There’s a commercial I see when I watch television shows on streaming services for store-bought naan that drives me fucking crazy. The characters in this commercial repeatedly describe naan as “a delicious fluffy flatbread,” in a way that feels like they want to erase all the connections that naan has to a culture and a place. They don’t mention India, or Pakistan, or any of the Asian and Arab countries where naan is a typical accompaniment to meals. It’s a flatbread! A delicious, fluffy flatbread! In the same way that Taco Bell strives to divorce the food it produces from its cultural context—food that comes from nowhere and has no history—this commercial took a food I have always known as Indian and divorced it from Indianness. Dosa Divas is a game that allows me to release some of the anger I feel about this.

My relationship to the Indian diaspora is complicated. My mother immigrated when she was seven, and her family immigrated before the cap on Asian immigrants was repealed in 1965, meaning that there was no diaspora culture to greet her in America. Add to that that she married a Black man, a lot of Indian Americans just don’t want to have anything to do with me. No joke, I have had many other Indians either tell me I am not Indian or straight up stop speaking to me after learning these facts. 

While there are examples of diaspora media products that speak to me—the 2001 movie American Desi, a shortening of the phrase “American Born Confused Desi,” and the music of Heems and MIA—I feel alienated by stories that describe an immigrant experience I have never known. Food was often the one cultural connection I had to other Indians. My mom still makes the recipes she remembers from her youth, and we both follow the handwritten recipes in a notebook that my ammama left for us. But I also find that stories about food in the diaspora community are often pretty shallow, reducing a rich culture into a small number of foods that come from a very specific area of India, or god forbid, telling yet another story about white kids thinking your lunchbox is stinky. 

Dosa Divas is not a story about the worthiness of Indian food, nor is it about what white people think about Indian food. From what I’ve played so far, it is a story about how food gets commodified, repackaged, and divorced from the things that make cooking and eating an essential part of creating a community.

Dosa Divas follows sisters Amani and Samara as they take a roadtrip through a science fiction world inspired by Indian culture. Their destination is their old family restaurant, but on the way they discover that their other sister Lina has taken the family business and turned it into an evil corporation that sells meals in tubes. If Lina had the idea to repackage naan as delicious fluffy flatbread, I am certain that she would, but her mission goes farther than that—she wants to rid the world of cooking entirely so that everyone has more time to work sixteen hour shifts in the mines.

As Amani and Samara travel to their hometown, they encounter hungry people who desperately want dosa—and dosa they provide. In the first town, a fishing village, dosa is the thing that empowers people to repair bridges and start planning about how to fight off Lina’s corporate goons. Each dosa is carefully crafted by Amani and Samara together, from ingredients either found in the environment or bartered for. The cooking minigames have not outstayed their welcome so far, but more than the minigames, I love the many different recipes for dosa that you collect as the game goes on. You learn how to make spicy fish dosa and sweet banana dosa and savory veggie dosa, all of which can later be used as healing items during turn-based battles.

In combat, where you face off against Lina’s lawyers, each of the characters' skills and attacks are assigned a flavor value—essentially just taking the RPG genre convention of different elements and replacing them with Salty, Sweet, Sour and Savory. But by attacking an enemy and using their flavor weakness against them you can break their shields and make them Stuffed, allowing you to do more damage. So far it’s just complex enough to be fun without feeling unwieldy, but the (ahem) flavor text around these character abilities really makes them come together for me. Uncle Hinti, the disembodied character who delivers on-screen hints, tells the player that Stuffed enemies are too busy dreaming of a home-cooked meal to bother protecting themselves from attacks. Who among us hasn’t drifted into a daydream thinking about Mom’s idli and walked into scaffolding?

More than anything, Dosa Divas makes me ravenous. I wish more diaspora stories were about how our culture can and is commodified, rather than arguing for its worthiness or reinforcing a specific narrative of diaspora that excludes people like me. But it also, specifically, makes me hungry for dosa. My mom told me that ammama made dosa so thin and crispy and perfectly golden brown that she was gifted with a golden spatula—not very useful for cooking, but a compliment to her skill. I can still taste her dosa in my mouth, hot and oily and just a little bit sour. I can’t have those dosa again, but someday I hope to at least follow her recipe.

Marisa Kabas has an excerpt from looks like a fascinating new book by a former top USAID official:

Without introductions, Joel, who was eating a frozen Indian dinner, jumped right in. “In full transparency, we’re drawing down USAID,” he said. “We’d like you to walk us through your mission-critical functions so that we can close things out smoothly. What are the key priorities that we need to keep working on in GH, and the staff needs to carry them out?”

Draw down. Close out. The words he dropped so casually rang in my head. Our global health programs didn’t concern him, he was only interested in the quickest way to shutter the agency. I knew this was my only chance to make him see why our work mattered.

“Thanks, Joel,” I began. “With the current pause on foreign aid, we’re primarily focused right now on the waiver to restart our lifesaving activities. But emergency response is only a tiny fraction of our work. So much of what we do is to strengthen sustainable health systems around the world for long-term health improvements. Let me tell you about that work as well as some of the more urgent needs.”

Joel, who had been checking his watch, shrugged and took another bite of his microwaved paneer. Just as I was about to go on, Paul Seong spoke up. “I’d say just stick to the lifesaving stuff,” he said. Aside from Jason Gray, Paul was the only career official representing the front office in this meeting. My only prior engagement with Paul was the Ebola briefing on Monday after which he had asked for the names of the meeting’s participants, who had been the only staff spared from administrative leave that day. Paul had been a relatively junior foreign service officer until recently, when he had somehow ingratiated himself with our new political leaders. Now the political appointees seemed to look to him for strategic advice on how to tear down the agency, and he appeared to relish his newfound influence, which was affirmed by his seat at the center of the conference table. Joel and the others nodded their agreement.

Disappointed, though not surprised, I began to describe various life- saving components of USAID’s global health portfolio, highlighting how we prepare for and respond to emerging pandemic threats; support the diagnosis and treatment of tuberculosis, malaria, and HIV; and immunize millions of children from the deadliest childhood diseases. I spoke for about five minutes, focusing primarily on our infectious diseases work and hoping to keep the attention of people who seemed to have no experience—or interest—in global health.

When I finished, the room was silent, the political appointees looking at one another in what appeared to be disbelief. The silence was broken by Ken Jackson, who chuckled softly and shook his head. “Wow, there really is so much that USAID does that we never knew,” he said. “This is the story that needs to get out there.”

Joel, also smiling, chimed in next, echoing Jackson’s amazement. “I had no idea you did all this,” he said. “As a Republican, when I think of what USAID does in global health, I assumed it was just, you know, abortions.”

It doesn’t get any less depressing than this. The destruction of USAID in itself dispositively settles the question of whether Trump is the worst president of the 21st century — countless people will die because of the impulsive actions of amoral know-nothings.

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Assuming our various wars haven't escalated, I will be on vacation when this post comes out. Here are a few things I've read recently.

Catching Feelings, by Amanda Manitach

Cool article about the Georgetown Steam Plant and Marcellus Bonow-Manier, its artist in residence. I have fond memories from college wandering the ancient science building on campus. Each floor had a distinct smell, one from all the fruit flies we raised, and the labs had mercury traps in the sinks. I'm excited to see what the steam plant has in store for us.

As he makes his way through the plant, he clutches a compact Ricoh GR digital camera. Its screen is fully busted, he explains, so he can't see the picture in frame before shooting it, nor review the images until he uploads them. That's why it's his favorite. When something catches his attention-the traces of a note scribbled on the wall, a patch of paint peeling off steel, a bird's bones crumpled on a window sill-he shoots. Sometimes it's just a frisson in the air that coaxes him to take a picture, like a divining rod for 21st-century spirit photography. The results are, in his words, "some really weird, bizarre, crazy photos."

Sam Altman and Aaron Swartz Saw the Future, by David Moore

I've been long-reading this (different) article about Sam Altman in the New Yorker. I learned that Altman and civil rights activist / tech genius Aaron Swartz were in the same cohort. Swartz downloaded millions of files from JSTOR, facing 35 years in prison for doing so. Altman became a billionaire running a business that harvests orders of magnitude more copyrighted material. Seeing them together feels like one of those moments where two futures diverged. Doesn't feel like we got the good path, does it?

In November Sam Altman was briefly fired from OpenAI, in part for lying to the company’s board, before quickly returning in response to pressure from employees and investors. As the tech industry watched, agog, Altman completed his jettisoning of OpenAI’s much-touted commitment to safety in A.I. in favor of billions in investment.

Aaron Swartz was threatened with decades in jail for accessing (not disseminating) information; Sam Altman, whose company has accessed—and openly monetized—orders of magnitude more information than Swartz, has polluted and then regurgitated that information to the public, and gathered endless cash reserves from investors with which to fend off lawsuits challenging its commercial ambitions.

Swartz, the tenacious open-source programmer and champion of open access to publicly-funded research; Altman, who has increasingly closed off access to information about his A.I. model.

Swartz, who helped defeat the SOPA/PIPA internet censorship bills; Altman, whose company is bankrolled by Microsoft, which in 2011-2012 supported the restrictive “internet blacklist” bill, PIPA. Swartz, who drew attention to institutional corruption, who co-founded progressive advocacy groups that are still active on behalf of the open web; Altman, who has taken on the role of A.I. evangelist and counts the right-wing libertarian megadonor Peter Thiel among his mentors.

Mexistentialism, by Carlos Alberto Sánchez

Mexistentialism was a new concept to me before I read this essay. Sánchez distills the philosophy into three words: Nada es seguro. Nothing is certain. Objectivity is imperialism because it's impossible. Nobody has remove from the world around them.

Thinking of my father is one reason why I think it’s important to read Mexistentialism now, or to read it in times of crisis. When we do, not only are we gifted with vocabulary that can help us articulate our current crisis – words like accidentality, zozobra, nepantla and relajo – but it helps us understand how our crises and our philosophies are intimately tied to one another, how historical trauma shapes or informs our perspectives, and why our perspectives matter in the first place. After all, there is a reason why my father thinks that ‘nothing is certain’, and it has nothing to do with something he’s read or something someone’s told him. It has everything to do with the life he’s lived.

NASA’s Artemis II Crew Beams Official Moon Flyby Photos to Earth, by Jessica Taveau

I didn't think a moon flyby, not even a visit, would capture so many imaginations. It's been surreal to see the images coming back from the Artemis II crew this week. We're contemplating nuclear annihilation while witnessing how very small we all are. It feels like we're at another path diverging. I hope we choose the right one.

Our four Artemis II astronauts — Reid, Victor, Christina, and Jeremy — took humanity on an incredible journey around the Moon and brought back images so exquisite and brimming with science, they will inspire generations to come,” said Dr. Nicky Fox, associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters in Washington.

See you next week!