This is foremost a blog about ideas, even when I'm doing food reviews. Maybe especially when I'm doing food reviews. So below you will not find pornographic images of food, a slapdash bio of a chef or restauranteur, or anything like that. I'm going to tell you what I think a burger should be, and why Black & Orange in DC gets closer to this ideal than any other burger joint, bar, or restaurant I've ever been to.
Prior to Black & Orange my burger standard was the now-widespread Five Guys. Five Guys makes a great burger because it follows all the important laws of what a great burger should be. First, it's greasy and melty, such that the juices and grease from the meat and the surface it was cooked on commingle with the melted cheese (a burger must have cheese). Second, the meat patties and the bun are relatively thin, giving the burger a good balance of meat to bread to other ingredients. Third, these burgers don't take themselves too seriously; they don't come with quinoa and creme fraiche or two whole avocados.
Where burgers go wrong, in my view, is by hopping on the "gourmet" burger train. You know a "gourmet" burger well, because they're (unfortunately) the standard at bars and restaurants: a huge, thick patty that might as well be a giant meatball placed gently between two halves of an oversized roll, optionally topped with some kind of bleu cheese crumble, soggy bacon, avocado, any number of obscure ingredients, practically a whole onion and a whole tomato, piled high to the point at which you have to eat it with a fork and knife because you can't really fit it in your mouth to take a bite.
Other variations on the "gourmet" burger include some kind of "special" "Angus" beef, a "steak" burger, or even a Kobe beef burger. The misguided people who make you these things are effectively catering to the fat, middle-aged businessman who wants a steak in a bun because he has no taste, and feels guilty ordering another steak this week.
But if you want Kobe beef, order a steak! A burger is a sandwich, after all; not a gourmet meal. It's not supposed to have the thickness of a cut of prime rib, nor be as lean as a filet, nor as decoratively dressed as a circus performer.
Black & Orange is everything a burger should be, and, crucially, none of what it shouldn't be. For starters, the meat is perfectly seasoned (the "Square One" is seasoned simply with salt and pepper, and it's *fantastic*). The patty isn't paper thin--a little less than a half-inch--so it doesn't become a physical challenge to take a bite. And when you do take a bite, you're guaranteed to get an optimal balance of well seasoned beef, bun, choice of melted cheese, and consistently (amazingly so) fresh tomato, onion, and lettuce. The bun itself is medium density, such that it doesn't disintegrate from the grease and juices from the burger, but doesn't overwhelm the other ingredients either. And unlike the better greasy burger chains like Five Guys, Black & Orange will actually cook your burger to order, striking 'medium' with perfect accuracy. If there's any hint of "gourmet" to this burger, the well-cooked patty that remains juicy from first to last bite is it; but otherwise we're talking about a burger that stands on the simple, aesthetic strength of its perfect proportions, consistently fine preparation, and crisp veggies.
You will want to get one of these burgers, even before I tell you that the fries are double-fried and crispy, everything a fry should be as well...
Friday, December 28, 2012
Tuesday, December 18, 2012
3 Dumb Arguments Against Gun Control, and How to Refute Them
1) Controlling guns won't stop murder. Crazy people will always find a way. Look at what Timothy McVeigh did. You can't outlaw fertilizer.
First, no one arguing for any form of gun control ever argued that gun control would eliminate murder or violence as we know them. When people make the argument above, which is true but irrelevant, they're pointing to a red herring to evade the actual issue of whether gun control could reduce gun death; not whether gun control would *elminate* gun death and violence outright, and usher in a new utopia. This response is like answering "but you can't stop eating or you'll die!" to a person who says they intend to cut back on saturated fats. So if someone throws this red herring at you, simply refocus (if possible) the discussion back to the meaningful question that silly argument 1 evades: could gun control measures *reduce* gun death?
2) Cars/cigarettes/alcohol kill far more people than guns do. So you wanna ban cars, now?
This argument is another attempt to avoid the central question by making ridiculous comparisons. But when we consider "concentration of lethality" for these things--guns, cars, cigs, and booze--it becomes clear that there really is no sensible comparison here. If every time you lit up a cigarette, took a single drink, or went for a ride in your car, you possessed in that single action the potential to kill equivalent to firing a gun one time, you better believe we would be regulating these things more heavily than we already do.
By the same token, if, statistically, as many people fired guns in this country as often as we light a cigarette, go for a drive, or drink a beer--in other words, if frequency and prevalence of use were controlled for in a comparison between the lethality of guns and that of these other things--we'd be stepping over bodies on the way to the grocery store every day. The reason we shouldn't regulate tobacco, cars, and alcohol--very deadly things over the long run and in extreme quantities--as much as we should regulate guns is that guns are exponentially more deadly than any of these other things. One gun shot one time can end a life. If you shotgun a person they die. If the comparison in this argument were valid, it would give a whole new meaning to shotgunning a single beer, which, we know, doesn't kill you. Imagine how many beers you drink, cigarettes you smoke, and car trips you take in a given week. Now imagine what this country would be like if for every instance of those, we all also fired a bullet.
3) Americans are safer because we have more guns.
Usually this argument is accompanied by cherry-picked data or anecdote about how guns make us all safer. You'll get an example of data without controlling for population density, different national cultures, socioeconomic factors that impact crime across the board, etc. Someone will point out that a small, monolithic town in a meat-and-potatoes region of the US (usually in the South or Midwest) has a population of 3000 people, all of whom own a gun, and there hasn't been a murder in Podunk, KS in 55 years! What they won't tell you is that cities with the highest rates of gun homicide and gun death, like Chicago or Detroit, are full of guns, and no safer for it.
Up next you might get sent a chain-mail story about that one teacher in Smalltown, Texas who came to work one day with a pistol and gunned down a criminal trying to stick up the lunch ladies in the cafeteria for cash. What a hero! Also, an outlier.
If you listen long enough to a person making this argument, you'll eventually get some ranking table stats, e.g. the handful of "right to carry" states in the US have less gun homicide, or Switzerland has lots of guns but hardly any gun murder. Again this is cherry-picked data reported without controls and focused not on what happens in the majority of the world, but on outliers plucked to make an untenable case. They're not telling you that without controlling for other factors, the simple fact that a "right to carry" state or a country like Switzerland has less gun homicide--if this is indeed a fact at all--doesn't demonstrate causation between the absence of gun control and the absence of gun murder.
Likewise, that the US witnesses over 9000 gun homicides a year but, fear not, still has a lower gun murder rate than Hondouras and Swaziland, is supposed to convince you that our ratio of guns to homicides is favorable. Hey, look, the US has the highest gun ownership rate in the world, but we're only 20-something in gun homicide rate! Who are these other countries that we share this coveted position with? El Salvador, Jamaica, Colombia, South Africa...
This sort of argument amounts to throwing shit against a wall, because it relies on outliers and non-controlled studies or data to mislead people. As this clear and useful Harvard Public Health literature survey concludes (using controls and spanning the breadth of the published research), more guns = more gun murder.
First, no one arguing for any form of gun control ever argued that gun control would eliminate murder or violence as we know them. When people make the argument above, which is true but irrelevant, they're pointing to a red herring to evade the actual issue of whether gun control could reduce gun death; not whether gun control would *elminate* gun death and violence outright, and usher in a new utopia. This response is like answering "but you can't stop eating or you'll die!" to a person who says they intend to cut back on saturated fats. So if someone throws this red herring at you, simply refocus (if possible) the discussion back to the meaningful question that silly argument 1 evades: could gun control measures *reduce* gun death?
2) Cars/cigarettes/alcohol kill far more people than guns do. So you wanna ban cars, now?
This argument is another attempt to avoid the central question by making ridiculous comparisons. But when we consider "concentration of lethality" for these things--guns, cars, cigs, and booze--it becomes clear that there really is no sensible comparison here. If every time you lit up a cigarette, took a single drink, or went for a ride in your car, you possessed in that single action the potential to kill equivalent to firing a gun one time, you better believe we would be regulating these things more heavily than we already do.
By the same token, if, statistically, as many people fired guns in this country as often as we light a cigarette, go for a drive, or drink a beer--in other words, if frequency and prevalence of use were controlled for in a comparison between the lethality of guns and that of these other things--we'd be stepping over bodies on the way to the grocery store every day. The reason we shouldn't regulate tobacco, cars, and alcohol--very deadly things over the long run and in extreme quantities--as much as we should regulate guns is that guns are exponentially more deadly than any of these other things. One gun shot one time can end a life. If you shotgun a person they die. If the comparison in this argument were valid, it would give a whole new meaning to shotgunning a single beer, which, we know, doesn't kill you. Imagine how many beers you drink, cigarettes you smoke, and car trips you take in a given week. Now imagine what this country would be like if for every instance of those, we all also fired a bullet.
3) Americans are safer because we have more guns.
Usually this argument is accompanied by cherry-picked data or anecdote about how guns make us all safer. You'll get an example of data without controlling for population density, different national cultures, socioeconomic factors that impact crime across the board, etc. Someone will point out that a small, monolithic town in a meat-and-potatoes region of the US (usually in the South or Midwest) has a population of 3000 people, all of whom own a gun, and there hasn't been a murder in Podunk, KS in 55 years! What they won't tell you is that cities with the highest rates of gun homicide and gun death, like Chicago or Detroit, are full of guns, and no safer for it.
Up next you might get sent a chain-mail story about that one teacher in Smalltown, Texas who came to work one day with a pistol and gunned down a criminal trying to stick up the lunch ladies in the cafeteria for cash. What a hero! Also, an outlier.
If you listen long enough to a person making this argument, you'll eventually get some ranking table stats, e.g. the handful of "right to carry" states in the US have less gun homicide, or Switzerland has lots of guns but hardly any gun murder. Again this is cherry-picked data reported without controls and focused not on what happens in the majority of the world, but on outliers plucked to make an untenable case. They're not telling you that without controlling for other factors, the simple fact that a "right to carry" state or a country like Switzerland has less gun homicide--if this is indeed a fact at all--doesn't demonstrate causation between the absence of gun control and the absence of gun murder.
Likewise, that the US witnesses over 9000 gun homicides a year but, fear not, still has a lower gun murder rate than Hondouras and Swaziland, is supposed to convince you that our ratio of guns to homicides is favorable. Hey, look, the US has the highest gun ownership rate in the world, but we're only 20-something in gun homicide rate! Who are these other countries that we share this coveted position with? El Salvador, Jamaica, Colombia, South Africa...
This sort of argument amounts to throwing shit against a wall, because it relies on outliers and non-controlled studies or data to mislead people. As this clear and useful Harvard Public Health literature survey concludes (using controls and spanning the breadth of the published research), more guns = more gun murder.
Monday, December 3, 2012
Are You a New Zombie?
Today's post is about connecting three points of reference in popular culture today: the cultish interest in zombies and zombie memes, the widespread embracing of "geek" culture, and the ironic detachment that is essential to both of these phenomena.
I love making fun of people who are really into zombies and zombie films in an "ironic" way. This is perhaps the filmic equivalent of embracing the "ugly Christmas sweater": an ironic celebration of something known and accepted as corny and uninteresting simply for the sake of irony itself. And this is supposed to generate humor, viz.: "HAHA, this is funny because it's so BAD. I am funny because know its BAD but I STILL LIKE IT!" In a few minutes of brainstorming I'm sure we could come up with dozens of such examples of ironically elevating something to high desirability status precisely because it's so undesirable.
The "geek shall inherit the Earth" mentality similarly relies on a certain kind of irony: "geek chic" means embracing the awkwardness and social ineptitude stereotypically associated with geekdom as manifestations of a higher order of thinking. Geeks laud themselves as too preoccupied with more important things to sufficiently bother with personal hygiene, friendliness, or meaningful human contact. Being removed in this way excuses the geek to revel in technological advancement.
In each of these cases ironic detachment stands in as a way of refusing the questions of whether to pursue or aspire to something better, and how to judge what is deserving of our attention. Embracing crappy art might have started out as a laudable attempt at tearing down antiquated hierarchies of taste, but at this point it's become a way of constructing a new hierarchy with the ass end at the top. Similarly, embracing disconnectedness and antisocial behavior may have started as an admirable attempt to reclaim a derogatory word--"geek"--from the mouths of dumb jocks and bullies who wrongly deride people with technical or scholarly interests, but today it has become simply an excuse for the fetishization of technology and esoteric personal interests at the expense of meaningful human interaction.
Irony is the culprit here. Generally deployed with puerile thoughtlessness and (memes being exhibit A) an appeal to tribal thinking, today's tactless, diluted irony is a shell of its former self. Irony should have the power to make our hair stand on its ends; instead it makes expressionless people staring at computer screens and smartphones type LOL in silence.
What is deliciously ironic, however, is the way in which people walking about town staring into their smartphone screens actually resemble zombies. These are the new zombies, and I write this with sincerity. They amble around in zigzags bumping into things, feeding off the insipid e-content of other malnourished brains. Inside their heads there are no thoughts of their own; in fact, to be left without some kind of numbing stimulation--Facebook and Twitter updates, a news feed, a low-skill video game, etc.--I wonder whether these zombies are capable of achieving a single original thought, or whether they'd simply keel over or fall asleep if forced to live for a matter of seconds with nothing but the low buzz of their central nervous systems to distract them from living.
We need less irony, more sincerity today. We need to learn not merely to throw technological solutions at real problems, nor to duck them with ironic remove, but how to figure out which things we should sincerely care about. New Zombies are the sort who can't even figure out which things they themselves care about, or to abandon the idea of caring altogether. How can we take these people seriously? And how can we ever progress as a society that's too ironic to believe in progress?
I love making fun of people who are really into zombies and zombie films in an "ironic" way. This is perhaps the filmic equivalent of embracing the "ugly Christmas sweater": an ironic celebration of something known and accepted as corny and uninteresting simply for the sake of irony itself. And this is supposed to generate humor, viz.: "HAHA, this is funny because it's so BAD. I am funny because know its BAD but I STILL LIKE IT!" In a few minutes of brainstorming I'm sure we could come up with dozens of such examples of ironically elevating something to high desirability status precisely because it's so undesirable.
The "geek shall inherit the Earth" mentality similarly relies on a certain kind of irony: "geek chic" means embracing the awkwardness and social ineptitude stereotypically associated with geekdom as manifestations of a higher order of thinking. Geeks laud themselves as too preoccupied with more important things to sufficiently bother with personal hygiene, friendliness, or meaningful human contact. Being removed in this way excuses the geek to revel in technological advancement.
In each of these cases ironic detachment stands in as a way of refusing the questions of whether to pursue or aspire to something better, and how to judge what is deserving of our attention. Embracing crappy art might have started out as a laudable attempt at tearing down antiquated hierarchies of taste, but at this point it's become a way of constructing a new hierarchy with the ass end at the top. Similarly, embracing disconnectedness and antisocial behavior may have started as an admirable attempt to reclaim a derogatory word--"geek"--from the mouths of dumb jocks and bullies who wrongly deride people with technical or scholarly interests, but today it has become simply an excuse for the fetishization of technology and esoteric personal interests at the expense of meaningful human interaction.
Irony is the culprit here. Generally deployed with puerile thoughtlessness and (memes being exhibit A) an appeal to tribal thinking, today's tactless, diluted irony is a shell of its former self. Irony should have the power to make our hair stand on its ends; instead it makes expressionless people staring at computer screens and smartphones type LOL in silence.
What is deliciously ironic, however, is the way in which people walking about town staring into their smartphone screens actually resemble zombies. These are the new zombies, and I write this with sincerity. They amble around in zigzags bumping into things, feeding off the insipid e-content of other malnourished brains. Inside their heads there are no thoughts of their own; in fact, to be left without some kind of numbing stimulation--Facebook and Twitter updates, a news feed, a low-skill video game, etc.--I wonder whether these zombies are capable of achieving a single original thought, or whether they'd simply keel over or fall asleep if forced to live for a matter of seconds with nothing but the low buzz of their central nervous systems to distract them from living.
We need less irony, more sincerity today. We need to learn not merely to throw technological solutions at real problems, nor to duck them with ironic remove, but how to figure out which things we should sincerely care about. New Zombies are the sort who can't even figure out which things they themselves care about, or to abandon the idea of caring altogether. How can we take these people seriously? And how can we ever progress as a society that's too ironic to believe in progress?
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