The Science Behind Mental Afflictions
Hosted by Pamela Paul
Sara Manning Peskin talks about “A Molecule Away From Madness,” and J. Kenji López-Alt discusses “The Wok.”Friday, March 18th, 2022
[MUSIC PLAYING]Pamela Paul
How can an errant protein or a minor DNA glitch make you lose your mind? Sara Manning Peskin joins us to talk about her book, “A Molecule Away From Madness: Tales of the Hijacked Brain.” What makes cooking with a wok so special? Kenji Lopez-Alt will be here to talk about his new book, “The Wok: Recipes and Techniques.” Plus, our critics will be here to talk about the books they’ve been reading and reviewing.
This is the Book Review Podcast from The New York Times. It’s March 18th. I’m Pamela Paul.
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Sara Manning Peskin joins us now from Philadelphia, where she is an assistant professor of clinical neurology at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of her first book. It’s called “A Molecule Away From Madness: Tales of the Hijacked Brain.” Sara, thanks for being here.Sara Manning Peskin
Thanks for having me.Pamela Paul
So I mentioned to you before we started recording, but I’ll mention for listeners: I read your book and loved it. My 12-year-old son read your book and loved it. One of the things that you did so well in this book was explain science really through stories and, in particular, through case histories.
The style reminded me a little bit of Lisa Sanders’s Diagnosis column in The New York Times Magazine, if you’re familiar with that. Each one is written kind of like a mystery, and I’m curious what the thinking was behind that.Sara Manning Peskin
I think I wanted to capture how this actually unfolds in real time, that for a lot of us, we go to doctors and you get a diagnosis and it’s as if that diagnosis has always existed. But in fact, the diagnosis was invented by someone who discovered something. And actually, the history behind these diseases is often lost.
Actually, since writing the book, when I see patients in clinic, when I diagnose someone with Alzheimer’s disease, I tell them: This is how we figured out what Alzheimer’s disease is. This is who it was. This is how it happened. And I think it’s more meaningful and actually allows us to understand diseases better.Pamela Paul
And you do it not only in telling the biographies of the scientists and the doctors who uncovered these diseases and afflictions but also of patients. And one of the questions I had was, are these patients actual patients of yours?
Some of the case studies in the book, you use the full names— I don’t think they’re pseudonyms— for these people that— some of them that you’ve treated?Sara Manning Peskin
Only two of them are actually my patients, and when I interviewed them for the book, they weren’t under my care anymore. Most of them were people who were referred to me by colleagues.
Actually, I did change their names, but the other details I have left the same, with a thought that when you read a book where it’s sort of compilations, it’s hard to know: Is that really an accurate picture of what it’s like to live with that disease? Or is it stylized in the way that the author thinks it is or things it looks like? And so, I wanted to keep the details right so that readers can be sure that what they’re seeing is what these diseases really look like.Pamela Paul
How is it different writing about people that you’d actually treated from writing historical case histories, in some cases of people who are long since dead?Sara Manning Peskin
It totally changed how I see medicine actually. When we see patients in the hospital or in clinic, you get this small glimpse of what’s going on.
And even if you have them tell— you ask them to tell us, what is it like when you move around the world, and where do you see difficulty, and what brought you here? But seeing someone in their house with their family, learning about what they were like before disease, what they’re like after, is just a totally different understanding of the humanity of these conditions.
So one of the stories is about a woman born into difficult circumstances, had this mother who pushed her to get a good education. She ended up at an elite university, graduated, came home, woke up one morning and couldn’t really create new memories. She kept asking her mom what was for breakfast after they’d already eaten.Pamela Paul
Oh, yeah.Sara Manning Peskin
And her mom ends up taking her to the hospital. And she becomes acutely psychotic. It turns out she’d been watching “The Walking Dead,” and she starts to believe that she’s living inside the show, and she calls different nurses and family members by names of characters from the show. I met her while she was in the hospital, and I remember thinking, her mom was just so impressive and such a wonderful advocate for her while she was there. But for the book, I actually went out to their house after she’d been treated. She actually did wonderfully and was back home doing well, and it was amazing to see what she had been like before the disease, to hear her mom talk about the experience to her, her talk about what it was like to wake up after all of that. And it’s a glimpse that we really never get as physicians otherwise.Pamela Paul
Well, let’s talk about that case. The chapter is called “Zombie Apocalypse,” and it’s the story of Lauren Kane. In her case, her affliction was caused by a protein. Can you explain?Sara Manning Peskin
Most of us know proteins as, you go to the grocery store and you buy Greek yogurt and it has a lot of protein. But proteins, really, they’re particular molecules. And if you think about your body, DNA is essentially just a computer code that has all the information and the instructions for running the cell and running a body. But it’s proteins that really are the workhorses of the cell. And there are particular proteins that are called antibodies that the body makes to try to get rid of invaders. The antibodies are things that we make that helps us fend off viruses and bacteria.
But it turns out in this condition that this woman had, her body actually made an antibody that, instead of targeting something that’s not supposed to be there, it actually targeted her brain, and that’s what caused her disease. And when her doctors figured it out, and they filtered out the bad antibodies and they gave her a medication to make her body stop making antibodies, she actually did beautifully well and she went back to being herself. And that disease was only discovered within the last two decades. So if that had happened 30 years ago, she would have been sent to an inpatient psych facility, probably would never have gotten out.Pamela Paul
And what is it called? That disease.Sara Manning Peskin
So it’s called NMDA receptor encephalitis. So it’s a long name. The encephalitis part just means that it’s an inflammation in the brain, and NMDA receptor— that’s actually also a protein. And it turns out the reason why people have this disease is in many cases, or about 50% of the cases, they can develop a tumor on their ovaries, and the tumor cells actually have this protein called NMDA receptors. And then the body mistakenly thinks that it’s foreign, and so it makes these antibodies to try to get rid of these receptors. But we also have them in the brain. And so we end up attacking our brains.Pamela Paul
So one of the surprising things that causes mental illness, or the hijacked brain, as you put it in your subtitle, is proteins, or errant proteins. Another goes under the category of evaders and invaders, as you term it, and some of those are vitamins, which is really surprising. Thiamine and niacin. Can you explain what happens if you don’t have enough, let’s start with thiamine, and how we figure it out that that was the culprit?Sara Manning Peskin
Most of us, I should say, get plenty of vitamins and don’t need to take extra vitamins, because we actually now have flour that’s fortified with them. But that didn’t used to be the case. And so with thiamine deficiency, it goes back to actually a psychiatrist in Russia, named Korsakoff. And he started noticing that he would see these patients that had a disease where it was called multiple neuritis, they would get really weak and they would eventually pass away. But he noticed they had this really unusual memory problem, where they would do what’s called confabulations. So they would essentially create memories that never existed.
He talks about going to see a patient in the hospital and he would ask the patient, “What did you do yesterday?” And the patient would give this extended story about having gone on this incredible trip, whereas Korsakoff knows the guy’s been sitting in the hospital for weeks. And sometimes people describe it as filling in gaps where your memory is not working quite correctly, and so you try to create a story to try to fill in the places that are missing in a way that feels logical. We don’t know if that’s actually how it works, but in any case, the main thing about it is people are what’s called honest liar, so they don’t know that they’re doing it. It’s not purposeful lying, they just sort of come up with these memories of things that never happened. And Korsakoff actually dies before he figures out what was causing it, but it turns out it’s in many cases, although not all, it could be caused by a deficiency in thiamine, which is vitamin B1.
And then the niacin story is quite remarkable. So it used to be, in the early 1900s in the southeastern U.S., there was this huge epidemic of a disease called pellagra, and it caused this fairly disfiguring rash. It caused people to have an upset stomach and it caused dementia. And nobody knew what was causing the disease. There was this idea going around that it was caused by flies that would transmit it from one person to another. And the disease tended to affect people who were impoverished, and so the concept of it being transmitted by flies was easy to stomach for people, because they could say, well, it’s poor people’s own lack of sanitation.
But the disease gets worse and worse, and then the surgeon general calls on this guy, Joseph Goldberger. And Goldberger had been born at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains, came to the U.S. at age 9 speaking almost no English, and works his way up to becoming a public health officer. And he’d gone all around the country and even outside the country solving diseases. He contracted typhoid and typhus, and yellow fever along the way, so he’s really in the trenches. And the surgeon general says, Goldberger, could you take on pellagra? And very quickly Goldberger figures out that it’s not actually an issue of sanitation, it’s actually a deficient diet. And it’s not that these poor people are so unclean that they’re bringing disease on themselves, it’s actually that the country is starving them essentially. And it is such a more difficult concept for people to accept, and he just works tirelessly, even to the point of trying to expose himself to a supposed infection and proving that he doesn’t get it.Pamela Paul
OK, you have to talk about some of the things that he does, because it’s so appalling.Sara Manning Peskin
[LAUGHS] It’s so graphic. There’s actually a great book about him that starts off with exactly this moment. So he essentially took samples of body fluids from people with pellagra. So he took a sample of their blood and then injected it into his own shoulder, he scraped off some of the flakes from their rashes, mixed it with stool and urine, and then would ingest the pills. He actually had colleagues who volunteered, because they believed in him so much, and they volunteered to participate in the research studies too. And his wife even tried to participate, although he limited her participation, and only let her get an ejection of blood. In the end, he has this very funny line in his paper that says, “Considering the amount of filth that we took in, we didn’t do half badly, and none of us got pellagra and none of us got the disease.”Pamela Paul
So that disease is basically gone now.Sara Manning Peskin
So that disease has gone, because eventually they figured out it was actually caused by a deficiency in vitamin B3. And that’s now in flour and lots of other things that we eat regularly. And so, essentially, it still exists in some parts of the world in places where they don’t have fortified ingredients, or where there’s essentially starvation, but for the most part, it’s mostly gone.Pamela Paul
Another disease in your book that also no longer exists is kuru. Tell us about kuru and how it ended up infecting so many members of a small tribe in Papua New Guinea.Sara Manning Peskin
So kuru was this wild disease that came to be known in the 1950s. There was this guy, Vincent Zigas, who was a public health officer. He had been born in Estonia, went to Australia, gets sent to Papua New Guinea. Starts working there for a few years, and then meets this colleague who says, “Hey, if you go to the highlands of Papua New Guinea, you’ll see there’s this disease that’s killing women and children.” And so Zigas, he’s a physician in the area, he feels like he should know about it, and ends up getting invited to go into the highlands and to go trekking. And he starts witnessing this condition, and he sees these women who essentially can’t stand up. So they go to stand and they’re so imbalanced that they fall down, and the same with children. And they lose their language, and they start laughing uncontrollably in situations that are not funny, and they pass away within about a year. And the disease becomes so common that people in the tribe actually were having trouble finding wives. Usually in Papua New Guinea, it was that the men would get killed in warfare and there was a surplus of women. This was the opposite, because so many women were getting killed, and they couldn’t figure out what was going on.
Eventually, Zigas starts a bit of a research project and starts dissecting brains of people who’ve passed away from the disease, and he makes slides and he sends one set off to the NIH in the U.S., he sends actually another set off to become an exhibit in London. And with the help of some colleagues, he actually figures out that these are related to two other diseases that we now know about in animals and another disease in humans.
Eventually, what they realize is that the disease is caused by actually a protein. And it turns out that these proteins are— normally they have to be folded in a really specific way in a really complex 3D structure, and they can misfold in a way that makes them toxic, and the misfolded proteins then cause all the other proteins to misfold also. So that’s how it spreads. And so kuru, the way that it was spreading in this tribe in Papua New Guinea, was that the tribe actually practiced cannibalism. And so after people died, they would take different parts of the body and different people would eat different parts. And it tended to be actually that the women, as part of the funerary practice, would tend to eat the brain, and that’s how they were getting infected. And they would bring leftovers home for their children, and that’s how the children were getting infected. And once that was figured out, cannibalism was outlawed, and kuru essentially doesn’t exist anymore.Pamela Paul
One of the overall takeaways that you come away with from reading this book is that a lot of mental illness of what we think of as madness, as your subtitle says, and craziness, is just as much physical as it is mental or psychological, if that makes sense, or that we’re coming to understand that. Is that accurate?Sara Manning Peskin
I think more and more we’re moving in that direction. Just had a patient I saw recently where the patient had a condition where it caused him to have a complete overhaul in his personality. He’d been this warm, kind, loving husband, and now he started berating his wife. He became extraordinarily religious, where he hadn’t been religious at all before. He had become obsessed with selling a product that he thought was going to make them millions of dollars.
And his wife had thought this whole time that either she was doing something wrong, or maybe he was having an affair, or maybe he just wasn’t interested in her. And she came to our clinic. It turned out actually his disease was caused by a mutation in his DNA that caused him to have this complete change in personality. And it was just a shocking adjustment for her to realize that all this time she thought her marriage was disintegrating, because marriages and people change. And actually it was caused by a single molecule.Pamela Paul
I want to go back to the phrase in your subtitle, “Hijacked Brain.” How is that different from just any other mental illness? Is it that it’s temporary, or curable, or that there’s a very clear physical cause?Sara Manning Peskin
I think when I was using the word, my sense was to aim at the fact that there is a real, definite molecular cause. And so it’s a sense of you are, essentially, no longer in control of your own thoughts and your own cognitive processes because of these particular molecules. So it was to try to convey this idea of these are people who lost control of their own mind, because of these culprit molecules that we now know about.Pamela Paul
Are we discovering new versions of this, new variations of this all the time?Sara Manning Peskin
We are. So, yeah, that condition that we talked about that caused that woman to think that she was living in “The Walking Dead.” That was the first disease of its kind to be discovered and described. We now know of more than 10 conditions that are similar, that cause different symptoms, they’re caused by a different antibody, but we didn’t even know they existed 10, 15 years ago. And we’re now diagnosing them in patients all the time. And these diseases have come to this gray area, where we’re discovering them so quickly, but the information isn’t disseminated as quickly as you might think. So if you get one of these conditions and you happen to be in a place where there’s an expert or someone knows to look, then you could get treated and you can get better. If you happen to end up in a place where news hasn’t hit, they don’t have the tools to diagnose it, you may never get treated.Pamela Paul
What do you think is the most interesting research that’s taking place right now in this area, these molecular causes of mental illness?Sara Manning Peskin
The biggest problem, I think, that most people think about is Alzheimer’s disease. That’s where we’ve made some of the biggest advances, and yet we still haven’t cracked it. When we think of Alzheimer’s disease, what it really is is under a microscope, buildup of two proteins, amyloid and tau. For so many years we actually could not diagnose it until someone died. And so we would have to tell people, “I think you have Alzheimer’s disease, but I can’t prove it to you until you die from it,” which is a horrible thing to have to say to someone.
And actually now we have the tools, so in living people, to actually pick up when they have buildup of amyloid and tau proteins. So we can see someone in clinic, and we can actually say, “Hey, we can detect these molecules in you while you’re still alive,” which has been a huge breakthrough, because for so long part of the reason why we’ve struggled to cure Alzheimer’s disease is because we had no idea who really had it in living people. And so we would enroll people in drug trials when about 80 percent of them had the disease, but about 20 percent turned out not even to have Alzheimer’s disease. So how can you know if a drug works if you’re testing it on people that don’t have the condition?
Now that we can actually diagnose the condition at a molecular level in living people, it’s just opened up huge doors for drug trials for Alzheimer’s disease. And I think that’s probably been one of the biggest developments that will affect the largest number of people.Pamela Paul
Well, in the book you really give a sense of how far we’ve already come with this science. It’s completely fascinating. The book, again, is called “A Molecule Away From Madness: Tales of the Hijacked Brain,” by Sara Manning Peskin. Sara, thank you so much again for being here.Sara Manning Peskin
Thank you so much. This is such a neat thing for me. [MUSIC PLAYING]Pamela Paul
So here’s a request for our listeners. I get lots of feedback from you, some complaints, lots of kind words. Really appreciate it. You can always reach me directly at books@nytimes.com. I will write back. But you can also, if you feel moved to do so, review us on any platform where you download the podcast, whether that’s iTunes, or Stitcher, or Google Play, or somewhere else. Please feel free to review us and, of course, email us at any time.[Music Playing] Pamela Paul
Kenji Lopez-Alt joins us from Seattle. His new book is called “The Wok: Recipes and Techniques.” Kenji, thank you for being here.Kenji Lopez-Alt
Thank you for having me.Pamela Paul
You are the first cookbook author I have had on the show.Kenji Lopez-Alt
[LAUGHS] That’s so flattering.Pamela Paul
[LAUGHS] I saw this book and this is a really— I’m just going to start off right here, it’s just a really beautiful book. It’s a beautifully designed book. And I’m curious if you as an author get involved at all in what the book is going to look like, what the photographs and layout are going to be like, the look and feel of a cookbook.Kenji Lopez-Alt
So this book was meant to be reflective of the first book, “The Food Lab,” so the all-capital typeface and everything, we drew from there. I mean, the idea was that we wanted them to look good next to each other on the shelf, so it’s the same dimensions as “The Food Lab,” with the opposite color scheme, with a black color scheme, as opposed to white. As far as the design and layout and everything, I don’t really have much to do with the layout other than final approval, and all that stuff, but I do work relatively closely with the designers at Norton. And the photographs I took myself, with the exception of a couple, where my 4-year-old was on the shutter. If you see my hands in the photo, that’s my 4-year-old behind the camera on a tripod, and I tell her, “OK, push the button now,” and she pushes it.Pamela Paul
Did she get a photo credit? [LAUGHS]Kenji Lopez-Alt
I think I mentioned her in the acknowledgments. And then the cover design, that little illustration, that was something I doodled first, and then handed my doodle to a real designer who made it look good.Pamela Paul
I was going to say it’s a very nice doodle. Since you brought up “The Food Lab,” that’s probably what people who are familiar with you and your work associate with you most. But for those of us who don’t know what “The Food Lab” is, explain. What is that?Kenji Lopez-Alt
Well, “The Food Lab” started as a column online on Serious Eats. It was a food science column. I’m not a food scientist, with a capital S, scientist, but I write about science and technique behind cooking, particularly behind home cooking. So the goal with “The Food Lab” was always to make it practical to home cooks. So it started as a column on Serious Eats in 2009, and then eventually I developed that into a book that was released in 2015. So it’s a large cookbook. The recipes in it are mainly in the American repertoire, American and America adjacent repertoire, so things that are familiar to home cooks. But really it’s about, maybe a third of the book is recipes, and the rest of the book is all talking about techniques and basic principles of food science. Some very basic thermodynamics and chemistry and physics, and all these things that I think help you become a more agile cook. Kinds of things that once you understand them, they allow you to improvise more in the kitchen and stray away from the recipes more.Pamela Paul
So you said that you’re not a scientist, but you went to MIT, you come from an illustrious family of scientists. How did you get into science-based cooking?Kenji Lopez-Alt
[LAUGHS] So, yes, there are a lot of scientists in my family. Science was just part of the language at home growing up, because my grandparents lived with us also, or one floor below us in an apartment building. And so science was just a basic part of our language in the household growing up, and something I was always interested in. I started as a biology major, I actually finished with a degree in architecture, and I switched halfway through. But cooking, I fell into it accidentally in the middle of college, got my first restaurant job the summer after my sophomore year, when I was just trying to figure out what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. And it was a summer job that ended up becoming a career.
And as far as the science element goes, I was cooking for a number of years in restaurants, and all through that time I had a lot of questions about— for me, it’s natural to ask, why do we do something, why is this working the way it does? And in restaurants, just by the nature of how a restaurant works and the goal of a restaurant, which is more speed and consistency, you don’t have a lot of time to really focus on thinking about those types of questions, or experimenting with them. And so I had this backlog of questions built up in my head that eventually I started to get to explore, first when I was working at Cook’s Illustrated as a recipe developer and editor, and then eventually in my own kitchen at home for when I started writing The Food Lab column for Serious Eats.
So, yeah, the marriage of science and X is something that I feel was always destined to happen in whatever I chose to do as a career path. And it just happened to be food. I feel like I was in the right place at the right time to be able to write about these things, and to build a career out of the type of stuff I write about, because I was there right at the dawn of the food internet and the food blogosphere, and now food video. And all these things seem to really easily work with the type of content I produce, this sort of intersection of cooking and nerd renaissance that happened, 10 or 15 years ago. I got very lucky to be able to do what I do now.
So one of the other questions I had was as a cook, I was the new guy at one of the restaurants I worked at for a while, and as the new guy, it was my responsibility to cook breakfast. About once a week or so, the entire restaurant would get rented out for breakfast parties, and so I boiled a lot of eggs early on in my career, and my strategy back then— and this is the type of restaurant where all the eggs had to look perfect— so my strategy back then was to boil about 40 percent more than I was going to need, knowing that when I was peeling them, some of them were going to end up cracked, and with shells that were difficult to peel off.
And so I’ve always wondered what makes egg shells stick, what’s the best way to cook an egg so that the shell peels off cleanly. That was a question that I actually tried to answer in my very first Food Lab column, and then also in my first New York Times column I revisited that. At that point in my career, I had my own restaurant, and so I was able to use it to host a double blind experiment where we got 100 people to come in, and each one of them peel a dozen eggs, cooked in various methods, and then see what factors really went into making the eggs faster to peel, and then also peel with the least defects in the surface of the white.Pamela Paul
All right, this is actually another really important question that I would like to have answered now.Kenji Lopez-Alt
[LAUGHS]Pamela Paul
What are you supposed to do?Kenji Lopez-Alt
So of all the variables we tested, and I tested everything from— age is one that people say matters a lot, and I tested eggs that were 60 days old versus literally fresh out of the chicken that morning, it didn’t actually make much difference. The pH of the water didn’t make much difference, shocking with ice didn’t really make much difference. The only thing that really mattered was the temperature of the water when you add the eggs to it. So if you start the eggs in cold water, which is the method I used to use, and if you start the eggs in cold water and bring them up to a boil and then shut it off, which I think is a very common way people do it, the egg shells tend to fuse to the whites a lot more, as opposed to if you have a big pot of boiling water, or a steamer full of hot steam, and you lower the eggs into that, then they peel much faster, much more easily. It goes from— I can’t remember what the exact numbers were in the testing we did, but it was something around a 70 percent success rate if you start with cold water up to a 93 percent success rate.Pamela Paul
All right. Let us get to “The Wok,” because you skipped the wok in your first book. How did that happen? Why did you leave the wok out?Kenji Lopez-Alt
I actually didn’t. My first book used to be much longer. It was actually originally going to be a two-volume set. And in the introduction of the first book, there’s a two-page spread about woks, and how the wok is the most versatile pan in my kitchen, and how it’s my favorite tool, and how it has been my favorite tool for years. And there was going to be an entire chapter on wok cooking, but we ended up cutting that chapter, along with a few others, in the interest of length, because the book is already— as it is, it’s 950 pages long. And so I think, originally, it was around 1,600 pages, so we cut out quite a bit of material. And when we cut out that wok chapter, we forgot to cut out the two-page spread at the beginning explaining how great woks are. So it’s this funny thing, because in the book it says, woks are great, and then there’s nothing else about it in the rest of the book. [LAUGHS]Pamela Paul
So it’s just a teaser for this book.Kenji Lopez-Alt
Exactly. So when I started writing that second volume, I was rewriting and reworking a lot of material I already had that got cut from the first one. And so I was working on the wok chapter, and it was up to a couple hundred pages, and I had barely started talking about stir frying, the most basic technique, and there’s still braising and simmering and steaming and frying and pan frying and deep frying and noodles, and all these different things that I wanted to talk about that you can do in a wok. And so I called my editor and I said, “Melanie, why don’t we just make this entire book about the wok? Let’s just write a wok book, forget about Food Lab II for now, let’s just do a wok book.” And she loved the idea, and so that’s what we did. And it was actually a fun, and— relatively, it took a lot of time, of course, but it was a relatively painless book to write, because I am so familiar with my own wok and the ways that it’s useful to me.Pamela Paul
I want to stay with stir fries for a second, because that’s a real misnomer, right, you’re not supposed to stir a stir fry. What are you supposed to do?Kenji Lopez-Alt
It’s more of a toss fry, than a stir fry. And this is the point that I think Grace Young also makes in her books, the sort of Western concept of having a pot on the stove, keeping the pot relatively stationary, and then stirring it around with a spoon. That’s what stirring is, whereas in a wok, when you’re stir frying, in fact, most of the time, if you’re very skilled at it, you don’t even need a second tool at all, you can just hold the wok and toss it. And, in fact, some dishes, for example, Cantonese style, dry, fried beef chow fun. That’s a dish where some chefs will even go so far as to say you cannot use a tool to cook it, because you’re going to break up the noodles, you’re going to crack the noodles with the spatula.
And so, yeah, when you’re stir frying, it’s really much more of a tossing motion, where you toss everything, and it flies back to the back side of the wok, slides up the back, and then rolls back over through this hot column of air, and then tumbles back into the wok. And that process is actually very important to stir frying, because in the same way that when you stick your hand out of a moving car, your hand cools down very quickly, because of the wind blowing against it. Or in the same way that, say, a convection oven will heat things faster than a still air oven. And when you throw things through the air, and when you have moving air surrounding them, temperature changes and evaporation take place faster. So that process of stir frying where you really want to drive off surface moisture as quick as possible, so that your food is not stewing in its own juices, that tossing motion is really essential to that, because it makes the food cook faster, and it also encourages faster evaporation.Pamela Paul
What does a wok do that other pans don’t do? I mean, what makes it so special?Kenji Lopez-Alt
Well, there’s a few things, and it really depends on what cooking method you’re talking about. But obviously the first one is the shape, and the way that it’s heated. So a Western skillet has a wide, flat surface, and your goal with those is to heat it relatively evenly, so that there’s no real hot spots, so the entire surface is heated to the same temperature. And so the materials in both the way they sit on a burner reflect that, whereas with a wok, typically, you’re looking for a wide range of temperatures. So you want a really, really hot zone at the bottom, and then gradually, progressively cooler zones as you move up to the sides, which gives you instant control over how fast your food is cooking.
When you’re talking about a stir fry, it’s conducive to stir frying, because that’s what allows you to do that motion where you’re flipping a large volume, like a half pound of food, or a pound of food, up into the air all at once, which is very difficult to do in a Western skillet, and be able to catch it. And so Western skills are more designed for searing or slow sauteing things like that, whereas a wok is much more designed to rapidly drive off moisture, and to very evenly and quickly cook a number of foods that are cut to relatively the same size.
There are other properties of a wok as well. Most woks these days that people use are going to be made of either carbon steel or cast iron. I generally recommend using a carbon steel wok. And that material itself, both carbon steel and cast iron, once they become seasoned, and it’s a slightly different sense of the word seasoning than when you think about a Western-style cast iron skillet. When you season it, you’re building up layer after layer of these polymers by heating oil in it. And so it ends up with a relatively thick nonstick layer that makes it so that the food doesn’t actually even come in direct contact with the metal. In a wok, you’re not really building up that many layers like that. What you’re really looking for is a single layer of black oxide, which is what you get when iron is heated, exposed to oxygen.
So with a wok, you’re seasoning each time you do it, but that black coating actually has a direct effect on the flavor of the food coming out of the wok as well. So if you cook side by side in, say, a stainless steel, shiny wok versus a well seasoned carbon steel wok. The carbon steel wok has a lot more of what they call that wok hei flavor, the smoky flavor that you get out of a really good stir fry, or certain types of good stir fries. So part of that comes from the material of the pan itself.Pamela Paul
You mentioned wok hei, and I’m going to spell that, it’s hei, h-e-i, not h-e-y. Breath of the wok, what is that?Kenji Lopez-Alt
So it really depends on who you ask. Some people take a very metaphysical approach to it, where the wok hei is really something that you’re trying to— that comes just from eating in restaurants, it’s not something you would really capture at home. And I hear this response more from people who are familiar with Chinese food in China, and are familiar with Chinese home cooking versus restaurant cooking. So in those descriptions, wok hei is the sizzle of a very high restaurant burner, the plume of smoke that comes out when they’re stir frying, and there’s this particular taste that’s highly seasoned that you get out of restaurant food as opposed to home cooking, which is a gentler style of wok cooking.
For me, personally, wok hei, as someone who grew up in the West, and was really only familiar with Chinese food in the context of restaurants, and particularly growing up in the ‘80s in New York, that was mostly Southern Chinese influenced, Chinese-American, and Chinese restaurants, so Cantonese, Hong Kong style cuisine, where there actually is a lot of this— that’s where the concept of wok hei comes from. In Northern China it’s not that familiar, for example. But for me, it was always what my dad would describe as that good, smoky flavor. I remember going to restaurants, we would look for good beef chow fun, and my dad would always say, “Oh, this place does it really well, it has that nice smoky flavor.” And we didn’t know what the word wok hei was back then, but we could identify when a cook was really good at it.
And so, for me, and I think for a lot of people, that smoky, intense flavor that you get from a really high-heat stir fry, that you get when the flame actually jumps into the pan, and directly sets things on fire inside the wok, that’s the flavor of wok hei that I associate with the term. That smokiness.Pamela Paul
What else do non-wok users not understand about the wok? What do people do wrong? What are the biggest misconceptions?Kenji Lopez-Alt
So the biggest misconception, I would say, is probably the same one that I had for many years. And this is something that I think is unique to Western users of woks. And again, it goes back to the idea that my familiarity with wok cooking, in particular with Chinese cooking, comes mainly from Southern Chinese restaurants in the U.S., or Chinese-American restaurants in the U.S. A little bit of home cooking, but for me there was a little bit of home cooking, because my mom is Japanese and they would use woks in Japan as well, but that was Japanese cooking, different from Chinese food.
And so I think when a lot of people think of woks, they think of these intense high-heat stir fries, and they think, I can’t cook properly in a wok unless I have this 150,000 BTU restaurant style burner, which I believed for a long time as well. But if you stop and think just for a little bit about it, that’s a pretty absurd thing to think, because there are literally hundreds of millions of people cooking in woks every day that don’t all work at restaurants, they all cook at home. And a Chinese range might be a little bit different from a Western range, but it’s not going to be this giant flaming behemoth that you have at a Chinese restaurant.
And so the idea that you can only cook with gas, and that you can only cook if you have a very high-heat restaurant burner, that’s, I think, complete nonsense. And I think that actually holds back a lot of people from understanding the versatility of a pan like this. So part of it is resetting your expectations of what types of food you should be cooking in a wok, or you can be cooking in a wok, and then, of course, the other part is the technique and understanding the basics of how you cook in a wok, because if you’re familiar mainly with Western techniques like searing and sauteing, stir frying and braising in a wok, for example, are quite different from their Western counterparts. So I’m hoping that this book does a good job of illustrating the types of foods you can make in a wok, and the techniques you need to get there.Pamela Paul
There’s a lot more technique in the book than actual recipes as you explain, and it’s incredibly practical and useful. But just for fun, leave us with, not a recipe, but what is your favorite thing to cook in a wok?Kenji Lopez-Alt
That would be Japanese style mapo tofu. So mapo tofu is a dish originally from Sichuan province in China. It was introduced to Japan in the ‘70s, which is where my grandparents and my mom learned it. And so growing up, for me, Japanese style mapo tofu that my mom made was always my favorite dish growing up. It differs from the Sichuan— so the Sichuan version is famously mala, so it’s numbing and hot from the flavor of Sichuan peppercorns and chilies, and usually it has a very thick layer of this dark, dark red chili oil that floats on top of it.
And so there’s a recipe for that in the book, but the Japanese version is much more savory and sweet, and hot. It doesn’t have any Sichuan peppercorns, so it’s not numbing at all. And the chili level, the heat level, is relatively mild. So it’s my favorite comfort food from growing up, and it’s also probably the dish that I’ve made the most in my life, outside of restaurants at least. It’s the home cooked dish I’ve made most of my life, especially now, because I have kids. And my daughter loves it, and it’s a dish that takes about 10 minutes start to finish. And it’s one of those things where it’s, like, if I don’t know what else to serve my daughter that day, I always have the ingredients for Japanese mapo tofu, and I know that she’s always going to eat it, so it’s just become a staple dish in my house now as well.Pamela Paul
All right. Well, I’m going to start with that. I have not yet cooked from this book, but I have read this book, and it is completely fascinating. So I am looking forward to the actual eating part. Kenji, thank you so much for being here.Kenji Lopez-Alt
Thank you for having me.Pamela Paul
Kenji Lopez-Alt is the author of “The Food Lab,” and his new book is called “The Wok: Recipes and Techniques.”
[MUSIC PLAYING]John Williams
I’m joined now by two of The Times’ staff critics, Alexandra Jacobs and Jennifer Szalai, to talk about the books they’ve recently been reviewing.Alexandra Jacobs
Hello, John.Jennifer Szalai
Hi, John.John Williams
Alexandra, you reviewed a memoir this week by someone whose memoir I would want to read, and you made me want to read it even more. Who was it? And what’s the book?Alexandra Jacobs
It is the memoir of Harvey Fierstein, who is the consummate New York theater, showbiz personality. He’s dabbled in Hollywood a bit. He’s best known perhaps for “Torch Song Trilogy.”John Williams
On stage.Alexandra Jacobs
Yes, on stage, which was made into a movie, but it was an absolutely seismic event in New York theater in the 1980s.John Williams
And if no one knows his name or cannot bring him to mind, he also has one of the, if not the most, distinctive voices in— I don’t know if any of us want to do the imitation but—Alexandra Jacobs
(IMITATING HARVEY FIERSTEIN) I don’t want to do it.John Williams
(IMITATING HARVEY FIERSTEIN) But you will if you have to.Alexandra Jacobs
(IMITATING HARVEY FIERSTEIN) I will. (IN REGULAR VOICE) As he writes in the memoir, he has— it’s like an extra set of vocal chords or something. But he also— he also wore out his voice screaming in some early avant-garde production that— anyway, there’s no one like Harvey Fierstein, and there’s nothing like this memoir. It’s absolutely one of a kind.
I just love it. It’s full of these incredible one-liners, way too many to trot out here. But my favorite one is a kind of Nora Ephron-esque one he has in the beginning, which is, “Time heals nothing.”
[CHUCKLING]
You know, he’s so funny. But it’s a dark humor, which is my kind of humor, too. And just, there’s something for everyone in this book.John Williams
And what are the dark parts? I mean, I assume, he obviously was in New York during the height of the AIDS crisis and—Alexandra Jacobs
Yeah, I mean, I think just growing up. He writes of dressing up as a girl when he was young. He had these various illnesses.
He stood out. He was different. And so he suffered the way that all children who are different or don’t quite fit in stand out. And then he had dyslexia, you know, which is what sent him to plays because the text is spare.
It was easier for him to read and skips two grades in high school and gets into the avant-garde theater and very early on is in a Warhol production. Oh, even before that, in high school, he’s always running into celebrities, even when he’s young. Anais Nin visits his English class, and he reads her tarot cards, so it’s like that kind of—Jennifer Szalai
What?Alexandra Jacobs
Exactly. It’s a kind of literary showbiz Zelig.John Williams
It’s early in the year, but I’m not sure there will be a better detail in a review this year than him reading Nin’s tarot. Or did she read his tarot cards?Alexandra Jacobs
He read her tarot cards, which I feel is very Harvey, you know. He seized the moment. He’s a scene stealer. He’s a scenery chewer and a scene stealer, yes.John Williams
That’s about as far removed from my high school experience as I can possibly imagine. Jen, you’ve reviewed not just one book this week. You looked at a new book, but through a wider lens. The book is Cathy O’Neil’s “The Shame Machine,” which is sort of an ominous title. Tell us what she means by that, and also what you use this book to think about and write about.Jennifer Szalai
By the title, she’s talking about those mechanisms that basically fuel and feed off shame, which is a very common emotion. I think it’s something that people have been thinking a lot about and talking a lot about, especially within the last several years, especially in the context of social media, which is something she does touch on. But she’s also looking at, for instance, advertising.
The weight-loss industry, the wellness industry, things that make people feel like they’re inadequate essentially, that they should feel ashamed of a certain part of themselves in order for these industries to make a profit. And so I use this book as an occasion to talk about shame in general because it’s something that I’ve been thinking about. Also, there was a really interesting essay that Vivian Gornick— the critic Vivian Gornick published in Harper’s a few months ago, which was about humiliation, the most extreme forms of shame.
It’s really one of those essays that just sort of explore humiliation in different forms. She brings her own personal experience into it. She talks about literature, how it’s been such a rich subject for novelists.
So that got me thinking about the way that shame has been used, both in terms of trying to essentially regulate and maintain social hierarchies and social order and how it’s also been abused, how it’s been made to make people feel bad, how it can be such a crushing experience, which I think is something that Gornick really gets into, that it can actually be extremely damaging. She calls it, at some point, it’s almost soul killing. And so I looked at various books.
There was this one fascinating book by Peter Stearns, who’s a historian of emotion, which I think is just such a great title. And he looks at shame through history. He looks at it cross-culturally in different cultures. He looks at the way that shame has or has not been distinguished from other things, like embarrassment or guilt, in different languages.
I also looked at more contemporary books, like Jon Ronson’s book “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed,” which is a book that I think, when it came out six or seven years ago, it was a best seller. I mean, people were ready for a book like this, which really delved into the world of public shaming. And his argument was that, in the world of digital media or social media where a lot of people congregate, there’s an opportunity to be shamed by strangers and in front of strangers for things that might have, in a previous era, just happened and gone largely unnoticed.John Williams
And then there’s this interesting flipside, which is shamelessness. You talk about how that’s entered our political stream a bit more vividly in the last few years.Jennifer Szalai
It’s interesting to think about the Trump presidency. And one of the things that he was called was shameless, and that was a word that was used, I think, both pejoratively but also, for some of his supporters, there was something really that they thought was liberating in this, that he was saying and doing all these things that the mainstream might have looked down on but that in previous eras might have been more acceptable. It’s interesting to read O’Neil’s book because her argument is that, just like there’s good kinds of shame and bad kinds of shame, she’s saying there’s good kinds of shamelessness and bad kinds of shamelessness.
And so when she’s talking about shame, there’s the punching down shame. She brings her own personal experience of growing up. Since she was a kid, she struggled with her weight, and so she was made to feel shame.
And so she’s saying that there’s like a real liberation and freedom in being able to say, no, no, no, I’m not going to be shamed for this anymore. I’m taking control of this. This is who I am. I’m not going to listen to whatever voices are trying to tell me that I’m not good enough.John Williams
It’s a tricky thing. I mean, it’s a hard thing to not feel when people really want you to.Jennifer Szalai
Well, this is exactly it. And I think that this is why it’s a subject that there’s just always going to be something in it because it does have to do not only with ourselves and how we see ourselves but our relationship to the world around us. And that’s why I think it’s the kind of feeling that it can fuel itself or feed on itself. I mean, there’s that whole notion of a shame spiral, which I think is just really evocative, where it’s like, you feel shame and then you feel some shame for feeling shame.Alexandra Jacobs
You know who shame did not crush? Shame did not crush Harvey Fierstein.Jennifer Szalai
Well, there you go.John Williams
Right, I was going to say he probably experienced a lot of it when he was younger.Jennifer Szalai
Right.John Williams
And he overcame it.Alexandra Jacobs
Maybe.John Williams
I wonder why things like elation can’t spiral. Why does shame have to be the spiraling one?Alexandra Jacobs
Oh, God, yeah.Jennifer Szalai
Right.Alexandra Jacobs
There’s never enough elation. But there’s always more shame to spare.John Williams
Maybe we should get that historian of emotion on here.Alexandra Jacobs
Yeah.Jennifer Szalai
The historian of emotion, Stearns, he does talk about, because shame feeds on insecurity, and I mean what’s more bottomless than insecurity. It’s like you feel something, but then you question it. You wonder if it’s the right feeling.
It’s just around and around it goes. There’s a long history of using shame for the purposes of enforcing social order. It’s not really as common anymore. But in the past, people would be put in pillories if they did something wrong.John Williams
And the scarlet letter that you mentioned.Jennifer Szalai
Scarlet letters, dunce caps for students who were misbehaving in class, I mean, there was this idea that because it was so painful, the idea was that it would force somebody to really ruminate and brood over what they had done, that it would be really effective as a form of punishment. But, of course, we now look at those punishments differently.John Williams
Yeah, its excesses are legion and unfortunate. And yet also you go through life often wishing that some people felt more shame than they do, so it’s a complicated subject. I have 25 more questions about it, but I’ll let listeners visit your essay online. And thank you for being here to talk about it. Thank you both.Alexandra Jacobs
Thank you, John. [MUSIC PLAYING]John Williams
This is John Williams, and I am joined by the host of the podcast, Pamela Paul, to turn the tables on her. She has some news. What’s going on, Pamela?Pamela Paul
Well, as some of our listeners know, not all, the reason I get to host this podcast, which is— I just want to mention— the oldest and longest-running podcast at The Times. It just turned 16 years old. The reason I get to do this is because of my day job.
My actual day job is editing The New York Times Book Review and running the books desk here at The New York Times. And I’ve been doing that for nine years, and I’m actually not going to do that anymore. So this is my last time hosting this podcast.John Williams
So this has come as a shock to me and to our listeners because it has been nine years, which is amazing, because I’ve been here for all of those nine years. And so I’m feeling the passage of time, as one does. We had occasion to talk a couple of times last year because, like you said, there was a big anniversary last year when it turned 15. And so we talked about this a bit.
But I know that when you first started it, there were obviously some nerves because it’s a different part of the job that wasn’t necessarily what you got into journalism for. How much did you embrace that at first and how much did you really want to jump in and do it? Or did you ever think about whether you wanted that to be part of the mix?Pamela Paul
Well, as you know, Sam Tanenhaus, the original host of this podcast and my former boss, he actually was also here for nine years as the editor of The Book Review, as was his predecessor, Chip McGrath. So it feels like there’s some kind of timer that goes off where you’re like, I am done being the editor of The Book Review. In any case, he had been done. And it had been announced that I was going to be his successor as the editor of The Book Review.
But I didn’t really think about the podcast at the time. I’d been on the podcast as a guest and as a reviewer, talking about books that I reviewed when I was a freelancer. But I wasn’t actually even in my office yet as editor. Sam hadn’t left. And he invited me— I remember he was walking down the hall full of cheer and excitement.
And he said, “Hey, come on down to the studio. We’re doing the last segment, my last episode of the podcast. Everyone’s coming on. You should come on.” And I was, like, wait a minute.
I haven’t started my new job yet. If this is your last segment, who’s hosting it next week? And he said, “You are.” And I just was really kind of shocked and terrified, as you mentioned, because I had never hosted a podcast.
And I think I really didn’t know what I was doing. And it’s interesting. Sam said to me towards the end of his time at The New York Times as the editor, he said, “My favorite part of the job is the podcast.” And I just thought that was insanity. And I have to say, here I am at the end of nine years as editor of The Book Review, and I can pretty much say the podcast was my favorite part of the job in the end.John Williams
It doesn’t surprise me that it wasn’t in the front of your mind when you were taking over for Sam because it did sort of seem like his baby at the time. He had been the only host of it. And back then, nine years ago, there weren’t that many podcasts at The Times, were there?Pamela Paul
No, I mean, I think that it had gotten down to maybe three or four podcasts at that moment. Actually, our excellent producer, Pedro Rosado, would know that much better than either of us because he was here working on those podcasts at the time. But there was a science podcast.
There was a thing where someone essentially read the morning news. And there was Popcast, of course, which Pedro also produces. And there was The Book Review. They had just kind of cut back.John Williams
Right. There was a kind of contraction. That was sort of a larger cultural phenomenon, that there was this burst of podcasts, and there was a contraction, and then there was a re-burst.Pamela Paul
Right, right. And so nine years ago was during the contraction, when they said, what is this podcast thing that we’ve started. Let’s dial back on that. But they kept the podcasts, I think, that had a strong listenership at that time, and they kept us going.
So it was kind of unusual. And I think, for a long time, I didn’t really believe that anyone listened to it. So that took a small amount of the pressure off.John Williams
But you found out people listen to it because we often hear from listeners, which is also a great part of the podcast.Pamela Paul
We do. And I have to say, I’m going to miss that. I hope that someone will forward me some of your emails, should anyone email anything after this episode, because getting those emails was really just fantastic. You’re just like, the emails that we would get to books@nytimes.com from our podcast listeners were— all right, I’ll just say it.
They were my favorite emails. They were my favorite emails. We also get letters to the editor, which I like, and a lot of complaints and customer service questions and all kinds of things go through that email inbox. But the emails from listeners were often really personal, passionate, opinionated.
Some people would let me know when they did not like a guest or did not like my interview of the guest, did not like the questions I asked. It was funny how people would ask for more about what we’re reading, more information. Or they would report that they had read something that we talked about and share their feedback. So I really loved that.John Williams
Yeah, I love the ones you would forward to me and Greg and others who are on What We’re Reading saying, “A couple of months ago, someone was talking about a book, set in this place with this kind of character. What was that?” And we all kind of had to recreate it. Speaking of What We’re Reading, that was one of the segments that did not exist, for sure, during Sam’s time. I wonder what else has changed in the podcast. I imagine if we listen to an episode from nine years ago, it would sound pretty different.Pamela Paul
Yeah, What We’re Reading evolved from a kind of Inside the Best sellers that had been done by a number of people. Jenny Schuessler did it for a while. Then Greg Cowles did it, and we would talk about what was new on the best-seller list. And I thought that the larger idea was what are people in the world reading. So then it evolved into what are we in the wider world reading.
But we sort of then stopped talking about the wider world or the best-seller list at all and just turned it into a conversation about books. And it kind of became one of the— I keep saying, “everything was my favorite.” I’m just full of enthusiasm. And people who listen to this podcast know that I’m not always full of enthusiasm about everything.
But I loved What We’re Reading because it was a chance to talk to my colleagues here, who I’ve loved working with, and to talk to our critics and other editors on the desk and to try to recreate the kind of conversations that we had when we were in the office. So that also became really nice during the pandemic. The one downside— well, there are a couple downsides.
It is really nice to see people in person and to look at human faces when we do that— when we have that conversation. The other downside is that, for technical reasons, it can only be a conversation of three. And when we were in the office, it was a roundtable of four, which sometimes got a little rowdy, but I liked the variety.John Williams
Well, and to your point about reader emails or listener emails earlier, it did— it almost made what the wider world is reading more a part of it because I think people reacted more to those conversations than they had to the best-seller list, with their own thoughts about what they were reading or whether they had read the things that we were talking about. I know that I’ve gotten some really lovely emails, and I’m sure you’ve gotten many more, about some of the books we’ve discussed on there and people’s memories of them or wanting to know what else we would recommend by that author. So I should say that in this sad period, I think of you as having really long ago actually perfected the hosting of this podcast, from the early days when I know that you felt shaky, although that didn’t really come across all that much. I feel like you hit the ground running. But you definitely got more comfortable in the role, and I think of you now as a very seasoned interviewer and have done some very moving and probing interviews with people.
So in the interim and for a little bit in the future, I’ll be hosting the podcast. The podcast isn’t going anywhere. And I don’t remember really specifically— I know that Sam told you one thing was to really be in the place of the general reader’s brain and not to get too far into the weeds, but to let the author describe what their project is and their thoughts about it. And I wonder if you have any advice for me, a terrified interim host.Pamela Paul
No, you’re going to be great. You already know how to do this, and you’ve subbed for me on a number of occasions. I remember a very early negative review, I think, on iTunes after I took over, said, “Pamela Paul sounds bummed.”
And— and I never got over that in my head. I thought, I didn’t realize I sound bummed. I think it’s just abject terror. But I think you’re going to be just great. I am looking forward to listening to you.
As you know well and Pedro knows and everyone in our office knows, I found it hard to listen to the podcast myself because I don’t like listening to my own voice. And I would really only listen to it if somebody told me that episode was especially great. I was kind of curious, like, really. Let me listen.
But now I’ll get to listen to you, and I will be completely unconflicted. So I want to turn the tables now and say, welcome, John, new host of The Book Review podcast. I think listeners have a lot to look forward to.John Williams
Well, that’s very kind of you, and I appreciate it. And I appreciate all the times that you have let me host segments over the years as a way to make myself a bit less terrified as this happens. And let’s quickly say before you go, where people can find you and read you and what you’ll be up to because I know that you have a lot of readers and followers.Pamela Paul
Oh, thank you. Well, before that, let me just say also you are going to be obviously in the excellent hands of our producer, Pedro. And I could not be more grateful to Pedro Rosado. Every week, I say to him that he makes me sound much better than I really do in real life. And he knows that that’s true better than anyone.
So Pedro will still be here as well. So I’ll be moving to Opinion, back to writing as an op-ed columnist or an opinion columnist, as it’s now called, which is something that I have very sorely missed. I’ve been doing it on the side.
I’ve written five books since I’ve been at The Times. But I did that by essentially not living, not sleeping and not having any fun. So I’m really looking forward to going back to writing full-time and during daylight hours on my paid time and not my free time.John Williams
Well, I look forward to reading you there and also maybe to having you on a future episode of the podcast when your next book comes out, since you’re so prolific.Pamela Paul
Oh, right, now I can— now I can talk about it. Or maybe I’ll review a book, and you can have me on to talk about that.John Williams
That would be great. Thanks, Pamela, for everything.Pamela Paul
Thanks, John. [MUSIC PLAYING]
Remember, there’s more at nytimes.com/books. And you can always write to us at books@nytimes.com. I write back; not right away, but I do.
The Book Review podcast is produced by the great Pedro Rosado from HeadStepper Media, with a major assist from my colleague John Williams. Thanks for listening. For The New York Times, I’m Pamela Paul.
Book ReviewSubscribe:Apple Podcasts
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March 18, 2022
The Science Behind Mental Afflictions
Sara Manning Peskin talks about “A Molecule Away From Madness,” and J. Kenji López-Alt discusses “The Wok.”Hosted by Pamela Paul
Transcript
TRANSCRIPT
0:00/1:00:45
The Science Behind Mental Afflictions
Hosted by Pamela Paul
Sara Manning Peskin talks about “A Molecule Away From Madness,” and J. Kenji López-Alt discusses “The Wok.”Friday, March 18th, 2022
[MUSIC PLAYING]Pamela Paul
How can an errant protein or a minor DNA glitch make you lose your mind? Sara Manning Peskin joins us to talk about her book, “A Molecule Away From Madness: Tales of the Hijacked Brain.” What makes cooking with a wok so special? Kenji Lopez-Alt will be here to talk about his new book, “The Wok: Recipes and Techniques.” Plus, our critics will be here to talk about the books they’ve been reading and reviewing.
This is the Book Review Podcast from The New York Times. It’s March 18th. I’m Pamela Paul.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Sara Manning Peskin joins us now from Philadelphia, where she is an assistant professor of clinical neurology at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of her first book. It’s called “A Molecule Away From Madness: Tales of the Hijacked Brain.” Sara, thanks for being here.Sara Manning Peskin
Thanks for having me.Pamela Paul
So I mentioned to you before we started recording, but I’ll mention for listeners: I read your book and loved it. My 12-year-old son read your book and loved it. One of the things that you did so well in this book was explain science really through stories and, in particular, through case histories.
The style reminded me a little bit of Lisa Sanders’s Diagnosis column in The New York Times Magazine, if you’re familiar with that. Each one is written kind of like a mystery, and I’m curious what the thinking was behind that.Sara Manning Peskin
I think I wanted to capture how this actually unfolds in real time, that for a lot of us, we go to doctors and you get a diagnosis and it’s as if that diagnosis has always existed. But in fact, the diagnosis was invented by someone who discovered something. And actually, the history behind these diseases is often lost.
Actually, since writing the book, when I see patients in clinic, when I diagnose someone with Alzheimer’s disease, I tell them: This is how we figured out what Alzheimer’s disease is. This is who it was. This is how it happened. And I think it’s more meaningful and actually allows us to understand diseases better.Pamela Paul
And you do it not only in telling the biographies of the scientists and the doctors who uncovered these diseases and afflictions but also of patients. And one of the questions I had was, are these patients actual patients of yours?
Some of the case studies in the book, you use the full names— I don’t think they’re pseudonyms— for these people that— some of them that you’ve treated?Sara Manning Peskin
Only two of them are actually my patients, and when I interviewed them for the book, they weren’t under my care anymore. Most of them were people who were referred to me by colleagues.
Actually, I did change their names, but the other details I have left the same, with a thought that when you read a book where it’s sort of compilations, it’s hard to know: Is that really an accurate picture of what it’s like to live with that disease? Or is it stylized in the way that the author thinks it is or things it looks like? And so, I wanted to keep the details right so that readers can be sure that what they’re seeing is what these diseases really look like.Pamela Paul
How is it different writing about people that you’d actually treated from writing historical case histories, in some cases of people who are long since dead?Sara Manning Peskin
It totally changed how I see medicine actually. When we see patients in the hospital or in clinic, you get this small glimpse of what’s going on.
And even if you have them tell— you ask them to tell us, what is it like when you move around the world, and where do you see difficulty, and what brought you here? But seeing someone in their house with their family, learning about what they were like before disease, what they’re like after, is just a totally different understanding of the humanity of these conditions.
So one of the stories is about a woman born into difficult circumstances, had this mother who pushed her to get a good education. She ended up at an elite university, graduated, came home, woke up one morning and couldn’t really create new memories. She kept asking her mom what was for breakfast after they’d already eaten.Pamela Paul
Oh, yeah.Sara Manning Peskin
And her mom ends up taking her to the hospital. And she becomes acutely psychotic. It turns out she’d been watching “The Walking Dead,” and she starts to believe that she’s living inside the show, and she calls different nurses and family members by names of characters from the show. I met her while she was in the hospital, and I remember thinking, her mom was just so impressive and such a wonderful advocate for her while she was there. But for the book, I actually went out to their house after she’d been treated. She actually did wonderfully and was back home doing well, and it was amazing to see what she had been like before the disease, to hear her mom talk about the experience to her, her talk about what it was like to wake up after all of that. And it’s a glimpse that we really never get as physicians otherwise.Pamela Paul
Well, let’s talk about that case. The chapter is called “Zombie Apocalypse,” and it’s the story of Lauren Kane. In her case, her affliction was caused by a protein. Can you explain?Sara Manning Peskin
Most of us know proteins as, you go to the grocery store and you buy Greek yogurt and it has a lot of protein. But proteins, really, they’re particular molecules. And if you think about your body, DNA is essentially just a computer code that has all the information and the instructions for running the cell and running a body. But it’s proteins that really are the workhorses of the cell. And there are particular proteins that are called antibodies that the body makes to try to get rid of invaders. The antibodies are things that we make that helps us fend off viruses and bacteria.
But it turns out in this condition that this woman had, her body actually made an antibody that, instead of targeting something that’s not supposed to be there, it actually targeted her brain, and that’s what caused her disease. And when her doctors figured it out, and they filtered out the bad antibodies and they gave her a medication to make her body stop making antibodies, she actually did beautifully well and she went back to being herself. And that disease was only discovered within the last two decades. So if that had happened 30 years ago, she would have been sent to an inpatient psych facility, probably would never have gotten out.Pamela Paul
And what is it called? That disease.Sara Manning Peskin
So it’s called NMDA receptor encephalitis. So it’s a long name. The encephalitis part just means that it’s an inflammation in the brain, and NMDA receptor— that’s actually also a protein. And it turns out the reason why people have this disease is in many cases, or about 50% of the cases, they can develop a tumor on their ovaries, and the tumor cells actually have this protein called NMDA receptors. And then the body mistakenly thinks that it’s foreign, and so it makes these antibodies to try to get rid of these receptors. But we also have them in the brain. And so we end up attacking our brains.Pamela Paul
So one of the surprising things that causes mental illness, or the hijacked brain, as you put it in your subtitle, is proteins, or errant proteins. Another goes under the category of evaders and invaders, as you term it, and some of those are vitamins, which is really surprising. Thiamine and niacin. Can you explain what happens if you don’t have enough, let’s start with thiamine, and how we figure it out that that was the culprit?Sara Manning Peskin
Most of us, I should say, get plenty of vitamins and don’t need to take extra vitamins, because we actually now have flour that’s fortified with them. But that didn’t used to be the case. And so with thiamine deficiency, it goes back to actually a psychiatrist in Russia, named Korsakoff. And he started noticing that he would see these patients that had a disease where it was called multiple neuritis, they would get really weak and they would eventually pass away. But he noticed they had this really unusual memory problem, where they would do what’s called confabulations. So they would essentially create memories that never existed.
He talks about going to see a patient in the hospital and he would ask the patient, “What did you do yesterday?” And the patient would give this extended story about having gone on this incredible trip, whereas Korsakoff knows the guy’s been sitting in the hospital for weeks. And sometimes people describe it as filling in gaps where your memory is not working quite correctly, and so you try to create a story to try to fill in the places that are missing in a way that feels logical. We don’t know if that’s actually how it works, but in any case, the main thing about it is people are what’s called honest liar, so they don’t know that they’re doing it. It’s not purposeful lying, they just sort of come up with these memories of things that never happened. And Korsakoff actually dies before he figures out what was causing it, but it turns out it’s in many cases, although not all, it could be caused by a deficiency in thiamine, which is vitamin B1.
And then the niacin story is quite remarkable. So it used to be, in the early 1900s in the southeastern U.S., there was this huge epidemic of a disease called pellagra, and it caused this fairly disfiguring rash. It caused people to have an upset stomach and it caused dementia. And nobody knew what was causing the disease. There was this idea going around that it was caused by flies that would transmit it from one person to another. And the disease tended to affect people who were impoverished, and so the concept of it being transmitted by flies was easy to stomach for people, because they could say, well, it’s poor people’s own lack of sanitation.
But the disease gets worse and worse, and then the surgeon general calls on this guy, Joseph Goldberger. And Goldberger had been born at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains, came to the U.S. at age 9 speaking almost no English, and works his way up to becoming a public health officer. And he’d gone all around the country and even outside the country solving diseases. He contracted typhoid and typhus, and yellow fever along the way, so he’s really in the trenches. And the surgeon general says, Goldberger, could you take on pellagra? And very quickly Goldberger figures out that it’s not actually an issue of sanitation, it’s actually a deficient diet. And it’s not that these poor people are so unclean that they’re bringing disease on themselves, it’s actually that the country is starving them essentially. And it is such a more difficult concept for people to accept, and he just works tirelessly, even to the point of trying to expose himself to a supposed infection and proving that he doesn’t get it.Pamela Paul
OK, you have to talk about some of the things that he does, because it’s so appalling.Sara Manning Peskin
[LAUGHS] It’s so graphic. There’s actually a great book about him that starts off with exactly this moment. So he essentially took samples of body fluids from people with pellagra. So he took a sample of their blood and then injected it into his own shoulder, he scraped off some of the flakes from their rashes, mixed it with stool and urine, and then would ingest the pills. He actually had colleagues who volunteered, because they believed in him so much, and they volunteered to participate in the research studies too. And his wife even tried to participate, although he limited her participation, and only let her get an ejection of blood. In the end, he has this very funny line in his paper that says, “Considering the amount of filth that we took in, we didn’t do half badly, and none of us got pellagra and none of us got the disease.”Pamela Paul
So that disease is basically gone now.Sara Manning Peskin
So that disease has gone, because eventually they figured out it was actually caused by a deficiency in vitamin B3. And that’s now in flour and lots of other things that we eat regularly. And so, essentially, it still exists in some parts of the world in places where they don’t have fortified ingredients, or where there’s essentially starvation, but for the most part, it’s mostly gone.Pamela Paul
Another disease in your book that also no longer exists is kuru. Tell us about kuru and how it ended up infecting so many members of a small tribe in Papua New Guinea.Sara Manning Peskin
So kuru was this wild disease that came to be known in the 1950s. There was this guy, Vincent Zigas, who was a public health officer. He had been born in Estonia, went to Australia, gets sent to Papua New Guinea. Starts working there for a few years, and then meets this colleague who says, “Hey, if you go to the highlands of Papua New Guinea, you’ll see there’s this disease that’s killing women and children.” And so Zigas, he’s a physician in the area, he feels like he should know about it, and ends up getting invited to go into the highlands and to go trekking. And he starts witnessing this condition, and he sees these women who essentially can’t stand up. So they go to stand and they’re so imbalanced that they fall down, and the same with children. And they lose their language, and they start laughing uncontrollably in situations that are not funny, and they pass away within about a year. And the disease becomes so common that people in the tribe actually were having trouble finding wives. Usually in Papua New Guinea, it was that the men would get killed in warfare and there was a surplus of women. This was the opposite, because so many women were getting killed, and they couldn’t figure out what was going on.
Eventually, Zigas starts a bit of a research project and starts dissecting brains of people who’ve passed away from the disease, and he makes slides and he sends one set off to the NIH in the U.S., he sends actually another set off to become an exhibit in London. And with the help of some colleagues, he actually figures out that these are related to two other diseases that we now know about in animals and another disease in humans.
Eventually, what they realize is that the disease is caused by actually a protein. And it turns out that these proteins are— normally they have to be folded in a really specific way in a really complex 3D structure, and they can misfold in a way that makes them toxic, and the misfolded proteins then cause all the other proteins to misfold also. So that’s how it spreads. And so kuru, the way that it was spreading in this tribe in Papua New Guinea, was that the tribe actually practiced cannibalism. And so after people died, they would take different parts of the body and different people would eat different parts. And it tended to be actually that the women, as part of the funerary practice, would tend to eat the brain, and that’s how they were getting infected. And they would bring leftovers home for their children, and that’s how the children were getting infected. And once that was figured out, cannibalism was outlawed, and kuru essentially doesn’t exist anymore.Pamela Paul
One of the overall takeaways that you come away with from reading this book is that a lot of mental illness of what we think of as madness, as your subtitle says, and craziness, is just as much physical as it is mental or psychological, if that makes sense, or that we’re coming to understand that. Is that accurate?Sara Manning Peskin
I think more and more we’re moving in that direction. Just had a patient I saw recently where the patient had a condition where it caused him to have a complete overhaul in his personality. He’d been this warm, kind, loving husband, and now he started berating his wife. He became extraordinarily religious, where he hadn’t been religious at all before. He had become obsessed with selling a product that he thought was going to make them millions of dollars.
And his wife had thought this whole time that either she was doing something wrong, or maybe he was having an affair, or maybe he just wasn’t interested in her. And she came to our clinic. It turned out actually his disease was caused by a mutation in his DNA that caused him to have this complete change in personality. And it was just a shocking adjustment for her to realize that all this time she thought her marriage was disintegrating, because marriages and people change. And actually it was caused by a single molecule.Pamela Paul
I want to go back to the phrase in your subtitle, “Hijacked Brain.” How is that different from just any other mental illness? Is it that it’s temporary, or curable, or that there’s a very clear physical cause?Sara Manning Peskin
I think when I was using the word, my sense was to aim at the fact that there is a real, definite molecular cause. And so it’s a sense of you are, essentially, no longer in control of your own thoughts and your own cognitive processes because of these particular molecules. So it was to try to convey this idea of these are people who lost control of their own mind, because of these culprit molecules that we now know about.Pamela Paul
Are we discovering new versions of this, new variations of this all the time?Sara Manning Peskin
We are. So, yeah, that condition that we talked about that caused that woman to think that she was living in “The Walking Dead.” That was the first disease of its kind to be discovered and described. We now know of more than 10 conditions that are similar, that cause different symptoms, they’re caused by a different antibody, but we didn’t even know they existed 10, 15 years ago. And we’re now diagnosing them in patients all the time. And these diseases have come to this gray area, where we’re discovering them so quickly, but the information isn’t disseminated as quickly as you might think. So if you get one of these conditions and you happen to be in a place where there’s an expert or someone knows to look, then you could get treated and you can get better. If you happen to end up in a place where news hasn’t hit, they don’t have the tools to diagnose it, you may never get treated.Pamela Paul
What do you think is the most interesting research that’s taking place right now in this area, these molecular causes of mental illness?Sara Manning Peskin
The biggest problem, I think, that most people think about is Alzheimer’s disease. That’s where we’ve made some of the biggest advances, and yet we still haven’t cracked it. When we think of Alzheimer’s disease, what it really is is under a microscope, buildup of two proteins, amyloid and tau. For so many years we actually could not diagnose it until someone died. And so we would have to tell people, “I think you have Alzheimer’s disease, but I can’t prove it to you until you die from it,” which is a horrible thing to have to say to someone.
And actually now we have the tools, so in living people, to actually pick up when they have buildup of amyloid and tau proteins. So we can see someone in clinic, and we can actually say, “Hey, we can detect these molecules in you while you’re still alive,” which has been a huge breakthrough, because for so long part of the reason why we’ve struggled to cure Alzheimer’s disease is because we had no idea who really had it in living people. And so we would enroll people in drug trials when about 80 percent of them had the disease, but about 20 percent turned out not even to have Alzheimer’s disease. So how can you know if a drug works if you’re testing it on people that don’t have the condition?
Now that we can actually diagnose the condition at a molecular level in living people, it’s just opened up huge doors for drug trials for Alzheimer’s disease. And I think that’s probably been one of the biggest developments that will affect the largest number of people.Pamela Paul
Well, in the book you really give a sense of how far we’ve already come with this science. It’s completely fascinating. The book, again, is called “A Molecule Away From Madness: Tales of the Hijacked Brain,” by Sara Manning Peskin. Sara, thank you so much again for being here.Sara Manning Peskin
Thank you so much. This is such a neat thing for me. [MUSIC PLAYING]Pamela Paul
So here’s a request for our listeners. I get lots of feedback from you, some complaints, lots of kind words. Really appreciate it. You can always reach me directly at books@nytimes.com. I will write back. But you can also, if you feel moved to do so, review us on any platform where you download the podcast, whether that’s iTunes, or Stitcher, or Google Play, or somewhere else. Please feel free to review us and, of course, email us at any time.[Music Playing] Pamela Paul
Kenji Lopez-Alt joins us from Seattle. His new book is called “The Wok: Recipes and Techniques.” Kenji, thank you for being here.Kenji Lopez-Alt
Thank you for having me.Pamela Paul
You are the first cookbook author I have had on the show.Kenji Lopez-Alt
[LAUGHS] That’s so flattering.Pamela Paul
[LAUGHS] I saw this book and this is a really— I’m just going to start off right here, it’s just a really beautiful book. It’s a beautifully designed book. And I’m curious if you as an author get involved at all in what the book is going to look like, what the photographs and layout are going to be like, the look and feel of a cookbook.Kenji Lopez-Alt
So this book was meant to be reflective of the first book, “The Food Lab,” so the all-capital typeface and everything, we drew from there. I mean, the idea was that we wanted them to look good next to each other on the shelf, so it’s the same dimensions as “The Food Lab,” with the opposite color scheme, with a black color scheme, as opposed to white. As far as the design and layout and everything, I don’t really have much to do with the layout other than final approval, and all that stuff, but I do work relatively closely with the designers at Norton. And the photographs I took myself, with the exception of a couple, where my 4-year-old was on the shutter. If you see my hands in the photo, that’s my 4-year-old behind the camera on a tripod, and I tell her, “OK, push the button now,” and she pushes it.Pamela Paul
Did she get a photo credit? [LAUGHS]Kenji Lopez-Alt
I think I mentioned her in the acknowledgments. And then the cover design, that little illustration, that was something I doodled first, and then handed my doodle to a real designer who made it look good.Pamela Paul
I was going to say it’s a very nice doodle. Since you brought up “The Food Lab,” that’s probably what people who are familiar with you and your work associate with you most. But for those of us who don’t know what “The Food Lab” is, explain. What is that?Kenji Lopez-Alt
Well, “The Food Lab” started as a column online on Serious Eats. It was a food science column. I’m not a food scientist, with a capital S, scientist, but I write about science and technique behind cooking, particularly behind home cooking. So the goal with “The Food Lab” was always to make it practical to home cooks. So it started as a column on Serious Eats in 2009, and then eventually I developed that into a book that was released in 2015. So it’s a large cookbook. The recipes in it are mainly in the American repertoire, American and America adjacent repertoire, so things that are familiar to home cooks. But really it’s about, maybe a third of the book is recipes, and the rest of the book is all talking about techniques and basic principles of food science. Some very basic thermodynamics and chemistry and physics, and all these things that I think help you become a more agile cook. Kinds of things that once you understand them, they allow you to improvise more in the kitchen and stray away from the recipes more.Pamela Paul
So you said that you’re not a scientist, but you went to MIT, you come from an illustrious family of scientists. How did you get into science-based cooking?Kenji Lopez-Alt
[LAUGHS] So, yes, there are a lot of scientists in my family. Science was just part of the language at home growing up, because my grandparents lived with us also, or one floor below us in an apartment building. And so science was just a basic part of our language in the household growing up, and something I was always interested in. I started as a biology major, I actually finished with a degree in architecture, and I switched halfway through. But cooking, I fell into it accidentally in the middle of college, got my first restaurant job the summer after my sophomore year, when I was just trying to figure out what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. And it was a summer job that ended up becoming a career.
And as far as the science element goes, I was cooking for a number of years in restaurants, and all through that time I had a lot of questions about— for me, it’s natural to ask, why do we do something, why is this working the way it does? And in restaurants, just by the nature of how a restaurant works and the goal of a restaurant, which is more speed and consistency, you don’t have a lot of time to really focus on thinking about those types of questions, or experimenting with them. And so I had this backlog of questions built up in my head that eventually I started to get to explore, first when I was working at Cook’s Illustrated as a recipe developer and editor, and then eventually in my own kitchen at home for when I started writing The Food Lab column for Serious Eats.
So, yeah, the marriage of science and X is something that I feel was always destined to happen in whatever I chose to do as a career path. And it just happened to be food. I feel like I was in the right place at the right time to be able to write about these things, and to build a career out of the type of stuff I write about, because I was there right at the dawn of the food internet and the food blogosphere, and now food video. And all these things seem to really easily work with the type of content I produce, this sort of intersection of cooking and nerd renaissance that happened, 10 or 15 years ago. I got very lucky to be able to do what I do now.
So one of the other questions I had was as a cook, I was the new guy at one of the restaurants I worked at for a while, and as the new guy, it was my responsibility to cook breakfast. About once a week or so, the entire restaurant would get rented out for breakfast parties, and so I boiled a lot of eggs early on in my career, and my strategy back then— and this is the type of restaurant where all the eggs had to look perfect— so my strategy back then was to boil about 40 percent more than I was going to need, knowing that when I was peeling them, some of them were going to end up cracked, and with shells that were difficult to peel off.
And so I’ve always wondered what makes egg shells stick, what’s the best way to cook an egg so that the shell peels off cleanly. That was a question that I actually tried to answer in my very first Food Lab column, and then also in my first New York Times column I revisited that. At that point in my career, I had my own restaurant, and so I was able to use it to host a double blind experiment where we got 100 people to come in, and each one of them peel a dozen eggs, cooked in various methods, and then see what factors really went into making the eggs faster to peel, and then also peel with the least defects in the surface of the white.Pamela Paul
All right, this is actually another really important question that I would like to have answered now.Kenji Lopez-Alt
[LAUGHS]Pamela Paul
What are you supposed to do?Kenji Lopez-Alt
So of all the variables we tested, and I tested everything from— age is one that people say matters a lot, and I tested eggs that were 60 days old versus literally fresh out of the chicken that morning, it didn’t actually make much difference. The pH of the water didn’t make much difference, shocking with ice didn’t really make much difference. The only thing that really mattered was the temperature of the water when you add the eggs to it. So if you start the eggs in cold water, which is the method I used to use, and if you start the eggs in cold water and bring them up to a boil and then shut it off, which I think is a very common way people do it, the egg shells tend to fuse to the whites a lot more, as opposed to if you have a big pot of boiling water, or a steamer full of hot steam, and you lower the eggs into that, then they peel much faster, much more easily. It goes from— I can’t remember what the exact numbers were in the testing we did, but it was something around a 70 percent success rate if you start with cold water up to a 93 percent success rate.Pamela Paul
All right. Let us get to “The Wok,” because you skipped the wok in your first book. How did that happen? Why did you leave the wok out?Kenji Lopez-Alt
I actually didn’t. My first book used to be much longer. It was actually originally going to be a two-volume set. And in the introduction of the first book, there’s a two-page spread about woks, and how the wok is the most versatile pan in my kitchen, and how it’s my favorite tool, and how it has been my favorite tool for years. And there was going to be an entire chapter on wok cooking, but we ended up cutting that chapter, along with a few others, in the interest of length, because the book is already— as it is, it’s 950 pages long. And so I think, originally, it was around 1,600 pages, so we cut out quite a bit of material. And when we cut out that wok chapter, we forgot to cut out the two-page spread at the beginning explaining how great woks are. So it’s this funny thing, because in the book it says, woks are great, and then there’s nothing else about it in the rest of the book. [LAUGHS]Pamela Paul
So it’s just a teaser for this book.Kenji Lopez-Alt
Exactly. So when I started writing that second volume, I was rewriting and reworking a lot of material I already had that got cut from the first one. And so I was working on the wok chapter, and it was up to a couple hundred pages, and I had barely started talking about stir frying, the most basic technique, and there’s still braising and simmering and steaming and frying and pan frying and deep frying and noodles, and all these different things that I wanted to talk about that you can do in a wok. And so I called my editor and I said, “Melanie, why don’t we just make this entire book about the wok? Let’s just write a wok book, forget about Food Lab II for now, let’s just do a wok book.” And she loved the idea, and so that’s what we did. And it was actually a fun, and— relatively, it took a lot of time, of course, but it was a relatively painless book to write, because I am so familiar with my own wok and the ways that it’s useful to me.Pamela Paul
I want to stay with stir fries for a second, because that’s a real misnomer, right, you’re not supposed to stir a stir fry. What are you supposed to do?Kenji Lopez-Alt
It’s more of a toss fry, than a stir fry. And this is the point that I think Grace Young also makes in her books, the sort of Western concept of having a pot on the stove, keeping the pot relatively stationary, and then stirring it around with a spoon. That’s what stirring is, whereas in a wok, when you’re stir frying, in fact, most of the time, if you’re very skilled at it, you don’t even need a second tool at all, you can just hold the wok and toss it. And, in fact, some dishes, for example, Cantonese style, dry, fried beef chow fun. That’s a dish where some chefs will even go so far as to say you cannot use a tool to cook it, because you’re going to break up the noodles, you’re going to crack the noodles with the spatula.
And so, yeah, when you’re stir frying, it’s really much more of a tossing motion, where you toss everything, and it flies back to the back side of the wok, slides up the back, and then rolls back over through this hot column of air, and then tumbles back into the wok. And that process is actually very important to stir frying, because in the same way that when you stick your hand out of a moving car, your hand cools down very quickly, because of the wind blowing against it. Or in the same way that, say, a convection oven will heat things faster than a still air oven. And when you throw things through the air, and when you have moving air surrounding them, temperature changes and evaporation take place faster. So that process of stir frying where you really want to drive off surface moisture as quick as possible, so that your food is not stewing in its own juices, that tossing motion is really essential to that, because it makes the food cook faster, and it also encourages faster evaporation.Pamela Paul
What does a wok do that other pans don’t do? I mean, what makes it so special?Kenji Lopez-Alt
Well, there’s a few things, and it really depends on what cooking method you’re talking about. But obviously the first one is the shape, and the way that it’s heated. So a Western skillet has a wide, flat surface, and your goal with those is to heat it relatively evenly, so that there’s no real hot spots, so the entire surface is heated to the same temperature. And so the materials in both the way they sit on a burner reflect that, whereas with a wok, typically, you’re looking for a wide range of temperatures. So you want a really, really hot zone at the bottom, and then gradually, progressively cooler zones as you move up to the sides, which gives you instant control over how fast your food is cooking.
When you’re talking about a stir fry, it’s conducive to stir frying, because that’s what allows you to do that motion where you’re flipping a large volume, like a half pound of food, or a pound of food, up into the air all at once, which is very difficult to do in a Western skillet, and be able to catch it. And so Western skills are more designed for searing or slow sauteing things like that, whereas a wok is much more designed to rapidly drive off moisture, and to very evenly and quickly cook a number of foods that are cut to relatively the same size.
There are other properties of a wok as well. Most woks these days that people use are going to be made of either carbon steel or cast iron. I generally recommend using a carbon steel wok. And that material itself, both carbon steel and cast iron, once they become seasoned, and it’s a slightly different sense of the word seasoning than when you think about a Western-style cast iron skillet. When you season it, you’re building up layer after layer of these polymers by heating oil in it. And so it ends up with a relatively thick nonstick layer that makes it so that the food doesn’t actually even come in direct contact with the metal. In a wok, you’re not really building up that many layers like that. What you’re really looking for is a single layer of black oxide, which is what you get when iron is heated, exposed to oxygen.
So with a wok, you’re seasoning each time you do it, but that black coating actually has a direct effect on the flavor of the food coming out of the wok as well. So if you cook side by side in, say, a stainless steel, shiny wok versus a well seasoned carbon steel wok. The carbon steel wok has a lot more of what they call that wok hei flavor, the smoky flavor that you get out of a really good stir fry, or certain types of good stir fries. So part of that comes from the material of the pan itself.Pamela Paul
You mentioned wok hei, and I’m going to spell that, it’s hei, h-e-i, not h-e-y. Breath of the wok, what is that?Kenji Lopez-Alt
So it really depends on who you ask. Some people take a very metaphysical approach to it, where the wok hei is really something that you’re trying to— that comes just from eating in restaurants, it’s not something you would really capture at home. And I hear this response more from people who are familiar with Chinese food in China, and are familiar with Chinese home cooking versus restaurant cooking. So in those descriptions, wok hei is the sizzle of a very high restaurant burner, the plume of smoke that comes out when they’re stir frying, and there’s this particular taste that’s highly seasoned that you get out of restaurant food as opposed to home cooking, which is a gentler style of wok cooking.
For me, personally, wok hei, as someone who grew up in the West, and was really only familiar with Chinese food in the context of restaurants, and particularly growing up in the ‘80s in New York, that was mostly Southern Chinese influenced, Chinese-American, and Chinese restaurants, so Cantonese, Hong Kong style cuisine, where there actually is a lot of this— that’s where the concept of wok hei comes from. In Northern China it’s not that familiar, for example. But for me, it was always what my dad would describe as that good, smoky flavor. I remember going to restaurants, we would look for good beef chow fun, and my dad would always say, “Oh, this place does it really well, it has that nice smoky flavor.” And we didn’t know what the word wok hei was back then, but we could identify when a cook was really good at it.
And so, for me, and I think for a lot of people, that smoky, intense flavor that you get from a really high-heat stir fry, that you get when the flame actually jumps into the pan, and directly sets things on fire inside the wok, that’s the flavor of wok hei that I associate with the term. That smokiness.Pamela Paul
What else do non-wok users not understand about the wok? What do people do wrong? What are the biggest misconceptions?Kenji Lopez-Alt
So the biggest misconception, I would say, is probably the same one that I had for many years. And this is something that I think is unique to Western users of woks. And again, it goes back to the idea that my familiarity with wok cooking, in particular with Chinese cooking, comes mainly from Southern Chinese restaurants in the U.S., or Chinese-American restaurants in the U.S. A little bit of home cooking, but for me there was a little bit of home cooking, because my mom is Japanese and they would use woks in Japan as well, but that was Japanese cooking, different from Chinese food.
And so I think when a lot of people think of woks, they think of these intense high-heat stir fries, and they think, I can’t cook properly in a wok unless I have this 150,000 BTU restaurant style burner, which I believed for a long time as well. But if you stop and think just for a little bit about it, that’s a pretty absurd thing to think, because there are literally hundreds of millions of people cooking in woks every day that don’t all work at restaurants, they all cook at home. And a Chinese range might be a little bit different from a Western range, but it’s not going to be this giant flaming behemoth that you have at a Chinese restaurant.
And so the idea that you can only cook with gas, and that you can only cook if you have a very high-heat restaurant burner, that’s, I think, complete nonsense. And I think that actually holds back a lot of people from understanding the versatility of a pan like this. So part of it is resetting your expectations of what types of food you should be cooking in a wok, or you can be cooking in a wok, and then, of course, the other part is the technique and understanding the basics of how you cook in a wok, because if you’re familiar mainly with Western techniques like searing and sauteing, stir frying and braising in a wok, for example, are quite different from their Western counterparts. So I’m hoping that this book does a good job of illustrating the types of foods you can make in a wok, and the techniques you need to get there.Pamela Paul
There’s a lot more technique in the book than actual recipes as you explain, and it’s incredibly practical and useful. But just for fun, leave us with, not a recipe, but what is your favorite thing to cook in a wok?Kenji Lopez-Alt
That would be Japanese style mapo tofu. So mapo tofu is a dish originally from Sichuan province in China. It was introduced to Japan in the ‘70s, which is where my grandparents and my mom learned it. And so growing up, for me, Japanese style mapo tofu that my mom made was always my favorite dish growing up. It differs from the Sichuan— so the Sichuan version is famously mala, so it’s numbing and hot from the flavor of Sichuan peppercorns and chilies, and usually it has a very thick layer of this dark, dark red chili oil that floats on top of it.
And so there’s a recipe for that in the book, but the Japanese version is much more savory and sweet, and hot. It doesn’t have any Sichuan peppercorns, so it’s not numbing at all. And the chili level, the heat level, is relatively mild. So it’s my favorite comfort food from growing up, and it’s also probably the dish that I’ve made the most in my life, outside of restaurants at least. It’s the home cooked dish I’ve made most of my life, especially now, because I have kids. And my daughter loves it, and it’s a dish that takes about 10 minutes start to finish. And it’s one of those things where it’s, like, if I don’t know what else to serve my daughter that day, I always have the ingredients for Japanese mapo tofu, and I know that she’s always going to eat it, so it’s just become a staple dish in my house now as well.Pamela Paul
All right. Well, I’m going to start with that. I have not yet cooked from this book, but I have read this book, and it is completely fascinating. So I am looking forward to the actual eating part. Kenji, thank you so much for being here.Kenji Lopez-Alt
Thank you for having me.Pamela Paul
Kenji Lopez-Alt is the author of “The Food Lab,” and his new book is called “The Wok: Recipes and Techniques.”
[MUSIC PLAYING]John Williams
I’m joined now by two of The Times’ staff critics, Alexandra Jacobs and Jennifer Szalai, to talk about the books they’ve recently been reviewing.Alexandra Jacobs
Hello, John.Jennifer Szalai
Hi, John.John Williams
Alexandra, you reviewed a memoir this week by someone whose memoir I would want to read, and you made me want to read it even more. Who was it? And what’s the book?Alexandra Jacobs
It is the memoir of Harvey Fierstein, who is the consummate New York theater, showbiz personality. He’s dabbled in Hollywood a bit. He’s best known perhaps for “Torch Song Trilogy.”John Williams
On stage.Alexandra Jacobs
Yes, on stage, which was made into a movie, but it was an absolutely seismic event in New York theater in the 1980s.John Williams
And if no one knows his name or cannot bring him to mind, he also has one of the, if not the most, distinctive voices in— I don’t know if any of us want to do the imitation but—Alexandra Jacobs
(IMITATING HARVEY FIERSTEIN) I don’t want to do it.John Williams
(IMITATING HARVEY FIERSTEIN) But you will if you have to.Alexandra Jacobs
(IMITATING HARVEY FIERSTEIN) I will. (IN REGULAR VOICE) As he writes in the memoir, he has— it’s like an extra set of vocal chords or something. But he also— he also wore out his voice screaming in some early avant-garde production that— anyway, there’s no one like Harvey Fierstein, and there’s nothing like this memoir. It’s absolutely one of a kind.
I just love it. It’s full of these incredible one-liners, way too many to trot out here. But my favorite one is a kind of Nora Ephron-esque one he has in the beginning, which is, “Time heals nothing.”
[CHUCKLING]
You know, he’s so funny. But it’s a dark humor, which is my kind of humor, too. And just, there’s something for everyone in this book.John Williams
And what are the dark parts? I mean, I assume, he obviously was in New York during the height of the AIDS crisis and—Alexandra Jacobs
Yeah, I mean, I think just growing up. He writes of dressing up as a girl when he was young. He had these various illnesses.
He stood out. He was different. And so he suffered the way that all children who are different or don’t quite fit in stand out. And then he had dyslexia, you know, which is what sent him to plays because the text is spare.
It was easier for him to read and skips two grades in high school and gets into the avant-garde theater and very early on is in a Warhol production. Oh, even before that, in high school, he’s always running into celebrities, even when he’s young. Anais Nin visits his English class, and he reads her tarot cards, so it’s like that kind of—Jennifer Szalai
What?Alexandra Jacobs
Exactly. It’s a kind of literary showbiz Zelig.John Williams
It’s early in the year, but I’m not sure there will be a better detail in a review this year than him reading Nin’s tarot. Or did she read his tarot cards?Alexandra Jacobs
He read her tarot cards, which I feel is very Harvey, you know. He seized the moment. He’s a scene stealer. He’s a scenery chewer and a scene stealer, yes.John Williams
That’s about as far removed from my high school experience as I can possibly imagine. Jen, you’ve reviewed not just one book this week. You looked at a new book, but through a wider lens. The book is Cathy O’Neil’s “The Shame Machine,” which is sort of an ominous title. Tell us what she means by that, and also what you use this book to think about and write about.Jennifer Szalai
By the title, she’s talking about those mechanisms that basically fuel and feed off shame, which is a very common emotion. I think it’s something that people have been thinking a lot about and talking a lot about, especially within the last several years, especially in the context of social media, which is something she does touch on. But she’s also looking at, for instance, advertising.
The weight-loss industry, the wellness industry, things that make people feel like they’re inadequate essentially, that they should feel ashamed of a certain part of themselves in order for these industries to make a profit. And so I use this book as an occasion to talk about shame in general because it’s something that I’ve been thinking about. Also, there was a really interesting essay that Vivian Gornick— the critic Vivian Gornick published in Harper’s a few months ago, which was about humiliation, the most extreme forms of shame.
It’s really one of those essays that just sort of explore humiliation in different forms. She brings her own personal experience into it. She talks about literature, how it’s been such a rich subject for novelists.
So that got me thinking about the way that shame has been used, both in terms of trying to essentially regulate and maintain social hierarchies and social order and how it’s also been abused, how it’s been made to make people feel bad, how it can be such a crushing experience, which I think is something that Gornick really gets into, that it can actually be extremely damaging. She calls it, at some point, it’s almost soul killing. And so I looked at various books.
There was this one fascinating book by Peter Stearns, who’s a historian of emotion, which I think is just such a great title. And he looks at shame through history. He looks at it cross-culturally in different cultures. He looks at the way that shame has or has not been distinguished from other things, like embarrassment or guilt, in different languages.
I also looked at more contemporary books, like Jon Ronson’s book “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed,” which is a book that I think, when it came out six or seven years ago, it was a best seller. I mean, people were ready for a book like this, which really delved into the world of public shaming. And his argument was that, in the world of digital media or social media where a lot of people congregate, there’s an opportunity to be shamed by strangers and in front of strangers for things that might have, in a previous era, just happened and gone largely unnoticed.John Williams
And then there’s this interesting flipside, which is shamelessness. You talk about how that’s entered our political stream a bit more vividly in the last few years.Jennifer Szalai
It’s interesting to think about the Trump presidency. And one of the things that he was called was shameless, and that was a word that was used, I think, both pejoratively but also, for some of his supporters, there was something really that they thought was liberating in this, that he was saying and doing all these things that the mainstream might have looked down on but that in previous eras might have been more acceptable. It’s interesting to read O’Neil’s book because her argument is that, just like there’s good kinds of shame and bad kinds of shame, she’s saying there’s good kinds of shamelessness and bad kinds of shamelessness.
And so when she’s talking about shame, there’s the punching down shame. She brings her own personal experience of growing up. Since she was a kid, she struggled with her weight, and so she was made to feel shame.
And so she’s saying that there’s like a real liberation and freedom in being able to say, no, no, no, I’m not going to be shamed for this anymore. I’m taking control of this. This is who I am. I’m not going to listen to whatever voices are trying to tell me that I’m not good enough.John Williams
It’s a tricky thing. I mean, it’s a hard thing to not feel when people really want you to.Jennifer Szalai
Well, this is exactly it. And I think that this is why it’s a subject that there’s just always going to be something in it because it does have to do not only with ourselves and how we see ourselves but our relationship to the world around us. And that’s why I think it’s the kind of feeling that it can fuel itself or feed on itself. I mean, there’s that whole notion of a shame spiral, which I think is just really evocative, where it’s like, you feel shame and then you feel some shame for feeling shame.Alexandra Jacobs
You know who shame did not crush? Shame did not crush Harvey Fierstein.Jennifer Szalai
Well, there you go.John Williams
Right, I was going to say he probably experienced a lot of it when he was younger.Jennifer Szalai
Right.John Williams
And he overcame it.Alexandra Jacobs
Maybe.John Williams
I wonder why things like elation can’t spiral. Why does shame have to be the spiraling one?Alexandra Jacobs
Oh, God, yeah.Jennifer Szalai
Right.Alexandra Jacobs
There’s never enough elation. But there’s always more shame to spare.John Williams
Maybe we should get that historian of emotion on here.Alexandra Jacobs
Yeah.Jennifer Szalai
The historian of emotion, Stearns, he does talk about, because shame feeds on insecurity, and I mean what’s more bottomless than insecurity. It’s like you feel something, but then you question it. You wonder if it’s the right feeling.
It’s just around and around it goes. There’s a long history of using shame for the purposes of enforcing social order. It’s not really as common anymore. But in the past, people would be put in pillories if they did something wrong.John Williams
And the scarlet letter that you mentioned.Jennifer Szalai
Scarlet letters, dunce caps for students who were misbehaving in class, I mean, there was this idea that because it was so painful, the idea was that it would force somebody to really ruminate and brood over what they had done, that it would be really effective as a form of punishment. But, of course, we now look at those punishments differently.John Williams
Yeah, its excesses are legion and unfortunate. And yet also you go through life often wishing that some people felt more shame than they do, so it’s a complicated subject. I have 25 more questions about it, but I’ll let listeners visit your essay online. And thank you for being here to talk about it. Thank you both.Alexandra Jacobs
Thank you, John. [MUSIC PLAYING]John Williams
This is John Williams, and I am joined by the host of the podcast, Pamela Paul, to turn the tables on her. She has some news. What’s going on, Pamela?Pamela Paul
Well, as some of our listeners know, not all, the reason I get to host this podcast, which is— I just want to mention— the oldest and longest-running podcast at The Times. It just turned 16 years old. The reason I get to do this is because of my day job.
My actual day job is editing The New York Times Book Review and running the books desk here at The New York Times. And I’ve been doing that for nine years, and I’m actually not going to do that anymore. So this is my last time hosting this podcast.John Williams
So this has come as a shock to me and to our listeners because it has been nine years, which is amazing, because I’ve been here for all of those nine years. And so I’m feeling the passage of time, as one does. We had occasion to talk a couple of times last year because, like you said, there was a big anniversary last year when it turned 15. And so we talked about this a bit.
But I know that when you first started it, there were obviously some nerves because it’s a different part of the job that wasn’t necessarily what you got into journalism for. How much did you embrace that at first and how much did you really want to jump in and do it? Or did you ever think about whether you wanted that to be part of the mix?Pamela Paul
Well, as you know, Sam Tanenhaus, the original host of this podcast and my former boss, he actually was also here for nine years as the editor of The Book Review, as was his predecessor, Chip McGrath. So it feels like there’s some kind of timer that goes off where you’re like, I am done being the editor of The Book Review. In any case, he had been done. And it had been announced that I was going to be his successor as the editor of The Book Review.
But I didn’t really think about the podcast at the time. I’d been on the podcast as a guest and as a reviewer, talking about books that I reviewed when I was a freelancer. But I wasn’t actually even in my office yet as editor. Sam hadn’t left. And he invited me— I remember he was walking down the hall full of cheer and excitement.
And he said, “Hey, come on down to the studio. We’re doing the last segment, my last episode of the podcast. Everyone’s coming on. You should come on.” And I was, like, wait a minute.
I haven’t started my new job yet. If this is your last segment, who’s hosting it next week? And he said, “You are.” And I just was really kind of shocked and terrified, as you mentioned, because I had never hosted a podcast.
And I think I really didn’t know what I was doing. And it’s interesting. Sam said to me towards the end of his time at The New York Times as the editor, he said, “My favorite part of the job is the podcast.” And I just thought that was insanity. And I have to say, here I am at the end of nine years as editor of The Book Review, and I can pretty much say the podcast was my favorite part of the job in the end.John Williams
It doesn’t surprise me that it wasn’t in the front of your mind when you were taking over for Sam because it did sort of seem like his baby at the time. He had been the only host of it. And back then, nine years ago, there weren’t that many podcasts at The Times, were there?Pamela Paul
No, I mean, I think that it had gotten down to maybe three or four podcasts at that moment. Actually, our excellent producer, Pedro Rosado, would know that much better than either of us because he was here working on those podcasts at the time. But there was a science podcast.
There was a thing where someone essentially read the morning news. And there was Popcast, of course, which Pedro also produces. And there was The Book Review. They had just kind of cut back.John Williams
Right. There was a kind of contraction. That was sort of a larger cultural phenomenon, that there was this burst of podcasts, and there was a contraction, and then there was a re-burst.Pamela Paul
Right, right. And so nine years ago was during the contraction, when they said, what is this podcast thing that we’ve started. Let’s dial back on that. But they kept the podcasts, I think, that had a strong listenership at that time, and they kept us going.
So it was kind of unusual. And I think, for a long time, I didn’t really believe that anyone listened to it. So that took a small amount of the pressure off.John Williams
But you found out people listen to it because we often hear from listeners, which is also a great part of the podcast.Pamela Paul
We do. And I have to say, I’m going to miss that. I hope that someone will forward me some of your emails, should anyone email anything after this episode, because getting those emails was really just fantastic. You’re just like, the emails that we would get to books@nytimes.com from our podcast listeners were— all right, I’ll just say it.
They were my favorite emails. They were my favorite emails. We also get letters to the editor, which I like, and a lot of complaints and customer service questions and all kinds of things go through that email inbox. But the emails from listeners were often really personal, passionate, opinionated.
Some people would let me know when they did not like a guest or did not like my interview of the guest, did not like the questions I asked. It was funny how people would ask for more about what we’re reading, more information. Or they would report that they had read something that we talked about and share their feedback. So I really loved that.John Williams
Yeah, I love the ones you would forward to me and Greg and others who are on What We’re Reading saying, “A couple of months ago, someone was talking about a book, set in this place with this kind of character. What was that?” And we all kind of had to recreate it. Speaking of What We’re Reading, that was one of the segments that did not exist, for sure, during Sam’s time. I wonder what else has changed in the podcast. I imagine if we listen to an episode from nine years ago, it would sound pretty different.Pamela Paul
Yeah, What We’re Reading evolved from a kind of Inside the Best sellers that had been done by a number of people. Jenny Schuessler did it for a while. Then Greg Cowles did it, and we would talk about what was new on the best-seller list. And I thought that the larger idea was what are people in the world reading. So then it evolved into what are we in the wider world reading.
But we sort of then stopped talking about the wider world or the best-seller list at all and just turned it into a conversation about books. And it kind of became one of the— I keep saying, “everything was my favorite.” I’m just full of enthusiasm. And people who listen to this podcast know that I’m not always full of enthusiasm about everything.
But I loved What We’re Reading because it was a chance to talk to my colleagues here, who I’ve loved working with, and to talk to our critics and other editors on the desk and to try to recreate the kind of conversations that we had when we were in the office. So that also became really nice during the pandemic. The one downside— well, there are a couple downsides.
It is really nice to see people in person and to look at human faces when we do that— when we have that conversation. The other downside is that, for technical reasons, it can only be a conversation of three. And when we were in the office, it was a roundtable of four, which sometimes got a little rowdy, but I liked the variety.John Williams
Well, and to your point about reader emails or listener emails earlier, it did— it almost made what the wider world is reading more a part of it because I think people reacted more to those conversations than they had to the best-seller list, with their own thoughts about what they were reading or whether they had read the things that we were talking about. I know that I’ve gotten some really lovely emails, and I’m sure you’ve gotten many more, about some of the books we’ve discussed on there and people’s memories of them or wanting to know what else we would recommend by that author. So I should say that in this sad period, I think of you as having really long ago actually perfected the hosting of this podcast, from the early days when I know that you felt shaky, although that didn’t really come across all that much. I feel like you hit the ground running. But you definitely got more comfortable in the role, and I think of you now as a very seasoned interviewer and have done some very moving and probing interviews with people.
So in the interim and for a little bit in the future, I’ll be hosting the podcast. The podcast isn’t going anywhere. And I don’t remember really specifically— I know that Sam told you one thing was to really be in the place of the general reader’s brain and not to get too far into the weeds, but to let the author describe what their project is and their thoughts about it. And I wonder if you have any advice for me, a terrified interim host.Pamela Paul
No, you’re going to be great. You already know how to do this, and you’ve subbed for me on a number of occasions. I remember a very early negative review, I think, on iTunes after I took over, said, “Pamela Paul sounds bummed.”
And— and I never got over that in my head. I thought, I didn’t realize I sound bummed. I think it’s just abject terror. But I think you’re going to be just great. I am looking forward to listening to you.
As you know well and Pedro knows and everyone in our office knows, I found it hard to listen to the podcast myself because I don’t like listening to my own voice. And I would really only listen to it if somebody told me that episode was especially great. I was kind of curious, like, really. Let me listen.
But now I’ll get to listen to you, and I will be completely unconflicted. So I want to turn the tables now and say, welcome, John, new host of The Book Review podcast. I think listeners have a lot to look forward to.John Williams
Well, that’s very kind of you, and I appreciate it. And I appreciate all the times that you have let me host segments over the years as a way to make myself a bit less terrified as this happens. And let’s quickly say before you go, where people can find you and read you and what you’ll be up to because I know that you have a lot of readers and followers.Pamela Paul
Oh, thank you. Well, before that, let me just say also you are going to be obviously in the excellent hands of our producer, Pedro. And I could not be more grateful to Pedro Rosado. Every week, I say to him that he makes me sound much better than I really do in real life. And he knows that that’s true better than anyone.
So Pedro will still be here as well. So I’ll be moving to Opinion, back to writing as an op-ed columnist or an opinion columnist, as it’s now called, which is something that I have very sorely missed. I’ve been doing it on the side.
I’ve written five books since I’ve been at The Times. But I did that by essentially not living, not sleeping and not having any fun. So I’m really looking forward to going back to writing full-time and during daylight hours on my paid time and not my free time.John Williams
Well, I look forward to reading you there and also maybe to having you on a future episode of the podcast when your next book comes out, since you’re so prolific.Pamela Paul
Oh, right, now I can— now I can talk about it. Or maybe I’ll review a book, and you can have me on to talk about that.John Williams
That would be great. Thanks, Pamela, for everything.Pamela Paul
Thanks, John. [MUSIC PLAYING]
Remember, there’s more at nytimes.com/books. And you can always write to us at books@nytimes.com. I write back; not right away, but I do.
The Book Review podcast is produced by the great Pedro Rosado from HeadStepper Media, with a major assist from my colleague John Williams. Thanks for listening. For The New York Times, I’m Pamela Paul.
20:15 / 1:00:36
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