Latest news with #StregaNona
New York Times
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Living the Slop Life
There is something about checking my phone, recently, that has felt like turning up at Strega Nona's home for pasta. I show up hungry, bowl empty and fork at the ready, for a headline, a meme or an Instagram reel. But then the servings do not stop. There are more and more and more of them, the posts, like the pasta in the beloved children's book, overflowing. The servings come from the ether, a bottomless well of mushy, purposeless, dissociated slop. It is impossible to avoid slop these days. Slop is what we now call the uncanny stream of words and photos and videos that artificial intelligence spits out, images that are often close enough to our reality to be believed at first glance, but then set off a tinny alarm of unreality. Jesus Christ made out of shrimp. President Trump photoshopped to look like the pope. A cat deep-frying potatoes. A horse made out of bread (thoroughbred). The word slop is onomatopoetic, conjuring the sound of formless stew being ladled onto a cafeteria tray, sure to be unsatisfying yet in endless supply, landing with a deadening plop. 'Like Oliver Twist gruel,' said Anne Kavalerchik, a sociologist at Indiana University, who deleted Instagram from her phone last year to avoid encountering as much A.I. slop. In February, she wrote on X: 'Word of the year should be slop.' Offline, we are swimming in more slop. 'Slop bowl' is the term many use for the nebulous mash of ingredients served up at fast-casual restaurants — Cava, Naya, Sweetgreen, Chopt — where the selling point of the assembly line is efficiency, not craft: 'VC-funded millennial slop bowl,' Andy Verderosa, who works in advertising, called it in a recent post on X. Shein, Temu and other fast fashion brands sell clothing so cheap that the allure of an online order seems less like new outfits and more like the incessant replenishing of outfits, clothes pouring from a tap that will not turn off. 'Fast fashion slop,' the designer Joe McGrath called it. On the children's show Cocomelon, giggling doe-eyed children wiggle in sketches engineered to make sure toddlers do not turn away. 'Growing up on Cocomelon slop,' went a recent X post, 'graduating to consuming short form content slop.' There is a set of consistent qualities across these varied servings of slop: videos, social media posts, clothing orders, protein bowls. There is something distinctly nonhuman about them, like they did not come from the same creative processes — writing, filming, cooking — through which people have long made art and videos and meals. There is something at first comforting and then disquieting about their limitlessness, the idea that you can keep being fed videos, packages of sundresses and mushy lunch forever. And there's something about the product that feels eerie in its regulated homogeneity, every item offering the illusion of choice — Chicken or tofu? You write the bot's prompt! — but then coming out looking curiously the same. 'It's complete blah blah blah,' said Danielle Carr, an assistant professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, describing the experience of scrolling through slop on her X feed. 'Lacan has this notion of empty speech, which is when the patient in analysis is going through their same blah blah blah, empty speech that doesn't signify anything. It's similar to that. It's mind-deadening.' All these forms of slop also share a firm grip on our routines. Scott Hurd, an executive who works at Catholic Charities USA, decided to give up slop for lent, minimizing unnecessary interactions with A.I.-generated content. 'Don't ask ChatGPT to generate ideas,' Mr. Hurd wrote. 'The brain God gave you is far more efficient.' Julia Hava, who hosts the podcast Binchtopia, decided to quit fast-casual eating because she had started to feel a strange unease eating meals designed to wring extra minutes from her day. 'The classic slop bowl is not bad, but it's not good — it's fuel,' Ms. Hava, 28, said. 'It's almost the closest we can get to eating Soylent for lunch.' (Slop you can drink.) Mr. Verderosa, 35, who commutes twice a week into his Manhattan office and then waits in line for a fast-casual lunch, contemplated the ubiquity of slop on a recent Tuesday while ordering a bowl at Dos Toros. He stood inside Brookfield Place, surrounded by a dozen varieties of fast-casual restaurants, in a sea of office workers scrolling on their phones while waiting to be handed their midday mush. 'I'm sure all these slop bowl places — Cava, Naya, Dos Toros — adhere to some sort of crunch-meets-rice-meets-mush ratio that marketers and scientists have perfected,' Mr. Verderosa said. 'I'm sure there's an algorithm that tells every company exactly how crunchy to make every item.' TikTok feeds, meanwhile, are overtaken by streams of 'fast fashion slop.' Thousands of users have embraced the genre of the 'Shein Haul' reveal: Somebody hugs to their chest a bulging package, then rips it open and rifles through pounds of pink sequined crop tops, floral bikinis and pinstriped halters in a frenzied flare of enthusiasm. 'Me knowing I don't need anymore clothes but I'm addicted to shein,' reads a typical video caption. Kyla Scanlon, an economic commentator who coined the term 'vibecession,' notes that across different kinds of consumption — how we eat, how we dress, how we post — people are choosing to minimize thought and maximize efficiency, even when the outcome is a little less expressive (your outfit is the same as everyone else's), a little less satisfying (your lunch bowl tastes just like yesterday's) or a little less human. 'What we see with fast fashion or fast-casual food is that people order it online and it comes to their door — the more decisions they can outsource to technology, the better,' Ms. Scanlon said. Much like obscenity, slop can be easier to spot than to define. To Ms. Scanlon, 'slop' is the accumulation of vast quantities of unnecessary stuff, clothes that look like they were made to go 'straight for the trash can.' To Ms. Carr, 'slop' describes an aesthetic that is eerily nonhuman, and makes people feel like they're losing their grip on reality. 'It evacuates your belief in the realness of yourself and other people,' Ms. Carr said. It's early, but there is some research on what A.I. slop exposure could do to our minds. One study from the M.I.T. Media Lab, examining the brain activity of 55 students, found that those completing tasks using ChatGPT had significantly reduced levels of attention. Anthony Wagner, a neuroscientist at Stanford, reviewed a decade of research on how multitasking affected attention and memory, and found that people toggling back and forth between lots of sources of online and offline information performed worse at memory tasks. Some psychiatrists say it makes sense that being confronted with nonstop online slop comes with cognitive downside. 'There can be a fatigue with these low quality, slightly jarring A.I.-generated images that just look a little bit off,' said Dr. Susan Tapert, a psychiatrist at the University of California, San Diego, who has examined the cognitive effects of doomscrolling. 'There's this additional moment of decision — is this even coming from a person? Is this at all true?' People who are finding themselves in the muck — reading slop online, buying slop online — recognize the twinge of dread it induces. Sam Buntz, a tutor and writer in Chicago, was standing in a grocery store recently and pulled up X. One of the first images his scroll yielded was President Trump holding a lightsaber, bulging muscles protruding from a Luke Skywalker Jedi vest, with the caption, 'May the 4th be with you.' 'That's classic slop, coming from the top,' Mr. Buntz thought. As slop tends to do, it raised questions: Was the image A.I. generated? (Seemingly yes.) Had the official White House account really posted it? (It had. But why?) He summed up the way that scrolling through slop made him feel: 'It scatters your thoughts and leaves you in this fugue state.' So now some posters and shoppers are trying to edge away from it. Ms. Scanlon, for example, sees posts from 'de-influencers' encouraging people to buy less low quality goods and avoid the slop hangover (all the more useful given the prospect of tariff-related price hikes). Ms. Hava has given up slop bowls. Mr. Hurd, who wrote the essay encouraging people to give up slop for lent, said he had been inspired by observing the A.I.-generated images that his teenage daughter encountered: A.I.-generated action figures, A.I.-generated Studio Ghibli memes. It saddened him to think of her taking it all in. 'If the world is awash in A.I. slop, will the really talented artists of the future be recognized, or are they just going to be washed away in a sea of slop?' Mr. Hurd asked. He was not sure whether anybody took up his lent appeal. But he was touched when his daughter shared it with her friends, just one protective parent's plea to stop the slop.
Chicago Tribune
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Heidi Stevens: Instead of a wedding registry, they asked for children's books. And then gave them all away
This is a love story about a couple who found each other a little later in life, after their kids were grown, after their first marriages ended, after life threw a few unexpected twists their way. But it's also a love story about books. Children's books, specifically. First, the couple. Katy Coffey is a delightful, hilarious, artistic force for good in the world. We first met years ago at a brunch hosted by a mutual friend. Coffey was raising two kids as a single mom. I was raising two kids as a single mom. We bonded immediately and then didn't talk for years, as single moms raising two kids are wont to do. But we stayed connected on social media and I watched her posts and photos over the last couple of years start to include, here and there, a tall, handsome, smiling guy named Brian. One day last summer, I ran into them walking along Michigan Avenue. I got to meet tall, handsome, smiling Brian Werle (he has a last name) in person. They looked like they were in love. (You can tell.) We learned that we now live only a few blocks apart; she had sold her house in the suburbs when her kids, Rosie and Beck, were grown and off doing their own things. In March, Coffey posted a photo on Facebook from the Cook County clerk's office. She and Werle were holding up a marriage license. (Plot twist!) They were married two weeks later, on Coffey's birthday. Her son, Beck, and his childhood friend Stas sang 'All You Need is Love' to the tune of their own guitars. I scrolled through the posts and savored the abundant joy because I love happy endings and I believe so strongly in new beginnings and also there's nothing more hopeful than a wedding. We so need hopeful right now. And then I saw photos of children's books. Dozens and dozens of children's books, displayed on a table, their joyful, colorful, playful covers just begging to be cracked open. Now, the other love story. Instead of wedding gifts, Coffey and Werle asked for children's books, which they would donate to a place that would put them in kids' hands and ignite kids' wonder and send kids on adventures that will forever shape who they are and how they go through the world. 'When my kids were growing up, we read obsessively,' Coffey said. 'Every day. Every night.' Rosie, Coffey's daughter, has 'Harold and the Purple Crayon' and 'Strega Nona' tattoos, inspired by a couple of her favorite books from childhood. Coffey has a storage unit filled with boxes and boxes of children's books, waiting (patiently, she's quick to add) to be read to grandchildren. 'Reading was really important in both of our households,' Coffey continued, 'and we really felt like there was some kind of connection there.' Through Rosie, who now works for Start Early, a nonprofit focused on early childhood, Coffey and Werle connected with Educare, a child care center that serves children age 6 weeks to 5 years in Chicago's South Side Washington Park neighborhood. They asked Educare for a wish list of children's books, and Educare happily obliged. Next they reached out to Women and Children First, an independent bookstore in Chicago's Andersonville neighborhood on the North Side, and asked for a list of recommendations. Then Coffey and Werle did a little research and wishing of their own and, combining all three lists, built a registry, of sorts. Only instead of dishes and bedding, it was 'The Rainbow Fish' and 'The Color Monster' and 'Julian is a Mermaid' and 'Being You.' In their wedding invitation, they included a QR code to purchase books from Women and Children First, which shipped the books straight to Coffey and Werle's condo. Then Coffey and Werle brought a bunch of the books to the wedding venue and displayed them on a table with the guests' place cards. A few days later, they delivered 62 books to Educare. 'It felt really good,' Werle said. I love this little slice of kindness in a world that could use some right now. I love that a whole bunch of kids were just gifted a sense of belonging. I love that gift as a celebration of finding where your own heart belongs. 'What we want and we need,' Coffey said, 'is for the next generation to feel loved and to feel celebrated and to feel proud of their diversity and to feel like they've been seen.' What better way to do all that than with piles and piles of children's books? Talk about a happy, hopeful ending. And beginning.
New York Times
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
I've Read ‘Strega Nona' 100 Times. Now I Feel Sorry for Her Sidekick.
When I heard that 'Strega Nona' is turning 50, I did what any self-respecting book lover would do: I heated up a bowl of pasta and paid the signora a visit. I remembered Tomie dePaola's Caldecott Honor-winning picture book for the same reasons you might: oodles of noodles pouring out of a cauldron, threatening to overtake a Calabrian village rendered in soothing earth tones; panicked locals; the titular grandmother sorceress who saves the town. These are the ingredients that made 'Strega Nona' a classic, and the reasons it's the toast of classroom parties today. (Hello, parent boiling pasta before work and shoving it, still steaming, into a Ziploc bag. I see you!) As for Strega Nona herself, she remains a timeless style icon. Show me a woman who doesn't covet well-knotted scarves and toasty capes and I'll show you Miranda Priestly. But the character who caught my eye on my anniversary reading hasn't inspired a postage stamp, a TikTok trend or a D.I.Y. Halloween costume. He received a nod in a 1975 New York Times review of 'Strega Nona' merely as a catalyst for his boss's heroism. Later he landed his own pair of books, but not before serving as the butt of the lesson for the bulk of Generation X. His name is Big Anthony, and he's the awkward, galumphing antihero who makes 'Strega Nona' possible. Yes, he causes a boatload of trouble. I still think we should give him a second chance. We meet Big Anthony on the fourth page of the book, after we've seen Strega Nona kibitzing with girls who want husbands and men who have warts. She has a practice to run — witchcraft meets homeopathy — and she's not getting any younger. In modern times, Strega Nona might pull a policy for long-term-care insurance out of her apron pocket. In medieval times, she posts a help-wanted flier in the town square. 'And Big Anthony, who didn't pay attention,' de Paola writes, 'went to see her.' Hat in hand, eager to please, Big Anthony looks like the kind of guy who addresses you as ma'am even after you've invited him to call you by your first name, which Strega Nona most certainly has not. She rattles off a no-nonsense job description: 'You must sweep the house and wash the dishes. You must weed the garden and pick the vegetables. You must feed the goat and milk her. And you must fetch the water.' There is a caveat, however: 'The one thing you must never do is touch the pasta pot.' We know where this is going, but let's recap for the kids who, ahem, weren't paying attention the first time they heard this story. While Big Anthony is going about his chores, he spies Strega Nona crooning over her cauldron, which miraculously fills with pasta. He misses the part where she blows three kisses so the spaghetti stops multiplying. Naturally, when Strega Nona zips off for a girls' weekend with Strega Amelia, Big Anthony tries his hand at the enchanted pot. He invites everyone in town to bring their forks, platters and bowls to Strega Nona's cottage. We can see the pride on Big Anthony's face — dePaola was the master of downward-facing eyelids — as guests line up for the feast. There's plenty of pasta for everyone. Until there's too much — way, way too much. Spaghetti swirls out of the house and into the street, a nightmarish, glutinous river. As the villagers try to stave it off with mattresses, furniture and doors, Strega Nona serendipitously returns: 'She sang the magic song and blew the three kisses and with a sputter the pot stopped boiling and the pasta came to a halt.' In my memory, the book ended here. I'd forgotten how the townspeople turn on Big Anthony. The men shout, 'String him up.' But Strega Nona says, 'The punishment must fit the crime,' and she hands Big Anthony a fork: 'Start eating.' When I was in my orange Toughskins jeans era, this sounded like bliss; the only thing better than all-you-can-eat spaghetti was a bottomless ice cream I was in my please-go-to-sleep-so-I-can-have-a-moment's-peace era, it sounded like just deserts: a 'consequence,' if you will, for not listening. Now I see the hellishness of the punishment, and its excess. Poor Big Anthony! He made a mistake and, hand to heart, he regrets it. Maybe Strega Nona could have imparted a more valuable lesson with public forgiveness. After all, what did her charge take away from punitive pasta consumption except a too-full stomach? (Here dePaola the artist fumbles, unless he intended for Big Anthony to look pregnant.) I'm aware that 'Strega Nona' is a fable — equal parts 'Sweet Porridge' by the Brothers Grimm and 'The Sorcerer's Apprentice' by too many contributors to count (and most famously starring Mickey Mouse). But, really, did this sincere young man deserve to be scorned and humiliated? The first thing we learn about Big Anthony — he 'didn't pay attention' — lands now in a way it didn't when I was listening to 'Strega Nona' on the floor of my school library, or while turning the pages for my own children. This time, dePaola strikes a match of compassion across my formerly flinty soul. I won't go so far as to suggest that Big Anthony might have had A.D.D.; far be it from me to diagnose a fictional character (or anyone, for that matter). At the very least, he could have used some understanding. In 'Big Anthony and the Magic Ring' (1979), we once again catch wind of our friend's lackluster attention span: He nabs a gold ring that transforms him into Handsome Big Anthony, able to dance the tarantella all night long. Disaster strikes (or does it?) when a mob of desperate ladies — Maria, Concetta, Clorinda, Rosanna, Theresa, Francesca and Clotilda — chase him up a tree. Readers can draw their own conclusions about the moral of the story. Almost 20 years later, dePaola gave us 'Big Anthony: His Story,' a prequel of sorts following the town's scapegoat from babyhood until the day he walks through Strega Nona's door. From that moment on, Big Anthony is a reliable foil. And Strega Nona can be depended upon to rescue him from whatever scrape he finds himself in, even if she does so with the air of someone who would resurface a half-empty glass of milk leftover from dinner. Next month, dePaola fans can look forward to 'Where Are You, Brontë?,' the maestro's final completed book, written before he died in 2020. Charmingly illustrated by Barbara McClintock (whose oeuvre includes the 'Adèle & Simon' books), this weeper features the ultimate sidekick: a loyal dog. It's hard to imagine 'Where Are You, Brontë?' in the regular bedtime rotation, focusing as it does on the death of dePaola's beloved Airedale terrier. Nonetheless, it's a worthy, sensitive resource for a family coping with the loss of a pet. For me, staring down my youngest child's high school graduation, with our family dog's collar now in a shadow box in the living room, it was a lot to take. But, like 'Strega Nona,' the book is a reminder of the joys of companionship, even if the aftermath is bittersweet. Which brings me back to Big Anthony, who is a gatherer of people in addition to being a guy who can't pay attention. He pays dearly for his swagger, having disobeyed an elder and thrown an unsanctioned party. But look how happy everyone is before it all goes wrong — neighbors and nuns, peasants and royalty bumping elbows as they twirl their spaghetti. Had I been among the masses, I'd like to think I'd have appreciated Big Anthony's impulse to bring people together. Maybe this is his magic song, imperfect but important. And maybe, 50 years from now, we'll have learned how to come to the table (or the pasta pot) without rancor or recrimination. We can only hope.
