Noland Johnson aims his kuipad, reaching the 20-foot pole made of sun-bleached saguaro cactus ribs that bends under its own weight.  His target is also a saguaro, this one living and rising some two stories into the desert sky.  He slides the sharp tip of the kuipad behind one of the cactus’s arms, which is crowned with bulbous fruit.  Oval and plump, about twice the size of dates, these fruit cluster atop wavy saguaro arms and central columns.  Many are pinkish or red:  ripe.  Others have split open like banana peels and sun-dried.  Sweat shining, his daughter ready with a bucket below, Noland jerks the kuipad and razes down the day’s first edible jewel.  Until the 1900s the Tohono O’odham—the people of the American Indian tribe that Johnson belongs to—lived predominantly off wild desert foods.  That they did so in such an elemental, waterless country seems remarkable now; the area is so arid that mesquite roots will delve more than 150 feet for water.  The Sonoran Desert, though, is widely alive.  Hundreds of its 2,000 or so plant species are edible, and they flash in and out of season.  Chris Malloy  See pictures at https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-to-forage-sonoran-desert 

Watergate reporter Bob Woodward gave student journalists advice on getting to “the best obtainable version of the truth” during an informal conversation at the Institute of Politics (IOP) of the University of Chicago in May 2019.  “I often say if somebody came from Mars and spent a year in the United States and came back, and they asked who are the people in America who have the best jobs, they’d say the journalists,” Woodward said.  “We get to make momentary entry into people’s lives when they’re interesting—and get the hell out when they cease to be interesting!”  About halfway through the event, IOP director David Axelrod stopped in.  Axelrod asked Woodward, whom he called “a living legend,” about the future of journalism in the digital age.  “Reporters today have no luxury of time,” Axelrod said, “and it seems to me that that is really burdensome, to have to do the assiduous work required to report accurately but do it in a timeframe that’s compressed.”  Woodward agreed with Axelrod.  “The impatience and speed of the Internet and the whole Internet mentality is crippling to journalists,” he said.  “I think it’s crippling to people who read or listen to journalists [as well] because the expectation is:  Give me the summary.  Give me the one sentence.  Give me the headline.  And as we all know, sometimes the headlines are wrong.”  Woodward said that to tackle public distrust, reporters need to cultivate humility.  He referenced a letter that Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham sent him and Carl Bernstein after Nixon’s resignation, in which Graham told the pair to “beware the demon pomposity.”  “The demon pomposity stalks the halls of the media, politics, academia, business, Silicon Valley, Wall Street,” Woodward said.  “And this demon pomposity really is bad for the media.  Because what is happening is, reporters are taking sides . . . I think that is a catastrophe for the political system.”  Asked what is needed to make journalism objective again, Woodward referenced a scene from the film Dead Poets Society in which actor Robin Williams stands on his desk and asserts the importance of thinking about new ways to do things.  Like Williams in the film, Woodward said that journalists “have got to rethink everything.  It’s a big job.  I don’t know who’s doing it.  But if we don’t rethink it, we’re just heading off a cliff.”  Woodward said he is “very worried” about the future of journalism given the climate of partisanship and increasing public distrust, but that in the end, he is convinced that “there are facts.”  He offered several pieces of advice to student journalists interested in getting at those facts.  He told students to “go to the scene,” to “always show up,” and to ask sources for help.  “The four most potent words in journalism or any human contact [are]:  ‘I need your help,’” Woodward said.  Camille Kirsch  https://www.chicagomaroon.com/article/2019/5/30/woodward-students-journalism-heading-cliff/ 

“Fungi are the ultimate longevity experts, managing to pave their way through a billion years of life,” says Tonya Papanikolov, a holistic nutritionist and founder and CEO of Rainbo, a line of ingestible mushroom supplements.  “From a wellness perspective, they increase the body’s immunity and resilience to stress and have the ability to enhance brain functions, too.”  It’s also increasingly common to see the digestible variety in unexpected forms, such as mushroom lattes on the menus at wellness-minded cafés and coffee shops.  At Two Hands in New York’s Tribeca, a drink containing a reishi mushroom powder by Wylde One is listed right alongside turmeric lattes and matcha teas.  As Wylde One founder Stephanie Park notes, mushrooms are more closely related to humans than they are to plants, making their active compounds bioavailable to the human body.  “We share almost 50 percent of the same DNA with mushrooms,” she says.  Jamie Rosen   https://robbreport.com/muse/beauty-wellness/mushrooms-beauty-2918019/  See also https://www.refinery29.com/en-gb/mushroom-wellness-trend 

A ghost kitchen is a professional food preparation and cooking facility set up for the preparation of delivery-only meals.  A ghost kitchen contains the kitchen equipment and facilities needed for the preparation of restaurant meals but has no dining area for walk-in customers.  Restaurants that use ghost kitchens may have a different physical location for walk-in customers, or may be a delivery-only ghost restaurant.  A ghost kitchen differs from a ghost restaurant in that a ghost kitchen is not necessarily a restaurant brand in itself and may contain kitchen space and facilities for more than one restaurant brand.  Find examples of some delivery-only facilities at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_kitchen 

Near the end of her dissent in Shelby County v. Holder, Justice Ginsburg suggested a simple analogy to illustrate why the regional protections of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) were still necessary.  She wrote that “[t]hrowing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”  https://repository.law.umich.edu/book_chapters/81/           

In the early 20th century, there were more than 500 candy stores in Brooklyn alone.  Patrons came for the sugar, but they stayed to use telephone booths, read the newspaper, and refresh themselves at the soda fountain.  Sometimes, the neighbors just came by to hang out.  And according to Elliot Willensky, author of When Brooklyn Was the World: 1920-1957, “A candy store minus an egg cream, in Brooklyn at least, was as difficult to conceive of as the Earth without gravity.”  For a couple pennies, young soda jerks could make you an egg cream in a few seconds.  All they needed were seltzer, milk, and chocolate syrup.  No eggs and no cream.  So why the name “egg cream”?  Theories abound.  Maybe it once featured eggs and cream, but lost the ingredients after the Great Depression (plus, the drink does resemble those made with frothy egg whites, such as the Ramos Gin Fizz).  Or perhaps it was a case of a young soda jerk misunderstanding a Parisian’s heavy-accented order for chocolat et creme.  Others suspect the name is an American approximation of the Yiddish echt keem, meaning “pure sweetness.”  Candy shop owner Louis Auster is often credited with inventing the drink.  Unfortunately, Auster took his original chocolate syrup recipe to the grave.  Should you require a festive occasion to drink an egg cream, mark your calendar. March 15 is National Egg Cream Day.  https://www.atlasobscura.com/foods/egg-cream 

Stephen Sondheim wordplay from Into the Woods about an aging cow:  “while her withers wither with her”  Thank you, Muse reader!

“Names have different polarities.  Different weights.  Different histories.”  “I absorb your flattery.”  The Border Lords, Book 4 of the Charlie Hood series by T. Jefferson Parker 

“Wine is bottled poetry.”  “Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well.”  Robert Louis Stevenson  https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/854076.Robert_Louis_Stevenson 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2281  November 6, 2020