2020年9月9日 星期三

The T List: Five things we recommend this week

Walter Price paintings, three-legged chairs — 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.

See This

New Abstract Paintings From Walter Price

Walter Price’s “A Breeze Filled With Determination Wafted Towards Us” (2018).Courtesy of the artist and Greene Naftali, N.Y.

By Madeline Leung Coleman

T Contributor

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When Walter Price was growing up in Macon, Ga., he would sometimes wake before sunrise to join his mother on the porch and watch the day begin. It was a habit that the self-described early bird reinforced during the four years he spent in the Navy, before attending art school on the G.I. Bill and later moving to New York. Today, the 31-year-old’s ultra-disciplined art-making ritual involves rising before 5 a.m. to stretch, exercise and draw. Price’s first show opens this week at Greene Naftali and features paintings and drawings of images that, like your first thought of the day, hover between dream and waking observation. In his modestly sized acrylic paintings, abstracted landscapes and domestic scenes are overlaid with sketchy graphite lines, floating shapes, pasted-in photographs and inscrutable phrases. In one work from 2019, “It has to rain before you can see where all the leaks are at,” lightly sketched human figures pass between cars, holding umbrellas aloft; the sky is a bruised chartreuse, rain clouds daubed on in a thick, gluey gray. In another canvas from 2018, a crimson sun in a fuchsia sky burns down on a red convertible and field of bright blue palm trees. It all stems from the artist’s obsession with color and line. As he said in 2018, “I tend to try to take all the basic fundamental elements of art and create a very funky painting.” “Pearl Lines” is on view at Greene Naftali from Sept. 11 through Oct. 31, 2020, at 508 West 26th Street. Reservations are recommended, greenenaftaligallery.com.

Eat This

The Latest Sweet Obsession in Paris? Babka.

Babka Zana developed four varieties of its dense, braided speciality: chocolate hazelnut, pistachio orange, halvah lemon and cinnamon.Geraldine Martens

By Hilary Moss

As soon as I can safely make it to Paris, I plan to divide my caloric intake between my sister-in-law’s kitchen and Babka Zana, a recently reopened bakery in the Pigalle neighborhood, in the city’s Ninth Arrondissement. Its proprietors — the husband-wife duo Emmanuel Murat, a film producer, and Sarah Amouyal, a fashion stylist and artistic director — had long dreamed of doing a culinary project together. “We cook a lot and travel when we can to discover new flavors,” says Amouyal. The pair fell in love with babka — the dense, braided cake popular in the Jewish community of 19th-century Poland — on trips to Tel Aviv and New York City, and decided to create their own space dedicated to the sweet treat. Amouyal and Murat perfected their brioche recipe alongside the celebrated French pastry chef Benoît Castel and then developed four different kinds — chocolate hazelnut, pistachio orange, halvah lemon and cinnamon — for Babka Zana’s opening in January. The shop also offers rugelach, another Jewish-Polish pastry, sandwiches on homemade challah bread and bourekas, which are Israeli cheese-filled puffs. Amouyal and Murat closed the bakery temporarily in the spring because of the pandemic but are now back in business, with a babka ice-cream sandwich added to the offerings — perfect for late summer. 65 Rue Condorcet, Paris, babkazana.com.

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Try This

Expertly Designed Three-Legged Chairs

The Poltrona-U armchair.Courtesy of UXUA

By Rima Suqi

T Contributor

“I’ve always had an obsession with chairs that have only three legs,” mused Wilbert Das, the Dutch-born designer, former creative director of Diesel and co-founder of Uxua Casa hotel and spa in Trancoso, Brazil. Das lives with and often commissions pieces of this style for homes he designs for clients such as Anderson Cooper and Richard Gere (who Das is working with on a resort in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico) — so it’s no surprise that his new collection of home furnishings features two three-legged designs. The Poltrona-U armchair and Cadeira-U dining chair are both curvaceous pieces inspired by midcentury designs and handmade by local artisans from reclaimed tropical hardwoods including brauna and muiracatiara. “It is now illegal to cut down these trees, but we buy a lot of old beams that I normally use to build new houses with an old soul,” he explained. These, like many other pieces in the collection — a sofa upholstered in vintage Italian linen, aortic-looking ceramic lamps and vases shaped like pendants — were originally made for the Uxua Casa hotel but developed into a commercial collection after guests repeatedly requested to buy them. uxuadas.com.

Rent This

Luxury Catskill Cottages for a Cozy Getaway

Eastwind’s three new suites, each of which sleeps four and features a lofted queen bed and private patio.Lawrence Braun

By Nancy Coleman

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Being housebound for months seems to have driven many of us toward the same escapist pastimes: baking crisp loaves of sourdough, staring at jigsaw puzzles for hours on end and, at least while the weather is warm, camping — the last of which, if you’re anything like me, is immediately ruled out by the bugs, humidity and your own utter lack of wilderness skills. The solution lies in the Catskills, where a new collection of cottages offers guests a slightly more luxurious way to experience the great outdoors. Eastwind, a hotel set in the hills of Windham, N.Y., has offered several two-person A-frame cabins from the luxury camping developer Lushna since it opened in 2018, but its four-person cabin suites are a recent addition. Each minimalist, wood-lined cottage is available year-round — insulated for the cooler months, air-conditioned for the summer — and comes with a patio, fire pit, lofted queen bed, pullout couch and a private bathroom inside. For those of us who are desperate for a change of scenery but still have to work, each suite also offers a writer’s nook, complete with a desk, electric outlets and a floor-to-ceiling window. Starting at $429 per night, eastwindny.com.

Covet This

Partow’s Elegant and Minimalist Clothing

Left: the artist Shirin Neshat in the Greta sweater made of tissue-weight merino wool. Right: the model Alek Wek in an Italian cotton poplin shirt. Craig McDean

By Thessaly La Force

Nellie Partow launched her eponymous brand in 2011, offering luxurious handmade knits and elevated tailoring for a no-nonsense type of working woman. A graduate of Parsons School of Design — with stints working at Donna Karan, Calvin Klein and John Varvatos — Partow’s clothes embody a complex understanding of luxury that conveys both strength and maturity (it helps that she’s also a competitive boxer). Her latest campaign — photographed by a frequent T contributor, Craig McDean, and styled by Camilla Nickerson — is a celebration of the women who wear (and have modeled) her clothes: artists such as Shirin Neshat and Laurie Simmons; models such as Alek Wek and Sasha Pivovarova. “These women aren’t striving for this perfection,” explained Partow. “They are marching to their own beat, and there’s a real sense of individuality and tenacity to who they are.” The clothes are all part of her latest, 56-piece collection, which debuts this month at New York Fashion Week. Of note: a rust-colored cotton trench, artfully embellished with brushed leather. In a year when we have been forced to reconsider our relationship to fashion, Partow offers a hard-earned elegance and a minimalist sensibility worthy of our attention. partow.us.

From T’s Instagram

Christian Louboutin’s Paris Home

The lounge in Christian Louboutin’s Paris apartment, with a sofa and screens from Egypt.© Simon Watson

Throughout his career, Simon Watson (@simonpwatson) has brought his unique eye to crumbling castles, monastic apartments and everything in between. Christian Louboutin’s Paris home, shown above, is one of 20 spaces included in “The Lives of Others,” a new book of Watson’s pictures of interiors. Paging through, one immediately sees why the photographer is sought out by many magazines, including T. “Aesthetic beauty is what stirs me and what always will,” he says, adding, “I suppose because I grew up in Dublin, I had a natural affinity for the Georgian sensibility. I spent time living in old houses with crumbling plasterwork and broken floorboards.” Indeed, his photos are often of homes that wear their history on their sleeves. But the images’ ease and elegance stem from much more than the physical elements within the frame, however fine. Follow us on Instagram to go inside the book, out this month from Rizzoli.

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On Tech: No, Facebook does not reflect reality

Despite what Mark Zuckerberg says, Facebook shapes our world.

No, Facebook does not reflect reality

Delcan & Company

Mark Zuckerberg is the world’s most powerful unelected person, and it drives me bonkers when he misrepresents what’s happening on Facebook.

In an interview that aired on Tuesday, Zuckerberg was asked big and thorny questions about his company: Why are people sometimes cruel to one another on Facebook, and why do inflammatory, partisan posts get so much attention?

Zuckerberg told “Axios on HBO” that Americans are angry and divided right now, and that’s why they act that way on Facebook, too.

Zuckerberg and other Facebook executives consistently say that Facebook is a mirror on society. An online gathering that gives a personal printing press to billions of people will inevitably have all the good and the bad of those people. (My colleague Mike Isaac has talked about this view before.)

It’s true but also comically incomplete to say that Facebook reflects reality. Instead, Facebook presents reality filtered through its own prism, and this affects what people think and do.

Facebook regularly rewrites its computer systems to meet the company’s goals; the company might make it more likely that you’ll see a friend’s baby photo than a news article about wildfires. That doesn’t mean that wildfires aren’t real, but it does mean that Facebook is creating a world where the fires are not in the forefront.

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Facebook’s ability to shape, not merely reflect, people’s preferences and behavior is also how the company makes money. The company might suggest to a video game developer that tweaking its social media ads — changing the pitch language or tailoring the ad differently for Midwestern college students than for 40-somethings on the West Coast — can help it sell more app downloads.

Facebook sells billions of dollars in ads each year because what people see there, and how Facebook chooses to prioritize that information, can influence what people believe and buy.

Facebook knows it has the power to shape what we believe and how we act. That’s why it has restricted wrong information about the coronavirus, and it doesn’t allow people to bully one another online.

Further proof: An internal team of researchers at Facebook concluded that the social network made people more polarized, The Wall Street Journal reported in May. American society is deeply divided, but Facebook contributes to this, too.

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So why does Zuckerberg keep saying that Facebook is a mirror of society? Maybe it’s a handy media talking point that is intentionally uncomplicated.

There are no easy fixes to make Facebook or much of the world less polarized and divided, but it’s dishonest for Zuckerberg to say his company is a bystander rather than a participant in what billions of people on its site believe and how they behave.

Zuckerberg knows — as we all do — the power that Facebook has to remake reality.

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Putting tech creepiness to good use

A reader from El Dorado Hills, California, emailed a follow-up question to last week’s newsletter about Utah’s flawed, but still promising, virus-alert app. Why does any health authority need to persuade us to download another app, when our phones already follow our movements and could be redeployed to figure out whom we might have exposed to the coronavirus?

Yup, fair question. First, I would say that it’s not great for a zillion apps to already collect information about where we go and what we do. But it’s true that one flaw of many coronavirus-tracing apps around the world is that people have to be persuaded to download yet another app, and trust what it does.

Google and Apple are working together on technology that would make it easier for states to notify people who may have been exposed to the coronavirus by detecting phones that come close to one another. With this technology, the states would not necessarily have to create separate health apps.

People still need to trust this virus-alert technology and give it permission to track their whereabouts. Trust in both technology companies and public health authorities has been sorely lacking in this pandemic.

Google and Apple’s technology is also still in development, and some elected officials and public health authorities in the United States and other countries decided they needed to create their own apps to give people more information about the coronavirus or to help track possible exposures. It’s a good bet that some states and countries will incorporate Google and Apple’s virus-alert system into their own early app versions.

Public health experts have said this kind of virus exposure notification technology will be useful for as long as we’re battling the coronavirus. And most people who have followed Google and Apple’s work have said the companies are (mostly) doing the right things to listen to health authorities and also protect people’s privacy.

This virus-alert technology will be flawed, possibly creepy and not a silver bullet, but we need it.

Before we go …

  • Online school stinks. So does in-person school. Crashing websites, cyberattacks and a tangle of technology complicated the early days of back to virtual school for many American school children, my colleagues Dan Levin and Kate Taylor wrote. Online learning problems were a symptom of a lack of guidance from state and federal education officials, one expert told them.And at colleges that opted to reopen for classes in person, my colleague Natasha Singer reported that administrators have sometimes failed to help or effectively isolate students infected with or exposed to the coronavirus.
  • Don’t buy a new phone expecting it to be magically faster: The next generation of wireless technology promises to make our phones zippier and connect our cars and factory equipment to the internet more easily. But right now, the claims about 5G wireless are a lot of hot air. A Washington Post columnist found that smartphones connected to 5G phone networks surfed the internet at roughly the same or even slower speeds than older networks.
  • I’m sorry. It’s pointless to make your canned beans look beautiful. If you’ve been on Instagram, you’ve seen that aesthetic of hyper organized and color-coded food pantries, closets and sock drawers. Go read this New York Times Magazine article about the two people most responsible for this look and how they reflect an online subculture that both fetishizes control over some aspects of life, like stylish junk drawers, while also reveling in being imperfect.

Hugs to this

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