Salvation and Desertion: A Family Crisis in the American Recession.” If you’ve ever been in the dumps, he’s your man. I read the book and bought tickets for tonight’s discussion. Also he comes by the NYT regularly, so we should get something of real importance out of the experience. 6 p.m. at 92nd Street Y, room 504. Free and open to the public. 9:30 p.m. at Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater. $5. Buy tickets here. This is the kind of book that makes you feel like it was probably a great idea to spend the morning reading the internet instead of getting something done. “Salvation and Desertion” looks at what it was like for families in America at the height of the Great Recession as foreclosures peaked, when layoffs topped 2 million a month, people lost their homes and families and friends. I remember this recession quite well, and I remember reading about a few families who got a whole lot of very bad news during that time. I don’t know what you should expect to see from such a book, but a couple of the families mentioned in the New York Times review and a bunch of people are definitely going to be in attendance tonight. [Here’s my own review of the book. The title and first line of the review alone seem pretty good, and I hope there are a lot of reviewers who feel this way about the book.] The New York Times Magazine had an interesting feature about the state of the movie industry in Mexico. If you’re anything like me, you may be like me in that you had never heard of it before and thought it was some kind of place where drug lords get to hang out while their girlfriends have orgies with each other. The piece looks at the impact of the financial crisis on Mexican film studios, as seen in films like “El Infierno” and the upcoming “El Aura Quebranta.” It seems like maybe the Hollywood model is being exported throughout the world. And I’m not saying that’s bad, but I hope they’re exporting something a little better than the sort of movies in this feature. I have to say, though, that the opening sentence of the article is great: “For several weeks this winter, Mexico City was awash in stories about the country’s first movie studio founded by a Jewish family nearly a century ago and run by a Jewish family for generations.” It’s funny. A movie studio being “run by a Jewish family for generations” is exactly what Mexico City needs. Or maybe that’s just another lie Hollywood tells us. 10 a.m. at 92nd Street Y, room 508. Free and open to the public. 9 p.m. at Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater. $5. Buy tickets here. This is part of an ongoing debate about the future of the arts in New York City. What do they mean by “cultural facilities?” Who do they mean by “the arts?” There are plenty of other things that they could be talking about. This debate has now become so heated that the New York Times even has a blog and a place for people to give their two cents. If you’re going to be at Lincoln Center at 9:30 p.m. and you haven’t been there recently, I recommend stopping by. 2 p.m. at 92nd Street Y, room 505. Free and open to the public. 2 p.m. at 92nd Street Y, room 505. Free and open to the public. 4 p.m. at 92nd Street Y, room 511. Free and open to the public. 9 p.m. at 92nd Street Y, room 510. Free and open to the public. 10:30 p.m. at 92nd Street Y, room 505. Free and open to the public. I hope you had a good Friday, and I hope you have a good weekend. A little break from this heat and the next week may turn out to be great. But as anyone who has been here for a while knows, that’s always a big maybe. One note: Our offices, which is to say The New York Times Building, are in Times Square. If you need to go somewhere but you want to stay far away from Times Square, we’re just a few steps up, around the corner and down the street. So don’t be afraid to come visit, even if it’s just for a few minutes. 7:30 p.m. at 92nd Street Y, room 503. Free and open to the public. It’s been a little while since I posted anything about what my roommates and I do in the evenings, but it’s been too long. Tonight I’m going to try out an old recipe for borsch. The first thing to know about this dish is that it’s Ukrainian, and specifically something that is served in Russia and throughout the former Soviet Union, but specifically a food that is a staple of the country now known as Ukraine. So really it’s Ukrainian-Russian. We’ll get to this again later. Here’s the second thing to know: borsch is an acquired taste. It is a soup that requires some concentration and not just when it’s coming off the fire. I will leave it to the experts on Ukrainian food to give you all the great details on what it is, but it’s some sort of sour soup that includes tomatoes. The tomatoes are cooked down with other ingredients to make the broth, which has them floating around in it. My own favorite description of borsch was about one that was served to Russian soldiers in a Russian Army regiment during World War II. In this version, the tomatoes were a type of tomato that don’t grow in the U.S. now and that people say can’t be found in any store in America. So this dish has a Russian military regiment, a Ukrainian ethnic group, the Soviet Union and maybe the biggest tomato story of the century. Sounds pretty good to me. And I hope you enjoy it. It’s probably nothing like the tomato soup in cans that you find in your local supermarket. There’s a reason I didn’t use canned tomatoes in mine. 1:30 p.m. at 92nd Street Y, room 503. Free and open to the public. There are very few people in the world who would be offended by the following: A man in Mexico City with no connection to the media dies. His funeral is held at a Jewish synagogue. There are lots of people there. There are more than 400 in fact. After the funeral, there’s a party at a bar on the upper floors of the building. At the bar, members of the families that own the building throw some money on the bar so that the crowd can continue to drink. Eventually, someone dies in the party because a lot of people had been drinking and smoking weed. Eventually, one of the partygoers dies because somebody drank too much and passed out. Eventually, a friend of the family dies because somebody poured vodka down him and he choked to death. Eventually, another guest of the family dies because somebody made a mistake with a chainsaw. Eventually, someone dies because somebody called somebody else “a faggot” and then the brawl that ensues is so violent that one of the bodies of water surrounding Mexico City is filled with his blood. Here’s what happened. The funeral was held in the largest synagogue in the city and a few hundred people attended the funeral. The family was from a wealthy Jewish family, and the funeral was attended by the head of the family and an enormous group of relatives, friends, family friends, employees and other kinds of friends. And the whole time, members of the media, including photographers and a few television stations, were there, getting video of the proceedings. It was in the synagogue of a particular kind of Mexico City elite. And it ended up not being that big of a deal, as funerals tend to go these days. No offense to anybody