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Albert Jack is our guest blogger during the week of September 28. If you have any questions for Albert Jack, add a comment to any of his posts. Here is some more information about Pop Goes the Weasel:

From the international bestselling author of Red Herrings and White Elephants-a curious guide to the hidden histories of classic nursery rhymes.

Who was Mary Quite Contrary, or Georgie Porgie? How could Hey Diddle Diddle offer an essential astronomy lesson? Do Jack and Jill actually represent the execution of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette? And if Ring Around the Rosie isn't about the plague, then what is it really about?

This book is a quirky, curious, and sometimes sordid look at the truth behind popular nursery rhymes that uncovers the strange tales that inspired them-from Viking raids to political insurrection to smuggling slaves to freedom.

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Barney’s Hosts Fashion Week Bash for Penguin Author Scott Schuman

In the midst of New York’s Fashion Week, Barneys hosted a soiree for fashion blogger Scott Schuman and his newly released Penguin Original, The Sartorialist. Lines snaked around the store as hundreds of fans and fashionistas gathered to toast Scott on his success. Scott also designed a men’s pop-up shop, featuring his favorite designers as well as his book, which will run through September 29th.

Scott is pictured here with Barney's Creative Director Simon Doonan (left). For more coverage, visit Scott’s blog.

Penguin employees can get the deluxe/gift edition of The Sartorialist at the unbelievable discounted price of $52.50 (cover price is $175) here in the Penguin USA Employee Book Store.
 

Penguin Audio Featured in AM New York

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Next week in Brooklyn at the powerHouse Arena there will be a cook off featuring three recipes from my book!  One of these is Hamburger Casserole For When Nobody Loves You And Never Will, so I thought I would share with you the origins of this delicious food.

There are a only few family recipes passed on to me by my grandmother Mary Bucha.  She was a prolific cook, but a gourmand she was not.  Most of her recipes begin with the instruction "open a can of soup." Her cole slaw, in particular, is legendary. As a child I was terribly jealous of my older brother Jason for many reasons, but chief among them was that my grandma called it "Jason's Cole Slaw."  It wasn't his cole slaw.  It was everybody's cole slaw.  I loved it, too.

Recently my brother had Thanksgiving at our cousin Lisa's house, and when he promised to bring the cole slaw, Lisa reacted as though he were bringing a tin of caviar directly from the Caspian Sea. You would have thought it was a secret family recipe that had gone to the grave with Grandma, and that only Jason had had the foresight to write it down. Well, I'm here to spill the beans.  I had to give Jason the recipe for the precious cole slaw because he never bothered to ask Grandma for it.  It goes like this:

"Chop up a cabbage.  Either the big kind, or a Napa cabbage or Bok Choy. Any kind of cabbage.  Chop the whole thing.  Put it in a bowl and pour a bottle of Wishbone Italian Salad Dressing over it.  The whole bottle.  If you have some of that stuff they call ‘Salad Seasoning' you can sprinkle it on top."

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The environmental lessons that New York and other dense cities offer are not necessarily easy to apply--and, even to city dwellers, they can often be difficult to discern--but the most important of them can be summarized simply:

Live smaller: The average American single-family house doubled in size in the second half of the twentieth century, and the size of the average American household shrunk. Oversized, under-occupied dwellings permanently raise the world's demand for energy, and they encourage careless consumption of all kinds. In the long run, big, empty houses are no more sustainable than SUVs or private jets, no matter how many photovoltaic panels they have on their roofs. As the cost of energy inevitably rises in the years ahead, and as the long-term environmental and economic consequences of our accustomed levels of wastefulness become clearer and more dire, we are going to need to find ways to reduce the size of the spaces we inhabit, heat, cool, furnish, and maintain. (A notable countertrend: while the typical American single-family house was doubling in size, rising real estate values in New York City were reducing the size of the living space of the average Manhattan resident, thereby making it more efficient.)