Monthly Archives: July 2026

Happy birthday Lila Jane! 13!

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Happy birthday sweet Lila Jane! You are 13!

You’ve had a great year.

Great grades. Varsity orchestra. First chair and excellence award at your summer music camp (that was so awesome!). Tons of friends who adore you. Your room, always impeccably organized and beautifully decorated. The most special little beagle/red heeler mix, Tillie Billie Eilish. And a family that loves and is so proud of you.

Mommy and I are so proud of the young person you are becoming. We’ve watched you grow both inside and out this year. And we know you are ready and strong for the big year ahead.

Happy birthday, sweet girl! We’ve been celebrating with family and friends all week and tonight we’ll share another birthday cake with your California friends. Happy birthday! We love you.

Just try to use “polyptoton” in a sentence. It’s not easy!

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While on vacation last week, I found myself needing the word polyptoton.

I used it in a post for the Southeast Texas Impact Initiative Substack. Writing about Vance’s “Communion” and Trump’s “communism,” it was the perfect lemma to bring it all together.

Here’s the article…

Whether communion or communism, Trumplicans subscribe to the school of “make it up as you go along.”

Even though it had been reduced from its list price of $35, I still couldn’t bear to shell out the $22.75 for J.D. Vance’s recently published memoir “Communion” (Harper 2026). Sorry, JD.

But I did read New York Times opinion contributor Carlos Lozada’s acute takedown of the Yale Law School grad’s new rationalization of the Maga racist, Christian nationalist policy platform.

Vance’s book teeters over his path to Catholicism. It’s enough to warm your heart.

But “deep” within this tome, the former U.S. senator representing Fifi-eating Buckeyes, and current Trump number 2 lays out his vision for the white supremacist Christian nation he envisions as our country’s future (ok, he didn’t actually write “white supremacist” but you don’t really need to read between the lines to infer the more profound meaning of his pseudo-philosophical syllogism.)

“The decline of Christianity has left us without a shared moral language,” Vance informs his readers. “Each of us, in our own weird ways, is guilty of casting aside the Christian inheritance of our civilization,” the VP opines.

Wow…

Click here to continue reading on Impact’s Substack. Thank you for being here and thank you for supporting Impact!

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo “was damned well a Houstonian.” Say his name! ICE murders must stop!

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Tracie and I are praying for the family of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo. He was fatally shot by ICE agents here in Houston on Tuesday morning.

His crime? He was undocumented. No criminal history. More than half of his life spent in Houston working to build a life for his family.

I was blown away this morning by a line from our paper of record, the Houston Chronicle. Its editors published an opinion yesterday entitled “ICE lies. And now they’ve killed a Houstonian.”

“Lorenzo may not have been an American on paper,” the paper’s editorial board wrote, “but he was damned well a Houstonian.”

That’s what the MAGA hegemon refuses to acknowledge: they are killing their fellow citizens, whether Minneapolitans or now a Houstonian. Last year, they were forced to admit that they killed an San Antonian American citizen in Texas as well. At least 20 people have died in ICE custody this year. Last year, 33 persons died in ICE custody.

Please say Lorenzo’s name! Please support your community by letting your fellow Americans — documented or undocumented — know that we see them, that we care about them, that they are citizens of our communities. Please remember that people in your city are forced to live with the constant fear that masked men in unmarked cars may prey on them or their loved ones without any notice.

On MLK Day this year, Rev. Jefferson, the leader of the Orange, Texas chapter of the NAACP, said what everyone has been thinking. ICE is the new Ku Klux Klan, he told the crowd gathered for celebration at Mt. Olive Church.

We’ll see if our mayor or our governor will make sure that ICE is held accountable for the killing of yet another productive member of society. In the meantime, we will continue to protest in the southeast Texas summer heat and we will continue to pray.

G-d bless Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and his family. G-d please, please protect our communities from ICE.

What I love about America: Ben’s Chili Bowl. Happy Fourth!

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Back when I was living in NYC and supporting myself through music, the bands I played with often performed at the Black Cat, a wonderful rock club in Washington D.C., not too far from Howard University.

No show at the Black Cat was complete without a late-night, after-show visit to Ben’s Chili Bowl, the legendary hot dog and chili restaurant just a short walk away.

I remember running into some cool dudes from a Washington-area band who had performed on the same bill as us.

Man, it’s so cool that you have a place like this in your town, I told one of them.

You’re not from around here, are you? he said. No, I told him, my band is from New York.

This is the south, he told me. And Ben’s Chili Bowl is one of the few places where it doesn’t matter if you’re black or white. Everyone hangs out here!

When I was back in the capital last year for a job, I made a beeline to Ben’s as soon as I finished work.

After I ordered my food and took a seat, “The Need to Be” by Gladys Knight and the Pips came on the radio.

Gladys sang over the loudspeaker:

To fulfill the need to be who I am
In this world, is all I ask
I can’t pretend to be something that I’m not
And I won’t wear a mask

Ben’s Chili Bowl is everything I love about our country: a neighborhood place where all kinds of people can be together just for the sheer fun of it, where all are welcome.

Happy Fourth everyone! If you’re in Houston, stop by the house for a hot dog and some homemade chili. That’s what we’ll be cooking. Everyone is welcome.

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?