Monthly Archives: July 2026

The Reflecting Pool fiasco is a good omen.

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The Mountain Dew hue of Trump’s botched Reflecting Pool restoration has become a stand-in for the grand level of his incompetence. He is the sparkling New York realtor and TV star who lacks the wherewithal of even your garden-variety swimming pool maintenance technician. And why is the president of the U.S. busying himself with such mundane issues when the rest of the world is on fire?

Click here to read my post this week for Southeast Texas Impact Initiative.

Impact, as we members of the group shorthand it, is a widely active and highly disciplined progressive group in Orange County, Texas, a land where Ruby Red Republicans outnumber Democrats four to one.

Weekly protests in Rogers Park in Beaumont, weekly Zoom meetings where Orange County residents can learn how to get involved in local politics, aggressive representation at city council and planning meetings… These guys are doing the day-to-day work, making sure that Democratic voices are heard in a place where they have been historically suppressed.

If you live in Orange, County (which includes the city of Orange, where Tracie grew up and where we spend a lot of time with family), please join up!

And if you want to support from afar, please donate via the group’s website.

Thanks for being there. Thanks for being here. And thanks for reading.

Natural wine gets its revenge at Slow Food U.

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Last week, a man named Nicola Perullo was named the new president of the Slow Food University of Gastronomic Sciences in Piedmont, Italy. He replaces the larger-than-life founder of the Slow Food movement and its earliest voice, Carlo Petrini, who recently passed away.

During the seven years I taught in the graduate program there, I only met Perullo once, in passing.

But the students would often share their impressions of his seminars with me.

Perullo is a brilliant scholar and self-styled contemporary philosopher. On paper, there’s no doubt about it, this dude has the goods (Derrida was an advisor on his doctoral thesis!). He’s carved a name for himself in the world of food and wine thanks to his extensive and impressive writings on the aesthetics of wine.

Because I taught communications, my students and I often discussed the historic natural wine movement and its epistemological implications: how natural wine, as an abstract concept, shaped our knowledge of wine knowledge.

I can’t remember a semester when the students didn’t ask me what I thought of Perullo’s core belief (and I believe that “belief” is the right word here because of the quasi-religious elements of the biodynamic and natural wine movements): if a wine tastes good, then it must be bad, he would instruct them. In other words, if it pleases it must be a product of the Babylonian wine industry.

It’s a paradox. It’s a conundrum. And it flummoxed my students.

It was Carlo Petrini himself who anointed Perullo as his successor. I can’t recall anywhere in his writings where Petrini made such an audacious claim. But it’s clear that this is the direction Perullo will lead the institution.

Until my final year there, I enjoyed teaching in Pollenzo immensely. But I also saw how the hyperaestheticization of wine distances it from its nutritional design. My students would often complain how Perullo and his natural wine fellows (all from Triple A distributors) would demean them because of their supposed lacunose wine knowledge.

It’s one of my biggest takeaways from the experience: if wine can’t be good and fun and shared in joy and friendship, what’s the point?