Smell Improvement Exercises • Really Really Really Slow Cooking • Unnecessary signage • Belly dancing and Timbaland

Smell training. Yes, you can improve your sense of smell with effort. Conventionally, we think of improving our ability to smell only when one has completely lost it. But the same principles can be applied to people with normal smell. 

Take three scents that you enjoy, or introduce yourself to new ones. Here are a few I like. Lemongrass. Scandinavian pine. Ceylon cinnamon. Vanilla bean. 

Now, similar to a yoga class, set aside time to do your smell-cercises. Focus your attention on each aroma. Sit with it. Swirl it around like a glass of wine. 

Repeat daily for 12 weeks. You may find yourself with an expanded capacity for smell. 

S.E. Rogie - Please Go Easy With Me Live 

I’m glad that Ezra’s the one that sampled this song. Palm wine musician S.E. Rogie from Sierra Leone has long been a favorite of mine. Vampire Weekend doesn’t just loop the sample, they elevate it. 

Really slow cooking. I’ve been trying to learn more about fermentation. I live in a culture where cooking expediency is favored. Readymade meals shipped in boxes. One pan recipes. Drive throughs. So, a meal that requires weeks of maturation and occasional burping is hard to justify. 

But it’s also delicious. 

One of the best meals I’ve ever had was at a Buddhist vegetarian restaurant in Seoul. The table was peppered with small bowls filled with vegetables, many of them fermented, covering a spectrum of flavors, often sharply contrasting with one another in flavor and texture. 

Chef's Table - Season 3 | Official Trailer [HD] | Netflix  

Season 3, Episode 1, Chef’s Table is the one I rewatch. Buddhist Chef Jeong Kwan takes the viewer on a tour of her temple and fermentation practice. She puts the clay pot in the ground and waits. This is not the Great British Bake-off. 

How do you even make the regeneration of bacterial cultures entertaining? You don’t. So you have to slow down and listen to the wind in the forest. I can highly recommend this episode. 

I really love when a book ends with a list of other books to research. This is from a cookbook about vegan fermentation from a Portland based chef. I never skip the acknowledgements.

This is the book that made me think differently about tempeh. 

If you’re interested in fermentation, I can recommend following Sandor Katz, who is the Mark Bittman of fermentation literature. I enjoyed this conversation with the author.  

Should that sign go there? In Chicago, there’s a practice of memorializing streets with the names of people who have contributed to society. This is common across America (ie, Martin Luther King Boulevard), but typically the memorial street name is the functioning street name. 

In Chicago, for some reason, the memorial street name is a secondary addition to the actual street name. In some cases, you have a memorial name (real street) and then an additional memorial name (honorary, not functional). 

In the photo above, there are two memorial street signs and two functional signs, one of them bent. (how did that even happen?) 

So, this all seems mostly anodyne, but isn’t this confusing for people who are new to the city? Also, it costs money. The city is in debt. Street signs add up. It costs $55-60 to make one, plus administrative overhead, plus maintenance. 

Here’s an alternative idea. Don’t do that. When I die, I’d like a memorial that actually helps other people. A soccer field in a vacant lot. A drinking fountain that actually works. Find the worst subway entrance, make it nice, etch my name in the corner. 

Business Idea of the week: Uber Therapy. It’s exactly what it sounds like. Rideshare, for those moments when you just need a little help. Lying on a couch is the classic setup. But I find something very soothing about the back seat of cars. No eye contact is necessary. As a bonus, by the time therapy is done, you’ve arrived at your destination.

Be cautious of doors and windows. Studies demonstrate that the act of walking through a door can have a deleterious effect on your short term memory.

Lest it melt away like an ice cube, one should be careful walking around a house while trying to retain a specific thought.

Similarly, one should open new browser windows with care. Even the slightest hint of new information may dislodge the thing you are hoping to recall. 

Khusara Khusara _ Hossam Ramzy 

Released in 1999, Big Pimpin was a huge hit and this is the source of the hook — a belly dancing record from the late 50s. I've always wondered how Timbaland came across this track.

Facebook - We're never lost if we can find each other

I love people’s faces. Within a matter of weeks after the world shut its doors, the corporation then known as Facebook released a video that starts with a series of nearly empty cityscapes. Watch it now and it’s a document that feels very different with the distance of time. 

Sure, it’s sentimental. It’s also a smart work of editing and rhetoric. Most media from that moment feels outdated. I think this one still works. It’s a story about people being separated from one another, bound by the constraints we impose on ourselves.

There’s no hard sell here, but there’s clearly persuasion. 

Released on March 31, I think this campaign was likely the precise PR turning point for Facebook, which would soon become Meta, moving away from the turmoil of the 2010s and into new corridors of volatility.

Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough.

— Richard Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics

Michael Neault • Chicago • Friday at dawn • Reply to this email with your notes and criticisms