The New Yorker

Yesterday The New Yorker published a comprehensive story about Tropical Race Four, a type of fungus that is currently threatening to destroy the United State's banana crop. While there are more than 1,000 types of bananas, only one, the Cavendish banana, is ideal for cultivating and exporting. Thus, the majority of banana plantations in the world harvest Cavendishes.

However, the Tropical Race Four fungus has already taken out Cavendish crops in Asia and Australia, and the fungus is set to hit Latin America next. If it does, the entire crop of US bananas could become extinct. While some scientists are frantically searching for a cure to Tropical Race Four, others are trying to engineer a stronger banana.

But, if there's so many other types of bananas out there, wouldn't it be easier to farm and export them? What do you think should be the solution to possible banana extinction?

>> To say Tomas Maier is a perfectionist is an understatement — The New Yorker just profiled him, and when writer John Colapinto went to visit the designer at Bottega Veneta's Milan headquarters, one of the PRs inspected Colapinto beforehand, picking off a "microscopic" piece of lint and commenting: "Oh, God. If that's there, he won't be able to think of anything else." In fact, Maier, who is now 53, dropped the "h" from his first name in his thirties, for symmetry's sake.

Maier refuses to live in Milan, "a city whose many design flaws he finds too frustrating to bear," Colapinto writes, so he spends a lot of time in airports between his home in Florida and the Bottega office in Milan. "I just sit there [at the airport] and look at people and I see what's the malfunction and how can we help that man," Maier says. "I pity him! That he makes his life so miserable — himself! — by carrying some ill-functioning bag that rips his jacket half off and gives him a bad shoulder ache at the end of the day. And it makes him look an idiot on top of everything."

Under Maier's guidance, Bottega — which was "weeks from bankruptcy" when he started, he says — has seen sales increase 800 percent in the past nine years. And part of that can be attributed to the Cabat bag Maier created — one of the label's top-selling items — which features no logos, no hardware, and no adornments, but carries a six-thousand dollar price tag. It's something of an anti-It It Bag.

"The It Bag is a totally marketed bullshit crap," Maier says. "You make a bag, you put all the components in it that you think could work, you send it out to a couple of celebrities, you get the paparazzi to shoot just when they walk out of their house. You sell that to the cheap tabloids, and you say in a magazine that there's a waiting list. And you run an ad campaign at the same time. I don't believe that's how you make something that's lasting — that becomes iconic as a design."

Maier sends the Cabat down the runway every year, unchanged, except for a difference in color or leather treatment. Only about 500 are made each season, which invariably sell out, and although Bergdorf Goodman and other luxury retailers have pleaded with Maier, he refuses to sell the Cabat bag anywhere but at Bottega Veneta stores.

When he first joined Bottega, Maier notified his bosses at Gucci Group (which owns the label), that in his first year designing for the brand, he would give no interviews and run no advertising. He also didn't want his name attached. "At that time in the nineties, lots of companies were called Tom Ford for Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche, Dior by John Galliano — you know, everything had an endless name," he explains. He hates the idea of designer cult of personality — of Karl Lagerfeld, for instance, he says: "Who cares how thin he is? Hasn't he reached a point in life where he can relax."

He's also anti-materialism: "I'm not somebody who likes to possess. I'm not the person who has six hundred suits. I want to have two suits. Actually, I want to have one suit, and I replace it." He applies that feeling to how people should shop, insisting that Bottega's goods are not beyond the reach of the middle class, which has been trained to want too many things. "Anyone, he said, could afford one $550 hand-painted cashmere scarf," Colapinto writes. "'Just have less,'" he said."

Though the dream of Brighton Beach, the Jersey Shore-inspired reality show about Russian-Americans, has yet to be realized, an article in The New Yorker all but assures it will be.

The show's producers, two 20-somethings of Ukrainian and Belarusian descent, have received hundreds of audition videos and are shopping the show. Besides an uptick in vodka sales, the show is sure to bring the gaudy, brawny Russian-American pride into our Internet, so we're going to have to learn to speak Rushlish. Here are three words to get you started.

• Vassya: A term of feigned endearment, like "bro" or "dude," between two male friends.
• Russki: The Russian equivalent of "guido." Be careful with this one though! Though it simply means one who is an ethnic Russian, it can be a slur when used by foreigners.
• A dura: I've seen it used to describe an idiotic female, but Urban Dictionary defines it as a naive female who doesn't know what's best for her. It can derogatory or playful.

That's it so far. Please add to it! The Internet is surprisingly ignorant of Rushlish. A wrong we hope Brighton Beach will promptly correct.


Source: Flickr User Bob Jagendorm

In this week's issue of The New Yorker, writer Judith Thurman asks an age-old question: what can you do about wrinkles?

The answer, she finds? Not much. "Apart from dying, there is, to date, no permanent cure for wrinkles," she writes. From there, the article explores the history (and occasional hucksterism) of anti-aging treatments, zipping from Cleopatra's techniques to modern-day fixes like Botox. It's interesting and funny stuff, especially when Thurman dryly describes the "vibrational qualities" of a $150 Sjal face mask.

Her research boils down to this: the one topical wrinkle fighter that's been proven to minimize wrinkles is prescription-only tretinoin (better known by its brand name, Retin-A). Even then, it's not without side effects — which suggests that the best way to deal with wrinkles is to stop worrying about them so much.

Paul Popenoe was not a psychologist or psychiatrist, nor did he finish college, but the father of marriage counseling in America was called Dr. Popenoe anyway. After all, he did have an honorary degree in sociology.

Before he opened the American Institute of Family Relations, his marriage counseling center in Los Angeles, he led a successful campaign to sterilize the mentally ill. It spawned a forced-sterilization law in California, which inspired two-thirds of other US states to do the same. He continued to follow his interest in only breeding the best by studying eugenics — the practice of selective breeding applied to humans — but after it was made unpopular by the Nazis he talked less of it and more of saving marriage (only those worth saving, of course). In 1949 his popularity peaked when Ladies Home Journal published an excerpt of his book Can This Marriage Be Saved?

Here's some of his advice, courtesy of The New Yorker.

• On birth control: “If charity begins at home, birth control should begin abroad. Continued limitation of offspring in the white race simply invites the black, brown, and yellow races to finish the work already begun by birth control."
• On the about-to-stray husband: Dick is about to leave his wife, Andrea, for another woman. He is bored with Andrea. “Living with her is like being aboard that ship that cruised forever between the ports of Tedium and Monotony,” he says. Can this marriage be saved? You bet. At Popenoe’s clinic, Andrea is urged to make herself more interesting. She learns how to make better conversation, goes on a strict diet, and loses eight pounds. The affair is averted.

Read more after the jump

The cover of this week's issue of The New Yorker was created using an iPhone. Artist John Colombo created the portrait of a west side Manhattan diner using Brushes, a $5 painting application. It's not the first cover he's created using the app; the first appeared last Spring. Since last June, Colombo has been posting his weekly Brushes illustrations on The New Yorker blog Finger Painting.

Brushes is one of the apps that's coming to the iPad, which hopefully means many more gorgeous, detailed illustrations are to come. To see a video of the cover's creation, read more

>> In the Jan. 18, 2010 edition of the New Yorker, Amanda Fortini profiles Laura and Kate Mulleavy of Rodarte and their quest to go against your typical "high gloss, high fashion, glamour, put-together, shiny, perfect — everything too exact" label, in the words of Laura.  The Fall 2009 thigh-high wraparound boots Nicholas Kirkwood created for Rodarte, for example, were meant to evoke "hands wrapped in plastic in a morgue."

Kate told the magazine, "The most unhappy Laura or I have ever been was when we heard we made 'a pretty dress.' We want to make people think, and, once you decide to do that, you will have people that don't like what you're doing."  She later added, "The other day, we were laughing that if we could take our clothes and bury them, and in ten years take them out, we would actually be satisfied [with how they look]."

Anna Wintour gives her two cents »

The “presiding grande dame of West Coast interior design,” Kelly Wearstler, is featured in a six-page profile in the Sept. 14 issue of The New Yorker.

I've always considered Wearstler (pronounced "Worst-ler") an enigma — wife of a hotel mogul, author, Top Design judge, crimped-hair enthusiast, Southern belle, ex-Playboy model — but her design skill is irrefutable. So, it was interesting to read about how the girl who grew up in a cluttered Myrtle Beach home decorated in a "blowsy Provincial style" became the face of ornate, layered, over-the-top Hollywood Regency style.

"You don’t hire her for her subtlety, you hire her for what her critics call ‘muchness'," said a client. Her style, as it turns out, is governed more by instinct than intellect: "I don't have time to think things through a lot. I just do how it feels," she says. I was also intrigued to hear that she thinks of herself as having "a very European sensibility" that's "well travelled, collected." Pick up a copy to read the full text or read an abstract online.

>> Christopher Bailey likes to think of himself as a "home bird": he's at ease mulching — "the smell of manure makes me happy" — barbecuing, or watching TV with "soup on my lap," he tells the New Yorker in their September 14 Style Issue.  But he's also the creative director of three-billion-dollar company Burberry.

Bailey is anti-elitist, the New Yorker writes.  He "came from a working-class background in Yorkshire" — his father was a carpenter, his mother dressed windows for Marks & Spencer — and one of his main goals for Burberry is to be "friendly and warm and embracing." He continues: "I think there's an expectation that all fashion companies have to be cold and austere and arrogant, and I just think there are other ways of doing things." 

He loves chocolate »

Most of us describe our homes in fairly generic terms, tossing out "modern," "traditional with a twist," or "relaxed Regency," if pressed for a characterization. Well, leave it to Jonathan Adler and Simon Doonan to turn dull description on its head.
To hear how they describe their home, read more