#institute of bread science

[softlymaximoff]

Head canons of Wanda Maximoff and new Avenger reader

18+ ONLY! MEN & MINORS DNI (blank blogs will be blocked you do not have my permission to republish my work onto any platform.

She absolutely terrified you. Her damn green eyes that looked like they were made out of sea glass were always watching. Most of the time they were cold or glaring and you never knew what the hell you did to be on the receiving end of it.

When cooking for the team became your job you just knew Wanda hated it. She’d barely touch the meals made, never said thanks and never offered to help. It was probably one of the most agonising parts of your week.

You, much to everyone’s surprise were also from Sokovia, or well, a small town just west of Wanda’s home country. Another thing she hated. First you come in as another failed test subject from some underground science freak lab, then become one of the team’s best additions and lastly, you were wanted.

Wanda never got the warm welcome, after the stunt she pulled all those years ago, she socially sabotaged herself. Without her brother, without her literal whole world, she was truly alone. Yes Natasha and Clint came up and checked on her every now and then but she knew it was only because Fury told them to.

You on the other hand, were the best thing the team’s seen since sliced bread. They had found you caught in a loop of ruthless behaviour after seeking you out for weeks, months even. Fist fighting men at the bar as they went to corner your mission agents, dealing with backend rivals who had done your institution wrong, targeting officials in a higher power conference from yards away. You were a spy with the ability to predict another’s internal thoughts.

Unlike Wanda however, you couldn’t show a person’s fear or control their mind. You were just a lurker in the back of someone’s dark twisted void of a thought system. You were a menace. Raised in a lab, released in a maze full of people from hell.

When they brought you in you were uncontrollable, snarky and feisty. But you weren’t a monster. You were just a vessel for the lab you escaped. REMUS was the name, Regimen, Effectus, Mactabilis, Ulciscor, Scientia. They had sedated you, Clint’s aim on his bow and arrow never ceased to amaze you.

That was 7 months ago. The team trained you to control your power and drive your combat and stealth skills to their respective teammates. Sparring with Bucky on combat drills, stealth recall practice with Nat and prediction drills with Clint and his arrows.

Wanda hated the special treatment you got. She loathed it. It made her feel even more of an outcast than she already was. Every time she’d see you with her teammates she’d scowl and put her walls up again. She never knew you saw her. You felt it. Her mind was the only one in the team you couldn’t weave your way into. No matter how hard you tried.

The only ever time her walls fell was when she’d heard your voice on a particular night you’d woken up from yet another nightmare. Your own internal battles were screaming at her to find you. Her heart hammered in her chest knowing she was the cause of this. She pushed her pride and anger down when your words became bitter and spiteful towards yourself.

That night she stood outside your door contemplating whether or not to go in but the final straw was when she’d heard your inner voice screaming for someone to make it stop. The sight of you curled up in a ball on the mattress on the floor hyperventilating made her own tears well up and she was by your side in an instant. To her surprise you didn’t even flinch, you just let her comfort you.

From then on, Wanda was nicer, a little less cold, and maybe even a little in love with you. She didn’t understand it, and neither did you. She came back to the tower one day when you and some of the crew were on a recon drill with fresh flowers from a local organic market near the compound. An array of Hibiscus, Lilly-of-the-Valley, purple Hyacinth, and a single Maidenhair Fern.

When you eventually came back from recon, Wanda’s flowers were at your room door, gentle red dust glowing around the bouquet like a whispered apology. Wanda never spoke to you much, but her actions had said all you needed to hear. You had finally found a friend in her. You were no longer a monster in her eyes, you were just you. And that’s all you could have asked for.

[whetstonefires]

okay so for the proposed very funny 'secretly half vulcan spock' modern coffeeshop AU scenario sparked by that concretes post, the only reasonable way i can see to set this up (without messing up vulcan culture in ways that would annoy me) is if Sarek crash-landed in Canada--probably alone in an escape pod, although if we want to make him the only survivor of a larger vessel coming down who evaded the government that could work too.

anyway Sarek doesn't have a sciences background to the extent Spock does, so i feel that finding himself in a 'stone knives and bearskins' scenario would be a bigger problem for him, and he'd have a great deal more trouble working around issues like 'i need some platinum to make this machine work' and his partner is like 'lol well i got bread.'

so he's stuck in canada trying to signal Vulcan for surreptitious rescue, and in the meantime he falls in with Amanda Grayson and they get him a fake identity and fulfill some cliches. and to their surprise they're reproductively viable, hello Spock.

so this fic is set like 20 years later and Spock is in college. i want to say in iowa because that's the natural habitat of jim kirk but spock is too much of a goddamn snob to go to school in iowa, they have no Notable Institutions, sorry iowa.

maybe he's got an associate professorship at the University of Iowa; academic job market sucks. Or maybe Jim left Iowa as soon as possible, being how he is, and they're in Big City.

the older they are the more you can stick them anywhere on earth for this. the younger they are, the more easily you can justify spock picking up a part-time job at the coffee shop. depends on where you want to go with the story.

anyway Jim runs (owner? manager?) the Not Starbucks indie coffee shop where Spock goes all the time (to get Not Coffee) and Spock being secretly half alien doesn't come up for ten chapters, except for how he comes across as spectacularly autistic and never takes off his stupid headband that covers his ears and eyebrows even when it's 102F.

[leroibobo]

The problem of poor nutrition among the urban poor was not only of interest to those engaged with industry and labour, but also to militaries—and thus there was also a military impetus behind the project of identifying protein requirements. During the Boer War of 1899-1902 the British military had struggled to find sufficiently tall and healthy recruits: 40-60% of would-be soldiers failed to meet the statutory height requirement (compared with around 10% in 1845) and this was suspected to be the result of poor nutrition in situations of urban poverty. A committee was set up to investigate, and the nutritional scientists they interviewed were confidently able to pinpoint the root of the problem: too little protein, especially meat and milk (although excessive drinking of overly-stewed tea was also considered a major worry). At the same time, it was feared that problems of public health might be a symptom of the “deterioration of the British race” instead of the result of poverty. The two explanations were intimately connected, since meat-eating in particular was increasingly understood as a site of racial difference and imperial superiority. Meat was believed to be necessary for bodily strength and was at least connotatively linked with desirable psychological traits like bravery and rationality; when it was found that certain populations (particularly in the US, Australia and Germany) had particularly high intakes of meat and that many Asian and African populations particularly low, this offered 19th century thinkers one possible explanation of imperial power and domination as a consequence of natural law (“the effeminate rice- eaters of India and China have again and again yielded to the superior moral courage of an infinitely smaller number of meat-eating Englishmen”). In India, distinctions were made between colonial subjects according to whether their traditional diets promoted ‘courage’ and ‘strength’. Rice in particular was condemned for its low protein content and wheat and lentils identified as preferable — but vegetarian diets of beans and grains were still fundamentally poverty diets compared with meat and milk.  The ‘ability’ to go without eating meat became a racialised symbol that could be weaponised in conflicts over labour and Asian immigration in the US (“you cannot work a man who must have beef and bread alongside of a man who can live on rice”). Institutions in the colonies offered European scientists opportunities to undertake nutritional experiments on populations “limited neither by unwillingness nor small numbers” which identified increased protein (meat, dairy, and possibly wheat) consumption as a means of improving the yield of colonial labour; thus the development of nutritional science was both informed and facilitated by racist-colonial beliefs. That said, it is hard to untangle racial from nationalist motivations here, as meat-eating also played a role in competition between western nations: the USDA saw evidence of US national superiority not just in the “starvation diets” of India and China but also in the fact that US protein recommendations were higher than those issued by European scientists.

Blaxter, T., & Garnett, T. (2022). Primed for power: a short cultural history of protein

[synthetic-ultramarine]

Without further ado, here is my post discussing the books I read in 2024, a full three months late. Click on the readmore to see my opinions about 28 books.

Books I Read and Liked in 2024

Tomie and Uzumaki by Junji Ito I read these along with Shelved by Genre, which was fun. I never really "get" slasher stories, I have a hard time figuring out the slasher's motivation as a character, but Tomie makes sense - she's like a fungus. She's a weird decomposer organism. There are some really captivating illustrations in both of these.

It's clear Junji Ito's work has been influential. He definitely has an influence on early SCP, which gives me an odd insight into the carceral elements of those stories that bother me so much. Notably, Ito doesn't include an institutional force that can defeat his monsters. The guys who wrote the early SCP stories would probably have presented themselves as epic hardcore horror fans who never get scared of anything, but I think they were scared of Tomie. They included the "police keep us safe" elements in their own stories not just because that's a common cultural narrative but because they believed it; because "the monster is still out there" scared them in ways they would never admit to, but "the police catch bad guys and keep the public safe" felt real and comforting to them in the face of that fear. This is the kind of insight you can get when you go back and read the classics.

To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis "A Delightful Romp," is, I believe, the formal literary term.

The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle I should have read this years and years ago.

Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo I was very touched by this portrayal of a teenage lesbian science fiction reader.

The Other Wind by Ursula K. LeGuin A lovely conclusion to the Earthsea series.

The Conquest of Bread by Peter Kropotkin Life-changing.

Entangled Life by Merlin Shelldrake Very good.

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer Life-changing.

I'm giving you a homework assignment: read Braiding Sweetgrass, and then Entangled Life, and then Bread, in that order.

Moby Dick by Herman Melville I think this book is good specifically because it is so slow and full of tangents. Nice to see some representation for the unnamed mental illness you get from being raised Presbyterian in Massachusetts. Also nice to see some representation for when you're talking to a sea captain and you can't tell whether the old bastard is serious or just fucking with you. Apparently that experience has not changed since the 1850s. This is the kind of insight you can get when you go back and read the classics.

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley I was in a fugue state after finishing this book. I asked a sculptor what she would do if her sculpture demanded she build a second one so it wouldn't be lonely.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte The most profoundly misunderstood of the Gothic novels.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald Incredible how you can recognize the terrible rich people of today in this depiction of the terrible rich people of 100 years ago.

Light From Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki A fascinating platonic queer My Fair Lady story; notably, it's not just the the proletarian student learning to appear classy and respectable from the high-class teacher, there's also a significant element of the teacher learning to appreciate and respect the tastes and perspectives of the student. Undertale is a plot point. And there's aliens as well. There are a lot of fun genre elements in this book, but it also touches on heavier aspects of poverty, abuse, and transmisogyny. I thought it was a substantial and ultimately hopeful story.

I, Robot by Isaac Asimov There is a moment in this book where the characters are trying to determine if a popular young politician is secretly a robot. Somebody turns to the roboticist Dr. Susan Calvin and says, "Susan - you're a woman." Jesus fucking christ, I say. here we go. "Surely you must have something to eat in your handbag." he continues. She has an apple. The politician is able to eat the apple, which suggests but does not conclusively prove that he isn't a robot. I can't argue with this. I do in fact put an apple in my bag every time I leave the house to do science.

Anyway can you fucking imagine if "don't build machines that kill people" was considered one of the most sacrosanct laws of engineering?

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut I think this is a good book. Its central metaphor is very potent. I do have to say that the portrayal of women was not great, and this would have bothered me more if it was an assigned reading rather than something I was free to put down.

Anyway can you fucking imagine if "don't build machines that kill people" was considered one of the most sacrosanct laws of engineering?

The Silver Metal Lover by Tanith Lee Reading an early scene where the main character's best friend tries to dump his boyfriend via fake seance, I realized what this book really is - it's a pre-code screwball comedy. For obvious reasons, my rule for male love interests is that they must still be interesting to people who are not attracted to them. I don't read a lot of romance because a lot of male leads fail this test, but the guy in this book passes. It's fascinating to try to figure out what he's really thinking. I wish the ending was different. Provenance by Ann Leckie I had a good time with this book - I especially liked the aliens.

Speaker For The Dead by Orson Scott Card Beautiful, powerful story about accepting other ways of life, from an author who famously does not do that in real life.

Raw Dog by Jamie Loftus This book has too many bodily fluid similes. Also, this book made me cry. It's nonfiction about hot dogs.

Chain Gang All Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah A devastating story. Incredibly good production and performances on the audiobook. Absolutely on another level when it come to "problematic characters".

Gathering Moss by Robin Wall Kimmerer Rotifera mentioned! A close friend of mine is a rotifer biologist, so they're like friends-of-a-friend to me. Quotes from the chapter about the wealthy man's garden circulate on tumblr - if you find those quotes interesting you should definitely read the whole chapter.

Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany The queerness of this story - a hugo winner from 1967 - is bold and unselfconscious. This a world where spaceships are crewed by polyamorous throuples, transgender-allegory animal people, and ghosts. The protagonist is an openly bisexual psychic poet spaceship captain. When she gets intimate with a beefy space pirate, I feel like a new release would have stopped to pat itself on the back and say "I just want to point out one thing here: When was the last time the girl kissed the boy in a space opera?". This book does not do that, it just proceeds with a scene where a psychic mind-meld is quite directly compared to pegging. I have to read more of Samuel Delany's work. What a breath of fresh air.

Books I Read and Did Not Like in 2024

Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree As I have previously discussed, I did not like this book. There is one thing I will say for it though: it's full of phrases that sound good when read aloud. "Here and there, copper-clad steeples..." is one I wrote down. Makes sense for something written by an audiobook reader. I think when people do like this book, that is probably what they see in it.

Snow Crash by Neal Stevenson This is where the word "metaverse" came from. Many of the most powerful men in the world love this book, and have sought Mr. Stevenson's counsel as a "Futurist" because of it.

Alarmingly, it is an intensely xenophobic text. This is the kind of insight you can get when you go back and read the classics. Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman I don't like how this book did gender. The threat of sexual violence is omnipresent, in a way that came across to me as empty sensationalism. The central relationship in this book is the bond between a Grizzled Thirty-Something Brown-Haired White Male Alcoholic and an orphan girl representing Innocence, complete with Mysterious Ability. This is a recognizable TvTrope, and I can't think of a single pre-modern example of it. It's Joel and Ellie, it's Booker and Elizabeth, it's a million shitty action movies. This relationship forms the emotional core of the book, drives the plot, and defines the gender dynamics of the story, and it's Conspicuously Modern. I picked this book up because I've seen a couple recommendations for it based on its historical accuracy; indeed, there is a lot of thought put toward what vegetables people would have eaten. However, in addition to the story being built around a modern action trope which expresses modern gender role anxieties, there are also a couple very significant inaccuracies near the end. There is a plot thread where the pope calls for a crusade and pogrom; this is immediately revealed to be a demon impersonating the pope, and the real human pope rescinds this decree as soon as the main characters restore him to power. There is a strong implication that a real official of the catholic church would never be an antisemite or an imperialist, only an external interloper could do that. This is of course absurd. This is followed up by a chapter that depicts hell as real, which was also not true during the 14th century, or at any other time. All the accurate details merely prop up these great inaccuracies.

So because of this book's depictions of gender and Catholicism I didn't like it and I think it is probably not worth your time. That said, the gay priest was the best part. If the traveling party had been just him and the little girl that would have been a significant improvement.

Books I Read and Had Miscellaneous Reactions to in 2024

Exordia by Seth Dickinson Man, that was fucked up. I wish it hadn't asked me to spend so much time caring about army men, but I found the high-concept concepts to be very conceptual. The first 10 percent of this book feels like its own entirely different story, and that's the part I really liked. There's a point where it rapidly shifts into the apocalyptic mode and stays there for the next 24 audiobook hours (not an exaggeration.) It's kind of exhausting. Familiarity with the original short story probably would have better prepared me for this; perhaps Tor's tumblr ads could have focused more on that, and less on a really inappropriate Marvel movie comparison.

Witchmark by C.L. Polk At first I really liked this, but the finale was surprisingly derivative of Fullmetal Alchemist, so I don't know, your mileage may vary.

[lesmisletters-daily]

Madame Victurnien’s Success

Les Mis Letters reading club explores one chapter of Les Misérables every day. Join us on Discord, Substack - or share your thoughts right here on tumblr - today's tag is #lm 1.5.9

So the monk’s widow was good for something.

But M. Madeleine had heard nothing of all this. Life is full of just such combinations of events. M. Madeleine was in the habit of almost never entering the women’s workroom.

At the head of this room he had placed an elderly spinster, whom the priest had provided for him, and he had full confidence in this superintendent,—a truly respectable person, firm, equitable, upright, full of the charity which consists in giving, but not having in the same degree that charity which consists in understanding and in forgiving. M. Madeleine relied wholly on her. The best men are often obliged to delegate their authority. It was with this full power, and the conviction that she was doing right, that the superintendent had instituted the suit, judged, condemned, and executed Fantine.

As regards the fifty francs, she had given them from a fund which M. Madeleine had intrusted to her for charitable purposes, and for giving assistance to the workwomen, and of which she rendered no account.

Fantine tried to obtain a situation as a servant in the neighborhood; she went from house to house. No one would have her. She could not leave town. The second-hand dealer, to whom she was in debt for her furniture—and what furniture!—said to her, “If you leave, I will have you arrested as a thief.” The householder, whom she owed for her rent, said to her, “You are young and pretty; you can pay.” She divided the fifty francs between the landlord and the furniture-dealer, returned to the latter three-quarters of his goods, kept only necessaries, and found herself without work, without a trade, with nothing but her bed, and still about fifty francs in debt.

She began to make coarse shirts for soldiers of the garrison, and earned twelve sous a day. Her daughter cost her ten. It was at this point that she began to pay the Thénardiers irregularly.

However, the old woman who lighted her candle for her when she returned at night, taught her the art of living in misery. Back of living on little, there is the living on nothing. These are the two chambers; the first is dark, the second is black.

Fantine learned how to live without fire entirely in the winter; how to give up a bird which eats a half a farthing’s worth of millet every two days; how to make a coverlet of one’s petticoat, and a petticoat of one’s coverlet; how to save one’s candle, by taking one’s meals by the light of the opposite window. No one knows all that certain feeble creatures, who have grown old in privation and honesty, can get out of a sou. It ends by being a talent. Fantine acquired this sublime talent, and regained a little courage.

At this epoch she said to a neighbor, “Bah! I say to myself, by only sleeping five hours, and working all the rest of the time at my sewing, I shall always manage to nearly earn my bread. And, then, when one is sad, one eats less. Well, sufferings, uneasiness, a little bread on one hand, trouble on the other,—all this will support me.”

It would have been a great happiness to have her little girl with her in this distress. She thought of having her come. But what then! Make her share her own destitution! And then, she was in debt to the Thénardiers! How could she pay them? And the journey! How pay for that?

The old woman who had given her lessons in what may be called the life of indigence, was a sainted spinster named Marguerite, who was pious with a true piety, poor and charitable towards the poor, and even towards the rich, knowing how to write just sufficiently to sign herself Marguerite, and believing in God, which is science.

There are many such virtuous people in this lower world; some day they will be in the world above. This life has a morrow.

At first, Fantine had been so ashamed that she had not dared to go out.

When she was in the street, she divined that people turned round behind her, and pointed at her; every one stared at her and no one greeted her; the cold and bitter scorn of the passers-by penetrated her very flesh and soul like a north wind.

It seems as though an unfortunate woman were utterly bare beneath the sarcasm and the curiosity of all in small towns. In Paris, at least, no one knows you, and this obscurity is a garment. Oh! how she would have liked to betake herself to Paris! Impossible!

She was obliged to accustom herself to disrepute, as she had accustomed herself to indigence. Gradually she decided on her course. At the expiration of two or three months she shook off her shame, and began to go about as though there were nothing the matter. “It is all the same to me,” she said.

She went and came, bearing her head well up, with a bitter smile, and was conscious that she was becoming brazen-faced.

Madame Victurnien sometimes saw her passing, from her window, noticed the distress of “that creature” who, “thanks to her,” had been “put back in her proper place,” and congratulated herself. The happiness of the evil-minded is black.

Excess of toil wore out Fantine, and the little dry cough which troubled her increased. She sometimes said to her neighbor, Marguerite, “Just feel how hot my hands are!”

Nevertheless, when she combed her beautiful hair in the morning with an old broken comb, and it flowed about her like floss silk, she experienced a moment of happy coquetry.

[darkmaga-returns]

Normalizing neurotoxic vaccine adjuvants has been a bread and butter staple for corporate media for over a decade. 15 years ago it was local KEYE TV CBS Austin who, with a straight face and The Science™-like authoritative tone, told you that injecting mercury ‘helps kids.’

Now, our friends at the New York Times just ran the headline, Yes, Some Vaccines Contain Aluminum. That’s a Good Thing.

In the article, the NY Times admits, “…aluminum adjuvants are found in 27 routine vaccines, and nearly half of those recommended for children under 5.”

Meanwhile, back in reality, aluminum adjuvants are literally toxic to the human body, causing cellular and nerve death. The corporate media and public health experts will tell you that the aluminum is just in the shots for a little bump…just to kick up the inflammation a notch.

Aluminum adjuvants also cause immune dysregulation, and are used in labs to induce autoimmunity in mice.

Yet aluminum adjuvants are included in 27 shots for children under 5 boasts the NY Times.

Harmful…helpful…or both?

To settle some of the controversy, attorneys representing the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN) asked the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to produce the studies relied upon to claim injected aluminum is safe.

[deliciousdietdrpepper]

Crying with my mama—

I ask what the limit to her love is.

She says that there’s nothing,

still some clarity is wanted.

She doesn’t understand

becoming something different,

but I can hold her hand

and she can ask forgiveness.

There’s a

blue sky ahead—

it grows

by keeping promises.

If god

made wheat

for bread,

then god made me to be an honest man.

Daily in communion with my deepest wishes—

shaving in the mirror,

reading science fiction.

Tomorrow and tomorrow, I will learn the meaning,

of the lengths that I will go to be alive, and love, and listen.

There’s a

blue sky ahead—

it grows

by keeping promises.

If god

made wheat

for bread,

then god made me to be an honest man.

I will not repeat the tenets of my born religion,

or lend weight to an argument that I am not sufficient.

I am not determined by the love that I am given.

I am here because I’m here because I’m here,

and it is written.

There’s a

blue sky ahead—

it grows

by keeping promises.

If god

made wheat

for bread,

then god made me to be an honest man.

I will choose myself over the institution.

I will not believe the propaganda that I’m used in.

I can break my heart to own my revolution.

Oh, and I am more courageous for the wanting.

I am more courageous for the wanting.

And I can choose to be

an honest man.

Mama, I won’t plead,

I’m simply what I am—

and you can still believe

whatever that you can.

[ivan-fyodorovich-k]

Not so long ago, the upper-middle-class Americans who exemplify the PMC would have filled the ranks of both parties. But beginning in the 1990s, professionals began migrating in large numbers to the Democrats. Many affluent people with a cosmopolitan outlook were repelled by the GOP’s social stances and drawn to the economic moderation of politicians such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. As the group made this partisan turn, the right zeroed in on the PMC as the enemy within. Conservative populists didn’t just disagree with the PMC’s political preferences; they accused an institutional elite of conniving to extend its own power. By inculcating a worldview hatched on university campuses—call it progressive or “woke”—this elite hopes to assert its dominion over the rest of society. It masquerades as the purveyor of science and objectivity, but it really is a hegemonic caste. Animosity to the PMC is a propulsive force in Trump’s second term. Rather than merely replacing its ideological foes—by installing its own appointees in federal agencies—the administration is bent on destroying their institutional homes, and the basis for their livelihood. That’s the lesson of the Department of Government Efficiency. In short order, DOGE has engaged in mass firings—sweeping attacks on the civil service as an autonomous bastion of power. The administration has moved to uproot the diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracy that sprawls across corporations and nonprofits. Although the federal government cannot crush entire universities and law firms outright, Trump has attempted to undermine their business models. The administration has eliminated many of the grants that fund research at major universities—and Republicans in Congress have proposed taxing these institutions’ endowments as well. Trump has stigmatized law firms by reprimanding them in executive orders, signaling to clients and potential clients that these firms will always be at a disadvantage in dealings with the government.In its strange inversion of American politics, the Trump administration has come far closer to executing a Marxist theory of power than any of its progressive predecessors. It has waged class warfare, not against billionaires but against a far more ubiquitous enemy. And it has done so with a certainty that justifies terrible excesses, a desire to purge that it has only just begun to realize.

. . .To the right’s own intelligentsia, two major developments that gathered force during Trump’s first presidency seemingly vindicated Burnham as a prophet who foresaw how the PMC would flex its power. One was the institutional embrace of left-wing identity politics. Corporations had spawned whole new bureaucracies devoted to DEI. Workers at Google, Nike, and The New York Times prodded the owners to shift politically in a progressive direction, ousting employees who allegedly held retrograde opinions on race and gender, propelling firms to promote minorities and invest in Black businesses. The PMC was flexing the power it had clawed away from corporate overlords. The other development was COVID-19. At the behest of public-health authorities, societies ground to a halt. The shutdown exposed the entitlements of life in the PMC, whose members holed up in their homes, streaming movies and baking bread, as others exposed themselves to the disease in the course of packing meat and delivering groceries. The opinions issued by the likes of Anthony Fauci became the basis for a new gripe: that arrogant experts were using a once-in-a-century pandemic as a pretext for stifling reasonable policy debate and exerting their own control over the country.

Isn't that exactly what happened though? For their manifold intellectual crimes it's not like the right made those two things up

Honestly, I know this writer is a member of that very class trying to defend it, and that I myself have spent many years trying to enter that class, but when they put it this way and their defense of themselves reads like an indemnification, I don't really feel that bad about what happens to them

[mariacallous]

We live today amid the dregs of time. A sense of doom is shared on all sides of the political spectrum. Democratic politics in the West has turned into a clash between two extinction rebellions and two nostalgias: an extinction rebellion of climate activists who are terrified that if we don’t radically upend our way of life, we shall destroy life on Earth, and an extinction rebellion of the “great replacement” right, which lives in fear that if something doesn’t change, it is the end of our way of life. The right is nostalgic for the past. The left is nostalgic for the vanished future. Radically different in their goals, they share one common vantage point: an apocalyptic imagination.

It is in the context of this creeping eschatological position that one can assess the originality and importance of Jonathan White’s In the Long Run: The Future as a Political Idea. White, a professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science, offers an original reading of the current crisis of democracy by defining it as a temporal regime and arguing that an “open future,” one that is not predetermined but is shaped by human agency, is a precondition for the successful functioning of democratic regimes. In his view, “When the future seems to be closing in, institutions organized around the idea of persistent disagreement and changing opinion start to look out of place.”

By contrast, the reigning characteristic of our “age of emergency” is that there is no room for error. If certain decisions are not taken today, it no longer matters whether they will be taken up tomorrow. It will be too late.

White’s argument is that, just as humans die in the absence of air to breathe, democracy can die from the inability to dream collectively. What makes democracy work is a productive tension between a near future and a distant and utopian future. The near future is the one we can plan for—the one that politicians promise to voters and remains at the center of democratic accountability. What the government did yesterday and what the parties pledge for tomorrow will always be the bread and butter of electoral politics.

White, however, is correct to insist that the distant and utopian futures, ones radically different from today’s reality, are also constitutive for democratic regimes. Distant futures are the basis for political hope today and the motivation for deferring the gratification of immediate political goals. Take the future out of democratic politics and elections turn into civil wars with ballots or a never-ending crisis management.

But today our relationship to the future is marked by collective distrust. The resulting imbalance between democracy as a project and democracy as a projection of futures—whether economic, demographic, or technological—is at the center of the West’s current crisis. Uncertainty about the future, and the resulting hope that tomorrow can be radically different from today, are the hallmarks of the democratic idea. The question is whether uncertainty is still possible in our current age of emergency.

White sees the future as a political idea that has gone through different historical iterations, not all of which have productive relationships to democracy.

His consideration of rational calculation is a useful case study. White makes clear the opportunities, and far greater risks, to assuming that the future can be mastered by experts who have mastered the scientific method and the use of statistical data. This faith was on the ascent in the early 20th century, White explains, when new forms of accounting inspired confidence in the power of business to project future earnings. The market forecaster was the new sage, and technocracy as a collective tool to solve the ills of man was infectious. Planning would become a new mantra and a way that ideologies of very different stripes could make sense of what came next.

But how does this impulse to rationally plan the future square with the open-mindedness of democracy and its inherent uncertainty principle? It would seem to be in contradiction. As White writes, “To assume the stability of people’s preferences is to discount the worth of a political process that seeks to change them.” One definition of democracy, offered by the political scientist Adam Przeworski, is a system in which elections cannot be changed ex post or predicted ex ante. Some things have to be left open to chance if a democracy is to be worthy of the name.

It is here that White’s stress on the utility of aspirational futures becomes a separate and essential dimension. Were everything to be left to expert planning or price signaling, the world of imagination would rapidly become impoverished. We would be taking our social cues from rational planners and prognosticators. Although White doesn’t mention him, the late sociologist Erik Olin Wright’s decadeslong research program on “real utopias” is instructive. Wright never lost sight of conceiving in bold yet imaginable terms a world of tomorrow that was also rooted in today’s pragmatic realities, squaring the circle of a wishful long game and the acceptance of the here and now.

In arguing for the critical importance of the future for the success of the democratic project, White is highly persuasive. But in trying to answer how the future could be reimagined, his analysis is less convincing. Out of fear of alienating, it seems, a progressive constituency, he stands guilty of diluting his most salient points while preaching the return of an old ideological politics. When trying to suggest the way out of the current age of emergencies, White starts to sound like a nostalgic leftist. His plea for the return of the revolutionary party strongly committed to a future project sounds noble but is ultimately unrealistic, as the absence of any suggestions for how to create this collective ideological project in his book seems to attest. In recent decades, the spontaneous resurrection of ideological politics has become the left’s version of alchemy.

White’s most important suggestion is also the least inspirational. In his view, the only way to escape the trap of a politics of emergency is to confront head-on the apocalyptic appeal of both the climate left and the great replacement right. Alexis de Tocqueville was one of the first to assert that the discourse of crisis is the native language of any genuine democracy. Democratic politics, he claimed, need drama. “As the election approaches,” Tocqueville observed in his classic travelogue, Democracy in America, “intrigue becomes more active and agitation lively and more widespread. The entire nation falls into a feverish state. … As soon as fortune has pronounced … everything becomes calm, and the river, one moment overflowed, returns peacefully to its bed.”

Democracy thus operates by framing the normal as catastrophic, while promising that all crises are surmountable, thus framing catastrophe as normal. Democratic politics functions as a nationwide therapy session where voters are confronted with their worst nightmares—a new war, demographic collapse, economic crisis, environmental horror—but are convinced they have the power to avert the devastation. In other words, democratic politics is impossible without a persistent oscillation between excessive overdramatization and trivialization of the problems we face. Elections lose their cogency when they fail to convince us that we’re confronting an unprecedented crisis and that we have it in our power to avert it.

It is at this point that the climate left ceases to be a friend of democracy—not because it is wrong in its judgment of the existential threat of global warming, but because its apocalyptic discourse prevents democracy from finding its necessary solutions. As White argues convincingly, “The sense of finality that fills today’s world is central to its volatility.”

In this context, it is worth comparing the anti-nuclear movement of the 1970s to the extinction rebellion of today. It is impossible to overstate the apocalyptic impact of the atomic bomb. For a world emerging from the ashes of World War II, the bomb was the end of the world imagined. But in political terms, preventing nuclear disaster was far easier than preventing climate disaster. To prevent nuclear disaster, it was enough for Soviet and American leaders to refrain from using the ultimate weapon. There was no time dimension. The success was to persuade the leaders of the two superpowers of what not to do. In a nuclear disaster, almost all of humanity will die simultaneously.

It is not the same with a climate disaster. It will take a longer time. At least initially, there will be winners and losers. And success will be measured not by telling leaders what not to do, but by convincing them to do certain things without necessarily a consensus around what might work. So, while the threat of nuclear disaster succeeded in mobilizing a global response that was a political success, the risk is that the climate emergency can result in fatalism and demobilization.

This banalization of catastrophe is the only way to make democracy work. Ultimately, this is also White’s important and necessary conclusion, one that he is shy to endorse. As the literary critic Frank Kermode argued, “Crisis is a way of thinking about one’s moment, and not inherent in the moment itself.” Our apocalyptic views of crisis and catastrophe are ways of making sense of the world, of rendering it intelligible.

White diagnoses today’s actually existing system of Western democracy as one exhausted of political imagination. The diagnosis is appropriate, but we should look closer to the cultural factors that have caused this exhaustion.

Reinhart Koselleck, the German intellectual historian, is helpful here in that he always insisted that modernity is defined in the dialectic between the “space of experience” and the “horizon of expectation.” But recently, something radical has again happened to both dimensions of our existence. Humankind’s recent collective migration into virtual reality redefines how we understand experience. Do we have war experience if we spent countless hours playing war games on our computer or if we religiously followed reports of ongoing wars happening elsewhere?

At the same time, the expectations about our own mortality are undergoing dramatic transformations. Could it be that we have reached the moment when nations start to look mortal while individuals are reluctant to take their own mortality for granted? It might be safe to argue that the changing demography of Western societies, their aging and shrinking, is one of the factors of the exhaustion of political imagination. Does an often childless younger generation view the future the same way that previous generations focused on the life of their children did? Is the diminishment of the nation-state in most parts of the West not at least partially responsible for the decline of the future? Is collective imagination, particularly a collective demographic imagination, in elective affinity with the nation-state?

And is the impotence of our collective imagination not related to the fact that, for some, particularly those resident in Silicon Valley, immortality is a project to be achieved in the very near future? Some informed observers believe the person who will live for 200 years has already been born. In this perversely paradoxical sense, anxiety about the apocalypse is fueled by our hope to cancel it forever. In our secular world, apocalypse is simply our own death.

In the same way that the invention of the modern individual was a precondition for the emergence of democracy in modern times, it is the hope of individual immortality that marks the end of collective dreams. Many would agree with Woody Allen when he explained, “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don’t want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment.”

The vanishing future is probably the most critical element for the current crisis of democracy. But it can’t be overcome by simply advocating for more democracy. And while White may not offer the needed answers, he is doing something even more important, and long overdue, by asking the right questions.

[ihatestarlings]

Friendly reminder that there is NO amount of microplastics that are considered safe, and they are in everything!

In a great study from 2021, published in the Journal of Hazardous Materials, it was shown that microplastic fibers, the same stuff that sloughs off from polyester fabric, causes intestinal damage and all sorts of other problems in Zebra fish (Zhao et al, 2021). This study essentially shows that microplastic fibers will cause harm to your digestive system.

BUt FIsH aRnT PEoPLe - Yes! Zebra Fish aren’t humans! But it is IMPOSSIBLE to fully test the impacts of microplastics on humans; A lot of these studies depend on looking at the physical state of the digestive tract, which can’t be done with euthanizing the organism that is being looked at, which you can’t really do to people. Also, pretty much everyone has ingested some amount of microplastics, so there really isn’t a good basis for comparison.

Even tho testing the effects of microplastics on people is difficult, there is still a ton of really cool research being done! Some really cool people donated their bodies to science, and researchers were able to look at their organs for microplastics, and got a ton of great information! This study showed that microplastics accumulated in human livers, kidneys, and brains. This means that it is hard for your body to get rid of microplastics, and these microplastics will stay in fragile areas for an extended period of time (Camden et al. 2024).

So, what can you do to keep yourself safe(er)? If you have the means, don’t get anything made of plastic! This means acrylic, polyester, nylon, and any other plastic fabrics. Don’t eat pre-processed food, like pre-breaded fish and microwave meals. Use wood cutting boards instead of plastic ones, and metal/wood cutlery instead of plastic!

This is a really complex problem, it’s really overwhelming to think about. But, we can do it! If we all take at least one step forward, we can go miles together.

TLDR: Microplastics are bad for your health, don’t use plastic.

Reading list:

Zhao et al. 2021 - Journal of Hazardous Materials

Ahrendt et al. 2020 - Marine Pollution Bulletin

Camden et al. 2024 - National Institute of Health

(there’s a lot more, but this is getting really long)

[argyleheir]

7, 16 and 60 for the "Ask meme for people in their 30s" (and up)

Yes! Thanks for the ask @great-exhibition-of-1851 🖤

7 Any groceries you've been getting into lately?

Shout out to Saf yeast! Just got a fresh block of it last weekend and am always reminded, if forced to go back to the little satchets from the baking isle, that Saf is the best. Trying to up my bread game this year :)

16 Where do you go when you need to get out of the house but it's raining?

Kind of haven't much recently but the movies!

60 Do you have an opinion on your local weather reporter?

I don't really watch local news much but there was a weather reporter I grew up watching named Hurricane Schwartz who would team up with the folks at the Franklin Institute science museum in Philadelphia to do some really neat reports.

Ask me!

[hplovecraftmuseum]

As I've mentioned previously, could Lovecraft's choice of an octopoid -type monster as inspiration for

his "High Priest", Great Cthulhu have followed a long tradition in Western symbolism? In the exploration of the Mafia by Claire Sterling titled, OCTOPUS, the multi-armed and all insinuating power of the Mafia is recorded. Political cartoons have incorporated tentacled monsters for more than 200 years and reflect on the insidious and subliminal powers of various government and corporate institutions over the general public. Of course Lovecraft did not believe in his own fictional entities, but could the permeating influence of humankind's various religious institutions have been symbolic to him in HPL's Cthulhu too? Cthulhu is prophesied to return one day just as many of the world's religions believe that their own prophets will return. Lovecraft himself was particularly dismissive of Christianity. Catholics particularly make prayers to a man dead and crucified on a cross of wood. To an outsider of the religion, Christian symbolism might look particularly grotesque and contradictory. In the face of modern science the stories of Jesus walking on water, raising the dead, feeding the masses from a single loaf of bread, etc, etc, might seem utterly outrageous. Just as the gods and 'Truths' of historic religious beliefs stretch the boundaries of logic and reason so too do many of the monsters and concepts presented in Lovecraft's fiction. (Exhibit 432)

[mfaunlv]

Here They Come!

Meet the Incoming Class

PhD/ Black Mountain Institute Fellows

Krista Diamond (Nonfiction)

Krista Diamond's essays and fiction have appeared in or are forthcoming in The New York Times, Slate, Hazlitt, Longreads, Catapult, Joyland, TriQuarterly, Beloit Fiction Journal, Porter House Review, and elsewhere. Her writing has been supported by Bread Loaf, Tin House, Sundress Academy for the Arts, and the Nevada Arts Council. In 2022, she was writer-in-residence for Desert Companion Magazine for whom she wrote a series of essays about Las Vegas lore. Her essay 'That Girl is Going to Get Herself Killed' was recorded by Oscar-nominated actress Naomie Harris for Curio. Prior to moving to Las Vegas, she worked in the national parks. She has an MFA in fiction from UNLV and is looking forward to continuing her journey at UNLV where she will be happy to offer personalized recommendations about desert hiking and Las Vegas tiki bars.

Arpita Roy (Poetry)

Arpita received her MFA in Poetry from George Mason University, where she was the Thesis Poetry Fellow for 2023-24. She has been awarded Cheuse Center Travel Fellowship and Bread Loaf Katharine Bakeless Nason Award. Her work can be found in Thrush, Psaltery & Lyre, Couplet Poetry and X-Ray. Arpita is from Kolkata, India.

Fiction MFA

Gustavo Alvarenga

Gustavo Alvarenga is a Salvadoran born writer whose cultural background and strong family bonds play heavily into his fiction. He was raised in the suburbs of Northern Virginia but moved to Las Vegas during his sophomore year of high school when his parents relocated for work. He worked as a technician in the telecom industry for over a decade before deciding to switch careers and commit fully to the art of writing. He enjoys board games, hikes with his dog, rainy days, snowboarding, rock climbing, and meeting new people.

Jade Bailey

Jade Bailey grew up in Kansas. After completing a BSc in Anthropology at the University of British Columbia and an MSc in Applied Social Research at Trinity College Dublin, she worked as a social researcher in Dublin, Ireland. She is pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing at UNLV.

Shayla Felix

Shayla Felix (She/her) is a disabled writer born and raised in Seattle Washington. She originally attended Eastern Washington University but later transferred, completing her BA in English with a Creative writing Emphasis at Western Washington University. Most of her writing focuses on hybridity with topics orbiting around Magical realism, feminism, nature, and self-identity. Some of her favorite pieces that she’s written appear in Voidspace_, Quarter After Eight, and Cold Mountain Review. She also hopes to travel to all 50 states one day.

Julia Lu

Julia is a fiction writer currently living in Houston, Texas, where she was born and raised. She studied film production in college. Julia enjoys cooking and baking, taking walks, and picture books. Her favorite season is summer.

Izuchukwu Udokwu

Izuchukwu Onyedibiemma Udokwu is a Nigerian storyteller. His work has appeared on LOLWE, Kalahari Review, AFREADA and others. He was shortlisted for the 2020 K & L Prize. His shortlisted story was published in an anthology of speculative fiction on Africanfuturism, Black Skin No Mask. He lives in Lagos, Nigeria, where he is a fashion designer and an interior designer, and still makes time to read and write stories.

Poetry MFA

Hüseyin Arıkan

Hüseyin Serhat Arıkan is an immigrant and poet from Ankara, Turkey. He earned his BS in Political Science from METU. He's excited to have his second collection, "Firar Folkloru" (The Folklore of Escape) published in Turkey this year. He is a progressive rock enthusiast and he can't manage to maintain a streak in Duolingo.

JM Huck

JM Huck is coming to creative writing with a background in visual art. She studied photography, printmaking and textiles at many schools in New York City, where she lived for eight years. JM spent three years teaching English in Japan, and she grew up a "third culture kid," graduating from an American High School in Italy. She has been placemaking her whole life and is happy to call Nevada her current home. Huck's undergraduate degree is in Economics from Agnes Scott College.

Seth Kleinschmidt

Seth Kleinschmidt is a poet from rural Wisconsin. Hailing from Lorine Niedecker's hometown, he proudly champions the Midwest in his poetry and is currently at work on a collection of sonnets about the Black Hawk War. He graduated with a degree in literary arts from Brown and has worked in the radio industry, both on and off the air, for fifteen years. Seth arrives in Las Vegas from Washington, DC, and in free moments plays soccer, bakes pies, and browses adoptable cats.

Lindsay Loughin

Lindsay Loughin is a nonbinary bipolar poet and essayist born in California and raised everywhere else. At one point a US Marine, and at another a high school marching band instructor, their current boss once said their resume looks like a fake person. They live with their two cats, collect cassette tapes and N64 games, and have a complicated relationship with the Oxford comma.

Non-Fiction MFA

Anesce Dremen

(photograph is courtesy of a collaboration with Balvinder Singh)

Anesce Dremen is a U.S. writer and educator often found with a tea cup in hand, traveling between the U.S., China, and India. A first generation college student and domestic violence survivor, Anesce studied in four cities in China with the support of the Critical Language Scholarship and Gilman Scholarship. She was a 2022-23 Fulbright-Nehru ETA in India. Anesce’s work has been published in Stillhouse Press, Gordon Square Review, SPAN Magazine, Tea Journey, Persephone’s Daughters, The Bombay Literary Magazine, Tiny Spoon, and Shanghai Poetry Lab, among others. Her work can be found at AnesceDremen.com.

Taylor Wright

Taylor Bradley Wright graduated from the University of Iowa with a BA in Playwriting before moving back to Los Angeles and founding a non-profit production company: 48 Hours Theatre. She's written and staged multiple original works, including A Dead Rabbit, One by One, and When the Lights Go Out, and was a 2023 finalist for the Dramatists Guild Foundations National Fellows program for her play, 1976: A Motel. For the past decade, she's been working event logistics, publicity, and talent relations for large-scale events across the country, including the Oscars, The Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Literary Festival, and over 100 film premieres, luncheons, screenings, and galas. She published her first novel, There's No Place Like House, in 2021 and has travelled from The Tattered Cover in Denver, CO to Prairie Lights in Iowa City for live readings and book signings. Her next book, Los Angeles: A Eulogy, is forthcoming. She is over the moon to be moving to Las Vegas with her banjo-playing husband and rescue pup, Olive, this summer to start this new chapter as a grad student at UNLV.

[witherns]

      nothing burns quite like the cold [...] the uncanny witchery of its changed trees [...] deep in the forest I stroll to hear the wisdom of winter [...] there's something horribly lonely about a place that's almost home [...] don't forget what I am [...] a withering winter…

      Atsushi’s parents carefully selected Yōsen High School for his education, seeking an institution that would embody their family’s cultural values and Catholic faith while exposing him to international perspectives. Though located far from their home in Kyoto, Yōsen’s unique blend of Catholic education, Western-inspired architecture, and diverse student body made it the perfect choice.

      As a mission-kei school—a term informally used to describe institutions emphasizing holistic development and social contribution—Yōsen required all students to attend morning mass at 7:30 a.m. and complete annual volunteer work, while offering robust exchange programs that attracted students from around the world.

      His parents had specifically chosen Yōsen to counter what they saw as Japan’s cultural inflexibility, wanting Atsushi to develop cross-cultural understanding alongside academic rigor. The school’s strict curriculum nurtured intellectual, physical, and spiritual growth through mandatory club participation, student-led tutoring, and communal activities like campus cleaning—all of which Atsushi navigated with quiet diligence.

      Under his parents’ insistence, he joined the basketball club, served on the health committee, and tutored exchange students from Korea and France, though he often found excuses to avoid helping English-speaking peers. Despite his academic success—graduating with honors—he felt adrift, uncertain of his future path.

      With his sharp mind, Atsushi could have pursued law, medicine, or even the arts, but he defaulted to his strongest subject: physics. He earned his bachelor’s degree in Theoretical Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics at Harvard, followed by a master’s in Nuclear Physics at the University of Caen Normandie, and finally a PhD from the Dalton Nuclear Institute.

      Yet, throughout his years of intense study, he found unexpected respite working part-time at a small bakery in Caen. The tactile joy of baking, so different from the abstractions of theoretical physics, stayed with him. After completing his doctorate, he took the opportunity to enroll at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, where he trained in Gastronomy and Culinary Arts.

      Fifteen years after graduating from Yōsen, at the age of 33, Atsushi returned to Kyoto—not as a nuclear physicist, but as the owner of a warmly lit bakery, where the exacting precision of science met the artistry of pastry.

      In the end, the education his parents had so carefully orchestrated led him somewhere they never anticipated: to a quiet life of flour-dusted mornings, the scent of fresh bread, and the satisfaction of creating something tangible.

[24worldnewsnet]

centuries, the people of Odisha have turned to pakhala – a fermented rice dish – to beat the heat. Now it's gaining global attention.It was a scorching hot day in Bhubaneswar, the capital of Odisha in eastern India. As the temperature soared, my university friends and I rushed to the cafeteria for the meal we looked forward to most in summer: a bowl of pakhala (water rice). Light and tangy, the dish gave us immediate relief from the oppressive heat. Two decades later, as I sit in my apartment in the dry heat of Riyadh, it remains my go-to comfort food in summer, especially after a long day in the sun. Pakhala is Odisha's unique summertime ritual. Also known as "poor man's gruel", the simple dish is made from leftover cooked rice soaked in water and fermented overnight in an earthen pot. It is usually mixed with yoghurt, tempered with mustard seeds, dried red chillies and curry leaves and served with a variety of sides such as mashed potatoes, sautéed green leafy vegetables and fried fish.Odias (people of Odisha) have consumed pakhala since ancient times since it's affordable and easy to prepare, yet nutritionally rich. "The earliest documented use of pakhala dates back to the 12th Century, when the dish was offered to Lord Jagannath (a Hindu deity worshipped in Odisha) at the Jagannath Temple in Puri," says Ritu Pattanaik, food historian and the author of the cookbook 259 Inherited Recipes of Odisha. "Even today, pakhala is one of the best foods to have when temperatures rise."Odisha has always been an agrarian society, and rice is a staple. "In the olden days, it was typical for women in the house to add water to leftover rice from lunch. There was no refrigerator at the time, so this prevented the rice from spoiling. In the morning, men ate this fermented rice and water before heading out to work in the fields. Pakhala gave them energy and helped them beat the afternoon heat."Central to pakhala's benefits is the slightly sour, probiotic-rich fermented water known as torani, which hydrates and protects the body against heat stroke. Once water and rice have undergone fermentation, torani becomes a rich source of lactic acid bacteria, which protect the stomach and intestines from infection and aid digestion.The dish is usually served with sides like fried fish and mashed potatoes (Credit: Ramya Maitreyee)"However, the benefits of torani don't end there," adds Dr Balamurugan Ramadass, professor at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Bhubaneswar. "In addition to probiotics, torani is a rich source of short-chain fatty acids (SCFA) with antiviral and anti-inflammatory properties. It also contains vitamin K, which [helps] heals wounds faster."He notes that torani delivers instant energy to an exhausted body, "which is why farmers consume one to two litres of it before going to work every day. An average person with a desk job can have two to three cups of torani daily and still benefit from this healing beverage."So trusted are torani's health benefits that India's National Disaster Management Authority advises people to drink it during heatwaves. In a country where extended summer heatwaves are becoming the norm, drinks like torani are increasingly seen as functional superfoods that both cool and nourish the body. "One of the simplest ways to increase your torani intake is to consume pakhala instead of plain rice or bread for lunch," says chef Abinas Nayak, winner of MasterChef India Season 6. He notes that pakhala is straightforward to prepare. "Take leftover cooked rice, pour water over it and leave it in an earthen pot to ferment overnight. Pakhala will be ready in the morning."Because of the humble ingredients and simple cooking method, a bowl of pakhala costs less than a dollar to buy – and significantly less to prepare at home. "In some ways, pakhala is the great equaliser in our society. It's accessible to and loved by everyone, regardless of class, income or background," says Nayak.Central to pakhala's benefits is the probiotic-rich fermented water know

[auro-university-blogs]

Why a Bakery and Patisserie Course Could Be Your Recipe for Success

Have you ever wondered why those beautifully crafted pastries and breads inspire such happiness? If your answer is yes then pursuing a bakery and patisserie course might be the ideal path for you. Whether you are a home baker dreaming of turning your passion into a profession or a student exploring culinary options, this guide will walk you through why this course could shape a rewarding career.

Turn a Passion for Baking into a Profession

Baking is a craft that brings joy to both the creator and the consumer. A bakery and patisserie course helps you transform that passion into a professional skill set. By joining a structured program, you gain access to expert instructors who guide you through techniques like fermenting, proofing, glazing, shaping, and decorating. You learn not only to follow recipes but also to innovate with flavors and visual appeal. This hands-on learning elevates your hobby into a credible craft that can become a career.

Master the Fundamentals Step by Step

Every successful baker relies on a strong foundation. The curriculum typically includes core topics such as:

Baking science covers yeast reactions and gluten development

Dough making for bread, cookies, and viennoiserie

Pastry methods like laminating and choux

Creams, filling, icing, and tempering chocolate

By mastering each element, you develop precision and attention to detail. You learn why ingredients matter, why temperature control is critical, and how subtle variations affect structure and taste. These fundamentals build confidence and open the door to creative experimentation.

Expand Your Creative and Entrepreneurial Horizons

Once you grasp the basics, you can unleash your creativity. A patisserie course encourages experimentation with flavor pairings, international techniques, and presentation artistry. Imagine reinventing classics like croissants with local ingredients or crafting elegant dessert plates that taste as great as they look.

If you dream of starting your own bakery or dessert brand, the course also covers valuable entrepreneurial insights. You gain knowledge on menu planning, cost analysis,  food safety regulations, branding, and customer service. With real-world training, you can launch your business equipped with a solid plan and practical skills.

Access Professional Facilities and Real World Practice

Professional baking labs replicate real bakery environments. You train on industrial ovens, mixers, proofing cabinets, and display setups. These facilities simulate the pressures of a commercial kitchen, ensuring you adapt easily to professional settings.

Many courses offer internship opportunities with bakeries, hotels or patisserie shops. This real world exposure helps you understand workflow manage orders and interact with customers. You also gain confidence in meeting quality standards and working within teams.

Network with Experts and Peers

Studying in a bakery and patisserie course connects you with fellow baking enthusiasts and instructors with industry experience. You share ideas collaborate on projects and build relationships that can support your growth. These connections often open doors to workshops internships and even job offers.

Prepare for Diverse Career Options

A patisserie diploma unlocks many career avenues. You could become a pastry chef baker chocolate artisan cake designer or work in F B management. You might specialize in wedding dessert styling wholesale bakery operations or boutique patisserie startup ventures.

Graduates are sought after in hotels restaurants high end cafes patisserie shops catering companies and culinary product development firms. Some even become food stylists or writers sharing knowledge through blogging teaching or online content.

Build Confidence and Professional Credibility

Certification from a reputable institute builds credibility with employers customers and investors. It demonstrates that you can deliver consistent high quality work and follow industry standards. This credential can be a key differentiator in a competitive market.

Furthermore working under guidance you develop important soft skills such as time management organization teamwork and leadership. These qualities are valuable in any work environment and help propel your career forward.

Why This Course Stands Out

Structured learning path helps you master techniques systematically

Hands on practice in professional kitchens prepares you for real roles

Creative freedom encourages innovation and personal style

Entrepreneurial training supports business ideas and freelancing ambitions

Industry networking connects you to potential employers and collaborators

Why Choose the Right Institute

The impact of your patisserie qualification depends heavily on where you study. Look for institutes that offer:

Professional standard labs and equipment

Experienced chefs as instructors

Balanced theory and practical modules

Internship placements in real bakeries or hotels

Support in career planning or business setup

If you want a well-rounded education that prepares you for success, consider exploring programs like the Diploma in Culinary, Baker,y and Patisserie offered by AURO University. They provide a mix of hands-on training, entrepreneurial guidanc,e and creative coursework that equips students for industry challenges. Their program creates confident graduates ready to step into professional kitchens or launch their own ventures.

Final Thoughts

A bakery and patisserie course offers so much more than baking skills. It teaches culinary science, artistic design, and professional discipline. It guides you toward entrepreneurship or opens doors in renowned kitchen establishments. If you love turning ingredients into edible works of art, this path could lead to a fulfilling career full of creativity and practical rewards.

If you are open to exploring top-notch culinary education beyond your current option, take a closer look at AURO University. With its focus on quality, learning supportive community, and career development, it could be the perfect launchpad for your bakery and patisserie journey.