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We got our hands on an MRE — a "Meal, Ready to Eat" from the Department of Defense. It's a real marvel of engineering. In one flat bag, there's an imitation McRib, clam chowder, a couple of drinks, and some trail mix, and some note about how by eating this you consent to joining the Marines. All in one flat bag!

Special Guest Mike Pesca: This meal disgusts me more before 8 a.m. than most meals disgust me all day.

Miles: I'm going to imitation eat this imitation pork rib.

Ian: Anybody got napkins? I'm looking for a few good napkins.

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The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

Adolf Hitler wakes from a coma to find himself in modern-day Berlin, where everyone assumes he's a comedian who never breaks character — and so the Fhrer becomes a novelty act, a YouTube sensation (the "loony YouTube Hitler") and then eventually a celebrity and politician. This is the premise of the German satirical novel Er Ist Wieder Da (Look Who's Back) by Timur Vermes, which is about to be published for the first time in English. The book has sold more than a million copies (and spurred furious debate) in Germany. Although many critics in Germany found the book tasteless, Vermes told The Guardian that it contains a serious warning: "If [the book] makes some readers realise that dictators aren't necessarily instantly recognisable as such, then I consider it a success." The book will be released next week in the U.K. — it doesn't appear to have a U.S. publisher yet — and will test how comfortable English-speaking audiences are with laughing about Hitler.

Rules in the U.K. ban people from sending books to prisoners. The restriction apparently went into effect in November, but the news went viral over the weekend. In an op-ed, the Horward League for Penal Reform's Frances Crook wrote that "punishing reading is as nasty as it is bizarre."

The Best Books Coming Out This Week:

In Laura Kasischke's psychological thriller Mind of Winter, Holly Judge wakes up on Christmas morning with the sentence "Something had followed them home from Russia" echoing around her skull. Alone in the house with her daughter, Tatiana, Holly becomes increasingly convinced that something is wrong – that Tatiana isn't the girl she picked out in a bleak Siberian orphanage 13 years ago. A blizzard keeps mother and daughter trapped in the house together, as Holly's narrative becomes more and more confused, with dark hints of a psychotic break. Though understated, Mind of Winter is leave-the-lights-on-tonight frightening, with a quiet edge of horror that is much more effective than gore.

Published in Nigeria in 2007, Teju Cole's Every Day Is for the Thief is being released in the U.S. this week. A lean and careful portrait of Lagos from the perspective of an unnamed narrator, it describes the city's everyday corruption, from the police to the woman who sells fuel at the gas station. One of the most arresting sketches is of the "yahoo yahoo," who spend their time in internet cafes writing email scams: "Once, looking to my right in an internet caf ... I see a letter being written from the 'Chairman of the National Office for Petroleum Resources.' The writer is a rough-looking man who is clearly chairman of nothing. There are other letters, from the heirs of fictional magnates, from the widows of oil barons, from the legal representatives of incarcerated generals, and they are such enterprising samples of narrative fiction that I realize Lagos is a city of Scheherazades. The stories unfold in ever more fanciful iterations and, as in the myth, those who tell the best stories are richly rewarded."

It's often said that the closest interaction many Americans have with other countries' cultures is through food. That kind of culinary diplomacy is particularly common in Washington, D.C., where immigrants from all over the world have cooked up a diverse food scene.

Now one scholar-in-residence at American University is using the city's food culture to teach her students about global affairs via a course on "gastrodiplomacy" — using food as a tool to foster cultural understanding among countries.

While the concept of gastrodiplomacy has been gaining traction among governments in recent years (former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton launched a "chef ambassador" corps a couple of years ago), the class is the first of its kind at a school of international relations, says Johanna Mendelson Forman, a policy expert on international conflict who teaches the new course.

"What's unique is that students themselves would never make the connection that food is a part of international relations," she says.

Already halfway through its first run, the course immerses students in the study of war and conflict prior to Sept. 11 — including the Vietnam War, the Soviet war in Afghanistan, and Ethiopia's civil war — and how those have led to the sizable diaspora in D.C. Students also get a taste of how food affected those conflicts.

Perhaps the best part of her class? The field trips to local ethnic restaurants, where students get to enjoy a traditional meal and hear the owners speak about the history of their culture. During a recent trip to Das Ethiopian Cuisine in Georgetown, students learned about the influences Italians had on Ethiopian cuisine when they colonized the country in the 1930s.

"The idea is for students to hear from the cooks, from the owners of these places, [about] how they see their cuisine as a communication tool in their own communities," says Mendelson Forman.

While gastrodiplomacy is a relatively new field in the realm of public diplomacy, the idea itself can be traced back to the ancient Romans, who often made peace with their enemies over a good meal.

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The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

Adolf Hitler wakes from a coma to find himself in modern-day Berlin, where everyone assumes he's a comedian who never breaks character — and so the Fhrer becomes a novelty act, a YouTube sensation (the "loony YouTube Hitler") and then eventually a celebrity and politician. This is the premise of the German satirical novel Er Ist Wieder Da (Look Who's Back) by Timur Vermes, which is about to be published for the first time in English. The book has sold more than a million copies (and spurred furious debate) in Germany. Although many critics in Germany found the book tasteless, Vermes told The Guardian that it contains a serious warning: "If [the book] makes some readers realise that dictators aren't necessarily instantly recognisable as such, then I consider it a success." The book will be released next week in the U.K. — it doesn't appear to have a U.S. publisher yet — and will test how comfortable English-speaking audiences are with laughing about Hitler.

Rules in the U.K. ban people from sending books to prisoners. The restriction apparently went into effect in November, but the news went viral over the weekend. In an op-ed, the Horward League for Penal Reform's Frances Crook wrote that "punishing reading is as nasty as it is bizarre."

The Best Books Coming Out This Week:

In Laura Kasischke's psychological thriller Mind of Winter, Holly Judge wakes up on Christmas morning with the sentence "Something had followed them home from Russia" echoing around her skull. Alone in the house with her daughter, Tatiana, Holly becomes increasingly convinced that something is wrong – that Tatiana isn't the girl she picked out in a bleak Siberian orphanage 13 years ago. A blizzard keeps mother and daughter trapped in the house together, as Holly's narrative becomes more and more confused, with dark hints of a psychotic break. Though understated, Mind of Winter is leave-the-lights-on-tonight frightening, with a quiet edge of horror that is much more effective than gore.

Published in Nigeria in 2007, Teju Cole's Every Day Is for the Thief is being released in the U.S. this week. A lean and careful portrait of Lagos from the perspective of an unnamed narrator, it describes the city's everyday corruption, from the police to the woman who sells fuel at the gas station. One of the most arresting sketches is of the "yahoo yahoo," who spend their time in internet cafes writing email scams: "Once, looking to my right in an internet caf ... I see a letter being written from the 'Chairman of the National Office for Petroleum Resources.' The writer is a rough-looking man who is clearly chairman of nothing. There are other letters, from the heirs of fictional magnates, from the widows of oil barons, from the legal representatives of incarcerated generals, and they are such enterprising samples of narrative fiction that I realize Lagos is a city of Scheherazades. The stories unfold in ever more fanciful iterations and, as in the myth, those who tell the best stories are richly rewarded."