in this issue
onward and upward
WHAT DO AMANDA GORMAN AND Giorgio Armani have in common? More than you might think. One is a 23-year-old poet from Los Angeles, one an 86-year-old style icon at the top of his fashion empire—but the gulf of decades between them collapses for me as I read their profiles this month. Both Amanda and Giorgio have presence; both radiate confidence, focus, and drive. They know what they want to achieve, and while Giorgio has a bit of a head start on this front, both leave little doubt that they will arrive where they are headed. As photographed by Annie Leibovitz (herself no stranger to confidence), Amanda is self-possessed and stunningly beautiful under the California sun, and Giorgio is as chic and elegant as ever in Milan. The combination seems exactly right…
contributors
Jason Horowitz As Rome bureau chief for The New York Times, Jason Horowitz began his pandemic reporting early, scuttling a ski vacation in February 2020 to cover Italy’s first coronavirus outbreak. Yet a year of lockdowns in Rome with his wife, Claudia, their kids, Elena and Luca, and a new puppy, Agrippina, had its charms. “It was crowded and trying but also wonderful,” Horowitz reflects. Recently the journalist spoke to designer Giorgio Armani (“Voice of Reason,” page 106) about the fashion industry and COVID-19. A “giant who looms over Milan,” Mr. Armani cut a fearsome figure, Horowitz admits, but their meeting was fruitful: “After a few minutes, he loosened up, laughed a few times, and was generous with his time and thoughts.” Doreen St. Félix Like many people, Doreen St. Félix first encountered…
home alone
One way to understand what had happened to her (what she had made happen, what she had insisted upon): It began with the house. It was the particular house, but it also was where the house was and where she discovered she wanted to be. It was a run-down, abandoned Arts and Crafts cottage in a neglected, once-vibrant neighborhood in the city of Syracuse. The house sat high on a tiny lot on Highland Street, which ran atop a hill that bordered a long expanse of grass and trees. It looked like a small, sloping park, but it was actually a cemetery, the old graves clustered in the southwest corner. Unless you were squeamish about graves—Sam wasn’t—the sloping green hill was quite pretty. Highland itself offered a wide view of downtown.…
spices of life
When I get in touch with Sana Javeri Kadri in late February, she’s in Kashmir, in northern India. The 27-year-old founder of Diaspora Co. flew here from her home in Oakland to visit the spice farmers she works with—an annual sourcing trip. “But this time everybody thought I was completely crazy,” she tells me over Zoom. She’s in a deep-maroon Frances Austen sweater with balloon sleeves, sitting cross-legged in the corner of her hotel room, which has good Wi-Fi (no small thing in Kashmir, which recently suffered the longest internet shutdown ever in a democracy). She appears impervious to our nine-and-a-half-hour time difference and a grueling schedule that has her traversing the length and width of India. “It was at a point where I knew that I needed to reassure…
rest assured
The premise, when I explain it to my kids, is confusing. You’re going to a hotel—to sleep? For the past 12 months, my passport has languished in its drawer, and not a single ticket stub has made its way into my wallet; travel of any kind is a novelty. A night away, simply to knock myself out? Inscrutable to them, highly appealing to me. And I wasn’t hitting just any old sack but rather the “world’s best bed”—at least according to Swedish mattress company Hästens, which has installed its $200,000 Vividus model (Drake’s a fan of the $400K Grand Vividus) in its Ultimate Sleep Suite at the Lotte New York Palace Hotel. When I arrive, the lobby is predictably muted, devoid of pre-COVID bustle, but it hardly matters. The elevator whisks…
flight reads
Second Place, by Rachel Cusk (FSG) The urge to find something to liven up the home front is all too understandable these days. M, the narrator of Rachel Cusk’s Second Place, is a writer stuck at home in the English marshland and waiting out an unspecified catastrophe. Not so much a patron of the arts as an insinuator into them, M invites a famous painter to come and stay with her. L, the artist, shows up with a girlfriend whom he had failed to mention and little interest in taking inspiration from the company at hand. His aloofness leaves his host to grapple with her own bruised ego and the motivations that drove her to seek him out in the first place. As the novel’s endnote makes plain, the story…
