A timely book, a seasonal recipe, and a podcast about getting things wrong.

1. Banished: The New Social Control In Urban America, by Katherine Beckett and Steve Herbert

Ordinarily, I try to keep work-related stuff out of this column—no celebration of the city’s super-useful online crime database here!—but I’m making an exception for this 2010 book about urban banishment zones, because I can’t stop thinking and talking about it.

The book traces the recent history of laws that punish people accused of relatively minor crimes, such as sex work, drug use, and various types of “loitering,” by banishing them from certain areas, such as parks, business districts, or entire neighborhoods, as with the Stay Out of Drug Area and Stay Out of Areas of Prostitution zones that the Seattle City Council is hoping to recreate. These laws penalize people for simply being in an area—prohibiting their “future lawful behavior,” as Beckett and Herbert put it, and effectively penalizing people for belonging to the class of “banished.”

For an academic book, Banished goes a long way to humanize the people who were impacted by these laws, explaining precisely how people are impacted by being banished and why they continue to return to the same places again and again, even when the consequence is often longer and longer stints in jail. A key chapter titled “Voices of the Banished” concludes,

As we demonstrated, compliance with banishment is difficult and therefore rare. … [M]ost of our interviewees reported that they did not comply with their exclusion orders, largely because they experienced the areas from which they were banished as essential to their physical and mental well-being. The fact that so many found in their exclusion zone meaningful social connections, important social services, and a place to call home reveals a problem at the core of the practice of banishment: a profound discrepancy between how officials understand “disorderly” areas and how those same places are experienced by the banished.

As officials once again begin to draw lines on maps delineating areas where people can be arrested for simply existing, this book—available at the Seattle Public Library and online booksellers—is a powerful reminder of the ways in which banishment harms individual people and fails to achieve its purported goals.

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2. Marcella Hazan’s Tomato Sauce

As someone who grew up in the South with access to a huge, beautiful garden, I am aware that there is such a thing as a “bumper crop” of tomatoes; if I wasn’t, the food blogs and magazines I read are constantly reminding me, with recipes promising to help me “use up” all those excess fruits I must surely have lying around. But until this year, my plants (with the exception of cherry varieties) rarely produced more than a handful of ripe, full-size specimens—that is, until this year, when even my most optimistically planted heirlooms came through with at least a few softball-sized beauties.

While I’m still enjoying those on tomato sandwiches with Duke’s mayonnaise (now available this far north, through some miracle of distribution), one single Roma plant produced at least a dozen pounds of gorgeous paste-style tomatoes that were perfect for this three-ingredient sauce, which I’ve already frozen in anticipation of the dark season to come. (Note: If you are making this sauce with fresh tomatoes instead of canned, you’ll probably have to cook it a little longer than the recipe says). The only fiddly (but necessary) step is blanching and peeling all those tomatoes, which doesn’t take very long at all; if you have a dehydrator, you can dry out the skins and pulverize them into a powder that will give a summery, umami boost to anything savory, from scrambled eggs to pasta to a winter beef stew.

3. The Constant: A History of Getting Things Wrong

This discursive, engaging podcast is about “accidents, mistakes and bad ideas that helped misshape our world”—from the disputed election of 1876 to theories about the heritability of human traits (did you know that Darwin didn’t understand how babies happen?) Written and presented by the irrepressible Mark Chrisler, this filthy, hilarious podcast is history as you’ve probably never heard it told.

Dive in anywhere, or start here.