| Every Friday, we spotlight recommendations from New Yorker staff and contributors. Today, we spoke with Jay Caspian Kang, who writes a column on a wide range of topics, including politics, television, and books. His recent two-part series examines how math education has inspired culture wars and how much—or how little—we really know about teaching kids math. Best book I’ve read recently: John McPhee’s “Levels of the Game,” which is a deeply reported book about a 1968 tennis match between Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner. A version of the book appeared in The New Yorker in 1969, and it’s well worth reading, not just for tennis fans but also for writers, because the immediate question you’ll be asking is: How does McPhee know what Ashe and Graebner are thinking? (Spoiler: The answer is that McPhee, according to L. Jon Wertheim’s book “Strokes of Genius,” got some reels of the match, rented a hotel room in the Caribbean, and watched the match with Ashe and Graebner.) 📚 An article I’m obsessed with: I spent the past couple of weeks reading up on the math wars of the nineteen-nineties, in which a proposed national curriculum became fodder for a decade-long fight that feels extremely relevant today. The best history I could find of this era came from an article by Alan Schoenfeld, a professor at U.C. Berkeley. The piece is, in part, an appeal to think of math education in a rational way that does not attach itself to the politics surrounding math, while also explaining why that’s been so difficult to do. 📄 A holiday comfort recipe: Budae jjigae is a Korean stew that loosely translates to “army-base stew,” and its ingredients, which fluctuate wildly given the recipe, come from things that were available during and after the Korean War, including Spam and slices of American cheese. Here’s a YouTube recipe that I think is easy and works pretty well. 🍲 Which of our writers’ recommendations are you interested in hearing? Reply to let us know. | 
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