Brow Beat

The Week in Culture, “Views From the 6” Edition

Views.
Album cover for Drake’s album Views.

OVO Sound

Allrecipes.com offers the single most accurate picture of American culinary desires, Nicholas Hune-Brown declares this week in his piece about the site, the most popular English-language food site in the world and a repository of easy, old-fashioned recipes for things like broccoli-cheese casserole, apple pie, and baked ziti. “What’s remarkable isn’t so much Allrecipes’ dominance but how distant the site feels from the food conversation in the media,” he writes. Hune-Brown is a writer based in Toronto, so you might call his take on Allrecipes a view from the 6.

Views From the 6 was supposed to be the title of Drake’s long-anticipated album—the 6 is Toronto, the rapper’s home city—until he shortened it to Views. Slate’s Carl Wilson, another Toronto resident, found Views underwhelming compared with some of Drake’s previous work, though there’s still a lot to like about it: “He’s greater when he’s goofier, even in his petulant way, warmer to his own shortcomings and more intimately human and eye to eye (or @reply to @reply) with the listener.”

From a uniquely Toronto perspective to a uniquely female one: In the Slate Book Review, novelist Pamela Erens wonders why there aren’t more depictions of childbirth in literary fiction, and Willa Paskin writes about the literature of motherhood—books by writers like Rivka Galchen, Maggie Nelson, and Sarah Manguso that prove that parenthood can inspire great art. Also in this month’s Slate Book Review, Mark O’Connell reviews Don DeLillo’s latest, Laura Miller tries to save the term allegory, Alexandra Coakley writes about a hilarious memoir of sadness, and more. Meanwhile, in the Slate Plus Year of Great Books Slate Academy, Laura Miller and Jacob Weisberg wrapped up their reading of Jane Eyre with a rousing discussion—and members can get free copies of the audiobook. Vote for what the book club should read next here.

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