Matador Network's Blog, page 2284

British guide on how to be Canadian

Writer and Brit James O’Malley recently went to Canada, and he made a supercut of him doing all the things Canadians do. The results, of course, are hilarious (“Tim Hortons” and “welding” are right next to each other, because why not?), and someone should give O’Malley a pile of money to do this in every country.

Also, a kudos to anyone who went up and visited Canada during the snowstorms and the polar vortex. It may not be the most balmy and pleasant time to be there, but it’s the most authentic.

The post A British guide on how to be Canadian appeared first on Matador Network.

Your gender dictates what you eat

Photo: Jiuck

A VIDEO ABOUT Arnold Schwarzenegger cooking a “Steak & Egger Sandwich” went viral recently. Basically, these guys cook a 78,000-calorie, protein-packed monstrosity — on the former governator’s very own tank.

With the men’s banter revolving around the masculine ideal of muscularity, it’s hard to ignore the fact that no women were included in the creation, or consumption of, this “sandwich.” It’s a glaring reminder that women are not, or should not be, interested in eating large quantities of food; that is an exclusively male pastime.

I had a conversation with two of my best girl friends about how we feel embarrassed whenever we eat more than the men in our lives, as we freely devoured chips, brownies, and fudge in the privacy of my basement, knowing there would be little judgment between the three of us. For most women in Western societies, there’s usually shame in hunger, tied to the symbolic nature of food in morality and sexual desire.

Men are expected to have voracious appetites, representing power, success, and release, while eating abstemiously is inherently feminine, signifying self-control, goodness, and selflessness. The basic act of eating, as illustrated in the Steak & Egger video, has complex meaning and cultural symbolism that varies greatly by gender.

Most of us are aware of the high prevalence of serious eating disorders in the US, such as anorexia nervosa and binge eating disorder. What’s just as concerning as these diagnosable disorders is the blind eye we collectively turn to the pervasive disordered eating habits that are normalized and even encouraged in American culture. These eating behaviors look very different for men and women, with women expected to subsist on meager meals and find shame in consumption, and men congratulated after devouring 2,000 calories in one sitting.

If we stopped hating our bodies, a lot of billion-dollar industries would go out of business.

These patterns are not unique to the United States, or the 21st century; in other cultures throughout the world, men are provided with, and expected to eat, more food, mimicking the gender roles of our ancestors, in which the men did the hard labor (and therefore needed more energy). Today, the division of labor isn’t quite so extreme, yet we continue to live in a world where men are allowed to eat more than women.

A woman with a large appetite is considered unhealthy, slovenly, and lacking self-restraint. Conversely, men who eat large portions are thought to be strong, masculine, and formidable. We assign foods with distinct meanings for different genders, forgetting that on the basic level, food is meant to simply energize and sustain us. Men have unique pressures to attain the hypermasculine muscular ideal, and women are supposed to thrive for emaciation.

These aesthetic ideals have replaced survival as the primary source of modern gendered eating norms.

American culture values physique above all other attributes, and, as a result, has different expectations of men and women with regard to food consumption. As a generalization, women skip meals, binge behind closed doors, and spend hours on the elliptical, while men fill their bodies with steroids, replace real meals with protein shakes, and build their muscles until they tear — there’s no doubt that all genders are conditioned to hate their bodies.

If we stopped hating our bodies, a lot of billion-dollar industries would go out of business. Think of all the weight-loss products, cosmetic companies, and fitness establishments that thrive off of our insecurities. We must start accepting our own and each other’s bodies, and recognize that we are not our bodies; only then can we stop placing so much significance on the quantity or types of food we eat.

If men and women weren’t faced with such extreme physical expectations, they would be able to consume food for nourishment and enjoyment, without worrying about weight, calories, muscle mass, or clothing size.

The post You are what your gender eats: On nutrition and body image in American culture appeared first on Matador Network.

Biking from Alaska to Argentina

THE 99% RIDE is an awesome travel / philanthropy project. Dirk flew to the Western Hemisphere from the Netherlands to ride his bike from Alaska to Argentina in support of small communities in Central and South America. He’s traveling with a crew of two people in a support van, sleeping in a tent, sometimes staying with people, most of the time not.

Dirk will travel 17,000 miles and through 15 countries. He’s made his way south from Alaska and was recently in Tijuana with plans to travel to the tip of South America.

Click on the infographic below for more info. To donate and help Dirk in his mission, visit his site.

The post Follow along on an Alaska-to-Argentina bike ride with a cause appeared first on Matador Network.

Woman hears for the first time

WHO DOESN’T love a good tear-jerker on a Friday afternoon. This video is of Joanne Milne, a 39-year-old British woman (deaf since birth and blind since her 20s due to Usher Syndrome) who had to wait four weeks after the cochlear implants operation to have them turned on.

For more details on the story, check out the Birmingham Mail.

The post Woman hears for the first time and cries, so will you [vid] appeared first on Matador Network.

This sport's being exported to India

Most of us don’t think of India as a typical haven for hockey lovers, but it just so happens that hockey in the Himalayas is a thing. (Also, alliteration rocks.)

Canadian Andrew Wahba is the man behind True Travellers Society, a website aimed at local integration and “off the tourist track” experiences. He started a fundraising drive to deliver hockey equipment to those living in Ladakh, India. His friend James Turner had been a hockey coach there, and he explained how the kids loved the sport and worked hard to maintain their rink, but accessing equipment was a huge barrier.

Andrew says gathering the equipment was a team effort, and True Travellers Society garnered a lot of support from Andrew’s home province of Saskatchewan. The mission was even aided by a local nonprofit called Ranch Ehrlo — an organization that provides an outdoor hockey program for children who miss out on sporting opportunities due to poverty or other barriers.

Canadian hockey fans. Gotta love ‘em.

Andrew and True Travellers Society ended up receiving over 500 kilograms of gear from all over Saskatchewan. The video says it all.

The post You won’t believe what sport is being exported to India (Video) appeared first on Matador Network.

Navigating stuckness

Getting stuck – at New York’s Lincoln Center fountain, with an approximate timeline of my life. All images by author.

Getting stuck

A few weeks ago, I was having dinner with my mom in Manhattan. She was telling me her plans for this year’s Christmas card. “This year,” she said, “instead of writing my usual newsy card, I think I’ll just say, ‘Amanda’s about to have a baby, and Jonathan moved from California back to New York.’”

“Sounds good to me,” I said.

“Well,” she said, “it seems like you used to do so much in a year, and I always wanted to include all your news. But this year, it just seems like you haven’t been doing very much, so I figured a shorter note was in order.”

I squirmed in my chair and readjusted my napkin. My mom — maybe like all moms — has a special way of saying just the thing that’ll hit your most vulnerable spot. She’s right — this year, I haven’t been doing very much. I’ve spent a lot of time wandering into churches, reading old journals, watching YouTube videos, and staring out of windows, but very little time making any work. I’ve been feeling really stuck, unsure about what to do next, and struggling with a lot of self-doubt and confusion.

After dinner, I walked across the street to the Lincoln Center fountain, and I sat on the granite slab next to the water. The night was dark and cold. Operagoers in tuxedos rushed to get taxis. I could feel the black stone below my body. I looked at the city sky but I couldn’t see stars. I turned my head to look at the water. The columns of water were moving up and down in some kind of pattern, but I couldn’t tell what it was. Sometimes the columns of water were tall, and moving up and down within their tallness. Other times, the columns of water were low, and moving up and down within their lowness. The columns of water were never not moving.

I thought about stuckness, and about where I lost the flow. I remembered other times in my life I’d been stuck, and how the stuckness always eventually passed. I thought how life is a lot like that fountain, with its columns of water moving up and down, and how the low points are actually thrilling because the high points are about to come back, and how the high points are actually terrifying, because the low points always come next.

I thought of my life as a series of chapters, and I realized that each time I’d been majorly stuck, it meant that a life chapter was ending, and that a new one needed to start — like the stuckness was always a signal indicating imminent change. My life has had a bunch of different chapters, each one beginning with the fresh-faced idealism of a new approach to living, and each one ending with a period of stuckness and a moment of crisis. I’d like to tell you about those chapters, in case they contain something useful for you.

I should say up front that I’m lucky to make a living mainly by giving talks about my work at conferences, companies, and universities, which affords me a lot of time each year to make new work (and to obsess endlessly about what that work should be). In Zen philosophy, they say that anything pushed to its extreme becomes its opposite. Sometimes I wonder whether too much freedom produces a weird kind of psychological paralysis, which is almost like prison. Still, obviously I’m grateful to be grappling with too much freedom instead of too little.

Paint (1995-2003)

Paint — a foggy field in Deerfield, Massachusetts, with pages from my travel journals.

In high school, I was a total romantic. I had a field easel, and I’d stand around in meadows doing oil paintings while wearing a little beret. In college, inspired by the travel journals of Peter Beard, I kept elaborate sketchbooks filled with dead insects, pasted plants, ticket stubs, watercolor paintings, photographs, and writing. I made these books by hand and kept them for several years. At the same time, I was studying computer science in the early days of the Internet, and I felt a growing rift between the sober art of painting and the dizzying potential of the web. I couldn’t find a way to bridge these two worlds, and I started to feel torn — partly pulled into the future, and partly stuck in the past.

I’d graduated from Princeton but was still living in town, doing odd jobs and generally feeling bad about myself and unsure about what to do next. I took a trip to Central America and ended up getting robbed by five guys who put a gun to my head, beat me up pretty badly, and stole my bag, which contained a sketchbook with nine months of work. It was one of those odd moments in life that’s really traumatic, but which ends up being a doorway into something new. After the robbery, I gave up painting, stopped keeping sketchbooks, and resolved to use computer code as my new artistic medium. I wanted to make things that guys with guns couldn’t steal. Around this time, I received a one-year fellowship at Fabrica, a communications research center in northern Italy. I moved to Italy, and I started writing code.

Data (2003-2008)

Data — coding I Want You To Want Me in my old apartment in Brooklyn, New York.

I became obsessed with the potential of data to tell me everything I’d ever need to know about life. I could sit safely at my desk and write computer programs to gather vast amounts of Internet data, which I thought could finally answer timeless questions like “what is love?” and “what is faith?” with precision and clarity. With manic self-confidence, I pumped out project after project visualizing different data sets, pairing each project with a bombastic artist statement about how the work revealed insights about humanity that had previously been hidden.

There was We Feel Fine (a search engine for human emotions), Universe (a system for deducing new constellations for the night sky), I Want You To Want Me (a study of online dating), Lovelines (a portrait of love and hate), 10×10 (a distillation of global media coverage), Phylotaxis (a visualization of science news), and Wordcount (an exploration of language).

My data visualization work coincided nicely with society’s increasing obsession with data-based reasoning, which was infiltrating nearly every aspect of our lives — from news, to sports, to finance, to education, to politics, to healthcare, to dating. Because of this, I got lucky, and had some early success. I got to speak at TED, got a commission from the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, showed my work at Sundance, appeared on CNN and NPR, and companies started paying me to give one-hour lectures about working with data. I quit my job, and spent all my time giving talks and making work.

I burned through projects and people, devouring a series of relationships that never seemed as interesting as my work. I was full of pithy insights about human emotion to spout at cocktail parties, but I started to notice that my data-based insights did very little to help my actual relationships. I began to grow suspicious of data. My insights felt increasingly superficial, and though they made me sound clever and witty, they didn’t do much to help me be kind. The world’s love affair with data was just heating up, but mine was cooling down.

MoMA commissioned the last data-based work I made: a project about online dating, called I Want You To Want Me. I’ve never worked harder on anything. For three months, I spent eighteen hours a day in front of a five-foot-wide touchscreen, poring over hundreds of thousands of dating profiles, and writing over 50,000 lines of code. I’d go for walks in the evening around my neighborhood in Brooklyn, and I’d look into restaurants at actual couples on actual dates, unable to imagine what they could possibly be saying. My mind was completely inside the machine, and I’d never felt more alienated from other human beings. I guess I thought the MoMA commission would somehow change my life, catapulting me into even higher echelons of fame and attention. But that didn’t really happen. The show went up, there was a big party, and then people basically went back to their lives.

I didn’t know what to do next. I went on some Internet dates, but it was hard to connect with anyone, and I just ended up feeling worse about myself. I started to get really depressed. I went down to Texas. I drove out to Marfa and saw the Marfa lights. I drove to the Mexico border and waded across the Rio Grande into a desolate Mexican town. I slept out in the desert under the stars. Being away from computer screens, I started to feel better. A sense of adventure and possibility crept back into my life. I’d meet strangers in diners, and it would feel good to talk to them. I started to feel human again. I liked the feeling of rambling around, getting into strange situations, and actually living life in the physical world. I decided to start making projects about the real world — where instead of using a computer, I’d do the “data collection” myself. I’d take photos. I’d shoot videos. I’d record sound. I went back to New York to get started.

Documentary (2008-2010)

Documentary — characters from The Whale Hunt, Balloons of Bhutan, and I Love Your Work.

Instead of trying to be the smartest person in the room, now I wanted to be the most interesting. Many people make choices to try to be better people — they take up yoga, they become vegetarian, they resolve to spend more time with their parents. Often, I use my work as a way to steer my life in a particular direction. I’ll identify something I want to change about myself, and then I’ll design a project to help me do it. In this case, I felt like I’d never really become a man. My childhood friends in Vermont were hunting deer, building houses, running farms, and being dads. I was just typing into computers, writing clever programs, and looking for praise. I wanted to change that. I wanted to live a bolder life, and I designed a series of projects to force me to try. I went whale hunting in Alaska. I traveled to Bhutan to learn about spirituality and happiness. I filmed the everyday lives of lesbian porn stars in New York. For each of my deficiencies (masculinity, wisdom, sexuality), I designed a project to help me confront it, which I hoped would help me transcend it. In a way, this worked. My life suddenly got interesting. People were curious. I always had outrageous stories to tell. I’d present these stories in intricate interactive frameworks of my own design, and I’d release them on the web. Again, I got lucky. My work with interactive storytelling coincided with society’s increasing obsession with “storytelling” in all of its forms.

Storytelling, which used to be a reasonably small niche populated by organizations like This American Life, The Moth, and StoryCorps, was suddenly everywhere. Every advertising agency was now a “storytelling agency,” every ad campaign was now a “storytelling campaign,” and every app was now a “storytelling tool.” Storytelling had gone mainstream and become one of those words — like “sustainability” and “innovation” — that’s so ubiquitous as to be basically meaningless. Yet through all this, I was riding the wave.

The World Economic Forum named me a “Young Global Leader,” citing my storytelling work. I was constantly being invited to trendy cocktail parties in New York. I was flying all over the world to give lectures. My life was moving very fast, but I began to feel like a fraud: I was wearing my stories like armor, telling the same winning tales again and again to laughter and praise, but never going deeper, and never revealing myself. I began to feel like a hunter, constantly chasing down the next story to win me acclaim. Since all my stories (like most documentaries) basically belonged to other people, I also began to feel like a thief.

One night, I hosted a dinner party for twelve at my apartment in Brooklyn. We stayed up till five in the morning and drank eighteen bottles of wine. My friend Henry stayed over, sleeping on the couch. At 7:00 a.m. a loud BOOM awakened us; the whole building was shaking. We rushed to the window to see that a car had crashed into the building; only its trunk was poking out of the hole it’d smashed in the wall. Smoke was rising from the hood. We ran into the street in our underwear, unsure if the car was about to explode (luckily, it didn’t).

I took the car crash as a sign to leave New York and find a new direction. I wanted to slow down. I wanted to simplify my life. I wanted to find balance again. I didn’t want to rely on other people’s stories. I didn’t want to be a thief anymore. Instead, I decided to hold a mirror up to myself and tell my own stories.

Autobiography (2010-2011)

Autobiography — my cabin in the woods in Sisters, Oregon, watched by an owl.

When I turned 30, I left New York, bought a car, and drove across the country to Oregon, where I spent four months living in a little log cabin in the woods. I’d see another person about once every four days when I traveled to town to buy groceries. I started a simple ritual of taking a photo and writing a short story each day, and then posting them on the Internet each night. I continued this ritual for 440 days, and I called the project Today.

At first, Today was a wonderful addition to my life. I found myself becoming more aware of the world around me, more capable of connecting with others, and better at identifying beauty. I became obsessed with life’s “teachable moments” — the little things each of us encounters that might have a teachable value to others. I got good at spotting these teachable moments and condensing them into little narrative nuggets, so that others could digest them. I began to understand that principles delivered out of context will never be remembered, and that telling people the story of how you came to hold a given principle is better — so it’s like they lived through it themselves. I got obsessed with the potential of stories to communicate wisdom, but at the same time, I began to understand that really, you can’t teach wisdom — it has to be won by experience. Stories can alert you to the existence of certain truths, but you never really embody those truths until you reach them on your own.

I traveled from Oregon, to Santa Fe, to Iceland, to Vermont, doing a series of art residencies, living like a hermit, and continuing my daily photo project. More and more people began to follow along, until an audience of several thousand strangers was observing the intimate details of my everyday life. This began to be a burden. The project took on a performative quality; I found myself intentionally hunting down interesting situations, just so I could write about them that evening. I found myself plundering the relationships in my life for material, often with damaging consequences. I began to feel like a spectator to my own life, unsure whether to document it or simply to live it.

During this time, I fell in love with a young woman named Emmy. She was working at the art gallery in Vermont where I had a show. We only knew each other briefly, but when she chose to leave me for her ex, I was devastated, and for a couple months, I could barely get out of bed. This was probably the lowest point in my life. My daily stories around that time were brutal and strange, and my family and friends began to worry that I was in danger of harming myself. At that point, the daily stories were simply too much, and I abruptly decided to stop the project. I sent a brief email to the people following it, saying I wouldn’t be doing it anymore, and thanking them for their attention.

Within an hour of sending that email, I received over 500 responses from people all over the world, telling me how much the project meant to them, and thanking me for doing it. Most of these people I’d never heard from before. One woman in the UK said the project had kept her from killing herself, because it gave her hope each day to keep going. Many people said they’d never written before because they never knew what to say, but that my daily story was their favorite part of each day.

I never imagined that such a simple project — just a photo and some of my thoughts — could touch so many people so deeply. It made me realize that the most powerful things are often the simplest, as long as they’re made honestly and with a lot of heart. It also made me believe in the power of personal stories, so I decided to make a tool to encourage other people to tell them.

Tools (2010-2013)

Tools — coding Cowbird in Siglufjörður, Iceland, under the aurora borealis.

I set out to create Cowbird, a storytelling platform for anyone to use. My dream was to build the world’s first public library of human experience — a kind of Wikipedia for everyday life. After making so many projects for people to look at, I wanted to make something for people to use.

I thought Cowbird would change the world. I thought it would become the anti-Facebook, harnessing a growing desire for substance, and that millions of people would use it. It was simple and beautiful, and brimming with detail, sincerity, and depth. I worked on it alone in isolation for two years, with monomaniacal certainty that people would love it.

During that time, the world changed. Storytelling apps became commonplace. Internet use went mobile. Tablets went mainstream. Geolocation emerged. I noticed these things, but I ignored them. I worked with single-minded focus on Cowbird, sticking to my original vision, which became increasingly out of touch with reality. By the time Cowbird finally launched, it joined a crowded field of storytelling apps (Instagram, Path, Facebook, Vimeo, Tumblr) with more to follow (Medium, Vine, Wander, Days, Storybird, Maptia, etc.). All these apps were basically the same — ways for humans to share photos, videos, and text — and this process began to bore me.

But I was living in northern California near Silicon Valley, and everyone urged me to do what everyone out there does, which is to start a company and raise money, so that’s what I did. I hired fancy lawyers for $850 an hour, founded a Delaware C-Corp, and arranged an angel round of $500,000 from a dozen investors, using a convertible note. This whole process felt icky to me, but I did it anyway — it was simply what everyone in California did. Right before we signed the paperwork, I had to fly to Spain to give a lecture.

For the first time in months, I had a few days away from computers and away from Silicon Valley. I wandered the streets of Barcelona, sat in cafes, and thought about the life I wanted to live. I watched old Catalonian couples walk hand in hand through leafy plazas. The women wore ankle-length dresses, and the men wore clunky shoes and fedoras. They walked slowly, said hello to friends, looked around at the buildings, and up at the trees. It was a world away from the frantic ambition of Silicon Valley — here it was just human beings living their lives.

A couple months earlier, a wealthy Internet friend had invited me on a sailing trip to the British Virgin Islands. One day, we visited Richard Branson’s private island. I was struck by Branson’s humility; even with all of his fame and success, he’d never stopped being kind — maybe that was his secret. It was interesting to see his life — the secluded tropical island, the flamingo colony, the giant tortoises, the lemurs, the bungalows, the sailboat races, the assistants, the phone calls, the beautiful people. This was the endgame of the money life, and it made me realize it wasn’t for me.

When I think about my own future, my dream is always the same. I’m living in a small beautiful farmhouse in a small beautiful town among a small community that values me. I’m living with a wife and kids I love deeply, and I spend each day making art and watching nature. My mind is clear and calm, I’m in control of my time, and I’m kind.

In a cafe in Barcelona, I decided not to take the investment money. In my heart, I realized I just didn’t want to run a company. I didn’t want to sit in meetings, manage people, market products, raise money, and send emails all day. Really, I just wanted to make small, beautiful things.

Getting unstuck

Getting unstuck — in my childhood bedroom in Shelburne, Vermont.

All we have in life is our time. People struggle after success. They hunger for fame, fortune, and power. But in all of these things, the same question exists — what will you do with your time? How do you want to spend your days? As Annie Dillard reminds us, “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

In life, you will become known for doing what you do. That sounds obvious, but it’s profound. If you want to be known as someone who does a particular thing, then you must start doing that thing immediately. Don’t wait. There is no other way. It probably won’t make you money at first, but do it anyway. Work nights. Work weekends. Sleep less. Whatever you have to do. If you’re lucky enough to know what brings you bliss, then do that thing at once. If you do it well, and for long enough, the world will find ways to repay you.

This fall, in a toilet stall in Burlington, Vermont, I saw this scrawled on the wall:

“Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive. The world needs more people who have come alive.”

If you’re doing something you love, you won’t care what the world thinks, because you’ll love the process anyway. This is one of those truths that we know, but which we can’t seem to stop forgetting.

In America, success is a word we hear a lot. What does it mean? Is it money, power, fame, love? I like how Bob Dylan defines it: “A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants to do.”

We have these brief lives, and our only real choice is how we will fill them. Your attention is precious. Don’t squander it. Don’t throw it away. Don’t let companies and products steal it from you. Don’t let advertisers trick you into lusting after things you don’t need. Don’t let the media convince you to covet the lives of celebrities. Own your attention — it’s all you really have.

In the tradeoff between timeliness and timelessness, choose the latter. The zeitgeist rewards timeliness, but your soul rewards timelessness. Work on things that will last.

Inside each of us is a little 10-year-old child, curious and pure, acting on impulse, not yet caring what other people think. Remember what you were doing at ten, and try to get back to doing that thing, incorporating everything you’ve learned along the way.

When I was ten, I was writing words and drawing pictures.

Maybe that’s the path out of the stuckness.

This post was originally published at Transom and is reprinted here with permission.

The post Navigating stuckness appeared first on Matador Network.

Is this video the new Gangnam Style?

SOMETIMES, THE BEST things I find on the internet, I don’t understand at all. This video, performed by MMA fighter Genki Sudo and his posse, World Order, is so random, crazy, unique, and uplifting, I can’t help but bop along to the beat. But is it only random, crazy, unique, and uplifting because I don’t speak Japanese, and therefore, the translation is lost to me? What is this video even about?

The group’s robot-like synchronization, coupled with adorable Japanese pedestrians who were lucky enough to get in the way, equals one fun, catchy music video with quirky dance moves that may make everyone forget PSY ever existed (if you haven’t done so already). I enjoy knowing that elsewhere in the world, people aren’t famous for “twerking,” but from just asking people to “have a nice day.”

The post Is this music video the new ‘Gangnam Style’? appeared first on Matador Network.

Travel is beautiful

Travel Is from The Perennial Plate on Vimeo.

OUR FRIENDS at Perennial Plate and Intrepid put this incredibly inspiring edit together to celebrate Intrepid Travel’s 25th Anniversary. How is travel beautiful to you?

The post Travel is beautiful appeared first on Matador Network.

London has better food than Paris

Photo: Garry Knight

I spent the last couple of weeks in London and Paris with my girlfriend. I’d been to both cities plenty of times before, so instead of trying to see all of the major museums and tourist sites, we adopted a new approach to the trip: “Eat our way through Paris. Drink our way through London.”

It was an obvious choice: Paris is known as one of the culinary capitals of the world, and London is perhaps best known for its pubs. But a few days after leaving Paris, we stopped at Borough Market on London’s South Bank, and I ordered a roast pork sandwich from one of the booths.

“Holy shit,” I said. “This is the best thing I’ve had all trip.”

As the week continued, I realized virtually all of my meals in London were better than all of my meals in Paris. And not just on this trip: I have yet to have a meal in Paris that I’ve been truly wowed by. Ever. Sure, the coffee’s great. But for Christ’s sake, a croque monsieur is just grilled ham and cheese. My mom made that shit for me when I was five if she was in a rush.

London, on the other hand, has long been declared a culinary wasteland. Images of gloppy mounds of starchy potatoes and overcooked meat smothered in gravy — which they often more accurately just call ‘brown sauce’ — are what travelers usually think of when they think of London. Often, you’ll hear the cliche, “You can find good food in London, but you can’t find good British food.”

There are a few reasons this is unfair. First of all, what is and isn’t British food is changing over time. As much as the Brits often hate to admit having a foreign influence, they were once the rulers of half the planet, and cultural exchange goes both ways. Tikka masala, a standard Indian staple here in the United States, was actually probably invented in Britain. And coronation chicken, a curried dish created for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, tastes more ‘Indian’ than it does ‘British.’

So you don’t get to say, “There’s great Indian food in London,” but not count it towards London itself. If you do, you can’t count any dishes with a foreign influence towards other great international cities like New York. What’s New York cuisine without pizza? (Pizza, incidentally, is one thing London is flatly not able to do well. As one New Jerseyan said to me in London, “I love the food here, but I cannot get a good fuckin’ slice of pie.”)

“It’s only in London that you find every conceivable style of cooking. When it comes to what’s new in cooking, to innovative cuisine, it’s all happening in London.”

Second, a lot of the people saying London’s food sucks are getting that food in a pub. London is chock-full of pubs, and while the trend of gastropubs is on the rise, they’re not typically known for their food. And while all food should to some extent count towards a city’s score, I think pub food should get a little less weight. Here in DC I usually know what the quality of food is going to be when I order in the bar: It’s just there to soak up the alcohol.

Paris, on the other hand, has gotten lazy. Don’t get me wrong — Paris is way ahead of most cities on the strength of its wine, cheese, and bread alone. But it’s kinda coasting otherwise. I felt the same way about Parisian food as I felt about a lot of the art in its many museums. I know I’m supposed to like this, but really, I’m just bored.

My girlfriend and I hopped from cafe to restaurant, cafe to restaurant, and we just couldn’t find a particularly good meal. Maybe I’ve just been unlucky every time I’ve been to Paris. Maybe I’ve been in the wrong neighborhoods. Maybe I’ve lacked a proper tour guide. But even following the suggestions of Parisians has led to just okay food.

And while as of last August London had a total of 69 Michelin stars to Paris’s 101 — a restaurant with 3 Michelin stars is considered among the best in the world, and Michelin-rated restaurants are usually very expensive — I would argue that high cuisine does not a good food city make. Because eating is universal. If the poor and middle classes can’t eat there, what’s the point?

On top of this, it’s usually the poor who are preparing our food. In America, as is often pointed out by Anthony Bourdain, many of our best line cooks are poor immigrants who couldn’t afford the dish they’re making for others. As such, I give stronger weight to delicious food from a pushcart or a dive joint, simply because the standard is so much higher for haute cuisine.

I’m not alone in thinking this. One of the world’s best chefs, Joel Robuchon — a Frenchman, nonetheless! — should be considered the culinary capital of the world.

“Why?” Robuchon said in an interview with the London Evening Standard, “Because it’s only in London that you find every conceivable style of cooking. When it comes to what’s new in cooking, to innovative cuisine, it’s all happening in London.”

So, by the power vested in me by Matador Network, I’m calling it: London has better food than Paris.

The post I’ll go ahead and say it: London has better food than Paris appeared first on Matador Network.

30 signs you're a jiu-jitsu addict

Photo: MartialArtsNomad.com

Your joints are sore and your ears are mangled, yet you still spend the entire day looking forward to training. Are you worried that you’re addicted to Brazilian jiu-jitsu? Take a long look at this list and judge for yourself.

1. You hip escape in bed to get out from under the covers.

2. You’re uncomfortable hugging your own mother without double underhooks.

3. Your closet is filled with more jiu-jitsu gis than t-shirts and jeans.

4. You find yourself debating whether or not to pass the guard during missionary sex.

5. You pronounce names beginning in “R” with an “H” sound.

6. Laundering your dirty gis has resulted in several destroyed washing machines.

7. You delete your web history so your significant other doesn’t see your jiu-jitsu watching habits.

8. You find your jiu-jitsu skills improve the more you train, yet your English gets worse.

9. All the t-shirts you do own are emblazoned with jiu-jitsu tournament graphics.

10. You’re on a first-name basis with your local seamstress.

11. You’ve been accused of having an affair as a result of hickey-like bruises on your neck.

12. When someone extends their hand, you don’t think “handshake,” you think “armdrag.”

13. Acaí, picanha, and caipirinhas are staples of your diet.

14. You can pronounce açaí, picanha, and caipirinha with ease.

15. You’ve unintentionally learned to speak Portuguese despite living in middle-America.

Photo: John Lamonica

16. You’ve been given the “it’s me or jiu-jitsu” ultimatum more than once in your life.

17. You chose jiu-jitsu every time.

18. You’ve sprained every finger and toe more than once.

19. You only plan vacations to places in close proximity of a jiu-jitsu academy.

20. The term “rear naked choke” doesn’t remotely remind you of sexual activity.

21. You have no problem defending yourself, yet shaking hands with an acquaintance hurts.

22. You’ve considered living at the jiu-jitsu academy in order to save commuting time.

23. Upon meeting someone, you inspect his/her ears before making eye contact or smiling.

24. You have expert-level mopping skills due to your daily post-training duties.

25. Several times a week, you skip your lunch break at work to go train.

26. Your budget includes an allocation for Mueller athletic tape.

27. You’re no longer scared of needles after draining your own cauliflower ear.

28. You carry your gi everywhere on the off-chance you might pass by the academy.

29. “Berimbolo,” “Kimura,” and “De La Riva” don’t sound like gibberish to you.

30. You found this list humorous, yet unsurprisingly applicable.

If you found yourself nodding or laughing at this list more than a few times, go get some help. Or better yet — as Kurt Osiander says, “Go train!”

The post 30 signs you’re a Brazilian jiu-jitsu addict appeared first on Matador Network.