The Gift Guide Begins!
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Art Buchwald
12 min read
The article opens by referencing Buchwald's famous 'Le Merci Donnant' Thanksgiving piece from his Herald Tribune Paris days. Readers would benefit from learning about this Pulitzer Prize-winning humorist's remarkable career, his Paris years, and his influence on American political satire.
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Gourmet (magazine)
14 min read
Ruth Reichl references her time as editor of Gourmet and her struggles with product pages. The magazine's 68-year history as America's premier food publication, its cultural impact, and its controversial 2009 closure provide rich context for understanding Reichl's career and food media evolution.
The late writer Art Buchwald wrote Le Merci Donnant in 1952 when he was a young reporter for the Herald Tribune in Paris. Buchwald figured since we sit down to the same meal every Thanksgiving, he could run the same article every year as well.
I’m not planning on running this article every year, but I am running it again. Because it’s about Thanksgiving. Because this year, for the first time in many years, we celebrated the holiday in New York City, and it made me think about the past in an an entirely different way. And also because I’ve always believed that by watching what people eat you can find out almost everything about them - and in this article Ian Dengler proves it.
This is one of the first long pieces I ever published, and it has always meant a lot to me. I spent hours listening to Ian talk about his research. It took my breath away.
It still does.
I have offered up a gift guide every year since I began my first blog in 2009. The strange thing about this is that when I became the editor of Gourmet I denigrated the magazine’s product pages as “just stuff.” It was one of my major failures as an editor; I just wasn’t very good at figuring out what products people might want -or how to make them want the products our advertisers wanted them to want.
But once I had my own platform and began writing about the things I love, everything changed. I wasn’t trying to sell anybody on anything, and I wasn’t trying to make money from it. I was simply telling you about the things I buy for myself and my friends. These aren’t products I’m paid to promote and I don’t get money if you buy them. They are, very simply, things I like and figure you will like too.
Some of these are things I’ve mentioned before - but I thought you might want to be reminded of them. Others are completely new.
Consider, for example this jam. I’ve written about the extraordinary Ayako & Family plum jams in the past, but if you’re like me and prefer tart to sweet, I want to tell you about this particular one. Pink Lady Plum is the tartest of the lot, and it really adds zing to a piece of toast. I’ve become
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