Maggie Blaha

Inspired by John Green’s podcast ‘The Anthropocene Reviewed’ where he rates different aspects of our human-centered geological age on a 5-star scale, I decided to do the same for quarantine. You can read all my quarantine reviews and sign up to get them in your inbox here.

In the early days becoming a writer, to me, meant hosting or attending sophisticated dinner parties in a brownstone apartment with crown molding and paintings on the walls in some city like New York or Paris. This might explain why I’m a much better dinner party hostess than I am a writer. My capacity for rigid discipline only extends to planning dinner party menus and playing the woman of society.

In these days of social distancing and lockdown, people have been using Zoom to stay connected with friends and loved ones. From work meetings to game nights to birthday parties and weddings, Zoom has helped make life feel a little normal during this plague.

It was Nora Ephron’s film Julie & Julia (2009) that really introduced me to Julia Child and her tome of French cuisine Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Ephron depicts Child as a dominating but charming figure, who is firmly set in her opinions but also curious and open to learning new things. The reason she even attended Le Cordon Bleu while living in Paris with her husband Paul was so she could relish in her love of French food and teach Americans to do the same. And even though Simone Beck, one of the co-authors of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, points out in the film that a degree really isn’t required to teach cooking classes, Julia is adamant about doing things “properly.”

If I could have gotten my tattoo when I was a kid, I wouldn't have needed to show the elephant within the stomach of a boa constrictor. That's not how the young artist in Antoine de Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince originally intended to present his drawing.