Hello and welcome to the August edition of Outward. I'm Ramon Alam, and I'm just recently a year

older and wiser, and here's what I learned upon entering my 44th year. It is possible using only

cookies, ice cream, and store-bought ice cream sandwiches to make the best birthday cake you'll ever

have. This is an actual recipe from the New York Times,

but I honestly feel like you can extrapolate based on that list of ingredients.

And I truly think that this is maybe all the wisdom I have to offer as I enter a new year.

This is a good reminder that isn't your thing making your own birthday cake?

My children's birthdays follow my own birthday very closely.

And so I usually do a lot of like birthday cake construction for them. And it usually happens in a rental house kitchen because we're often out of town for their birthdays.

Right.

But this particular recipe I've just described, you could make it like on the fly. You could make it in the backseat of a car if you had to. Highly recommend trying this one out. Well, I'm often trying to make a birthday cake in the back of a car. So I'll use this recipe the next time I'm in that situation. Yeah, you could probably pull it off. Absolutely.

So I'm Brian Lauder, editor of Outward, and I have just learned, just before we went to press or to record now, of the existence of the Cromatica remix album by Lady Gaga and many

other exciting artists.

And so my summer is now complete.

This is something that had been rumored and now it has been confirmed, I think, just last

night.

So I'm a happy gay and excited for that Rain on Me remix.

I'm happy for you.

Thank you.

I'm Christina Cauderucci, a senior writer at Slate, and I am coming to you live from our

co-workers apartment in Brooklyn, where I am cats sitting for a small angel named Sebastian.

And Brian, I was thinking of you because in our little video calls, I always see your cat's tail just kind of

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