I enjoy cooking. Whether it’s Tex-Mex, Italian, Indian, or whatever, it’s all grist for my mill. The nine cooking apps on my iPhone testify to that.

But there’s a problem with all of them: They all cater to white tastes.

Did you know that there’s even a Chinese cooking school in San Francisco’s Chinatown that teaches Chinese chefs how to cook to American (read: mostly white) tastes?

EatOkra, by developer Anthony Edwards, is an app that lets you find Black-owned restaurants and food trucks in dozens of cities around the country. …

Photo by Arseniy Kapran on Unsplash

I think I was five years old when I had my first sip of tea. I don’t remember if my mother gave it to me, or if it was my Nana, as they were both devotees of the magic brew. In a way it was almost ironic: my mother was sold on it’s benefits,but it was her mother-in-law, my Nana, who definitely believed in tea’s blessings.

Mom’s remedy for everything was tea and toast. Got the chicken pox? Tea and toast. I came down with the measles? Tea and toast, perhaps with a dash…

Forget Roswell. Forget Area 51

This is the truth behind aliens from space.

When it comes to alien conspiracies, there are two kinds of people. And to be clear, I’m not taking about aliens from other countries. I’m taking about real, bona fide extraterrestrial creatures that have come to earth in order to conquer us.

Yes, those aliens.

When it comes to them, there two kinds of people:

Group 1. These are the people who worry that some day aliens will arrive — unnoticed and unannounced — in Washington, D.C., and take over the government. These people are generally harmless. To be sure, Donald Trump…

Photo by Author, iPhone 12 Pro Max. Post-production: Graphite, Kompressor, Snapseed.

I forget the exact date, but I know what I was doing at the time: I was sitting through a rwo-week training session prior to being part of the original Apple iPhone Support Helpdesk. It was harder than you might think, especially when you realize that Apple’s obsession with secrecy meant we didn’t get to see a photo or even a drawing of an actual iPhone until the night it was released.

But as we learned more and more about its capabilities, I told out instructor that Apple had…

Winter is bad enough when you suffer from depression, but when you add Seasonal Affective Disorder, PTSD, and a couple of deaths in the family, it becomes an ordeal.

My mother died in December, 32 years ago; I lost my father in February 3 years ago. When my mother died, the period between Thanksgiving and January became the longest and darkest period of the year. My father’s death merely extended the season by a month.

For years after my mother died I couldn’t get through December without increasing my antidepressants, my anti-anxiety meds, and the number of visits to my…

One of the best things about Medium — perhaps the best thing about it — is how new members pop up daily.

I read your story this morning; I even gave it 25 claps. Then I checked your profile, mainly because I wanted to be sure I was following you and, if not, to rectify that status.

I was surprised to see that you had only 4 followers. Surprised, because the stories that appear on my daily feed are usually written by people who have been on Medium long enough to have amassed hundreds if not thousands of followers.

And…

Last month Stacey and I finally paid off our iPhone Xs. And while many people would breathe sighs of relief, our reaction was “UPGRADE!”

So this past Wednesday we headed over to our iPhone vendor to see what our options were. ( I’m not going to name the vendor for fear of reprisal, but their name begins with “Verizon.”)

I’ve spent considerable time over the past month looking at reviews of the new iPhone 12, our needs as Serious Photographers™, and after discussing it with Stacey, we decided on the iPhone 12 Pro Max. …

Everyone has memories around this time of year. Some of them are good, and some of them are not so good. In this one respect, Christmas is no different from any other time of the year.

What is it about Christmas that makes us nostalgic? Is it really the memories? And if that’s true, are the memories accurate or, filtered through the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia, are they only what we wished Christmases of the past had actually been?

Like you, I’ve also spent a lifetime storing up memories. Now that I’m 70 years old, it’s time to start sharing…