the Barefoot Philosopher (2024)

We are in the slim season of the year when I pass a dump truck full of potatoes on my way to school pick-up every day. It is dangerously, toweringly heaped with potatoes. Where is it going with all those potatoes? The grocery store? Multiple grocery stores? There are just so many potatoes.

Ina Garten has been on a podcast promotional tour for her memoir and I am in heaven. The interview on We Can Do Hard Things was especially good. I’m guilty of equating struggle with something worthwhile or beneficial or healthy or an accomplishment. Anything worth doing is going to be a challenge, etc. Ina has lived her entire life by the opposite philosophy—“if it’s not fun, why do it?”—and I cannot for the life of me remember hearing another woman share that message.1 Like, ever. In my personal life, or my pop-culture-consuming life.

This got me thinking about the philosophy classes I took in college. What philosophy had I heard/read by a woman? I was stunned—absolutely gobsmacked—to realize: I don’t think we read a single female philosopher. Not one. I can barely name a female philosopher. Simone de Beauvoir and Hannah Arendt are the only two I can think of, and I haven’t read either one of them. I read g.d. Plato over and over, blaaaaaargh, dry as dust, but barely anything from the 20th C. and zero women. And it has taken me seventeen years to scratch my head and think, What the fuck.

I was also, usually, the only girl in the philosophy class. Sometimes there was one other girl. Her name was Rebecca. All the professors were men and you may be shocked to learn that all the faculty remain male. (I checked.)

Barf.

I’ve been thinking a lot about these two podcast interviews with Jia Tolentino and Zadie Smith,2 which are the only two episodes of The Ezra Klein Show that I’ve listened to.3 Jia made me feel okay for letting my child watch TV and for pursuing and allowing pleasure into my life. Zadie made me feel slightly the opposite. She calls smart phones “behavior modifying devices” and now I can’t stop calling them that in my head. In both interviews, they talk about reading as the original distraction. Jia and Ezra talk lovingly about how much they read as young kids and how it was a means of escape and self-protection, but also just pure pleasure. Zadie describes her own behavior as an adult in almost the same way: being so absorbed in whatever she’s reading that she misses XYZ. Or if she has two minutes to wait for a train to arrive, she pulls out a book.

I remain convinced that if we acted more on the things that we loved as kids, we’d all be better off and a hell of a lot lighter and more content.

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Zadie also made me think of the last time I was in New York City, in January 2020. I hadn’t been there for an extended visit in a long while, and it felt so, so different. Everyone was looking down all the time, even when walking down the street. Restaurants and coffeeshops were quieter. And cabs were free everywhere you went! It poured all day long the Saturday that we were there and we had no trouble stepping to the curb and hailing a cab immediately. THAT HAS NEVER HAPPENED TO ANYONE EVER IN THE HISTORY OF NEW YORK AND RAINY DAYS. I felt like a witch, but really I was just a person without an Uber app.

I bet no one even gets lost anymore. When I lived there, I spent sixty percent of my free time getting lost. And/or waiting for someone who was stuck on the subway, or lost themselves.