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Oct 14, 2024 | 
flaminghydra.com | Yemisi Aribisala
by Yemisi AribisalaA preacher, who is both native speaker of the Yoruba language, as well as beautifully eloquent in many of its dialects, says that there are three kinds of marriages. The first is Ọ̀sìnkín, the Yoruba gold standard, where all protocols are attended to with deep respect, and dowry estimates calculated so the bride is not commodified but prized in terms of appropriate bijouterie. Or as Molara Wood the Yoruba intellectual broke down for me: akin to fresh corn no less.
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Jun 10, 2024 | 
aliciakennedy.news | Yemisi Aribisala |Colombe Schneck |Alicia Kennedy
Living in the Caribbean where avocados grow means Iâm well aware of their seasonal nature: Either there are avocados, or there arenât. I could go looking for the imported varieties, but I donât love avocados enough to warrant going against Mother Earth in this way. Iâll eat them when theyâre around, and itâll be one of those seasonal food thrills, and then I wonât think about them again for a while.
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Jun 3, 2024 | 
aliciakennedy.news | Yemisi Aribisala |Alicia Kennedy
I’m always nosy about the particulars of the mundane. I think most of us are, or else there wouldn’t be such massive industries built around watching people get ready for their days or make a sandwich. But what I personally really want to know about is how people stock their kitchens and pantries. Not just what’s in their kitchen, but how does the infrastructure of the city where they live and who they live with affect what they eat and how they go about getting it?
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May 27, 2024 | 
aliciakennedy.news | Yemisi Aribisala |Alicia Kennedy
There are over 38,000 people receiving this email, in all 50 United States and 166 countries of the world. Numbers are quite abstract: I know there are over 20,000 exceptionally dedicated readers who open the emails within 24 hours, but sometimes I can write an especially compelling subject line or the stars decide it’s fate, and many more join you. But the number of readers with whom I regularly chitchat is much smaller, by design and by necessity. I can only know so many of you.
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May 20, 2024 | 
aliciakennedy.news | Siobhan Phillips |Yemisi Aribisala |Aleksandar Hemon |Danielle Dutton
Siobhan Phillips is an English professor and the author of Benefit, a novel about money, sugar, and higher education that I had the privilege to discuss with her when it came out in 2021.
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May 13, 2024 | 
aliciakennedy.news | Yemisi Aribisala |Aleksandar Hemon |Alicia Kennedy
I have a years-long obsession (apparently) with people thinking itâs somehow hip or interesting to drink whole milk. Itâs this absolute nonsense perspective on the world that comes from people being in little urban bubbles of irony and demographic inertia, where they seem to believe plant-based milk or veganism generally have gotten such a firm grasp that whatâs truly interesting is⊠cowâs milk.
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Apr 22, 2024 | 
aliciakennedy.news | Ruby Saha |Yemisi Aribisala |Zilkia Janer |Alicia Kennedy
It was an email from Ruby Saha that inspired me to follow through on my idea to start The Desk Dispatch. She wrote me a kind note, and I realized that the best thing I could do for young writers was create a new space where they could have their work edited, seen, and compensated. In today’s Dispatch, her interest in diasporic traditions leads her to two bakers of Armenian descent who use a fragrant spice to stay connected to and rooted in their ancestry.
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Mar 16, 2024 | 
cnn.com | Yemisi Aribisala
Femi Oyebade, a Nigerian diasporan for more than 30 years and a Guinness beer connoisseur, assures me that there is a stark difference between Irish Guinness and Nigerian Guinness. Chalk and cheese won’t suffice in defining the distance between the two. Nigerian Guinness has weight in your mouth and is sumptuously smooth. It isn’t as bitter as Irish Guinness and has a lovelier, frothier head. Its sugar content is higher.
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Mar 8, 2024 | 
spoonuniversity.com | Yemisi Aribisala
Food is bound to come across your feed no matter what part of the internet you live in. Whether it’s a picture, YouTube video, TikTok, or Reel, food content is one of the few things we try out in real life. But why not take a step further into a different medium? As a novice home-cook, I ended up needing something more tangible than just my phone balancing between my toaster and the cutting board.
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Mar 4, 2024 | 
aliciakennedy.news | Yemisi Aribisala |Alicia Kennedy
“Memories are like flies swarming through the air, jumbled-up bits of memory,” Agnès Varda says in The Beaches of Agnès. “The vignette disrupts the notion of life as a narrative arc,” writes Dodie Bellamy in “Unbearable Intimacies.”*I feel more honest when I tell you stories in bits and pieces. Memory is a broken thing, and I am not very good at forcing it into order and narrative.
