The Weekly Wrap: April 27, 2025

My coworker joined her husband on a work trip last week. They went to Dubai and Doha. She brought us all back a bar of that viral Dubai chocolate. (I will NOT be sharing that with the kiddo.) As excited as I am for the chocolate, I really want to see pictures of her trip. I've never been to the Middle East and I'm not certain I will make it there. 

I have friends who travel to Belize fairly regularly. Other friends of mine vacationed in southeast Asia for their honeymoon. My bestie and her husband went to Japan. Other folks I know travel abroad for work. A couple I know do mileage runs across eastern Europe. 

Can we bring back vacation slide shows? Can we have parties where people just talk about their travels? I want to be an armchair passenger! 

You provide the pictures, and I'll make sure we all have airline-sized Biscoff cookies to nibble on while you talk about your adventures.

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• We are on the fast track to authoritarianism. [The Atlantic - gift link]
• A look at some lovely travel journals. [Colossal]

• To text, or not to text. [Life Kit]
• We don't yet know how the human body will respond on Mars. [Short Wave]
• The legacy of Pope Francis. [The Daily]
• The wisdom of the soccer crowd. [99% Invisible]
• Walking in the footsteps of early women adventurers. [Atlas Obscura]

• Olympic parent vs. regular parents at school field day. [The Independent]
• I opted to turn on Gladiator II with pretty low expectations. That was probably a good mindset to have. This movie felt like battle scenes in search of a cohesive plot. I think the director really wanted to film the aquatic scenes and designed a vague plot around that. I did like how it seemed that Denzel Washington was having a lot of fun. [Paramount+]

• For Easter dinner, the husband made sous vide duck a l'orange. It's so good and not that much work. (At least compared to the prissy oven roasted duck he made a decade ago.) Plus, you turn the marinade into a pan sauce and it makes the dish. We served this with green beans and crescent rolls. I might dip my crescent roll in the pan sauce... [Anova]
• I wanted a simple lunch meal prep this week. Black bean fajita skillet was a breeze. I opened a can of beans, snipped open some frozen veggies, and tossed everything in a pan. Then it was just a matter of tossing on some spices. I reheated these at work and scooped the mixture into tortillas with some shredded cheese. [Eating Well]