2020年7月15日 星期三

The T List: Five things we recommend this week

Unisex jerkins, raw vinegars, classic sportswear — 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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Taste This

New Raw Vinegars From Brightland

The brand’s two special-edition vinegars: Rapture (left) and Parasol (right). The bottles’ labels were created by the North Carolina design firm Stitch.Julia Stotz

By Jennifer Conrad

T Contributor

For Aishwarya Iyer, the founder and C.E.O. of the California-based pantry staple company Brightland, coronavirus-mandated stay-at-home measures have meant lots of cooking, lots of long walks and lots of time devoted to developing her company’s newest product: vinegar. To start, there are two limited-release offerings — Parasol and Rapture — both of which are considered raw for retaining a bit of the bacteria that spark the fermentation process and are thought to promote good digestion. The former is a champagne vinegar made with chardonnay grapes and navel and Valencia oranges; consider using it as a shrub in a tart summer cocktail. The latter is a juicy balsamic vinegar that comes from zinfandel grapes and blackberries; Iyer likes to drizzle it over grilled peaches and vanilla ice cream. They also both mix well with olive oil (try combining Parasol with Brightland’s basil-infused oil for a perfect panzanella dressing). Founded in 2018, the company is committed to sustainability and social consciousness (this month, 15 percent of proceeds from its Artist Capsule are going to the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund). The organic grapes used for the vinegars are grown in Northern California, and both varieties are double-fermented and distilled on a family farm on the Central Coast. Fittingly, the bottles’ Alexander Calder-esque labels are meant to evoke a California sun, and printed on the inside are little messages — Rapture, for one, reminds us to “look for wonder.” $22 per bottle, brightland.co.

Wear This

Luke Edward Hall’s Unisex Jerkins

Left: Luke Edward Hall wearing The Castle of the Forest Sauvage cream and green trellis print vintage glazed cotton jerkin. Right: a cream and red striped vintage cotton jerkin.Billal Taright

By Flo Wales Bonner

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Having your outfit compared to a pair of curtains isn’t usually a compliment. But for the London-based artist and interior designer Luke Edward Hall, who studied men’s wear design at Central Saint Martins, furnishing fabrics are as well suited for making clothes as more traditional materials. And so for his latest project, he is creating a limited run of unisex jerkins from surplus interior textiles, some left over from his own design projects and others carefully sourced online. Named the Castle of the Forest Sauvage, a reference to a land from Arthurian lore (Hall, who has a love of mythology, reread stories about the legendary British king during the lockdown), the line takes inspiration from the jerkin’s history as both formal attire and utilitarian military wear. Hall also looked to his own collection of Moroccan, Indian and Austrian waistcoats for design cues, eventually landing on a garment with an unfussy silhouette that lets the wildly colorful fabrics be the focus. “There are amazing trellis prints, medieval village scenes,” he explains. “These are patterns not made for clothes, and that’s part of the appeal.” Available through the designer’s Instagram page, @lukeedwardhall.

See This

A Florentine Artist’s Residency Goes Local

A collection of works in the Palazzo Galli Tasso’s loft, its frescoes newly revealed by renovations. Left: Duccio Maria Gambi’s Deep Void vase sits on Martino di Napoli Rampolla’s Marcolone table, with Mattia Papp’s “Atlantis Hall” hanging on the wall, Sasha Ribera’s Poplar stool on the floor and Bloc Studios’ Clelia vase on the pedestal. Right: Lorenzo Brinati’s “San Giovanni” hangs above Pietro Franceschini’s Bling Bling ottoman.Daniel Civetta

By Laura Rysman

A crisis can reveal space for new possibilities, and with Florence recently emptied of its customary throngs of tourists, Martino di Napoli Rampolla, the founder and creative director of the city’s Numeroventi artist residency, saw a chance to strengthen the community of Tuscan makers. Earlier this month, he opened the exhibition “So Close So Good” at the residence, which is housed within the stately 16th-century Palazzo Galli Tasso, showcasing the work of 10 local artists and designers produced during these past months of confinement. “We realized we can reclaim Florence for ourselves now,” explains di Napoli Rampolla. “The globalized system may be helpful and remunerative, but it’s not what makes a community healthy.” The works, which will also be exhibited online beginning July 16, have a distinctively Florentine feel, with an emphasis on natural materials and handcraft: The designer and artist Duccio Maria Gambi contributed slablike sculptures hewn from white onyx, their rough edges highlighted with spray paint in bold primary colors; Bloc Studios, a marble-focused design practice founded by Sara Ferron Cima, is showing satin-smooth vases; and the artist Justin Randolph Thompson hand-built a room-size multimedia installation that layers representations of Black experiences of both contemporary and colonial-era Italy. “We finally see how we can work amongst ourselves,” Di Napoli Rampolla says, “instead of looking abroad.” “So Close So Good” is on view at Numeroventi through Sept. 5, Via Pandolfini 20, Florence, and online beginning July 16, numeroventi.it.

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Listen to This

Country Singer Margo Price’s New Album

Bobbi Rich

By Daniel Wagner

This month, having pushed the original date on account of the pandemic, the singer-songwriter Margo Price released her third studio album, “That’s How Rumors Get Started.” Instead of touring, she’s been quarantining in Nashville, Tenn., with her family (her husband contracted the coronavirus but has since recovered). In a bit of a departure for Price, the album’s 10 tracks grapple with restlessness, career expectations, motherhood and the peripatetic life of a musician. But while Price may also have mostly traded in the pedal-steel-laden tracks of her previous two albums for up-tempo melodies Tom Petty would be proud of, her voice still carries that distinctive golden country glow for which she’s known and loved. Co-produced by Price and her friend and fellow singer-songwriter Sturgill Simpson — one of Nashville’s biggest stars, whose chameleonic style makes him an enigmatic figure to the industry’s establishment — the album sparkles with gospel singers, iconic guitar lines and soaring, catchy hooks. Three standout tracks — “Hey Child,” “Gone to Stay” and “Prisoner Of The Highway” — beg to be played on the open road, a place of much reflection throughout the record. Though that may be well-worn territory in the canon of country music, Price’s lyrics reveal an original portrait of an artist on the bus passing through. margoprice.net.

Buy This

Casual Sportswear Inspired by Princess Diana

Left: Ceres Sport Rib Sport Bra, $68, and Sport Rib Hi Legging, $108. Right: Ceres Sport Jersey Leotard, $128, and The Perfect Sweat, $148.Zak Bush

By Crystal Meers

Ceres, a new line of athletic wear created by the stylist and designer Nina Miner and the yoga teacher Kumi Sawyers, began in a typically Los Angeles fashion: while the pair were on a hike. The two had met recently through mutual friends and bonded, as they walked through Rivas Canyon, over their love for the perfectly broken-in, vintage long johns that Miner was wearing. As it turned out, they shared a desire to start their own line of sportswear inspired by the days when Olympians would train in cotton T-shirts and shorts and Princess Diana would throw a blazer over her sweatpants — in other words, a time before skintight black leggings in synthetic fabrics took over the gym. “You don’t have to be corseted in. It doesn’t have to be so tight in order for it to look good,” says Sawyer. The result is a sustainably made 17-piece collection cut from natural fibers such as cotton and cotton blends in Kelly green, navy and shades of beige with stylistic nods to both ballerinas (scoop-back leotards, deep V-neck tops) and boxers (waffle-knit tanks and leggings). The standout item may be the high-waisted cotton fleece sweatpants, which the pair swear flatter every body as they fit slim through the hip and don’t have pockets. “Pockets add bulk, and they’re unnecessary because if you’re hiking or running, whatever is in your pockets falls out anyway,” says Miner, who designed a fanny pack using fabric remnants from the line’s sweatsuits to solve exactly this problem. sportceres.com.

From T’s Instagram

#THouseTour

Scott J. Ross

The potter and designer Jonathan Adler and the author and fashion commentator Simon Doonan have been visiting Shelter Island since they met 25 years ago. Last year, they invited T to have a look around at the summer house they built on the island’s northern shore in 2011. Designed by Gray Organschi Architecture, it combines the midcentury Southern California Modernism of Richard Neutra with wabi-sabi naturalism: There are contiguous glass walls that wash the rooms in East End light, slate floors the color of the brackish Peconic Bay just a few steps away and natural wood ceiling panels that echo the sand dunes buffeting the property. There’s also a happy, slightly unruly mix of art and design objects, from a giant head-shaped planter by the functional artist Nicola L. to a Deco sunburst lamp from a thrift shop in Phoenix. See the full video by Scott J. Ross on T’s Instagram — and follow us.

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On Tech: Just collect less data, period.

Every company wants the biggest data stockpile possible. We need unilateral data disarmament.

Just collect less data, period.

Paloma Dawkins

Let’s list some anxieties about digital life: We’re being tracked all the time. Internet superpowers hold sway over what information we see and what we buy. Our sensitive information keeps getting hacked.

There’s no simple fix for these complex worries. But there’s a step that works toward addressing them all: Americans deserve a national limit on the information companies collect about us.

If you want to focus on one broad approach to tackle many of our internet horribles, remember this motto: Just collect less data, period.

Companies want to harvest as much data about us as possible because — well, why wouldn’t they? More information could help them target advertisements at us, track high-traffic areas in stores or show us more dog videos to keep us on their site longer.

For the companies, there’s no downside to limitless data collection, and there’s little to prevent them from doing so in the United States.

Why should we care? Fair question. (My Opinion section colleagues tackled this in their Privacy Project series.) Personally, I feel icky knowing that political campaigns can buy data showing who attends church, and that the Internal Revenue Service bought bulk records of people’s locations to (ineffectively) hunt for financial criminals. When there’s an arms race for our personal data, we lose control over where our information winds up and how it’s used.

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And I can’t shake what my colleague Paul Mozur said about digital surveillance in Hong Kong. For people to feel free, he told me, we need to know that we’re not always being watched. On some level, I’d bet that goes for Facebook and our television sets just as it does for governments.

Data also consolidates power. If you worry about Google, Facebook and Amazon having too much influence, you should be aware that at the root of their power is control over reams of information on where we go, what we do and what we like.

Competitors then do icky things to play catch up, like buying information from data-harvesting companies. The digital economy is a game of data intrusion one-upmanship.

When we and elected officials try to fight this, our efforts are often too myopic. Data privacy regulation and legislation has focused on requiring disclosure of data-targeted political advertisements, making privacy policies more clear, or forcing companies to show their digital dossiers on us.

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Fine, those are pragmatic steps. Better still is to step back to the underlying problem: All companies collect too much data about us in the first place.

I recognize that the devil is in the details, and I’m not offering that. (I’ll work on it. My Opinion colleagues had suggestions for lawmakers and regulators.) Senator Sherrod Brown, a Democrat from Ohio, released a draft privacy bill last month that proposed companies collect information only when it’s “strictly necessary.” Senator Josh Hawley, a Republican from Missouri, introduced a relatively similar proposal last year.

They weren’t the first to try for a sweeping federal privacy law, and they probably won’t be the last to fail. But I’m glad they’re trying to coalesce us around a big idea: Unrestricted harvesting of personal data has gone too far.

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In praise of unflashy technology

While I was reporting an article last year about expanding internet access in parts of Africa, no one wanted to talk about hot air balloons that transmit the internet.

Instead, people couldn’t stop praising metal poles that made it far easier and cheaper to bring internet connections to places where conventional cellphone towers weren’t a good option.

It was a useful reminder to me that sometimes the biggest innovations are the ones we never notice.

David M. Perry, a journalist and academic adviser at the University of Minnesota, wrote in The New York Times this week about how spell-check, smartphone voice control and other technology we take for granted can be life changing for people with disabilities.

“Disability technology can be so quotidian that nondisabled users don’t even notice,” Perry wrote.

To be fair, things like voice-activated helpers were marvels when they were first introduced, and now we’ve gotten used to them. And we do still want people to think big. Modern smartphones are an example of a flashy technology that really did change everything.

But what Perry highlighted is that we sometimes fixate too much on big-bang technologies that turn out to be impractical — driverless cars, to pick one example — or are trying to solve problems that people don’t really have, at the expense of lower-tech ideas that can be magical.

Perry said, for example, that there are constantly ideas to replace the white canes used by people with vision impairments, and blind people think the canes are great as is. (Here are some more boring but important technologies.)

Remember that when you get excited about drones that deliver library books, all-seeing shopping carts or whatever flashy thing that makes us think, “Cool!” Sometimes the stuff that draws the most attention will never work, and the seemingly simple stuff has the biggest impact.

Before we go …

  • Apple scores a legal (and financial) win: A European court overruled an order that would have forced the company to pay $14.9 billion in unpaid taxes, the Times tech reporter Adam Satariano reported. In 2016, a European Union regulator said Apple had made illegal deals with Ireland to keep its tax bill low.
  • Memes for a cause in Iran: People in Iran are coalescing around the hashtag #DontExecute and other social media messages to push for an end to government executions based on murky charges, from drinking alcohol to political activism. My colleague Farnaz Fassihi wrote that it was a “rare moment of solidarity among Iranians of varying political views around a single issue” in a country where the government has brutally crushed other forms of dissent.
  • Why does that textbook cost $24 million? Fortune digs into the oddities of computerized pricing to explain why a pillow might list for more than $10,000 on Amazon. Among the culprits are computers programmed to respond to price changes of competing products — with sometimes illogical results — and merchants setting artificially high prices so you won’t try to buy something.

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