Before the moment passes, I’d like to put in a good word about several absorbing articles in the Style Issue, cover-dated September 10:
* John Seabrook on Federico Marchetti, the business nerd who dragged fashion kicking and screaming into e-commerce with Yoox.com;
* John Colapinto on Will Guidara and Daniel Humm, who bought out and took over Danny Meyer’s Eleven Madison Park and elevated it to a ridiculously world-renowned restaurant;
* Aleksandar Hemon’s profile of Lana and Andy Wachowski, the filmmaking siblings who made The Matrix and its spin-offs and whose most recent work is the forthcoming adaptation of David Mitchell’s mind-bending novel Cloud Atlas (I enjoyed Tom Hanks’ quote — “I work for free. I get paid for waiting.” — and was touched by this remark by Steve Skroce, who has storyboarded for the filmmakers since The Matrix: “After the success of the first Matrix, they were able to get point son the box-office, video games, etc. They had a dinner at this great Italian restaurant in Santa Monica and all their key collaborators were invited. At each place setting was a golden envelope with a check inside. I’m not sure who got what, but I know what I received was far beyond what I could ever have guessed or hoped for.”); and
* Ian Parker on Bjarke Ingels, the Danish architect who has made himself a brand name at 37.
Then there’s Thomas McGuane’s short, pungent story “The Casserole” and Ariel Levy’s supercilious review of Naomi Wolf’s book Vagina: A New Biography, which made me laugh out loud. Key passage: “Wolf claims that vaginal slander — referring to the vagina by its ‘awful’ feline moniker, for instance — ‘apparently affects the very tissue of the vagina.’ She bases this conclusion on a study of female rats whose vaginal tissue showed signs of change after periods of stress. The experiment did not, however, entail researching yelling ‘Rat pussy!’ at the animals; stress was manufactured physically. Wolf’s interpretation of the science is, as usual, rather free.”
And who doesn’t love a cover by Ian Falconer?
another eye opens 
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