The Present Indicative, 17 March 2026
My Current Mood: Hungry
The platform remains free (and worth it) but in case you’re feeling philanthropic, I’ve set up a subscription page!
“Snakes. Why’d it have to be snakes?” Indiana Jones, Raiders of the Lost Ark
Happy Saint Patrick’s Day! As one out of ten sampled Americans who claim Irish ancestry, I am pleased to report the corned beef is in the slow cooker with the potatoes and carrots. The Guinness is refrigerating. We’ll celebrate our heritage tonight in proper American fashion: commemorating a Saint who was not Irish over food that is not Irish with drinks that do not taste as they do in Ireland. He didn’t even cast out the snakes!!
Our lives are a collection of modified influences. Traditions sublimated by availability, innovation, and marketing (see my discussion on Thanksgiving). Have you ever seen an Irish jack-o’-lantern? Pumpkins are a New World plant. They used turnips back in the day, and haunt my nightmares.
But save Samhain for seven months from now. Saint Patrick’s Day has always been special for me. Made more special 25 years ago when I began properly dating the woman who became my wife. She claims Polish ancestry and they eat corned beef as well, so it works! Even if they drink Żywiec.
“That belongs in a museum!”
I collect menus. Ya know, I thought about opening this section talking about the Irish bar in Somerville where my future wife and I connected, and how it’s no longer there. But get to the point, am I right? How many restaurants have made a difference in your life that are no longer there? Eating is an ephemeral experience and nothing about it but the memory and the credit statement remains, unless you take a menu.
The people around me may roll their eyes when I ask for a keepsake, but where else can you find a confluence of anthropology, culinary art and economics, marketing, and graphic design? We navigate the course of our lives and courses on our table through a well-made menu, and we complain otherwise. From a poorly written chalkboard to the 21 pages of The Cheesecake Factory.
Think about it. At this moment a taco is made in precise fashion, with specific ingredients, and with contemporary cost. And when tariffs change the price of avocados, guess what needs to be updated: the menu! It is a fleeting glimpse of our present tense, and the opportunity to collect menus grows scarce. Most of the time I ask the server or host and I’m told it’s all online. A tabula rasa ready to reinvent the identity and worth of a restaurant’s product at a moment’s notice.
“Fortune and glory, kid. Fortune and glory.”
I was an archaeology major in undergrad. I became an editor after that because the material culture of print means something to me as one artifact of our human expression. But we traded artifact for artifiction. Sure I can preach my truth to anyone with a web browser and this URL, but the slop clogging our channels might choke your attention before you even get a chance to consume (see last week’s newsletter).
Still, I am grateful. Thanks to the Wayback Machine, I can go see the website of the Irish Bar where my wife and I began dating in March, 2001. It certainly beats the afterlife of that same website being used to advertise random gambling sites.
“Nazis. I hate these guys.”
Raiders of the Lost Ark was released in the summer of 1981. That was 45 years ago. And it’s set in 1936, which is 90 years ago. So fun fact: the first Indiana Jones movie is the midpoint between us living today and Dr Jones preventing Nazis from obtaining the Ark of the Covenant (or, if you want to be more historical: the March remilitarization of the Rhineland, violating the Treaty of Versailles). So grateful that mobilized aggression is a thing of the past.
In Other News…
There’s good reason why we call a website’s organizing principles a “menu.” And we’re going to talk all about our user experience of that interface, in this week’s two-part episode of The Future Indicative, with our special guest, Alicia Clapper!!
The Future Indicative, Ep 7 Part 1
The Future Indicative, Ep 7 Part 2
As the Grail Knight said to Indy when he matched a simple cup to the humble means of a Jewish carpenter, at the end of the last great Indiana Jones movie: “You have chosen wisely.”
Cheers!
Alex Effgen