But I do think the idea that basic cooking skills are a virtue, that the ability to feed yourself and a few others with proficiency should be taught to every young man and woman as a fundamental skill, should become as vital to growing up as learning to wipe one’s own ass, cross the street by oneself, or be trusted with money.
I believe that the human animal evolved as it did—with eyes in the front of its head, long legs, fingernails, eyeteeth—so that it could better chase down slower, stupider creatures, kill them, and eat them; that we are designed to find and eat meat—and only became better as a species when we learned to cook it.
I like a blue cheese burger as much as the next guy—when I’m in the mood for blue cheese. But if it’s a burger I want, I stick to the classics: meat—and bun. I believe this to be the best way to eat a hamburger.
What makes a Wagyu steak so desirable is the unbelievably prodigious marbling of fat that runs through it—often as much as 50 percent. Its resulting tenderness and richness, and the subtle—repeat—subtle flavor. When grinding a hamburger, you can put in as much fat as you like—just reach in the fat can and drop it in the machine—so there’s no reason to pay a hundred bucks for a burger. A burger, presumably, already is about as tender as a piece of meat can be—and a taste as subtle as real Wagyu’s would, in any case, be lost were you to do something so insensitive as bury it between two buns and slather it with ketchup.
Call me crazy, call me idealistic, but you know what I believe? I believe that when you’re making hamburger for human consumption, you should at no time deem it necessary or desirable to treat its ingredients in ammonia. Or any cleaning product, for that matter. I don’t think that’s asking a lot—and I don’t ask a lot for my fellow burger-eaters. Only that whatever it is that you’re putting in my hamburger? That laid out on a table or cutting board prior to grinding, it at least resembles something that your average American might recognize as “meat.”
I was angry, too, in the usual ways: with my mom for having me, for being stupid enough to love me. With my brother for not being a fuckup like me. With my father for dying.
Given the current woeful state of backyard grilling, a priority should be assigned to instructing people on the correct way to grill and rest a steak. We have, as a nation, suffered the tyranny of inept steak cookery for far too long. There’s no reason that generation after generation of families should continue to pass along a tradition of massacring perfectly good meat in their kitchens and backyards.
The same month the Anglophone powers agreed on a screw thread, they established the International Organization for Standardization (better known by its short-form name, ISO). It was to be a United Nations for things. It had an administrative committee modeled after the UN’s Security Council: permanent seats for the five great powers (United States, Britain, France, China, and the Soviet Union) and rotating seats for other countries. The first president was from the United States.
Nevertheless, the Marshallese were ushered off the atoll, and the military detonated two atomic bombs there on July 1, 1946, each more powerful than those dropped on Japan. The test made the once-obscure atoll a household name. Four days after it, the French fashion designer Louis Réard debuted a two-piece bathing suit. He dubbed it the “bikini,” on the grounds that the sight of a woman’s mostly unclothed body was as sensational as the bomb.
Bin Laden was, in other words, an infrastructure guy. He was essentially running a mujahidin base in Pakistan. In 1988 he formed a small organization to direct the jihad. It was called, fittingly, al-Qaeda al-Askariya (“the Military Base”). Or just al-Qaeda (“the Base”), for short.
Hoover was a Quaker who had lived for a year among Osages in Indian Country (he later had Charles Curtis, a Native American with Osage heritage, as his vice president).
But you can’t overdo it—you can’t create so much space that you lose track of what’s going on or are surprised by what the product becomes. You can’t let it slide into mediocrity because you’re worried about seeming overbearing. Even if your hands aren’t on the product, they should still be on the wheel.
Being exacting and expecting great work is not micromanagement. Your job is to make sure the team produces high-quality work. It only turns into micromanagement when you dictate the step-by-step process by which they create that work rather than focusing on the output.
