet to the forest internet.