I picked up a roll of film that I shot at Sam and Megan’s wedding last month, and maybe my friend at the lab did some wizardry with the negative scanner, but the whole roll has this glowy, ethereal light shining through it. It’s a decidedly end-of-summer light. I like the way it makes me feel.

The past few mornings, our neighborhood has been white with fog, this dense fog that blows up the street in visible gusts, and it feels so familiar and so welcome, but it is a decidedly not-summer thing.

I’m writing this from an airplane to Chicago. Brandon is with me (!), and having had a lot of long days lately (hosting a dinner at Delancey in honor of Francis Mallmann (!), hosting a dinner at Delancey in honor of our friend Renee Erickson (!), being so fired up afterward that we planned another special dinner for mid-November, completing eight months of testing to finally finally finally put a wood-fired burger (!), Brandon’s new pet, on the Sunday night menu at Essex), we are giddy to get out of town. We bought Ranch-flavored Corn Nuts for the plane ride, and we intend to land with no teeth left. We’re going to sleep a little, and then probably eat a lot, and then we’ll drive to Madison on Thursday for my talk at the Wisconsin Book Festival. Madison, I heard a rumor that you’re great. I’m looking forward to meeting you.

In the meantime, there are many things to read.

I inhaled Lena Dunham’s brand new book, Not That Kind of Girl, in just over a week, which might be the fastest I’ve read anything that I wasn’t being tested on. There’s a lot of talk about her book, good and bad and indifferent, and I think that’s great. I loved it, and I loved that she was willing to do it – to write about bad decisions, condoms, body stuff, the messy stuff you do when you’re twenty, the stuff we’re not supposed to talk about.

The theme of last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine was feeding kids, and the entire country is now tearing its hair out. But I loved Mark Bittman’s piece about parenting as a food writer – not because I think his example is in any way the norm, food writer parents or no, but because he gave smart, sensible advice about eating.

On a related note, this article is so funny and so good. Thank you, Luisa.

And: career tips from smart women! SHINE THE WAY, LADIES.

See you very shortly.

P.S. Renee will be at Maiden Lane in New York City next Monday, and I hope you’ll go eat Messy Shrimp with her in my stead. (Tickets over this way.) She’s so good.