2020年9月30日 星期三

The T List: Five things we recommend this week

JW Anderson x Moncler, perfume for the home — and more.

Welcome to the T List, a newsletter from the editors of T Magazine. Each week, we’re sharing things we’re eating, wearing, listening to or coveting now. Sign up here to find us in your inbox every Wednesday. You can always reach us at tlist@nytimes.com.

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Hotel Les Deux Gares Opens in Paris

From left: a bedroom at Hotel Les Deux Gares in Paris with a vividly contrasting palette; a showy hotel bathroom in a bright 1930s-era suite.Benoit Linero

By Aimee Farrell

T Contributor

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The new Hotel Les Deux Gares in Paris’s 10th Arrondissement is a riotous collision of French and British style. The 40-room property, set in a 19th-century Haussmann building between Gare du Nord and Gare de l’Est, is the fourth offering from the Touriste hospitality group — and by far the boldest. The bedrooms are breezy and colorful: There are striped headboards with mismatched curtains; the walls are painted in olive greens and pale pinks with contrasting ceilings and trims; the bathrooms feature bright primary-toned tiles. “I love the fantasy of hotels,” says the English artist Luke Edward Hall, whom Touriste’s founder, Adrien Gloaguen, enlisted to design the interiors. “In the back of my head, the space was the home of a bohemian Paris collector that’s been opened up to guests.” Finding inspiration in Wes Anderson’s 2014 film, “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” he dialed up the theater, fearlessly playing with both prints (leopard and toile) and periods. In the hotel’s Art Deco-inspired corners, antique French Empire tables are topped with lights and lampshades displaying Hall’s sketches. His eclectic vision of French hospitality continues across the street at Café Les Deux Gares, a traditional bistro that includes a cherry-red bar and a trompe l’oeil tortoiseshell ceiling by the artist Pauline Leyravaud. Rooms start at $152 per night, 2, rue des Deux Gares, Paris, France, hoteldeuxgares.com.

Eat This

The Healing Properties of Moringa Powder

Maruyama Jones Farm’s moringa powder and capsules.Misa Maruyama

By Cathy Erway

T Contributor

Growing up on the Kekaha Sugar plantation on Kauai, Hawaii, Misa Maruyama Jones always enjoyed tasting the moringa leaves in her cup of tinola, a soothing chicken-and-green-papaya soup that her Filipino neighbors would make. “Eating neighbors’ home cooking at weekend parties was a part of life,” she says, noting how the delicate leaves were usually harvested from a backyard tree. The moringa tree — also known as malangguy — is native to South Asia but arrived in Hawaii thanks to Filipino immigrants who went to work the sugarcane and pineapple fields throughout the first half of the 20th century. Despite its longstanding reputation in Hawaii for possessing healing benefits, though, moringa has only recently become the object of a health-food craze on the mainland. Now, its leaves are crushed into powder and taken as supplements. These products, says Maruyama Jones, were initially unrecognizable to many locals as the same plant. However, some chefs have embraced the powdered form, sprinkling it over scallop crudo, miso ramen or furikake salmon. And Maruyama Jones believes that moringa seeds and capsules helped save her father’s life when he was battling cancer four years ago. This inspired her and her husband, Geoff, to start their own moringa farm in 2016 on the Big Island, in Kailua-Kona — Maruyama Jones Farm, where products including moringa-seed oil and moringa-leaf matcha tea are sold. From $15, maruyamajonesfarm.com.

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See This

Julia Phillips’s Sculptures at Matthew Marks

Julia Phillips’s “Mediator” (2020)© Julia Phillips, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery.

By Madeline Leung Coleman

T Contributor

The most disturbing part of Julia Phillips’s work is what she leaves out. The German sculptor, who divides her time between Chicago and Berlin, molds ceramics into devices that conform to the curves of the human body. Though mounted so as to suggest interaction, these are not inviting objects. “New Album,” an exhibition of Phillips’s work now on view at Matthew Marks, features, for example, what appears to be a pair of black binoculars, angled downward and mounted on a stainless-steel stand. Its ends are glazed in a blotchy salami pink, the rims of the eye holes left ruptured and bumpy. At the back of the gallery, two clay plates, each shaped to cover the back of someone’s head, ears, neck and shoulders, stand on poles. One is angled as if to push the head forward, forcing the unseen wearer to look to the floor; the other would crank the head back, exposing the tender dip of the throat. Phillips’s use of negative space implies a subtle sort of violence. “I’m not interested in designing torturous elements or actual functional elements,” the artist said in Berlin in 2018. “I’m interested in making sculptures that are kind of a mind game.” Inspired by Black feminist thought and the power relations embedded in colonialism, Phillips hopes viewers will “finish” these empty devices with their imagination — and ask themselves whether they would be the doer, or the done-to. “New Album” is on view at Matthew Marks through Oct. 17, 2020, at 523 West 24th Street, New York City. Reservations are recommended, matthewmarks.com.

Covet This

JW Anderson’s Moncler Collection Has Arrived

Two nylon puffer jackets with embossed dots, nylon scarves with spikes and floppy hats in nylon lègere. The look in black is accessorized with a nylon mini bag with spikes.Courtesy of Moncler

By Thessaly La Force

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Out this week is the highly anticipated JW Anderson collection from Moncler’s Genius, an ongoing collaborative series between the Italian-based brand and various designers, such as Simone Rocha, Richard Quinn and Matthew M. Williams of 1017 ALYX 9SM. “I’m from Northern Ireland,” Anderson explained of his interest in Moncler over Zoom, “so I’m very used to the cold.” Many of the collection’s 31 looks (around 180 pieces in total) were references to Anderson’s own prolific archive as a designer for his namesake brand (he is also the creative director of Loewe) — details such as floppy, wide-brimmed hats and oversize chains for the handle of a bag might look a little familiar — but all are rendered in Moncler’s signature nylon material to keep out the frost. “I’ve always loved puffers,” he added. “I love the shape they create. I’ve always wanted to play with it in my own collections. There’s nothing better than volume. It boosts the theatrics, and you can build character out of it and create a kind of abstraction.” Not one to shy away from bold colors, Anderson chose to work with canary yellow, silky pink, red and a bright sky blue for many of the items. A long vest printed with mallards and other pond fauna, with matching boots and bag, also stands out. Anderson acknowledged it was his way of exploring nostalgia: “I was thinking of summer camp, and a kid’s sleeping bag.” Both playful and dramatic, Anderson’s cerebral collection promises to not just keep you warm but make you think. moncler.com.

Try This

Frederic Malle’s Perfume Spray Bottle for the Home

Editions de Parfums Frédéric Malle Cafe Society Perfume Gun.Courtesy of Frédéric Malle

By Iva Dixit

“In perfume, when you work for the home, you want reassurance, comfort, cleanliness and luxury,” said the fragrance impresario Frédéric Malle as we commiserated over our mutual fidgetiness with life under quarantine. Malle’s recently resurrected room spray Perfume Gun, a hefty objet of smooth ceramic — cheekily made to emulate a bottle of Windex — is just the indulgence now that many of us are spending our working hours at home. It comes in two scents, both taken from Malle’s popular line of candles: Cafe Society and Jurassic Flower. The former is an earthy tribute to the 1950s Paris of Malle’s childhood, reconstructed from his fond memories of evenings at his parent’s Rive Gauche apartment, the air tinged with a Guerlain home fragrance that is no longer manufactured. The latter is extracted from the white flowers of the magnolia tree, offering a summery citrus scent graced by notes of peach and apricot. Before the pandemic, I would spray Malle’s perfumes on myself as a form of armor before stepping out into the world. Now, spritzing my living room with Cafe Society each morning is a private ritual, like invoking an invisible talisman that promises to ward off the restlessness of this seemingly endless stretch of indoor confinement. $195, fredericmalle.com.

From T’s Instagram

#CraftingWithT: Painted Lampshades

The designer Cressida Bell paints a stem onto a leaf using opaque black paint. You can use a black felt-tip pen for this, if you find it easier.Nicole Bachmann

Although the vast majority of the changes brought on by the pandemic have been difficult, if not heartbreaking, some slivers of sunlight have made this unnerving period rewarding in small ways. When we have less to do in the outside world, our interior world can become richer, and we can develop skills we’ve always wanted to explore. With this in mind, we present the first installment of #CraftingWithT, a new series of crafty how-tos, for which we call upon expert makers in the hopes of providing not only instruction but a temporary respite from the noise of the world. First up is a column on painting a lampshade — a project that will only occupy an afternoon but yield a tangible result, one that will add instant flair and cheeriness to any room. Your guide will be the London artist, textile designer and lamp and shade decorator Cressida Bell, who descends from a long line of members of the Bloomsbury Group, the early 20th-century philosophical and aesthetic movement led by British artists, writers and thinkers, and whose hand-painted shades bear certain Bloomsbury signatures — bright colors and modern, pared-down forms — mixed with her love of naturalism and whimsy. Check out Bell’s step-by-step guide on how to recreate one of her signature motifs on tmagazine.com, and follow us on Instagram.

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On Tech: How Facebook entrenches itself

The more Facebook knits together its apps, the harder it becomes for a government to break it up.

How Facebook entrenches itself

Anthony Antonellis

Facebook’s changes under the hood are a power grab.

My colleague Mike Isaac wrote about Facebook’s latest step to make its apps — its main social network, Instagram and the Messenger chat app — blend together more seamlessly behind the scenes. Facebook’s products would stay separate, but over time they would interact in ways they hadn’t before.

For example, Facebook is starting to let people use Instagram to send a photo to someone using Messenger, and vice versa. In the future, you might be able to text a friend who uses only WhatsApp, which Facebook also owns, from your Messenger account.

There might be — possibly? — handy things as a result of stitching these apps together, particularly for businesses. But the more Facebook operates as a unified empire and not a constellation of apps, the harder it becomes for a government to break up Facebook and the tougher it might become for rivals to chip away at the company’s dominance.

What’s happening now shows the difficulty of checking the power of superstar companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon. By the time the impact of small changes they make becomes obvious, it might be too late to do anything about it.

At Facebook, the more the company knits together its family of apps, the more difficult it becomes to untangle the company’s takeovers of Instagram and WhatsApp. Some academics and others have said Facebook should give up those apps because they saw those acquisitions as illegal tactics to insulate the company from competition.

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The other risk is that a more unified Facebook makes the company harder to unseat. Could any new messaging app succeed if Facebook funnels its 3 billion users seamlessly into Messenger, and convinces people not to bother going anywhere new?

This is not a theoretical risk. There is a history of technology companies tying together their products or customer information to make them invulnerable. Sometimes it works.

Google over the years has stitched together what once were separate parts of its internet advertising business into a largely unified system that makes it difficult for anyone to buy or sell ads online without going through Google. A generation ago, Microsoft got into hot water in part for trying to expand its dominance by linking its new internet browser to Windows. (That didn’t work, largely because governments and courts said no to this practice.)

Facebook knitting together its apps is technically different than what Google and Microsoft did, but the practical effect is largely the same. Both Google and Microsoft said — as Facebook is saying now — that combining their products was useful to customers. Maybe. It definitely helped expand the power of those companies.

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(Side note: Is it actually useful to message someone on Instagram from Messenger or whatever? People tend to use Facebook’s apps in different ways.)

One change from tech history is that people are now aware of the risks of companies uniting their products. As soon as Mike first wrote about Facebook’s app integration plan in early 2019, some lawmakers and regulators started to ask whether it was a ploy to insulate Facebook.

The question is what to do about the risk that Facebook is slowly entrenching itself. Regulators could say no to Facebook binding its apps together, but Facebook might be betting that lawmakers and regulators move more slowly than it does. And Facebook’s cynicism is probably right.

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Tech can’t fix everything. Sometimes it makes things worse.

I encourage you to read this article from Reveal, a nonprofit investigative news organization, about high injury rates in Amazon warehouses, and how Amazon’s public defense of its worker safety record was sometimes contradicted by company documents and private management discussions.

One of the blaring and disturbing conclusions I have from this investigation is that technology cannot paper over flawed systems built by humans. In fact, sometimes technology makes them worse.

Among Reveal’s findings was that at Amazon package warehouses that used more robots and other automated human helpers — technology that Amazon said was intended to make work safer and more efficient — rates of serious on-the-job injuries were significantly higher than they were in traditional warehouses.

Reveal’s reporting found that this happened because the company used robotic warehouses to increase productivity quotas to levels so high that it led to more instances of Amazon workers cutting corners, repeating the same motions and doing other things that led to more injuries. The article said that none of Amazon’s dozens of safety initiatives reviewed by Reveal suggested slowing down production quotas to try to reduce injuries.

Amazon didn’t respond to Reveal’s questions about the company’s injury data, but told the news organization that it had made significant investments in worker health and safety.

This report added to my concerns that we too often have misguided hopes for automation and other kinds of technology to solve complex problems. Too many Americans lack internet? Just wait for new wireless technology to magically fix it. Cities are clogged with cars? Wait for robot-driven cars to magically fix them. Nope and nope.

That’s not to say that technology can never help solve problems, but it’s not a magic wand. If humans set unrealistic expectations to move merchandise fast, then those same humans might use technology to absolve them of responsibility for fixing the problem.

Before we go …

  • GAH, THE INTERNET! Well, the U.S. presidential debate was pretty darn chaotic, and my colleagues have explanations about some of the misleading information that went wild online about it, including false rumors about Joe Biden being fed questions in advance and the glee of a far-right group that has endorsed violence at being mentioned by President Trump.
  • The software is watching you: Students spoke to my Times colleagues about what it’s like to use software that is intended to catch cheating in online exams by tracking people’s eye movements through a webcam and other steps. Spoiler alert: These students didn’t love it.
  • Ah, the innocent days when the internet was for judging people by their looks: Mashable makes a compelling argument that HOTorNOT, one of the first internet sites that went viral and let people rate the attractiveness of strangers, became a blueprint for internet activity in the 20 years since it started — and not only in a bad way.

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