San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
This recipe brightens a juicy steak with coriander and peppercorns.
Peppercorns, coriander, lemon zest and rosemary brighten a N.Y. strip
People often assume that I love cooking with my children. I’m afraid that’s not the case. I’m impatient, favor organization and like to call the shots, all qualities that make cooking with small, slow, messy humans an exercise in frustration.
Despite my reservations, I did teach my 7yearold to make scrambled eggs, mostly because he always requests eggs for breakfast and I got tired of making them. A couple months later, he had to make a “how to” book for his firstgrade classmates, so he wrote and illustrated a stepbystep guide to scrambled eggs. I puffed with pride as he told me that he’d dedicated the book … to his older brother. Such is the thankless work of mothering.
Now that I think of it, my children possess the skills necessary to make me eggs and toast for a Mother’s Day breakfast in bed. A parenting milestone, to be sure, but lost on me: I dislike breakfast in bed almost as much as I dislike Mother’s Day. And though I reject the capitalist holiday that affords mothers one day of attention when they deserve 364 more, it occurs to me it might be wise to begin teaching my kids to cook in the hope that on some distant date in their teenage years they might make me dinner, and it might be something I love, like Caesar salad, or spaghetti carbonara, or spicecrusted steaks and baked potatoes.
If I play my cards right, maybe in the year 2030, when my sons are 18 and 16, they might drive to the butcher shop and choose some fat New York strip steaks; they might even pay for them themselves, with money they’ve made lifeguarding or mowing lawns or babysitting. They’ll pull the mortar and pestle from the high shelf without my help, and the largest, heaviest castiron skillet from the drawer. They’ll preheat the pan, crust the steaks with spices and cook them carefully.
If my training goes according to plan, I won’t be there to ensure they don’t burn their arms or overcook the meat. This meal might happen some Sunday in May, or some Tuesday in October, or on a Thursday in February. And when it does, whatever the date, I’ll know it’s truly Mother’s Day. I might even offer to set the table.
Spice-Crusted Strip Steaks
For the best spice-crusted steaks, I use a combination of dry spices together with fresh lemon zest and fresh rosemary, which brightens up the mixture. To ensure the crust doesn’t burn when pan-frying the steak, turn the meat every two minutes as it cooks so the spices get browned and fragrant but not overtoasted. Use a fork to flip the steaks, rather than tongs, which can disturb the crust. For the juiciest steak, let the raw meat come to room temperature before cooking, and let it rest 10 minutes after cooking and before slicing.
Serves 2 to 4
1 tablespoon whole coriander seeds 1 tablespoon black peppercorns 2 teaspoons mustard seeds 1 tablespoon kosher salt
2 teaspoons finely chopped fresh rosemary
Zest of 1 lemon ½ teaspoon red pepper flakes
2 (8-ounce) New York strip steaks, 1½ inches thick, at room temperature
1 tablespoon grapeseed or other neutral oil
Instructions: In a mortar and pestle or spice grinder, combine the coriander, black peppercorns and mustard seeds and pound or pulse until coarsely ground. Transfer to a bowl and stir in the salt, rosemary, lemon zest and red pepper flakes and stir to mix.
Place the steaks on a rimmed baking sheet or large plate. Sprinkle half of the spice mixture on one side of both steaks, pressing to adhere, then flip the steaks and sprinkle the remaining mixture over the second side, pressing to adhere. Coat the sides of the steaks with any of the spice mixture that has collected on the baking sheet.
In a large, heavy frying pan (preferably cast iron) over medium-high heat, heat the oil. When the oil is shimmering, add the steaks and cook for 2 minutes. Flip the steaks carefully with a fork (don’t use tongs, because it will knock off too much of the spice mixture) and cook on the second side for 2 minutes more. Flip the steaks again, and cook for 1 minute, then flip and cook on the second side for 1 minute more, or until an instant-read thermometer inserted in the center of the steak registers 135 degrees for medium-rare. Transfer to a cutting board and let rest for 10 minutes, then slice and serve.
Today’s methods for governing the internet do not constitute a coherent system, much less a democratic one. Instead, internet governance is a contest for power between the most powerful tech companies, who put their shareholders first and want the internet to be a freeforall, and national governments, which prioritize the political interests of their own officials.
In this contest, both sides create the pretense of democracy. Facebook, based in Menlo Park, has created its own “independent oversight” board of global experts, though it’s unelected, and chosen by Facebook. The European Union touts its tougher regulation of privacy and the internet — but those regulators are also unelected and impose their rules on people far from Europe.
Which is why the internet needs a democratic system that operates beyond the reach of tech companies or national governments. Such a system must be both local — to allow people to govern the internet where they live — and transnational, just like the internet itself.
There is as yet no clearly articulated vision of such a government, but there are many constituent pieces that could be mixed together.
A Europebased network of human rights organizations has developed a Charter of Digital Rights — Article 4, for example: “Every person has the right to freedom of speech and expression in the digital world” — that could be part of the constitution of an internet government. The NetMundial Initiative, developed in recent years with a strong push from the World Economic Forum and a previous Brazilian government, offers ideas for international governance of the internet built around a council that mixes rotating and permanent members.
There are lessons to be learned from ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), a somewhat democratic nonprofit that, from a Los Angeles base, successfully governed a narrow part of the internet — the domain name system — with participation from more than 110 countries from 1998 to 2016.
An effective internet government must be collective — because the internet’s power, and commercial value, lies not in any individual user or data, but in the aggregation of users and data. In a mustread essay in Noema magazine (which is published by the Californiabased Berggruen Institute), Matt Prewitt, president of the RadicalxChange Foundation, suggested structuring internet governance not around individual data rights, but rather around a series of “data coalitions” — online unions that would give communities of users democratic authority.
“Data cannot be owned, but must be governed,” Prewitt wrote. “Data must be the subject of shared democratic decisions rather than individual, unilateral ones. This presents particular challenges for liberal legal orders that have typically centered on individual rights.”
In a similar vein, I’d suggest that the internet’s democratic government combine multiple forms of democratic governance.
The center of such a government should be a citizens’ assembly — a tool used around the world by countries and communities to get democratic verdicts that are independent of elites. This citizens’ assembly would consist of 1,000 people who, together, would be representative by age, gender, and national origin of the global community of internet users. They would not be elected individually, but rather chosen via randomized processes that use sortition (or drawing lots).
The assembly would be supplemented by an online platform that allowed people to report problems, make suggestions, or even petition for proposals that could be voted upon by internet users everywhere, in a global referendum. The models for such a platform include Rousseau, the controversial online environment through which Italy’s Five Star Movement governed itself for a time, and Decide Madrid, the online participatory framework that has spread from the Spanish capital to more than 100 cities worldwide.
National governments and tech companies would try desperately to influence this government, but they would not be in charge of it. And each citizens’ assembly would dissolve after two or three years — making it harder for the powerful to lobby it.
While the government would live online, it should have a realworld headquarters in the 18th century Swiss philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau’s hometown of Geneva.
If such a government endured and succeeded, it could join the ranks of international organizations like the World Health Organization or the International Red Cross. It also could offer a model for international democratic governance to address offline global problems, from public health to climate change.