cultural commentary from the desk of Don Shewey
It’s the Food Issue, with terrific in-depth stories on Greek yoghurt by Rebecca Mead, Adam Gopnik baking bread with his mother, the question of animals we love to much to eat by Dana Goodyear, and Italian superstar chef Massimo Bottura by Jane Kramer. Plus a few short takes, including one by Zadie Smith that I liked very much. And a short story by Thomas McGuane full of surprising and emotionally charged sentences called “Weight Watchers.”
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 