Make More Pie

Hopefully looking somewhat less bedraggled than during last night’s live muffin tutorial , if on a subject less sweet: sociopaths - the charming ones, the murderous ones - and those with other personality disorders that, based on experience and comments in the scroll, many many of us deal with. Some tips, some solace, some links. Questions/comments, fire away - you people are so quiet over here! R...

For those who joined the live feed, thank you for hanging out with me. (NB: Not sure why we lost the first three minutes of the video but we got the recipe in there so.) Any questions, fire away. I am good at very few things and baking is one of them. No questions too silly! For those who did not join, you might give the recipe a try. As mentioned below, these will be more popular than you anticip...

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How are you feeling on this fine Saturday morning? I’m apparently so turned around by how liberated I’ve been this week that I forgot, in the audio, that the markets are not open today. Be thankful for small favors. But man, what a week: the biggest two-day market drop ever, an estimated loss of $9.6 trillion since Trump took office, including yesterday Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk seeing $15.9 billio...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit nancyrommelmann.substack.com Donald McNeil Jr., a 45-year New York Times veteran, comes on the pod to talk with Nancy and Sarah about … so much. The prompt was the recent NYT story , “We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives.” As the paper of record tries to come correct on Covid, we wanted to hear from the science jo...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit nancyrommelmann.substack.com Mike Cummings spent much of the pandemic drinking beer with his friends on church steps in the East Village. It’s not that he didn’t like bars, he loved them, including St. Dymphna’s , where he’d bartended and which he once dreamed of owning. But New York City real estate is a shark tank, and for years, spot...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit nancyrommelmann.substack.com Anthony Falco is an international pizza consultant, which to me sounds more like teen boy’s fantasy than an actual gig... “I mean, I made the job up, but it is very real,” says Falco. “I've worked in 22 different countries around the world. And staying very busy.” In addition to fast-tracking the skills of p...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit nancyrommelmann.substack.com Kicking off CHEFS TALK with Jeff Miller, owner of the sushi bar Rosella , and Bar Miller , an eight-seat omakase restaurant that received a Michelin star in December. How does that change one’s fortunes? “It overnight switched it from a business that, you kind of don't know what to expect from one day to the...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit nancyrommelmann.substack.com Reading Noah Rothman’s new piece in Commentary, “ A Clockwork Blue: How the Left Has Come to Excuse Away and Embrace Political Violence ,” I felt as though he had written it just for me; this, because he called to account institutions and individuals who proclaim violence from the left justified, a trend I f...

On Tuesday morning, essayist and Unspeakable pod host Meghan Daum snapped a photo of her “Yeti-doodle” outside her home in Altadena, California. “Someone is loving the Santa Ana winds today,” she tweeted. Were the winds a reason to evacuate? Not according to Meghan’s neighbor. “She said, ‘Oh, this has happened before, let’s just keep an eye on it, there’s nothing to worry about,” Meghan recalls. N...

From Sarah Hepola and me, a little Smoke ‘Em to get you through Christmas Eve xx “The period of left-wing illiberalism that began about a decade ago seems to have drawn to a close. The final cause of death was the reelection of Donald Trump.” That’s the claim of a new article in The Atlantic by Jonathan Chait, which may or may not be true, but the article is a handy run-down of the past decade’s g...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit nancyrommelmann.substack.com Get two writers who grew up in New York City in the 1970s talking and they don’t stop, or at least Peter Blauner and I don’t stop, in a conversation that ranges from seeing The Cramps at CBGB’s, a crusading young prosecutor named Rudolph Giuliani, and a borough president plunging a kitchen knife into his che...

“[The Russians] always claim to free us and to help us. They free us from our houses, schools, hospitals, from our families, from everything. They want to make us completely free, and maybe even from our bodies.” - Oksana Hutnyk It is the 29th of September, 2024, and I'm going to take us back a few years to, February 24th, 2022, the day Russia invaded Ukraine and started a war that is ongoing. We...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit nancyrommelmann.substack.com The story of what happened when I visited with Edith Mitts, the mother of Gregory Cook, who’d murdered three of his meth buddies. A clip: “He walked into the woods with her, and he said he made her take her shoes off,” Edith said. “And he threw her shoes and made her walk barefooted in the woods because he d...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit nancyrommelmann.substack.com People sometimes ask, where do you get ideas for stories? One place that I've gotten ideas is when I read a very small item someplace else, something like, "Man Nails Girlfriend's Fish to Floor" and I'll think, what the heck is going on there? The way I found the story below started with a very small item in...

One of the super-cool things about being a journalist is that you can contact people whose work amazes you and say, “Come on my podcast!” and they almost always say, “Sure!” As did Michael Powell, one of my favorite journalists working today, currently at The Atlantic and previously at The New York Times , where, during the height of our national meltdown (aka 2020 to 2022), Michael took on subjec...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit nancyrommelmann.substack.com Pulled into NYC yesterday after two+ weeks on the road, wanting not much more than to sleep 14 hours. Nope! There are pies to be baked - birthday party for this one tomorrow night - and cogitating about the next piece, about a certain flaccidity among protesters and why that might be and what we might see wh...

A reading of yesterday’s piece on why I find the press reporting on Kamala Harris’s kitchen prowess so corrupt. Look, I hope she can cook! But please, no more tongue baths about a short-lived four-year-old YouTube series where the only thing she makes to completion is a tuna sandwich. Intro/outro music: “Kid Dynamite” by Matt Welch Those who hate audio and/or just me on audio - someone who listene...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit nancyrommelmann.substack.com I was heading out for an appointment at 4:45 when I thought I’d check, for the dozenth time, for updates on the Trump hush money trial, taking place 12 blocks from my house. Well, damn , the jurors had reached a verdict. Hustling past the buckets of live fish on Division Street, I made it to the courthouse j...

What do these four men have in common? They’ve all been guests (one in abstentia) on the Smoke ‘Em If You Got ‘Em podcast in the past two weeks. My cohost Sarah Hepola and I spoke with Michael Moynihan, “ The Fifth Column " co-host and formerly with Vice , about the new William F. Buckley doc, when conservatives were intellectuals, and why half a Yoo-Hoo is an aphrodisiac. ( 134: Michael Moynihan...

Cross-posted from Smoke ‘Em If You Got ‘Em podcast. Discussed: * First Sunday Zoom * Earthquake. Steve Kornacki. * Eclipse mania * Jennifer Senior wins award, keeps kicking ass * “Harmonica virgins” * Sarah’s new car, picture for paid subscribers only * Lessons of Isuecardealers.com * “ The True Cost of the Church Going Bust ,” by Derek Thompson ( Atlantic ) * The Matt Welch * Everyone meets at Pa...

Update: Many of you have written asking that the paywall be taken off this interview. I grant your request.. this time! Upcoming interviews include former Portland Mayor Sam Adams and Deputy DA Nathan Vasquez, who going up against his boss, DA Mike Schmidt. The more paid subscribers we get, the more free material can be posted for the freeloaders good citizens of Oregon and beyond xx Jessie Burke...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit nancyrommelmann.substack.com Jessie Burke - former champion fencer, business owner, mother of three, and now-candidate for Multnomah County Commissioner - is one of my favorite Portland people. Courageous, loyal, no-b******t, we’ve worked together, eaten together, maybe not drank together (gotta fix that…) and together watched what was...

Narrated version of this article is up. Totally stealing the “we use every part of the buffalo” from my pal Ethan Strauss at House of Strauss , which my pod partner Sarah Hepola named her favorite Substack of 2023. A lot of content coming your way, including from Israel, where I will head on the 15th, so many stories, so many people reaching out. Keep sending me your ideas and what you want to kno...

Waking up to the news that Hamas attacked Israel and that the country is now at war, I immediately texted my friend Yael Bar tur , who lives in NYC but is home in Tel Aviv visiting with family, a family I know and love. I had not yet read anything else, but for her tweet below. If you’re on Twitter, you can follow Yael , who will assuredly be posting updates. Ten minutes before I checked in with Y...