That container gently bubbling in the kitchen, a jar of vegetables and spices and antiseptic salt, is an exercise in patience. It’s a testament of expectation. It’s going to be your sauerkraut in just a few weeks if you can just wait, and taste, and trust. Ellie Sandor Katz’s seminal work, Wild Fermentation, has been considered the gateway text into a world of natural fermented foods. If you’ve only had jarred pickles or store-bought sauerkraut, you don’t have an inkling as to the delightful smells and flavors that await your experimentation. His book is a mixture of manifesto, recipes, and techniques just waiting for an adventurous microorganism explorer to take advantage of. At a speaking even at Buffalo Street Books in Ithaca, New York a handful of months ago, Katz entertained a small crowd with tales from the front lines of fermented food aficionados. Some of the crowd were hardened sauerkraut craftsmen, some had just begun their living food journey, and others were just intrigued looky-loos. Katz described the process of home fermentation – typically allowing a crock of vegetables to discover the potential of local micro-fauna from the comfort of an unrefrigerated shelf or counter – as “delightfully subversive.” This crowd, a mixture of older Ithacans with nice wool coats, high schoolers whispering and taking notes in spiralbound binders, and earthy-looking folks in flannel, would not be your typical crowd of subversives. But taking natural fermentation into your kitchen is a way to deliciously ‘stick it to the man’.…

The mission opens with a good-bye and closes with a hello. The Photographer: Into War-Torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders (First Second, 2009) opens with our protagonist leaving Paris to do a photo-reportage mission of a MSF (Médicins San Frontières, or Doctors without Borders) caravan that’s going into northeastern Afghanistan, near the city of Feyzabad. Starting with them in Peshawar, Pakistan he will cross fifteen mountain passes over 16,000 feet high, on foot through a country at war. On one side, invading Soviet forces and the army of the Communist government in Kabul. On the other, the Mujahideen, the Afghan resistance. In the middle, explains our protagonist, are the humanitarian organizations – the MSF. With the decade-long anniversary of 9/11 behind us, I thought it suitable to examine a bit of United States and World History of which people of my generation have no awareness or perception. Being a student – and a very young one at that! – when the Twin Towers fell, I was provided with little historical context or rationale to this major national catastrophe. The act of terror was explained away in the following months by finger-pointing and summary religious dogma. I am not ashamed to say that The Photographer provided me with an education that my educators never proffered. This is not to say that my education was poor; in fact, the opposite. Certain key events and details were not explained, whether they were deemed irrelevant or too complex. Perhaps in the wake of 9/11,…

If you are working towards publication and own an eReader, chances are there’s a copy of APE: Author Publisher Entrepreneur sitting on your Nook. It’s a manifesto on the art of self-promotion and marketing books aimed at the self-published author, but it’s making waves for wordsmiths of all publication inclination. Its author, Guy Kawasaki, wrote most of this bestselling eBook from a 5-by-5 closet of a dorm in UC Santa Barabara, and he had a few choice words about any authors with finicky writing styles in an interview with Upstart Business Journal: Writers should disavow themselves of the concept of an “ideal venue for writing a book” because it leads to “wimpification”: “I cannot write because the conditions are not ideal.” If you wait until conditions are perfect—the kids are asleep, making straight As, the house is clean, and global warming has been reversed, you’ll never write. A great writer can write under any conditions—not only ideal conditions. But don’t be fooled by his humble writing venue – he’s a successful startup engineer, entrepreneur, former Apple Evangelist, and possibly the epitome of a new breed of author brand. As Swenson Book Development wrote about close to two years ago, there are some hard truths about publication and self promotion authors need to understand, and most of it rests on getting out there and making yourself known. It’s definitely not ‘ideal conditions’ to be an author if you don’t like playing the marketing game. once upon a time all marketing was…