Micah's Read of the Week, Vol. 27
Micah interviews the author of last week's attack on Austin, fact-checking the president, Tiger Woods, a wild and fun story about Ricky Williams, pellet ice, the end of Dry January, and more.
Hello, and welcome to Micah’s Read of the Week.
This is a newsletter filled with things Micah Wiener finds interesting.
Check out the introduction post here and the entire archive of previous newsletters here.
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You won’t believe who joined me on the Mind of Micah podcast
Brett Alder is the guy who wrote the viral piece: I moved my family from California to Austin, Texas and regretted it. Here are 10 key points every person should consider before relocating.
Last week I skewered him. I called him an asshole. This week, he joined me on Mind of Micah to talk about how the piece got published, the attention it received, and his complaints about his family’s time in Austin. I think you’ll enjoy it.
Lede of the Week
From Reflections on four weird years fact checking every word from Donald Trump:
I had to email the Boy Scouts to find out if the President had invented a nonexistent phone call from the head of the organization. (He had.)
I had to email a Babe Ruth museum to find out if the President had made a bunch of false claims about the baseball legend while awarding him a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom. (He had.)
I had to email some of Michigan's most prominent organizations to find out if the President had actually received a state "Man of the Year" award he kept claiming he once got. (Nope.)
I fact checked every public word Donald Trump said or tweeted for just under four years. The job was unrelenting. The job was unrelentingly weird.
Dale essential covered the Trump dishonesty beat. I doubt any journalist has ever built a career documenting every lie and untruth uttered by a world leader. What a weird run.
In 2017, Trump averaged 2.9 false claims per day. By 2018, it was 8.3 false claims per day. What started as a side project I could handle in a few hours a week started requiring regular all-nighters. By the time I joined CNN in mid-2019, it required a second reporter, Tara Subramaniam.
I’ve followed Dale for years, dating back to his reporting days in Canada and I’ve always appreciated his professionalism as well as the perspective he maintained.
People almost certainly died because of Trump's Covid-19 lying. And people died at the Capitol because of Trump's lying spree about the 2020 election. Though there was some solid absurdist comedy mixed into the President's dishonesty repertoire -- I couldn't help but be entertained by his imaginary "sir" stories about burly blue-collar workers crying in his presence -- there were always dark consequences, too.
One of them was anger at journalists. I received hundreds of hateful emails, thousands of irate tweets, one graphic death threat I felt compelled to report to police. For all the Twitter moms' concerns about my mental health, though, the job was always much more tiring than traumatic. I was typing at home in pajama pants, not covering a war.
The best part of this story is Dale’s breakdown of his daily routine:
And so I stuck to a daily routine I could never have imagined before Trump launched his campaign.
I would roll over in bed, turn off my alarm, and open Twitter to see what lies the President of the United States might have told while I was sleeping. And then, because Trump lied about a staggering variety of topics, I would try to rapidly educate myself on stuff I had known nothing about -- trade with China, or Obama-era veterans' health care legislation, or hurricane forecasting.
The lying sometimes continued until I had gone to sleep. Every time I felt like I had caught up, Trump would lie about something new -- while still keeping many of the old lies in regular rotation. When I started tweeting fact checks of Trump's rally claims moments after he made them, admirers viewed this as a kind of magic trick. In truth, it was pretty easy. The President kept saying the same false stuff over and over.
Let’s hope we never have another president that requires a full-time fact-checking department.
The Temptation of Tiger Woods
HBO recently released a two-part documentary series about Woods. It was pretty good. We discussed it in-depth on my other sports podcast Too Much Dip. You can listen to that below.
As good as the doc is, this Vanity Fair story from 2010 is even better. The author speaks to several of Tiger’s mistresses, and each story is more jaw-dropping than the last.
It starts with his relationship with a hostess from his local Perkins pancake house:
Their relationship settled into a routine: meet at the CVS, follow him to the house, make love. Then she would return to her hostess stand and he would resume the life of a superstar golfer. “My feelings were growing strong for him,” she says, and she brushed it off when her fellow workers complained that he tipped a paltry 15 percent when paying with his black American Express card.
He bought her dinner only once. She was getting dressed to meet him—by then she was wearing lace panties in his favorite color, cherry red—when he called to say he’d be a few minutes late. “He said, ‘I’m getting something to eat at Subway,’ and I said, ‘I’m pretty hungry, too. Could you pick me up a chicken wrap?’” They ate their subs before making love that night, and Tiger washed his down with Baileys Irish Cream liqueur. “Straight out of the bottle,” Lawton says.
“Did he ever buy you anything?,” I ask.
“No,” she says. “Just the sub.”
Tweet Thread of the Week
This story from finding Ricky Williams from journalist Chris Jones is delightful. I’ve included the entire thing below.
I was like, I want to be the guy who finds him. My memory is a little foggy here, but I think I got Ricky’s email address from the godfather of one of Esquire’s editors. It was an AOL account, I remember. I wrote Ricky and asked him if he’d talk to me if I found him.
He replied! And he said if I found him, he would tell me everything. AMAZING. But first—finding him. There were reports that he’d been in Italy, Fiji, Japan, and, most recently, Australia. A guy who’d felt trapped was now making the most of his freedom. Ricky was on THE MOVE.
I asked Peter, my editor, if I could go searching for Ricky. I didn’t really think I would find him. But I figured I’d get some crazy travel out of it, giving chase. That’s what I was calling the story in my head: “Chasing Ricky.” I imagined I’d always be one step behind.
Peter asked me what I thought my chances were. My brain calculated, “Less than one tenth of one percent.” My mouth said, “50-50.” I don’t like to think I was lying so much as my brain and mouth had been in disagreement. Anyway, a coin toss was good enough for Peter: Go.
I had lived in Australia when I was a teenager. I dropped out of high school and surfed and dived—quite pleasant, really, even if I’d given my parents absolute fits. I knew that Byron Bay was a pretty spectacular place to hide out and smoke weed. Might as well start there.
I flew to Brisbane and drove to Byron Bay. You have to understand the strain of jet lag that follows a flight to Australia. I pulled into town and felt like I had cataracts. Also: What now? I hadn’t thought beyond getting to Byron Bay. I was like, I guess I’ll go to the beach.
I walked along the beach for about ten minutes… hoping I’d run into Ricky Williams? But honestly also hoping I wouldn’t, because I wanted to travel some more. I looked at the ocean and breathed in the salt and tried to feel more like a human. I was in a total dream state.
Eventually I ran into a leathery Australian man with long hair and a beard. He was wearing a tiny pair of shorts, and that was it. He seemed like someone who would know where someone like Ricky Williams might be. I asked him if he’d seen an extremely fast American man lately.
“Yeah,” he said. Okay, sorry to bother—Wait, what? The man said that a man matching my description was staying at a campground-turned-commune in the trees outside of town. I was like, No way. But what else was I going to do? I staggered to the campground like a drunk.
I found this hippie jungle paradise and went into the welcome hut and asked if someone named Ricky was staying there. A friendly woman said, “Yeah, he’s in the tents.” Now I thought… Is it actually possible that I’ve found Ricky Williams? In 20 minutes? No fucking way.
I walked over to “the tents.” There were maybe a hundred tents pitched all over the place. I thought, Do I just stand here and monitor the tents like a weirdo? That’s when I heard a soft American voice coming out of a little kitchen hut. “Oh no, thank you,” the voice said.
I put my head through the door and there he was: Ricky Williams in the flesh. He was turning celery into juice. I said, “Ricky?” And he turned around: “Yes?” And I said, “It’s me, Chris. From Esquire.” And Ricky said: “Wow, you found me.” And I said, “Yeah! I FOUND YOU.”
I called Peter from the bank of pay phones outside the campground. He couldn’t believe it. “What? Found who?” Ricky and I spent eight wonderful days together. Whale watching. Playing poker. Getting super high with a Gandalf-looking guy named Mystic Steve.
But that first night, we just went to a movie together, “The Village.” I was wiped out and fell asleep. I woke up when the lights came on, with my head on Ricky’s shoulder. I had no idea where I was. I just knew I was there with Ricky Williams, like I was always going to be.
Wellness Corner
Dry January is over
We did it. Congrats to everyone who participated. In addition to giving up booze, the fiance and I also stuck to a Keto diet last month. I feel pretty good! I dropped all of the pounds I added during the holidays plus a few more. It’s been a good reset. At my home, we plan to keep it going until the Super Bowl on Sunday, or maybe a frozen marg Friday night.
Keto hasn’t been too hard. I’ve eaten a metric ton of cauliflower in various forms. It just feels really weird that any diet allows and encourages you to snack on pork rinds, but I am not a doctor.
I do have an announcement to share: as I write this, I am in ketosis.
Pellet Ice Is the Good Ice
You know exactly what I’m talking about. Sonic ice. Pellet ice. The good stuff. It’s superior to all other forms of ice. I enjoyed this exploration of ice.
Here’s where pellet ice differs from crushed ice, with which it is often erroneously conflated: the compression of the nuggets creates flaky layers, which, as in a well-laminated pastry, render the ice pellets lightweight and airy, with crevices and tiny caves into which your drink can penetrate, and a yielding texture perfect for chewing. The ice is small, each piece only about a centimetre long and narrower in diameter, so it fills a glass more efficiently than lumbering cubes or half-moons, and somehow, in a quirk of thermodynamics, it allegedly melts more slowly. Unlike standard ice, it doesn’t clink; instead, it makes a soothing, gently percussive shuffling sound, like someone shaking an afuche-cabasa in the apartment next door.
Cashew Eggplant Chicken Stir-Fry
I’m gonna cook this Keto-friendly stirfry one night this week. I’ll probably omit the cornstarch and serve it with cauliflower rice. How exciting.
INGREDIENTS
1 pound slender Japanese eggplants or Indian (baby) eggplants
1 tablespoon sea salt, for the soaking water
1/2 medium red onion
12 ounces boneless, skinless chicken thighs
2 cloves garlic
1/2-inch piece fresh ginger root
1/3 cup no-salt-added chicken broth
1 tablespoon toasted sesame oil
1 teaspoon Sriracha
1 teaspoon fish sauce, preferably Thai or Vietnamese
1 1/2 teaspoons low-sodium soy sauce
1 teaspoon cornstarch (may substitute arrowroot)
1/2 cup (about 2 1/2 ounces) roasted cashews (salted or unsalted)
DIRECTIONS
Trim off and discard the eggplant stems, and then cut the eggplant crosswise into 1/2-inch rounds.
Dissolve the salt in a large bowl of water, then add the eggplant rounds. Weight them down with another bowl so they stay submerged. Soak for 18 minutes, then rinse, drain and pat dry.
Meanwhile, cut the onion into thin half-moons. Trim off and discard all visible fat from the chicken, then cut the chicken into 3/4-inch chunks. Peel the garlic and ginger root; mince both and place in a liquid measuring cup, along with the broth, half the toasted sesame oil, the Sriracha, fish sauce, soy sauce and cornstarch, whisking to form a slurry.
Heat 1 teaspoon of the toasted sesame oil in a wok or nonstick saute pan over medium-high heat. Swirl to coat; once the oil shimmers, add the eggplant. Stir-fry for about 5 minutes, until browned on both sides, then transfer to a plate.
Add the remaining 1/2 teaspoon of toasted sesame oil to the pan; swirl to coat, then add the chicken. Stir-fry for 2 minutes, then add the onion and cashews; stir-fry for about 2 minutes or until the chicken is cooked through. Stir in the slurry and return the eggplant to the pan; stir-fry for a minute or two, just until warmed through and evenly coated.
Where else can I find Micah content?
Podcasts: Mind of Micah, Back Door Cover, Too Much Dip
Twitter: @micahwiener & @producermicah (Why two twitters? It’s a long story)
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