May's Digest: If Only All Books Were Like Toby the Scoby

In my fridge in my house right now is a thing called a SCOBY hotel. It looks, depending on who you ask, like pig skin floating in a jar (my daughter’s opinion), like something you’d find in a specimen jar in a back-alley science lab (my son’s opinion), or like something that might crawl out in the middle of the night and kill me (my opinion, obviously—I’m the over-dramatic writer!

If you know what a SCOBY is and why it needs a hotel, kudos to you. I’d never heard of one until a fortnight ago and...