My Favorite Talks from XOXO 2019

I was fortunate enough to make it out to Portland, OR for the 2019 XOXO festival back in September. It was my third time attending — I went the first year and in 2015 — and, goodness, the conference has changed a lot. XOXO used to be comfortably in my wheelhouse and now it’s more on the outskirts, so instead of hearing a bunch of stuff I want to hear, I trust the conference organizers to present some things that I need to hear, to keep me curiously exploring new ideas, viewpoints, and experiences unlike my own.

XOXO has started posting videos of all their talks online (one new video each weekday), and I’m going to share some of my favorites here. The first video is of Tracy Clayton’s barnburner of a talk: Log Off, Fam — Self Care in the Timeline Era.

Clayton and I overlapped at Buzzfeed (she was an employee and I had a desk there working on kottke.org) but have never met, so it was interesting to hear about her success and ultimately bad experience there.

I’ll updating this post with the rest of my favorites as they’re posted on YouTube.

Update: I enjoyed Soleil Ho’s talk about how the drive by her and others to shift the food world’s conversation on representation and cultural appropriation is starting to bear some fruit.

Update: My favorite talk, the one that hit me most squarely in the feels, was by Emily & Amelia Nagoski. It was about burnout, which I have been, I think, struggling with lately w/r/t to this here website. There were several points during this talk when I felt absolutely naked, exposed — like they were talking just to me.

Harry Brewis told us about the time when a goofy project he started spun out of his control in the most wonderful way:

To close the conference, Rhea Butcher talked about the importance of seeking without necessarily worrying about the finding:

You can find all of the 2019 talks right here.

• Amelia Nagoski
• conferences
• Emily Nagoski
• Harry Brewis
• Rhea Butcher
• Soleil Ho
• Tracy Clayton
• video
• XOXO

Crack Pie, Girly Drinks, and Problematic Food Language

Soleil Ho is the new restaurant critic for the San Francisco Chronicle. In a recent article, Ho shared a thoughtful list of the words that she isn’t going to use in her restaurant reviews. One of the words is “crack”:

In addition to being overly dramatic, it seems really callous to write that a bowl of bean dip is “like crack.” No matter how delicious something might be, its effect on me is nothing close to what crack does to people and their families. It’s supposed to be funny and edgy to compare a gourmet cupcake to crack because of how far the chi-chi bakery I’m standing in is from the kind of community that has historically been devastated by the crack epidemic. The ignorance is the joke.

One interesting example of its persistence is in the way we talk about Momofuku Milk Bar’s “Crack Pie.” Writers have called its creator, chef Christina Tosi, a “crack dealer” and used the language of addiction to describe the dish. Honestly, the company should have done the right thing and changed it by now.

Language is power and words are meaningful beyond their simple or intended definitions. For any given problematic word, there are so many other words you can use.

See also New Language for Slavery and the Civil War.

• food
• language
• Soleil Ho