IT’S ALWAYS NEW AND ASTONISHING when it’s yours. Infatuation; sex; card tricks. How many humans have baked how many loaves of bread, across how many centuries? I’m sure Beoreg baked calmly, matter-of-factly, without paroxysms of cosmic delight. But that didn’t matter. For me, the novice, the miracle was intact, and I felt compelled by some

Here in Edinburgh, in the little Mazg neighborhood, when I go walking in the morning, through all the second-story windows I can hear the starters singing.

I considered the possibilities. An accident of gas could, I reasoned, produce a sound—boiling pots bubbled merrily—but it would be plosive. It would go pop, poof, or plop. Possibly boof or bloop. Maybe—maybe—ffft or frap; a farting sound could be explained. I let my tongue and vocal cords go slack, forced air out of my lungs, and simulated these

It was only then that I became aware of the depot’s soundtrack: currently an ambient swell so deep it could have been the far-off foghorns that guarded the Golden Gate. Was it the far-off foghorns? “She calls herself Microclimate,” Naz explained. “She samples the foghorns up close, then she plays with the sound, turns it into drums, voices,

Clingstone’s gaze turned inward, and more gently she said, “It never occurs to people that maybe I’d like to be the reckless one. The disrupter! As the years have passed, I have discovered in myself this . . . energy. Is it anger? A touch of spite? I’m not sure.” She looked back toward the restaurant. The beans on their strings were rippling on a

Prior to this just-in-time education, I had assumed that in a wood-fired brick oven, the flames of the fire baked the bread. I mean, of course, right? Wrong. Baking in this oven would be a two-step process, and the first was for the fire to charge those thick walls with heat. The thicker the walls, the more heat they could absorb and then return.

Seven judges sat in a line at a long table, four women and three men, swaddled and comfortable, wrapped in scarves and caftans. Plain fabrics, generous cuts. They had different-colored skin and different-colored hair, but they shared a satisfied plumpness. It looked like a committee of harvest gods drawn from all the pantheons. All except one,

The deal, she said, was this: Three minutes with the panel. Offer a taste; just a taste. Explain what makes you different. Be eloquent but concise but confident but deferential. Much of this is beyond your control; if you make pickles but the markets are overflowing with them, it won’t matter how great your pickles are.

The house was large and deeply lived-in, all the shelves and surfaces stacked with books and boxes, framed pictures, old greeting cards set up like tent cities. If there was a spectrum of spaces defined at one end by my barren apartment, this marked the other extreme. Every single surface told a story. A long one. With digressions.