long drive essay

“Journey into the Unknown: the Long Drive as a Unique Odyssey”

“Embark on a unique exploration of the long drive, where every mile becomes a chapter in a narrative of self-discovery. This essay delves into the literal and metaphorical dimensions of the journey, painting a vivid picture of the open road as a canvas for experiences as diverse as the landscapes it traverses. Discover the nuances of freedom, spontaneity, and personal growth, as the long drive unfolds as a distinctive odyssey, shaping individual narratives with each turn of the wheel.”

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“Journey into the Unknown: The Long Drive as a Unique Odyssey”

Embark on a distinctive odyssey as we delve into the realm of the long drive, where each mile unfolds a narrative of its own. The open road, stretching into the horizon, becomes a canvas for exploration and self-discovery, weaving a tapestry of experiences as unique as the winding paths ahead.

In the literal sense, the long drive transforms into a canvas of landscapes, each stretch of road presenting a dynamic interplay between the vehicle and its surroundings.

Picture a solitary driver cruising along scenic routes, or a group of friends forging memories amidst the changing scenery. These instances epitomize the essence of the long drive, where the journey becomes as significant as the destination.

Metaphorically, the long drive becomes a metaphor for life’s journey, a road trip of self-discovery and personal growth. Each turn, each detour, becomes a chapter in the unfolding story of the traveler’s life. The solitude of the road, the rhythm of the wheels against the pavement, becomes a symphony that accompanies introspection and contemplation. Like a protagonist navigating their own narrative, the traveler embraces the uncertainties and discoveries along the way.

Rooted in the exploration of the unknown, the long drive invites contemplation on the nuances of freedom and spontaneity. It challenges us to discern the intricate choreography between the traveler and the ever-changing landscapes, fostering a deeper understanding of how the journey shapes perspectives and forges memories.

The long drive is not just a physical movement from one point to another; it is a metaphorical exploration of the self and the world. By navigating the vast stretches of road, we gain insights into our own desires, fears, and aspirations. The road becomes a teacher, offering lessons in resilience, adaptability, and the beauty of the unexpected.

The exploration of the long drive transcends the commonplace; it becomes a pilgrimage into the heart of personal freedom. It encourages us to navigate the complex interplay of solitude and camaraderie, recognizing the profound influence of the journey on our individual narratives.

In conclusion, the long drive unfolds as a distinctive odyssey of self-discovery, where the road becomes a storyteller, and each mile marks a unique chapter. As we traverse the winding paths and open highways, the long drive stands as a guiding force, illuminating the profound ways in which the journey shapes the narratives of our lives.

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The Long Trail: Life on the Cattle Drive

Old-time drovers sought adventure but often suffered long stretches of boredom, not to mention deadly lightning, accidents, sickness and choking trail dust.

‘Head ’em up! Move ’em out!’ These six words, which closed most episodes of the popular TV series Rawhide (1959–65), sum up what many Americans know about the cattle drives of the post-Civil War West—that is to say, little. In fact, the early cattle drives went far toward healing Texas’ depressed postwar economy, while supplying much-needed beef to the Indian reservations and gold camps up north, and to the markets and homes of the nation’s Midwest and East. It was a process born of dire necessity, which soon passed into legend, coming to represent the cowboy and his Wild West to the rest of the nation and the world.

The cattle drive was not a novel concept. In the prewar years Texans drove beef on a small scale to the goldfields of California and the Rockies, and to the forts and reservations of the Southwest. But when the war ended in 1865, the South faced an economic collapse of staggering proportions, and Texas was no exception. One resource Texans had in plenty, however, was cattle. During the war, Texas cattle—almost exclusively of the temperamental, slab-sided, long-horned variety—had been roaming wild and procreating, with no local market in sight. One old-time trail drover recalled: “By the time the war was over they was down to $4 a head—when you could find a buyer. Here was all these cheap long-horned steers overrunning Texas; here was the rest of the country crying for beef—and no railroads to get them out. So they trailed them out, across hundreds of miles of wild country that was thick with Indians.”

The situation called for mobile commerce on a grand scale. Within a year of returning home from the battlefield, Texas cowboys drove an estimated quarter-million cattle north, making Texas the world’s undisputed ranching and cattle capital. The principal route the Texas ranchers took was the Chisholm Trail, named for cattle pioneer and trader Jesse Chisholm and extending from central Texas to the railhead in Abilene, Kansas. The “end of trail” changed based on what towns sprang up in the wake of the railroad as it snaked its way across the country’s midsection. As early as the summer of 1866, the pioneer Montana entrepreneur Nelson Story drove a herd of cattle from Texas to the Montana Territory goldfields, traveling the last stretch through Indian country on the contested Bozeman Trail. By 1886, an estimated 20 million “beeves”— 2,000 or 3,000 at a time, averaging 12 to 15 miles a day—made the journey up the northern trails (Chisholm, Goodnight-Loving, Western, etc.), to Newton, Ellsworth, Abilene, Wichita and Dodge City in Kansas; or to Sedalia, Missouri; or Ogallala, Nebraska; or Cheyenne, Wyoming Territory; or Miles City, Montana Territory. Most of the cattle ended up in the slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants of Chicago. The nation got its much-needed beef, and in the bargain the cowboy attained the status of America’s archetypal folk hero.

The Drovers

Traditionally, a trail herd of any size required a crew of 10 to 15 men. When he wasn’t off seeking water or scoping the route, the trail boss generally rode point, as did the cook (aka “belly-cheater,” “biscuit shooter” and other unprintable nicknames) and his chuck wagon—a practical carryall purportedly devised by famed Texas cowman Charles Goodnight. Behind them, one to a side, were the lead riders, followed by the swing riders and flankers. Off to one side rode the wrangler, who tended to the remuda—the small herd of reserve horses. Bringing up the rear, enveloped by the dust of thousands of plodding hooves, were the drag riders. “The poorest men always worked with the drags,” recalled one trail drover, “because a good hand wouldn’t stand for it. I have seen them come off herd with the dust half an inch deep on their hats and thick as fur in their eyebrows and mustaches.” Not that the others fared much better. “They would go to the water barrel at the end of the day and rinse their mouths and cough and spit and bring that black stuff out of their throats.”

The men who signed on to coax the recalcitrant Longhorns from the Texas scrub up the northern trails went by various names: waddie, drover/driver, herder, cowhand and the ever-popular cowboy. The terms cowpuncher and cowpoke—first used to define the men who used long poles to prod the cows aboard stock cars at the railheads—eventually became synonymous with cowboy. By some estimates at least one-third of them were black or Mexican. A number of former drovers wrote memoirs or narrated accounts of their adventures. Among the best-known and most readable is We Pointed Them North (1939), the recollections of Edward C. “Teddy Blue” Abbott, an Englishman who went up the trail for the first time in 1871 and eventually settled in Montana. Trail drovers were generally young. Most, Abbott wrote, were of medium build, quick and wiry, “as a heavy man was hard on horses.” They were, he recalled, “as a rule very good-natured; in fact it did not pay to be anything else.…I have seen them ride into camp after two days and nights on herd, lay down on their saddle blankets in the rain and sleep like dead men, then get up laughing and joking about some good time they had had in Ogallala or Dodge City.” Fiercely loyal to the outfit, they would, Teddy Blue insisted, “follow their wagon boss through hell and never complain.” The drovers were a nervy bunch. “There was only two things the old-time cowpuncher was afraid of,” Abbott wrote, “a decent woman and being set afoot.”

Most cowboys went up the trail for the adventure (to “see the elephant,” as they might have put it). Certainly, it wasn’t the pay that attracted them. The drive, which could take anywhere from several weeks to several months, depending on the trail and destination, could be boring for long stretches at a time, with nothing to see but flat land, dust and the bony hind ends of the cattle. That said, any number of natural and manmade challenges arose to break up the boredom. Among the most nerve-racking was the fording of rivers—and there were many rivers to cross. A drover had to negotiate several before leaving Texas. One old trail-drive song of the period, “The Rivers of Texas” (aka “The Brazos River”), names and describes each in turn:

We crossed the broad Pecos, we forded the Nueces, We swum the Guadeloupe, we followed the Brazos; Red River runs rusty, the Wichita clear, But down by the Brazos I courted my dear.

The fair Angelina runs glossy and gliding, The crooked Colorado runs weaving and winding, And the slow San Antonio it courses the plain, But I never will walk by the Brazos again.

Rivers could be fearsome obstacles, especially when they ran high. A swift current could carry away a cow, a horse or a man. Even slow water masked quicksand and deep holes. Crossing on one’s own was often a chore, but doing so in the company of a few thousand unpredictable cattle could tax a man’s endurance—or cost him his life.

There was no shortage of ways to die on a trail drive. If Western filmmakers are to be believed, gunplay was the primary cause of death among drovers. This is pure Hollywood, although trail outfits did face raids by hostile Indians and rustlers, as well as occasional resistance by armed settlers who balked at having their land trampled. One old-time Texas trail boss recalled: “That was a pretty hard set of people there at that time. Every man you saw had a pistol and a Winchester, and the children at the houses we passed were cutting their teeth on cartridge shells.” In most instances, however, death followed sickness, an accident or an act of nature. It came in the unromantic form of pneumonia, from sleeping under a single thread-worn blanket in all weather. A cowboy could be thrown to his death from a horse or dragged to death with a boot caught in the stirrup. Hollywood doesn’t always get it wrong. As we learned from Lonesome Dove (1989) when Gus McCrae died of blood poisoning, infection (little understood at the time) could carry a man off in a short time. Thunderstorms were not infrequent occurrences. One Texas trail boss remembered a storm in which “a bolt of lightning knocked five of the men down and killed seven horses in camp.” Teddy Blue Abbott had close calls: “Lots of cowpunchers were killed by lightning, and that is history. I was knocked off my horse by it twice. The first time I saw a ball of fire coming toward me and felt something strike me on the head. When I came to, I was lying under old Pete, and the rain was pouring down on my face.” And if lightning failed to strike a man or horse, it could still stampede a herd. “The cattle,” wrote Abbott, “were always restless when there was a storm at night, even if it was a long way off, and that was when any little thing would start a run.”

And finally, just when the drover thought he was safe to enjoy the fruits of his labor at trail’s end and paid a visit to a cow town courtesan, the strong possibility of more pain and misfortune followed, as many of the women who sold their favors to drovers had one form of venereal disease or another. Abbott noted that prostitutes often “followed [the cowboys] up” as the action shifted from one cow town to another, “and we would meet old pals in new places.” A popular cowboy song of the time, which went by the name “St. James Hospital” among others, tells the sad tale of a young cowboy dying as an effect of his dalliance with an end-of-trail “ceiling-gazer”:

Send for the doctor to heal up my body, Send for the preacher, come and pray for my soul, For my poor head is aching, Lord, my sad heart is breaking, I’m a poor cowboy, and hell is my doom.

Over time the song—which had antecedents in the British Isles under the medicinal title “Pills of White Mercury”—was cleaned up to where the cowboy was “shot in the breast,” and the title changed to the “The Streets of Laredo.” In the Wild West death by gunshot was clearly preferable to the other.

Not every mishap was fatal, but to paraphrase a common expression, what didn’t kill you often just hurt like hell. For example, weeks and months spent in the saddle, coupled with a steady diet of fried bacon and beans (“Pecos strawberries”) and an overfondness for strong drink, frequently led to a bad case of hemorrhoids—unromantic, yes, but true. Don’t look for any such admission in the annals of drover recollections; there are some things a cowboy simply didn’t share. Water was often hard to come by on the trail, and thirst was an ever-present possibility. Storms of huge hailstones pummeled both cowboys and cattle, and blizzards sometimes came out of nowhere, freezing horses, cows and sometimes men. Wind and blistering sun cracked and burned the drovers, especially the fair ones. Rheumatism and arthritis were also fairly common afflictions. The constant inhalation of alkali dust could bring on emphysema, against which bandannas offered only minimal protection. And working in such close proximity to animals, in less than sanitary conditions, the cowboy could contract a case of lice (“graybacks”) and attract an army of ticks. Daily bathing was not the practice anywhere in this time and place, but life on the trail made personal hygiene even more the exception than the rule. Body fungus was common. Cowboys were dirty nearly all the time, and they smelled of cows and worse.

Yet despite the dangers, the discomfort and the monotony, the slow pace and recalcitrant cows, there was no lack of boys and young men eager to sign on or make their mark for what they envisioned as the adventure of a lifetime. As old-time waddie J.R. Humphries, of Yoakum, Texas, recalled, “In my earliest boyhood days the great ruling ambition was to become a cowboy.” The epic work The Trail Drivers of Texas (1920) recounts the stories of hundreds of cowhands in their own words; nearly all reflect Humphries’ sentiments. Mainly farm or ranch-reared, they flocked to the trail herds, hopeful of “seeing the elephant.” And with the cattle pouring north in the millions, there was almost always a berth.

The Trail Bosses

In their portrayals of Tom Dunson in Red River (1948), Frank Culpepper of The Culpepper Cattle Co. (1972) and Gil Favor of Rawhide , to name just a few, filmmakers haven’t exaggerated the weight of the responsibility shouldered by the trail boss. The drive succeeded or failed depending on his decisions, experience and skill in and out of the saddle. “Oh, those trail bosses know their business,” Abbott affirmed, “and their business was to get their herd through in good shape; that was all they thought about.…Going into a new country, the trail boss had to ride his tail off hunting for water.…Lots of times he would ride up on a little knoll and signal to the point—water this way, or water that way.” The rule was, the herd watered first, then the men—by which time the water was considerably less than clear. After watering the N Bar herd at a particularly muddy creek in Montana, one cowboy complained to his trail boss, “I ain’t kicking, but I had to chew that water before I could swallow it.”

Cowhands recalled the best trail bosses long after the days of the drives had ended. Perhaps the most famous was Abner Pickens Blocker—“Ab” to his friends and “ Mr. Ab” to his drovers. Born on a ranch near Austin, Texas, in 1856, he earned a reputation as a tough, savvy cowman who, in the words of famed Texas chronicler J. Frank Dobie, “always tried to treat all hands fair, whether white, black or brown” and “was the most original-natured trail boss I have known.” Ab, Dobie added, “claimed to have looked down the backs of more cows and to have drunk water out of more cow tracks than any other man who ever pointed a herd toward the North Star.” According to Dobie, Blocker never owned cattle himself, choosing instead to boss the herds belonging to brother John, or as Ab called him, “Brother Johnnie.”

Many an old-timer had a Mr. Ab story to tell. Some “stretched the blanket” a mite. Other tales, such as the following, had the solid ring of truth: One fall night on the Cherokee Strip, it begins, Ab lay sleeping beneath the chuck wagon, when the herd stampeded. Clad only in his red flannel “long handles,” Ab pulled on his high-peaked hat and knee-high stovepipe boots, then leapt on his horse in pursuit of the cattle. Some 100 steers had bunched and splintered off from the herd, and he pursued them through the darkness. Ab finally gathered them at daybreak and found himself on the Salt Fork of the Brazos, a good 15 miles from camp. Seeing smoke rising from a nearby cabin, and in desperate need of coffee, he approached. Spotting a woman’s and baby’s clothes hanging from some bushes, Ab—rather than emerge in his underwear—waited in hiding, calling out only when a man finally appeared. After a quick repast of coffee, bacon and cold biscuits, Ab drove the 100 steers the 15 miles back to camp.

The Blockers became legends in the cattle trade, often driving several herds up the trail at once. For his part, John Blocker was a cunning businessman and—from an initial acquisition of 500 cows—built a cattle empire. Starting in 1871, he sent herds north every year until the trail drives ceased. In 1886 alone, he owned, either wholly or in part, some 82,000 head on the trail at one time. Abbott rendered his own opinion of the two brothers: “John Blocker was the greatest trail man who ever pointed a trail herd toward the North Star. Ab…was the fastest driver on the trail.” Ab lived well into the 20th century, paying no mind whatsoever to the machinery of the modern age. He died in 1943, at 87, neither having touched the steering wheel of an automobile nor flown in a plane. At his request he was buried in his boots and spurs.

On the flip side of the coin were the Olive brothers—Thomas, Ira, Bob and Isom Prentice (aka “Print”). Texas cattlemen born and bred, with all the racial prejudices of the time, they were abusive to blacks and Mexicans, sometimes to the point of murder. Their trail crew was known, in the parlance of the time, as a “gun outfit.” Ira sometimes served as head trail boss, and he was neither well liked nor respected by his drovers. Brother Bob was a killer and in the 1870s left Texas on the run after shooting a man. He landed in Nebraska, where he was shot dead attempting to capture two men suspected of stealing Olive cattle. Print, the de facto leader of the clan, hunted down the pair, hanged them and then set their bodies on fire. Print was killed in Colorado some years later in a minor dispute with a cowboy.

The Moonlighters

A number of the West’s most famous—and infamous—characters went up the trail at one time or another. For Texas native Nate Champion, of Johnson County War fame, the long drive served as his introduction to Wyoming Territory, where he eventually lived, ranched and was killed in a siege. Outlaws were no strangers to the drover’s life. Teddy Blue Abbott recalled a figure from his first drive: “Sam Bass was my father’s wagon boss. He wasn’t an outlaw then—just a nice, quiet young fellow…always very kind to me, and different from most of the wild devils who came up the trail in the ’70s.” Bass embarked on a brief career robbing trains and stagecoaches, before Texas Rangers shot him down in Round Rock.

Perhaps the most notorious badman ever to herd cattle was John Wesley Hardin. In 1871 Hardin, “on the dodge” for several previous shootings, sought to evade the law by working as a member of Jim Clements’ trail crew, driving some 1,200 cattle up the Chisholm Trail to Abilene. Being Wes Hardin, however, he could not go long without taking a life. While awaiting the order to put the cows on the trail, he shot a Mexican over a game of monte. As he wrote in his autobiography, “We all went back to camp and laughed about the matter.” Once under way Wes shot and killed one Indian while out turkey hunting, another during an Osage attack. On crossing into Kansas, a Mexican outfit drove its herd too close to Clements’ herd for the white drovers’ comfort, and in the mounted pistol fight that followed, Hardin added five men to his tally, bringing the overall number of his victims to around 20. He had not yet reached his 18th birthday. According to the shootist’s own reckoning, that number would more than double by the time the authorities locked him away in Huntsville Prison.

Hardin aside, most desperadoes and fast-pistol men appear to have behaved themselves around cattle and cowboys, and several—including Wild Bunch members Harry Alonzo “Sundance Kid” Longabaugh and Harvey “Kid Curry” Logan— were reportedly fine hands, who endeared themselves to their bosses and found a welcome when a welcome was needed.

The Cow Towns

To the drover the town at the end of trail represented the Valhalla for which he’d been sweating and freezing for long weeks in the saddle. Be it Abilene, Ogallala or Miles City, the offerings were predictably similar, and with money in his jeans, the cowboy was easy prey for the denizens of the redlight districts. He was offered every variety of liquor, games of chance and women. Cowhand Andy Adams described his brief visit to Ogallala and the broad spectrum of female companionship to be had for a price: “Here might be seen the frailty of women in every grade and condition. From girls in their teens, launching out on a life of shame, to the adventuress who had once had youth and beauty in her favor but was now discarded and ready for the final dose of opium and the coroner’s verdict—all were there in tinsel and paint, practicing a careless exposure of their charms.”

After first bathing and reoutfitting, the drover would devote himself to a monumental blowout, which might put him at odds with local lawmen, including the likes of “Wild Bill” Hickok, Bat Masterson, Bill Tilghman and Wyatt Earp. Cowboy fun could be very destructive, one way or another, and the local business community had a love-hate relationship with the Texas cowhands. “We’re not near so bad as we’re painted,” one old drover told a reporter. “We like to get up a little racket now and then, but it is all in play. Of course, sometimes we fall out amongst ourselves, and then there is a corpse.” Even the survivors of the end-of-trail exuberance had a cowboy lament. Take Texas cowhand G.D. Burrows: “This ‘big time’ would last but a few days…for I would soon be ‘busted’ and would have to borrow money to get out to the ranch.…I put in 18 or 20 years on the trail, and all I had in the final outcome was the high-heeled boots, the striped pants and about $4.80 worth of other clothes, so there you are.”

The End of an Era

1883 and 1884 were the boom years for the cattle drives. John Blocker claimed that in that span a half-million cows trailed through Ogallala alone. The following two years, however, saw a decline of cataclysmic proportions. In 1885 Kansas, then the primary destination for the northbound drives, closed its borders to Texas herds in an attempt to eradicate Texas fever, a fatal disease among cattle. Then, in the winter of 1885–86 several feet of ice and snow buried the northern range, making winter graze inaccessible and destroying cattle in staggering numbers, with stock losses that reached 90 percent. Ranchers called it the “Big Die-Up,” and it sounded the death knell for most of the large ranching operations in Montana and Wyoming. The following winter brought more blizzards, killing many of the surviving cattle. The old-time cattle industry, and the trail drives that fed it, never fully recovered.

But by the time the last herds trailed north in 1895, the cowboy had been elevated in the popular imagination from a laborer on horseback to America’s favorite folk hero. In his monumental tome The Great Plains (1931) Texas historian Walter Prescott Webb described the cowboy as perceived by the non-Westerner: “‘Ah,’ said the Easterner, ‘here is a new species of the genus Homo .…There is something romantic about him. He lives on horseback, as do the Bedouins; he fights on horseback, as did the knights of chivalry; he goes armed with a strange new weapon which he uses ambidextrously and precisely; he swears like a trooper, drinks like a fish, wears clothes like an actor and fights like a devil. He is gracious to ladies, reserved toward strangers, generous to his friends and brutal to his enemies. He is a cowboy, a typical Westerner.”

While the cattle drives faded before the coming of the new century, the cowboy entered into a popular culture state of grace that persists to the present day. When Owen Wister’s The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains (1902) first appeared, his romanticized depiction of the working cowhand merely solidified the nation’s fanciful notion of the classic Westerner. The image of today’s cowboy bears little resemblance to the old-time waddie who pushed Texas Longhorns north, but it serves as a reminder of a time when it all came down to a man on a cow pony. A century ago Texas rancher and former cowhand George W. Elam recalled: “Those old times, with their frontier ways and customs, have long since been superseded by the modern conveniences and developments of civilization. But the men who blazed the way for the material greatness that is our today were grand and noble spirits and are entitled to the grateful remembrance of their fellow countrymen.”

Ron Soodalter writes often about the American West and the CivilWar. Suggested for further reading are the books referenced in the story, as well as The Log of a Cowboy (1903), by Andy Adams; The Longhorns (1941) and Cow People (1964), both by J. Frank Dobie; The American Cowboy (1955), by Joe B. Frantz and Julian E. Choate Jr.; Once in the Saddle (1973), by Laurence I. Seidman; The Rawhide Years (1976), by Glenn R.Vernam; and Saddling Up Anyway (2006), by Patrick Dearen.

Originally published in the April 2013 issue of Wild West . To subscribe, click here .

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Schneier on Security

Long article on gm spying on its cars’ drivers.

Kashmir Hill has a really good article on how GM tricked its drivers into letting it spy on them—and then sold that data to insurance companies.

Tags: cars , insurance , privacy , surveillance

Posted on April 26, 2024 at 7:01 AM • 12 Comments

Q • April 26, 2024 7:25 AM

Note: The article “requires” JS to see more than just the first few paragraphs.

noname • April 26, 2024 11:38 AM

Heard about this story on the Clark Howard podcast.

Clark: “And as I predicted, when I talked about it, I said GM is going to stop doing it and GM is going to get sued for it.

Bam, bam, both things have happened already.”

https://www.freep.com/story/money/cars/general-motors/2024/03/29/gm-lawsuit-driver-data-collection-without-consent/73143189007/

Clark also talks about homeowner insurers doing AI-based scans of homes.

L-A-R-A • April 26, 2024 11:49 AM

noname, be sure to read GM’s statements carefully. They said they’d stop collecting the “driving data”, and would cut ties with two specific brokers. They also said’d they’d “evaluate” the situation or something similarly vague.

GM did not promise never to re-start such collection and/or sale. They didn’t promise never to re-create ties with those brokers, or create ties with others. They haven’t done or promised to do anything at all about the location-data being implicitly shared with the cellular providers via OnStar’s constant not-really-optional connection (if you don’t like it, look online for how to remove the fuse; and note that some of the minor systems, they might go off, but it’s nothing to worry about, it’s just a simple thing).

Ardie • April 26, 2024 12:04 PM

Doesn’t require your vehicle to accomplish this.

Your phone sure seems like a whore on its back for speed, acceleration (including high speed cornering, and hard braking), exact location of speeding, failing to stop, holding your phone / texting while driving, distracted by your unrestrained dog…

This can be aggregated over years before they turn you in. Imagine having your vehicle impounded and your driver license taken away because you don’t feel compelled to use a farday bag. This amazon one seems to work for me: ‘…com/dp/B0CNV7YVVB/ref=

Brownie points will always be lucrative in a police state. Your neighbor isn’t your neighbor, he’s business as usual. You can be crucified years from now for your transgressions by a very rich AI cop.

Its coming. Stay home. Plant a garden. Save the planet.

“because you showed them everything, it will all be taken and your kids will be castrated slaves” -Isaiah

Sofa • April 26, 2024 1:59 PM

Non-paywalled link to the same story: https://sg.news.yahoo.com/gm-tricked-millions-drivers-being-175245410.html

Mr.Smith • April 26, 2024 3:50 PM

Somehow I don’t think they have a fuse just for the spying. Probably tied it into the fuel system, and anything else they could think of.

L-A-R-A • April 27, 2024 12:07 AM

Mr.Smith, you can do a search for OnStar fuse. Some people have reported no negative side effects. Some have said the rear-view mirror loses the compass and auto-dimming features, or Bluetooth stops working, etc. One person said it broke “super” cruise control, whatever that is. So, it might be annoying, but it’s not yet crippling.

ResearcherZero • April 27, 2024 1:16 AM

Collect and document the process of evidence gathering when making a claim or complaint. Having documentation of everything you possibly can get as early as possible is essential.

If you ever have to deal with law enforcement, get everything they say in writing. Do not trust that they have performed the actions that they claim. Always pursue and ensure the documentation of witness statements and evidence collection has in fact taken place.

Any victim of crime or an accident is entitled to “prompt” receipt of an incident report.

Jon • April 27, 2024 6:09 AM

Plus, according to a report I heard yesterday, some people had their car insurance rates raised, based on the data that GM supplied to the insurance companies. So, GM’s and dealers’ mendacity directly led to higher costs for customers.

This is a step beyond the data collection of OBD-II systems, rental companies putting trackers and data gathering devices on cars, and other monitoring and reporting. If anything we need an expansion of the conception of 4th Amendment personal and civil rights.

L-A-R-A • April 27, 2024 2:25 PM

Regarding the insurance companies buying data and raising rates, I think they need to be sued over that too. And since they’ll have recent contact information for most of their victims—and GM probably has real-time location data, but let’s all act surprised when we “find out”—maybe these suits won’t end with just the lawyers getting rich.

Mr.Smith • April 27, 2024 5:37 PM

@L-A-R-A: Wait for it. And does the fuse currently take out all the spying? Or just the parts that interact with the driver?

L-A-R-A • April 27, 2024 6:03 PM

Mr.Smith, it depends what you mean by “all the spying”. I haven’t tried any of this personally, but it’s reputed to completely disable the car’s cellular communication. For example, if you crash, it won’t call 9-1-1, because it can’t. It’s likely that many car systems are still “spying”, and just unable to contact their “handlers”; and maybe some data will be exfiltrated when the car goes in for service.

And, of course, there are still the tire-pressure monitoring system (TPMS) communications, toll-road transponders, license-plate readers, the driver’s and passengers’ phones, one’s geo-tagged picture of oneself labeled “BRB, need to pop in to rob this bank”…

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Navel Gazing

John dickerson’s notebooks: the power of four numbers.

Noticing longer, gray lockboxes, a soul-crushing teacher, Georgia O’Keeffe and more are explored in this week’s audio essay from John Dickerson.

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Episode Notes

In this week’s essay, John discusses the art of attention and how to develop the skill of slow-looking.

Notebook Entries:

Notebook 75, page 8. September 2021

Notebook 1, page 54. June 1990

-        Magna carta 1215 at Salisbury

-        Girls skipping

-        The Haunch of Venison

-        Chris

References:

Georgia O’Keeffe Museum

A Little History of the World  by E.H Gombrich

Artist Jeff Koons

“ The Art of Divination: D.H. Lawrence on the Power of Pure Attention ” by Maria Popova for  The Marginalian

“ Gabfest Reads: A Woman’s Life in Museum Wall Labels ” for Political Gabfest

One Woman Show  by Christine Coulson

“ Grammy-winning artist Jason Isbell talks about the craft of songwriting and his latest music ” for CBS News

A Journey Around My Room  by Xavier De Maistre

“ Just think: The Challenges of the Disengaged Mind ” by Timothy Wilson, et.al for  Science

“ Our Rodent Selfies, Ourselves ” by Emily Anthes for the  New York Times

One Man’s Meat  by E.B. White

Podcast production by Cheyna Roth.

Email us at  [email protected]

Want to listen to Navel Gazing uninterrupted? Subscribe to Slate Plus to immediately unlock ad-free listening to Navel Gazing and all your other favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts by clicking “Try Free” at the top of our show page. Or, visit  slate.com/navelgazingplus  to get access wherever you listen.

About the Show

Political Gabfest host John Dickerson has been a journalist for more than three decades, reporting about presidential campaigns, political scandals, and the evolving state of our democracy. Along the way, he’s also been recording his observations in notebooks he has carried in his back pocket. He has captured his thoughts about life, parenthood, death, friendship, writing, God, to-do lists, and more. On the Navel Gazing podcast, John Dickerson invites you to join him in figuring out what these 30 years of notebooks mean: sorting out what makes a life—or a day in a life—noteworthy.

John Dickerson is host of CBS News Prime Time With John Dickerson , co-host of the Slate Political Gabfest, host of the Whistlestop podcast, and author of The Hardest Job in the World .

‘Disability Intimacy’ starts a long-overdue conversation

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Book Review

Disability Intimacy: Essays on Love, Care, and Desire

Edited by Alice Wong Vintage: 384 pages, $19 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

To whom does desire belong? How about love and care? These are the questions at the heart of “Disability Intimacy,” a new book of essays and ephemera collected by the San Francisco activist Alice Wong, and the answers are painfully obvious: Those human experiences are for everyone. What’s less obvious to many, and acutely painful to some of us, is that those questions needed to be asked and answered. This book needed to exist.

It is a longstanding and unfortunate truth that disabled people are often seen as undesirable and even as unable to experience desire, love or care in the ways that all individuals do. As disabled people we understand how false that notion is and how harmful it can be. Giving and receiving love — physically or verbally, in a context of romance, sex, close friendship or family bonds — is as much our right to experience as anyone else’s, and our stories of intimate connections and losses are worth telling as much as anyone else’s. So I commend Wong and the collection’s 40 contributors for taking on this topic.

“Disability Intimacy” is not an extended lament. Many of its standouts are downright celebratory, as well as lessons in engaging storytelling. “The Last Walk” by Melissa Hung explores the grief of losing a beloved friend while simultaneously cherishing their last moments together and the sling bag that became a physical memory of her friend Judy. In “Hi, Are You Single?” by Ryan J. Haddad, one of the standout poems in the collection, Haddad explores the messy, awkward and welcome way a hookup can support their collective desire for pleasure.

Having contributed to and read Wong’s anthology from 2020, “Disability Visibility,” I thought I knew what I was getting into, but the two collections are quite different. It was disappointing to come away from “Intimacy” without a theme as clear as that of “Visibility,” perhaps in part reflecting the older collection’s more straightforward subject matter. Love is complicated. And 40 contributors is a lot.

As one of the first of its kind to attempt what it is attempting, “Disability Intimacy” has the unfair expectation to be everything for everyone, to answer the question of desirability for an entire community that is not monolithic. Wong refuses to shut out the “other” in favor of the conventionally digestible. This collection shines in its entries that take big swings, discussing topics such as BDSM, queer love and intergenerational relationships — and even laziness, a concept that one essay reclaims and celebrates as a purposeful act of rest, epitomized by the love between a father and son who connect over turning out the light and climbing in bed to take naps. In these pieces, the authors seem to be living as unapologetically on the page as they do in life.

Tucked among the essays, readers will be delighted to also discover poems and even a conversation between two disabled people of color about redefining intimacy for themselves, ableism and what they refuse to call intimacy. It’s a refreshing and effective shakeup of the anthology form. It’s also a lot to take in.

I had to reread certain sections as some of the points got lost along the way, and sometimes I found myself mentally rearranging the book because entries felt misplaced. Although many of the pieces could have been shorter, none should have been left out. Might the cause have been better served with these many entries divided between two volumes? This could have encouraged the reader to sit with the thoughts and feelings that come up rather than rushing onward.

There is often a lot of pressure placed on books of this kind that amplify marginalized voices or tackle taboo topics, but remember: Sometimes a book does the world a service not because it is encyclopedic or full of answers but simply because it raises questions and starts conversations.

In the end, what we readers ask of ourselves is what counts. Whom do we allow ourselves to desire, and why? Toward whose stories do we gravitate, and whom do we leave in the margins? How will we expand our own worldview?

Keah Brown , a journalist, activist, actor and screenwriter, is the author of “ The Pretty One ” and “ The Secret Summer Promise .”

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Moscow, like other international urban areas , is decentralizing, despite considerable barriers. The expansion will lead to even more decentralization, which is likely to lead to less time "stuck in traffic" and more comfortable lifestyles. Let's hope that Russia's urban development policies, along with its plans to restore population growth, will lead to higher household incomes and much improved economic performance.

Wendell Cox is a Visiting Professor, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris and the author of “ War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life ”

Note 1: The 23 ward (ku) area of Tokyo is the geography of the former city of Tokyo, which was abolished in the 1940s. There is considerable confusion about the geography of Tokyo. For example, the 23 ward area is a part of the prefecture of Tokyo, which is also called the Tokyo Metropolis, which has led some analysts to think of it as the Tokyo metropolitan area (labor market area). In fact, the Tokyo metropolitan area, variously defined, includes, at a minimum the prefectures of Tokyo, Kanagawa, Chiba and Saitama with some municipalities in Gunma, Ibaraki and Tochigi. The metropolitan area contains nearly three times the population of the "Tokyo Metropolis."

Note 2: The expansion area (556 square miles or 1,440 square kilometers) has a current population of 250,000.

Note 3: Includes all residents in suburban districts with at least part of their population in the urban area.

Note 4: Urban area data not yet available.

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Road in city area.

The roads and ways of the city areas are very clumsy and many accidents are happening due to the short road. But you need to maintain the driving properly otherwise you may face accident. So now the government decided to expand the road which may put the positive effect on automobile sector. I think it is a helpful service for the society people. If you have a BMW car and you have faced any problem then better to repair it at BMW Repair Spring, TX for the best service.

Transit & transportation

Transit and transportation services are quite impressive in most of the urban cities; therefore people were getting better benefits from suitable transportation service. Urban cities like Moscow, Washington, New York and Tokyo; we have found high margin of transportation system that helps to build a better communication network in these cities. I hope through the help of modern transportation system we are able to bring revolutionary change in automobile industries; in this above article we have also found the same concepts to develop transportation system. Mercedes repair in Torrance

Moscow is bursting Noblesse

Moscow is bursting Noblesse at the seams. The core city covers more than 420 square miles (1,090 kilometers), and has a population of approximately 11.5 million people. With 27,300 residents per square mile (10,500 per square kilometer), Moscow is one percent more dense than the bleach anime watch city of New York, though Moscow covers 30 percent more land. The 23 ward area of Tokyo (see Note) is at least a third more dense, though Moscow's land area is at least half again as large as Tokyo. All three core areas rely

Belgravia Villas is a new

Belgravia Villas is a new and upcoming cluster housing located in the Ang Mo Kio area, nested right in the Ang Mo Kio landed area. It is within a short drive to Little India, Orchard and city area. With expected completion in mid 2016, it comprises of 118 units in total with 100 units of terrace and 18 units of Semi-D. belgravia villas

Russians seeing the light while Western elites are bickering?

What an extremely interesting analysis - well done, Wendell.

It is also extremely interesting that the Russian leadership is reasonably pragmatic about urban form, in contrast to the "planners" of the post-rational West.

An acquaintance recently sent me an article from "The New Yorker", re Moscow's traffic problems.

The article "abstract" is HERE (but access to the full article requires subscription)

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/02/100802fa_fact_gessen

One classic quote worth taking from it, is: "People will endure all manner of humiliation to keep driving".

I do find it odd that the "New Yorker" article author says nothing at all about the rail transit system Moscow had, on which everyone was obliged to travel, under Communism. It can't surely have vaporised into thin air?

Moscow is a classic illustration of just how outmoded rails are, and how important "automobility" is, when the auto supplants rails so rapidly than even when everybody did travel on rails up to a certain date, and the road network dates to that era, when nobody was allowed to own a car; an article written just 2 decades later does not even mention the rail transit system, other than to criticise the mayor for "failing to invest in a transit system".......!!!!!!!!

This is also a give-away of "The New Yorker's" inability to shake off the modern PC ideology on rails vs cars.

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Given their side effects, weight-loss drugs might not be good for all

The injectable drug Ozempic. Credit: AP/David J. Phillip

This guest essay reflects the views of Dr. Aurora Pryor, system director for bariatric surgery at Northwell Health and surgeon in chief at Long Island Jewish Medical Center.

When will we see through the haze of drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy?

Hopefully soon. These drugs might reach 30 million U.S. users by 2030. Surging, off-label demand has come with unintentional overdoses, rising prices and medication shortages. Further expansion seems likely with the Food and Drug Administration’s recent approval of another class of medications to reduce the risk of cardiovascular death, heart attack, and stroke in adults with cardiovascular disease and either obesity or overweight.

These medications, called GLP-1 receptor agonists or semaglutides, have gotten the attention of the New York City Council. One member has proposed a law requiring the city health department to release information on the consequences of off-label use of these medications for weight loss.

About 20% of patients taking GLP-1s for weight loss experience nausea and vomiting; 30% get diarrhea. Add headaches, swelling of nasal passages, allergic reactions, pancreatitis, and fatigue to the list, along with rare cases of thyroid cancer in laboratory animals.

Admittedly, bariatric surgery, my area of expertise, also poses risks, like any surgical procedure. Still, it remains a safe, long-term option offering better long-term control of weight and glucose levels than medical therapies for patients with Type 2 diabetes. Patients need accurate information about the risks and benefits of all options.

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There is no denying: Semaglutides are a powerful class of drugs helping push back on the obesity epidemic. They offer weight loss, reduced appetite, and slower emptying of the stomach that makes patients feel full faster.

I’ve also seen at my Great Neck-based practice what can happen when patients stop taking semaglutides. It can trigger weight (re)gain, a greater appetite, a surge of blood sugar, and lean muscle mass loss with body fat percentage gain. There can be withdrawal symptoms.

Data, physician awareness, and patient education can help us assess what’s best for each patient, medication or bariatric surgery. The lack of knowledge translates into only about 200,000 patients per year pursuing weight-loss surgery — about 1% of those who qualify for it.

Physicians need to share that bariatric surgery remains an effective, long-term tool that has become safer and less invasive. It can be highly effective for weight loss and management of obesity-induced complications, especially when surgeons use minimally invasive procedures. This approach, used in 90% of bariatric surgeries, results in shorter hospital stays, less blood loss during procedures, less postoperative pain, and fewer pulmonary complications and wound infections.

We need to review data comparing outcomes for patients who have undergone gastric bypass, sleeve gastrectomy, and intensive medical therapy alone. Of patients who underwent medical therapy, 12% achieved the desired diabetes targets after a year, but positive effects of metabolic surgery lasted longer and also improved cholesterol and triglyceride levels. Those advantages must be considered against potential post-surgical drawbacks like anemia or gastrointestinal problems.

It’s clear semaglutides have tremendous potential, though we don’t yet know their full impact. If we can find optimal ways to wean patients off those them, perhaps they might help patients maintain weight loss after bariatric surgery.

Semaglutides also have opened the door to reframing obesity as a medical condition — without shame. When we can consider weight-loss options without stigma, patients are better positioned to receive information from their doctors and make decisions. The less starry-eyed we are, the better we can focus on the positive, long-term health outcomes each patient deserves.

 THIS GUEST ESSAY reflects the views of Dr. Aurora Pryor, system director for bariatric surgery at Northwell Health and surgeon in chief at Long Island Jewish Medical Center.

Home — Essay Samples — Geography & Travel — Travel and Tourism Industry — The History of Moscow City

The History of Moscow City

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A History of Moscow in 13 Dishes

Jun 06 2018.

War, hunger, and some of the world’s great doomed social experiments all changed the way that Moscow eats.

Moscow, the European metropolis on Asia’s western flank, has always been a canvas for competing cultures. Its cuisine is no different. The ancient baselines of winter grains, root vegetables, and cabbage acquired scaffolding from both directions: eastern horsemen brought meat on sticks, western craftsmen brought pastries, and courtly French chefs came and drowned it all in cream.

History has a place on the plate here, as well: war, hunger, and some of the world’s great doomed social experiments from Serfdom to Communism to Bandit Capitalism all changed the way that Moscow eats. So in the spirit of all of those grand failures, we—a Russian chef and an American writer—will attempt here to reduce the towering history of this unknowable city to 13 dishes, with some Imperial past but a special emphasis on the more recent decades of culinary paroxysms as Moscow emerged from its Soviet slumber.

Olivier Salad

To visualize the long marriage between French and Russian cuisines, picture Peter the Great, on a diplomatic sojourn to Paris in 1717, a “ stranger to etiquette ”, meeting the 7-year-old boy-king Louis XV and lifting him in the air out of sheer elán. These things were simply not done, and yet, there they were. Peter’s joyful (and often envious) fascination with all things French took hold, among other places, in the kitchen. He brought French chefs back to his palaces, and then the lesser nobility followed suit, and when the first restaurants emerged in Moscow, they also spoke French. The Hermitage Restaurant, which was open from 1864 until history intervened in 1917, had a Francophone Belgian named Lucien Olivier as a chef, and he made a salad that was a perfectly unrestrained combination of French flavors and Russian ingredients: grouse! Veal tongue! Proto-mayonnaise! The ingredients now tend toward the pedestrian—boiled beef, dill pickles, various vegetables all bound with mayonnaise—and it has become a staple of Russian cuisine, especially on New Year’s. And yes, if you’ve ever seen the lonely Ensalada Rusa wilting behind the sneezeguard of a Spanish tapas bar, that is supposed to be a successor to the Olivier. But in Moscow, you should eat Matryoshka ’s version, which is not the original recipe but has some of that imperial richness: crayfish, quail, sturgeon caviar, and remoulade, all under a translucent aspic skirt, for 990₽ ($16).

There’s a type of expression around bottling things—bottled lightning, summer in a jar, etc.—that feels very apt here. What exactly is bottled with vareniye (jam)? A lot more than just fruit. These jams, which tend to be thinner than western varieties—with whole berries or fruit chunks in syrup—are bottled with a lot of Russian identity. There’s the Russian love of countryside. Deep dacha culture of summer cottages and personal orchards. Traditional naturopathy (raspberry vareniye taken with tea will fight fever). And above all, friendship is bottled here— vareniye made from the overabundance of fruit at one’s dacha is the most typical Russian gift, real sharing from real nature, even in the often-cynical heart of Europe’s largest megacity. Visitors who are short on lifelong friendships in Moscow can pick some up fine vareniye at any Lavka Lavka shop (we recommend the delicate young pine cone jam) or, curiously enough, at many Armenian stores.

Borodinsky Bread

The clinical-sounding title of Lev Auerman’s 1935 classic Tekhnologiya Khlebopecheniya ( Bread Baking Technology) doesn’t promise scintillation. But Auerman’s recipe for rye bread changed Russian bread forever. An older legend had it that the bread was baked dark for mourning by a woman widowed in the battle of Borodino in 1812, but the real birth of the bread came from Auerman’s recipes. A modification on sweet, malted Baltic breads, Auerman’s Borodinsky bread was 100% rye and used caraway or anise. The recipe has evolved a bit—today it is 80% rye and 20% wheat high extraction flour and leans more on coriander than caraway. But its flavor profile (sweet, chewy) as well as its characteristic L7 mold —a deep brick of bread—has made it easily identifiable as the traditional, ubiquitous, every-occasion bread of Moscow. You can buy it everywhere, but the Azbuka Vkusa high-end markets have a reliably good sliced version.

Buckwheat Grechka

Look closely at those Russians who have followed their money to live in London, or are vacationing in Cyprus or Antalya. See the slight melancholy that not even cappuccinos or sunshine can erase. It’s not because Russians are gloomy by nature; it’s probably because there is no real grechka outside of Russia and Ukraine, and that is devastating. Buckwheat grain and groats— grechka (or grecha in Saint Petersburg)—are deep in the culture. It’s a wartime memory: May 9 Victory Day celebrations feature military kitchens serving buckwheat like they did at the front. It’s a little slice of Russian history that lies somewhere between oatmeal and couscous. In Moscow, eat it at Dr. Zhivago with milk (180₽/US$2.90) or mushrooms (590₽/US$9.50), and rejoice.

Mimoza Salad

This fantastically expressive egg-and-canned-fish salad is a testament to Soviet ingenuity—it’s the ultimate puzzle to make a drastically limited food chain sparkle—and the universal human thrill of layering foods. The geological creation starts with a base layer of fish, then layers of grated cooked potato, mayonnaise, shredded cheese, grated carrots, sweet onion, diced egg whites and then capped with a brilliant yellow crumble of boiled egg yolk. It sits there on the plate, dazzling like the flowering mimosa tree it is named after. The taste? Well, it’s comfort food. Pick some up to go at any Karavaev Brothers location —the excellent deli chain sells it for 650₽ (US$10.40) a kilo.

It seems odd, almost impossible, to imagine a time in Russia before shashlik. It’s meat on a stick, something that all humans should have had on the menu since at least the time of Prometheus. But shashlik as we know it know—cubes of marinated meat cooked with vegetables over a mangal grill—didn’t really take off in Russia until the early 1900s. And due to a lack of suitable meat in much of the Soviet era (there were no meat cattle herds, only dairy), we’re starting the clock on shashlik in the late Soviet period. Despite its relatively recent (re)appearance, it is now the ubiquitous grill phenomenon of Russia, a welcome ritual of summer.

Much of Russian cuisine has borrowed heavily from Central Asia and further east over the millennia ( pelmeni anyone?), but plov is a striking example of an entire eastern dish making its way directly into Russian households. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and upheaval in many Central Asian Soviet Republics, mass economic migration to Moscow took off in the late 80s and early 90s. Central Asians today are the lifeblood of the Moscow labor force (part of up to 10-12 million Central Asian migrants living in Russia), and plov—rice steamed in stock with meat and vegetables—has jumped from the migrant communities to the homes of Muscovites everywhere. It has developed an unfortunate reputation for being a food that even finicky kids will eat, so there is a lot of harried domestic plov being made. But you can get a fully expressed Uzbek version at Danilovsky Market, online at plov.com , or at Food City—the surf-and-turf Tsukiji of Moscow.

The Big Mac

So many of the difficulties in American-Russian relations come down to one foundational attitude problem: The Americans (that’s half of this writing duo) were incredibly, distressingly smug through the entire fall of the Soviet Union. We mistook Soviet failure for an American victory, and that made all the difference. What does that have to do with a Big Mac? Well, when Russia’s first McDonald’s opened on Pushkinskaya in 1990 and 5000 people turned out to wait in line for the first taste of America, we back home in the states mistook it for culinary and commercial superiority. But there was something more complicated happening: Russians had been denied Western goods for so long and with such force that any outside identity was much-needed oxygen. And the long-term victory, as McDonald’s has continued to thrive in post-Soviet Russia, really belongs to the local franchise, which used higher-quality ingredients than in the U.S. and created a chain that was successful not because of its American identity but because of its Russian modifications. We wouldn’t recommend eating at any McDonald’s, especially not when there is Teremok for your fast-food needs, but having a soda in the original location is one way to sit and ponder the sin of hubris. And to use the free toilet and Wi-Fi.

The crown jewel of Levantine meat preparations, perhaps the single greatest street meat in the world: Shawarma. It first came to Moscow with a shawarma joint across from the Passazh mall, opened in the early 90s by Syrian cooks who dazzled masses with their sizzling, spinning, spiced meat emporium. Lines that stretched into the hundreds of people weren’t uncommon in those heady early days. And even though the original spot closed many years ago, Moscow shawarma only grew from there, mutating into the beast it is today, where you’re likely to find chicken, cabbage, mayo and a thin tomato sauce all combining to make the Levant a distant memory.

Fish Tartare aka Sashimi

One result of the aforementioned American smugness is that the West seemed surprised at how rapidly 1990s Russia assimilated some of the most hardcore capitalist traits, including but not limited to conspicuous consumerism. Moscow’s new elite was very, very good at that. What could be more conspicuous that recreating a restrained, exclusive seafood cuisine from Japan in the chaotic, landlocked megacity of Moscow? The very improbability of high-end sushi and sashimi in Moscow fueled much of its allure, and even though the trends have moved on from sushi, you can still tell the emotional attachment that the oligarch class has to those formative wastes of money. Sumosan restaurant started in Moscow back in 1997 and has since expanded to Monte Carlo and Londongrad , where they serve a dish that they call Fish Tartare, among others, in their restaurants and through their private jet catering service.

Blue Cheese roll

If the early elite sushi restaurants in Moscow were the frivolous edge of a food phenomenon, then Yakitoriya , a chain which started in the late 1990s, democratized it with affordable sushi rolls geared to local tastes. The Blue Cheese Roll, available now on their menu, seems like the apex (or nadir) of the Russianized roll: salmon, smoked eel, cucumber, cream cheese, Blue Cheese sauce. It might not be Jiro’s dream, but a true Russian middle class, one that can work honestly, earn meaningful salaries, and have a freaky sushi roll at the end of the week just like the rest of us—that’s something worthing dreaming for. Blue Cheese Roll, Yakitoriya, 417₽ (US$6.70)

If you’re American, have you ever wondered why tacos took over middle America but sopes remain virtually unknown? It’s curious how a country can assimilate some foods from their neighbors and but remain blissfully ignorant of others. That may explain what took place two years ago in Moscow, when the city seemingly discovered, as if for the first time, the bagged awesomeness that is khinkali , a soup dumpling from Russia’s southern neighbor Georgia. It became very trendy very quickly, and khinkali joints sprouted across Moscow like griby after a rain. But it wasn’t just that dish: what they were serving was a bit of the imagined southern, sybaritic lifestyle of the Caucasus, as promised in restaurant names like Est’ Khinkali Pit Vino ( Eat Khinkali Drink Wine ). Your best bets are at the stately Sakhli , around 100₽ (US$1.60) per soft, fulsome dumpling, or the more modernized Kafe Khinkalnaya on Neglinnaya Street , 100₽ (US$0.80) a dumpling.

We have named burrata—yes, that Italian alchemy of cheese and cream—the Perfect Dish of Moscow 2018, if only because it is the Dish of the Moment, ready to be enjoyed at the height of its faddishness now, and equally ready to be replaced when the city decides to move on. Read Anna Maslovskaya’s masterful breakdown of why—and where—to eat burrata in Moscow.

Top image: Olivier salad with chicken. Photo by: Kvector /Shutterstock

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The Perfect Dish: The Moscow Burrata

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