A Back-to-School Hello

Recent work, the recipe as technical writing, and a reading list about time

Hello!

I took the summer off from this newsletter, partly to work on other projects, and partly because the creeping horror of the news cycle has (mostly) robbed me of the ability to speak coherently on anything other than straightforward recipe-writing. With September has come the familiar comfort of knuckling back down to work, a back-to-school flush of energy (though I haven’t been a student in years).

I wonder if we talk enough about how writing recipes is actually technical writing? We might wax poetic in a headnote, the bulk of the work is typing out instructions, and it’s often incredibly boring. I’ve been doing a lot of this technical writing this summer, and it's given me newfound appreciation for the people who do it exceptionally well. To describe a detailed workflow with panache without letting style distract from form - it’s a remarkable thing! I’m also grateful that when the headlines are filled with monstrous behavior, I can sink into the formulaic rhythm of recipes, with their innate structure, straightforward rules, and familiar demands.

I have also taken comfort in following the work of the Gaza Soup Kitchen, who continue to feed people under unimaginably difficult conditions. You can support their work here.

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Here is some of my recent work, in case you missed it:

• I wrote a blog post for King Arthur Baking on how to substitute one sized pan for another in your baking projects. This topic is by its nature a little dry! But I truly think willy-nilly pan subs are the bane of most home bakers. It matters so much more than you might realize. Pausing briefly to consider the volume of your pan and how that might affect your bake can make a world of difference to the success of your recipes.

• For Kitchen Projects, I developed recipes for American biscuits, strawberry shortcake, and peach cobbler. These are all free to access, though I have a fun pan biscuit recipe and a bunch of infused whipped creams tucked behind Nicola’s paywall as well.

• I wrote a piece for Cake Zine on my complicated feelings around the AI discourse from the perspective of a recipe developer. The essay generated a lot of debate, which I’m grateful for - I learned a lot. I am by nature very wary of purity culture, where strict adherence to a moral ideal is necessary for someone to be “good” or “correct”, and I see this crop up a great deal in discussions of AI. Can we be “good”, if we occasionally opt in to using AI? I still maintain that there are limited, acceptable use cases for the technology, but in the interest of learning more I recently read The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want, by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna. There are many fascinating takeaways from this book, but one of the most compelling ideas I learned is that, even among tech experts, there isn’t a single, agreed-upon definition of what artificial intelligence means. Further, we are frequently being sold “artificial intelligence” products that are essentially fancy spreadsheets. In order for these products to work, they have to be continually moderated by unseen human intervention, often consisting of underpaid laborers in the majority world. The book also led me to think more deeply about how we define intelligence and communication, and what we lose when we ascribe consciousness to what the authors call “language extruding machines”.

  At any rate, if you haven’t read the essay yet, check it out and feel free to yell at me in the comments section - I promise I’ll read it. Maybe in two years I’ll write another follow-up.

• If you haven’t yet read my essay on sugar, do check it out, especially as we descend towards Halloween aka candy season.

• Did you know I have online cake decorating classes? You can find them here. Buy them once, watch the videos and own the recipes forever. Subjects include stacking tiered cakes, dome cakes (still on trend IMO), and king cakes.

For pleasure, I’ve been reading loads of speculative fiction and weeding my garden. We went away for a week and on my return I realized our agave had sent out the long, sturdy protuberance of the only flower it will ever produce. Most agaves are monocarpic, which means they bloom once and then die.

The agave death process.

I have been trying to take comfort in the fact that this is a normal part of the plant’s life cycle, and feel privileged I get to witness it. I’m still sad, though.

I’m not sure how it’s taken me so long to get around to it but I finally finished The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin. I found it an especially moving read after finishing The AI Con, as both discuss the limits of technology and the way language shapes our experience of the world. The Dispossessed also grapples with metaphysical concepts of time, which I promise is more gripping than it might sound. It reminded me of an old favorite from my childhood, Einstein’s Dreams by the physicist Alan Lightman, as well as the movie Arrival by director Denis Villeneuve, which is further based on the short story “Story of Your Life’ by Ted Chiang. Ted Chiang is additionally the author of several recent pieces on the failures of AI, such as “Why AI Isn’t Going to Make Art” and “Chat GPT is a Blurry JPEG of the Web”.

I’ve borrowed the phrase “death process” from the movie Arrival to think about my agave plant, as well - not an end, but a continuation.

I feel like I grew up with the tired stereotype of scientists thinking, dryly, only in terms of what they can prove, and all of these works remind me that scientists also passionately engage in conjecture about what cannot be made visible or demonstrable: both time, and what makes us human.

See you soon with my next piece, which is all about the weird and wonderful world of grain snobs.

-Bronwen

Another scene from my chaotic late-summer garden.