Make More Pie

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit nancyrommelmann.substack.com After sustaining “the atom bomb I needed to follow my passion” (her imminent layoff, her husband having an affair), Lisa Schroeder went to cooking school and, in 2000, opened Mother’s Bistro in Portland, Oregon. From day one the place was packed, everyone wanting what Schroder calls “Mother Food” – meatloaf...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit nancyrommelmann.substack.com The streets of Portland may be calmer than during the 108 straight nights of violence in 2020, but are things better? Or are they just as bad but in different ways? Photographers Chelly ( @hunnybadgermom on Twitter) and Michelle ( @cocainemichelle ) cover the city, including the current rise in homelessness...

We are talking feeding people this week, and Portland, and who counts as family. Yes that’s the little one in the pic, and me in the ‘stache. What a weird party that was! We wound up in a long conversation with an editor from another city, a visitor who tried to laser-beam you with his charm. “Don’t you know the effect you have on men?” he later said, to one of us, a line I found kind of hilarious...

Portland's current judicial system/activist class could not have rolled out any more of a red carpet to the man who murdered Rachael Abraham, a mother of six, three of whom were in the next (or the same) room as their mother was stabbed and strangled to death. Which begs the question: What are we willing to give up on the road to criminal justice reform? A reading of " The Collateralists ," by Nan...

A reading of “ Meet the Neighbors ,” from Forty Bucks and a Dream, Stories of Los Angeles , because I sense what you really need this holiday season is to hear about ululating Armenian widows in West Hollywood, Amway-selling Scientologists in Atwater Village, gunplay in Silver Lake, and Evian-filled swimming pools in Beverly Park. Speaking of holiday giving, Substack makes that a super-snap. Think...

Good morning from the compound in Chinatown, where it seems I rarely am these days, it’s been a year of travel for work and for pleasure, work and pleasure that this morning at 1am appeared at my door, in the forms of Oksana Hutnyk and her two daughters, Diana, 13 and Viktoria, 7, who after a bowl of ice cream showed me the moves I’d shown her in her kitchen last March in Lviv, Ukraine, by doing a...

Nancy Rommelmann and Sarah Hepola are back! Talking about: + Why they love the Ben Dreyfuss essay "The World is Not Full of Monsters" + What videos they watch in the bathtub + "Who is Max Boot? Did he write for Gawker?" + And speaking of Gawker... + That NYT interview with 8 "conservative" men + Who's allowed to say the C-word (anyone!) and why they're in favor of bringing back "twat" (it's funny!...

Entanglements, they're everywhere! In this episode of the Paloma Media podcast , Sarah Hepola and I look at: + The Will Smith-Jada Pinkett Smith turmoil + The Johnny Depp-Amber Heard mess + Online's "cruelty in the name of justice!" flamers Plus the modern complications of monogamy, Veronica Lake's hair (good!), the world of child actors in Hollywood (mostly bad), why John Updike got it right when...

Liz Wolfe (associate editor at Reason ) and I hop back into the studio to discuss Liz's recent grilling on Twitter over people accusing her of saying things she never said, the collective effervescence people experience from hating the same person or thing, huzzahs for the journalists who keep talking about what you're not (huh?) supposed to talk about ( Katie Herzog ! Sarah Hepola !), and the ide...

Hi all, on a Saturday night where I have forsaken all parties. The city doesn’t look too locked down, or not yet. I expect it’s coming. No one I know if freaked out, more, resigned. Let me know in the comments what’s like where you are. Earlier this week at Paloma Media , where it was New York Week all week, I posted the following audio, which I’ll likely mention in the Sunday round-up, but wanted...

Good morning on the 25th of April, and though I did not plan it, on this date in 1994, I was driving from Los Angeles to Illinois in a rented Ford Tempo with a pen pal of John Wayne Gacy’s, to visit the serial killer on death row shortly before his execution. Let’s say there was a lot of urgency to this trip, some of which could not be relayed in the feature, available for reading here and which I...

A week ago tomorrow, I got on a plane Minneapolis, with no brief other than several days before asking my editor at Reason, “Do you want some stuff from Minneapolis if I go?” and her answering, “Totally.” I hit some of you lovely people up for crowd-funding, in exchange for promised extras. Well, sad face… I will make up for the lack of extras now! Up top, an MP3 of me reading the first dispatch f...

Oh hey, what did Matt Welch and I do last night? Just as a snowstorm moved into NYC and right before we live-streamed his haircut on the new Paloma Media YouTube channel (which you should totally subscribe to )? We talked about Last Week’s Campaign to Cancel a Media Person Using What Radioactive Means Are at Hand. “But Nancy,” you’re asking, “ which campaign? There are so many…” We’re talking abou...

It is the case that the journalist who’s been covering a story but cannot be at the story stays glued to the story, and if she’s lucky, gets two people who were there to talk to her the next day. Hannah Ray Lambert , digital reporter for KOIN-TV in Portland, and Jeremy Lee Quinn , founder of and on-the-scene reporter for Public Report , were each kind enough to give me some of their time this morn...

Good morning, on the day before Christmas Eve. It’s 8am at the compound in Chinatown, aka, Paloma Media (of which, should you go follow on Twitter @PalomaMedia ? Well, yes), which yesterday gots a little tricked out with equipment. Contrary to the recording you are about you hear, which you might listen to while making the pecan pie recipe below, I misspoke (bc: 7am/no coffee/no tech): the studio...

So yesterday by husband announced that the business he’d built *literally with his hands* will be closing on December 15, and I had some thoughts… (audio) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nancyrommelmann.substack.com/subscribe