Serious Eats gives us the best carrot cakes in town.
[Photo Credit: A Spoon Full of Sugar]
Monday
April 6, 2026
Since 2002
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Morning Art
Broolyn Botanic Garden by Joseph O. Holmes
Undecided
It’s the last day of the regular season–perhaps–and the only thing we know for sure in the American League is that the Tigers have won the Central. If the Yankees win tonight they’ll be the champs of the AL East and own the best record in the league. If they lose and the Orioles lose, they’ll still win the East. If they lose and the Orioles win the regular season will be extended one day and the two teams will play for the East title tomorrow in Baltimore. If the A’s beat the Rangers tonight the A’s will win the AL West and the Rangers will be the wildcard.
Got that?
It’s foggy in New York this morning and we’ve got all day to wait, wonder…
…and hope.
[Picture Credit: Andrew Moore, from The World’s Best Ever via This Isn’t Happiness]
Damp Straight
Derek Jeter SS
Nick Swisher RF
Alex Rodriguez 3B
Mark Teixeira 1B
Robinson Cano 2B
Russell Martin C
Curtis Granderson CF
Eduardo Nunez DH
Ichiro Suzuki LF
Dave Phelps in the biggest start of his career. Ellsbury and Pedrioa are back. And I don’t care how poorly Lester has pitched this year, he’s still tough.
It’s wet in New York. Let’s hope they can get this one in.
Never mind the butterflies: Let’s Go Yank-ees!
[Photo Via: This Isn’t Happiness]
Taster’s Cherce
Who says we can’t do Sunday on Tuesday? Check out Food 52’s recipe for Sunday Steak with French Butter.
[Photo Credit: thirschfeld]
New York Minute
Go to Pinhole New York and check out Stefan Killan’s beautiful black-and-white photographs of our city.
Morning Art
Collage by Richard Diebenkorn
Jump Into the Fire
Derek Jeter SS
Ichiro Suzuki LF
Alex Rodriguez DH
Robinson Cano 2B
Mark Teixeira 1B
Nick Swisher RF
Curtis Granderson CF
Russell Martin C
Eric Chavez 3B
It’s CC. Shit’s On.
Never mind the preamble: Let’s Go Yank-ees!
[Photo Credit: Josh Adamski; 4096 Colours]
Ta Da
Here’s our pal Mark Lamster’s Q&A with Christopher Bonanos, author of Instant: The Story of Polaroid:
ML: One aspect of public relations at which Land was especially adept was in building relationships with artists. Because a Polaroid camera is a bit clumsy in the hand and hard to focus, because the saturation of the film is so idiosyncratic and rich, and because the format is so unique, Polaroid encourages, as you note, a kind of self-conscious artiness. It’s amazing what a broad spectrum of artists ended up working with Polaroid. I know when I started taking Polaroids, I was influenced by Walker Evans, one of the “house” artists.
CB: That’s somewhat true — though I’d say that it even more encouraged a kind of casual artless shooting that equates with what we do on social networks. The other day, I met an artist named Tom Slaughter who was a huge Polaroid user back in the eighties. We were going through his photos — he has thousands — and it’s striking how much each box of them looks like an Instagram feed. They’re the same kinds of casual snapshots that somehow also feel documentary and a little profound: people eating and drinking, sitting on the porch, whatever. And it’s even the same square format, which is not an accident: the Instagram guys explicitly pay homage to Polaroid in their logo, and have a display of old Polaroid cameras in their offices. On the genuinely arty end of things, though, it’s true that Polaroid opened up its own big niche. The spontaneity was valuable to some people, like Andy Warhol; the color was especially useful to others, like Marie Cosindas; and the unique technology was valuable to Ansel Adams and a lot of other people.
I’ll never forget my father’s Polaroid camera, the sound of it being unfolded, the pleasure in pressing the red buttom to take a picture (always a treat), watching the image come out. And then fighting with my brother and sister to see which one of us could shake the photograph until an image appeared. It felt like magic.
[Photo Credit: Sincerely Lola]
Only Just to Play
Sam Anderson interviewed Junot Diaz in yesterday’s Times Magazine about Diaz’s new collection of short stories, This is How You Lose Her:
How many stories did you generate in total?
I’ll tell you what, I can name the stories for “The Cheater’s Guide to Love” before “The Cheater’s Guide to Love” came. There’s a story called “Primo” that was supposed to be at the end of the book — that was a miserable botch. I spent six months on that, and it never came together. There was a story called “Santo Domingo Confidential” that was trying to be the final story, that I spent a year on. I must have written a hundred pages. It was another farrago of nonsense. I wrote a summer story where the kid gets sent to the Dominican Republic while his brother is dying of cancer; he gets sent because his mom can’t take care of him. It was a story I called “Confessions of a Teenage Sanky-Panky,” which was even worse than all the other ones put together. And that was another 50-page botch.
That must be tough.
That’s why I never want to do this again. It’s like you spend 16 years chefing in the kitchen, and all that’s left is an amuse-bouche.
There’s a classic bit of creative-writing-class advice that tells us we need to learn to turn off our internal editors. I’ve never understood how to unbraid the critical and the creative. How do you manage that?
You’ve raised one of the thorniest dialectics of working, which is that you need your critical self: without it you can’t write, but in fact the critical self is what’s got both feet on the brakes of your process. My thing is, I’m just way too harsh. It’s an enormous impediment, and that’s just the truth of it. It doesn’t make me any better, make me any worse, it certainly isn’t more valorous. I have a character defect, man.
So turn on your harsh paternalistic, militaristic critic —
It’s my dad.
O.K., invite your dad in: I want to hear his review of Junot Díaz the bad writer. What is wrong with that stuff? What are the mistakes you make?
First of all, nonsense characterization. The dullest, wet-noodle characteristics and behaviors and thoughts and interests are ascribed to the characters. These 80-year-old, left-in-the-sun newspaper-brittle conflicts — where the conflicts are so ridiculously subatomic that you have to summon all the key members of CERN to detect where the conflict in this piece is. It just goes on, man. You know, I force it, and by forcing it, I lose everything that’s interesting about my work. What’s interesting about my work, for me — not for anyone else; God knows, I can’t speak for that — what’s interesting in my work is the way that when I am playing full out, when I am just feeling relaxed and I’m playing, and all my faculties are firing, but only just to play. Not to get a date, not because I want someone to hug me, not because I want anyone to read it. Just to play.
[Photo Credit: Fornication]
Taster’s Cherce
Manger’s bread winner means we all win.
Morning Art
Drawing by Milo Manara.
"This ain't football. We do this every day."
--Earl Weaver
--Earl Weaver