Vollmann and Recipes

"We Always Leave Things Unfinished"

Alexander Sorondo | Big Reader Bad Grades | 30th June 2026

Account of a morning with the writer William T. Vollmann. He doesn't have a cellphone or use the internet, and in the 1990s the FBI thought he might be the Unabomber. He has cancer and won't live much longer. His seven-novel sequence telling history of the North American continent will end at six books. But he's still writing, writing, writing: a 3,000-page novel, and a "short" 32,000-word report from Cuba (5,700 words)

Puzzle: Play Nomido, the Browser’s daily word game.

The Anxiety Of The Perfect Loaf

Josh Izaac | 22nd June 2026

Cooks today are "paralysed by precision" because recipes include exact quantities of ingredients to use. They didn't always; until the 19C, culinary instructions were much looser and relied on the cook's past experience. This control is an illusion. "The kitchen is a biological environment. Cooking is a deeply personal experience, and culinary precision is no replacement for intuition" (2,100 words)