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Production of the company’s parkas was once fully unionized, but labor organizers say the owners have taken a harder line in recent years.
Canada Goose, the luxury jacket maker, has cultivated an image that is not only chic but also socially conscious. It has forged alliances with environmental advocates and talked of its commitment to high labor standards.
These efforts have paid off as the company outgrew its roots as a family enterprise and built a worldwide following for its parkas, which can cost over $1,000 and have been worn by celebrities like Daniel Craig and Kate Upton. “We believe that the brand image we have developed has significantly contributed to the success of our business,” the company wrote in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing in March.
But production employees of Canada Goose, who were all unionized as of 2010, have complained that the company has taken an increasingly hard line toward labor that is at odds with its stated values.
In 2019, a company official was cited by a provincial labor board for unfair labor practices during a union election at a newer facility, and some employees complain that the company has retaliated against them in recent months for supporting a union.
“People have fear,” said Alelie Sanvictores, a worker who has been active in union organizing. “Some people are scared to talk to me.”
Canada Goose denies that it is anti-union and that it has retaliated against union supporters. “It is the employees who will decide their path forward, and Canada Goose will support their decision,” the company said in a statement. The company dismissed the official cited for unfair labor practices.
On Wednesday, a few dozen labor activists picketed the Boston headquarters of Bain Capital, the private equity firm that owns and controls Canada Goose, hoping to pressure the jacket maker to endorse a union at three plants in Winnipeg.
The tensions at Canada Goose appear to illustrate the challenges of seeking rapid growth while maintaining a high-minded reputation that helps sustain a luxury business.
An immigrant named Sam Tick founded Canada Goose, then known as Metro Sportswear Ltd., in 1957. Its lone factory, in Toronto, unionized in the mid-1980s.
After Mr. Tick’s grandson Dani Reiss took over as chief executive in 2001, he sought to increase worldwide sales of what had largely been a North American operation. Still, he committed to making its parkas in Canada even as much of the country’s apparel industry was moving offshore.
“By keeping the majority of our production domestic, we contribute to local job growth and can more easily maintain our high manufacturing and labour standards,” the company wrote in its 2020 sustainability report.
But Mr. Reiss has seemed more skeptical of unions than his predecessors at Canada Goose. After the company bought a production facility in Winnipeg in 2011, the union sought a voluntary recognition or a neutrality agreement that would allow workers there to unionize easily.
“Dani Reiss said he wasn’t interested in doing that,” said Barry Fowlie, who for roughly a decade has directed the Canada Council of Workers United, the union that represents workers at the company.
A company spokeswoman said the union had never asked for voluntary recognition “in any official context.”
Bain Capital purchased a majority stake in Canada Goose in 2013 and listed it on the New York and Toronto stock exchanges in 2017.
Under Bain’s ownership, the number of unionized workers increased to over 1,000 just before the pandemic, thanks to growth at the original Toronto plant and the addition of two more facilities there. A collective bargaining agreement that predated the new sites makes all Toronto-based production workers part of the union.
But facilities in Winnipeg, where the company’s three factories had over 1,000 production workers before the pandemic, are not covered. The growth of the work force there has helped lower the company’s union membership among production workers to about one-third today, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Workers at the Winnipeg plants say many of them make the province’s minimum wage, which is about 12 Canadian dollars per hour (around $9.65), though workers can earn more if they exceed certain production targets. The company said nearly 70 percent of workers were making more than the minimum wage.
In interviews, five workers complained that managers were often abusive toward the largely immigrant work force.
One worker, Immanuelle Concepcion, said her supervisor flew into a rage over mistakes in some jackets she appeared to have worked on. “She told me, ‘How dare you allow this to happen? How dare you?’” Ms. Concepcion recalled. “I was shaking. I haven’t experienced humiliation that way.”
The Canada Goose spokeswoman said that the company had gotten no reports of “frequent abuse” and that all reports of harassment were investigated.
In June, the company disciplined two workers at one of its Winnipeg plants shortly after they had identified themselves as union supporters. One said he had routinely been wearing headphones while working, but was warned and then written up for it — on two consecutive days — only after he went to work wearing a union T-shirt.
Until then, said the worker, Trevor Sinclair, “my supervisor never said anything about it.”
Canada Goose said that “no employees face disciplinary action due to union organization” and that disciplinary action had been taken against Mr. Sinclair once management became aware of his violation.
Nearly 30 percent of Canadian workers are union members, compared with about 11 percent of American workers. Mr. Sinclair said he felt that Canada Goose was essentially importing an American model of fighting unions.
“The way they treat us is not how Canadians treat each other,” he said. “Management doesn’t really understand what Canada is about.”
Philip Keith contributed reporting.
She ran a family foundation that focuses on environmental sustainability and founded a jewelry company that uses recycled metals for its designs. She died in a bicycle accident.
Boryana Straubel, a former executive at Tesla, the electric car company, who was also the executive director of the Straubel Foundation, a family foundation that focuses on environmental sustainability, and the founder of Generation Collection, a jewelry company that uses recycled metals for its designs, died on June 19 while riding her bicycle on a highway in Washoe County, Nev. She was 38.
A spokesman for the Nevada Highway Patrol said Ms. Straubel died after being hit by a car traveling in the opposite direction.
As a teenager growing up in a small Bulgarian town, Ms. Straubel was a self-described math nerd who spent Friday evenings in a deserted pay-by-the-hour internet shop researching foreign universities. That behavior made her a loser among her peers who were out partying, she wrote later, as part of an assignment for Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. (When she was younger, she had turned down sleepovers to stay home and work on math problems.)
When she arrived in the United States in 2005, she spoke no English. But after earning a degree in economics from the University of California, Berkeley, she became a star at Tesla, where she led teams in human resources and new markets expansion, among other roles.
She also met Jeffrey Brian Straubel, known as J.B., one of Tesla’s founders. As chief technology officer, Mr. Straubel, an engineer, was in charge of Tesla’s battery cell design and other innovations.
“J.B. Straubel is the guy people imagine Elon Musk to be,” Edward Niedermeyer, author of “Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors” (2019), said in an interview. “His work was at the heart of what allowed Tesla to become Tesla.” Forbes magazine, which compared the relationship of Mr. Musk and Mr. Straubel to that of the Apple co-founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, has estimated Mr. Straubel’s net worth at $120 million. He stepped down from his position as chief technology officer in 2019.
The couple married in 2013 and started their family foundation in 2015.
Ms. Straubel conceived her company Generation Collection when she learned that precious metals like gold were a large component of electronic waste. A jewelry company that used this material instead of mined gold — which is carbon intensive and heavily polluting, and which often relies on forced and child labor — fit her desire to create a business that had a positive environmental and social impact.
“I joined Tesla in 2011 when it was still a small company and people made fun of me,” Ms. Straubel told The New York Times in April, when Generation Collection opened for business. “We were seen as a bunch of nerds who believed so hard in something that everyone else just didn’t get, but I believed absolutely in the mission, and look how that turned out. But now I trust my gut.”
Boryana Dineva was born on May 26, 1983, in Bulgaria. With the fall of Communism in 1989, her family emigrated to Germany, where they lived for a few months in a refugee camp. They also lived in Austria and Russia. After learning English, Boryana spoke a total of five languages — all with an accent, she said, even her mother tongue.
In 2008, she graduated from the College of San Mateo, a two-year community college in Silicon Valley, along with her younger brother, Stoyan. With scholarships from the San Mateo Rotary Club, among other awards, they were both accepted at Berkeley, where Boryana earned a degree in economics. She worked as an account manager at Brocade, a software company, before joining Tesla in 2011.
She became vice president of talent and culture at the Wikimedia Foundation in 2015, before returning to Tesla for another year and a half. She then returned to school to better prepare herself for her philanthropy. She earned a master’s degree in management from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business in 2019 and a master’s degree in management science and engineering the next year from Stanford’s School of Engineering.
Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, the founder and chairman of the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society and a guru to the area’s newly wealthy, directing them in how to give their money away, taught Ms. Straubel in her Stanford courses on philanthropy and justice and on women and leadership. Ms. Straubel became a protégée and then a friend.
“Her critical thinking skills were at the highest level,” Ms. Arrillaga-Andreessen said. “But what’s so powerful about Boryana is, she took the theory and the knowledge that she was given in class and over the last few years translated it into action and impact in her own philanthropy.”
Ms. Straubel’s survivors include her husband and their two young sons. Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.
“Boryana wanted to help people who had leadership potential and were committed to make a difference in the world, but who needed a little extra support to get there,” said Pamela Hinds, a professor of management science and engineering at the Stanford School of Engineering. “She was full of energy — passionate, caring and very persistent.”
New Yorkers on not having to sneak off to smoke marijuana.
When recreational marijuana was legalized in New York State in March, much of the change was not immediate. But there was one instantly observable difference: While it is not yet legal to sell or buy marijuana in New York, smoking a joint on the street is not a crime anymore. As long as they observe the same restrictions as on cigarettes, smokers can pretty much spark up where they like.
This means the furtive trip to the “weed spot” — the reliably low-key loading dock, river cove, rooftop, whatever — is no longer required to smoke a blunt. And while some may miss the routine, that tends not to be the case for New Yorkers of color, who have been ticketed and arrested for marijuana possession at a far greater rate than others in the city.
Here, a look at how the experience of getting high on the streets of New York City compares before and after legalization.
Sarah Pagan, 30, office manager
The Blockhouse in Central Park is “basically part of my weed history,” said Sarah Pagan.
“When I started smoking at 18 with my ex-boyfriend,” she recalled, “we would cut school and come up here.” Back then she lived with her parents in Brooklyn, and the couple stumbled onto the Blockhouse, originally used as a wartime fort, tucked away on a trail that overlooks the park. When the trees aren’t grown in, she said, you can see down to street level.
“It’s serene,” Ms. Pagan said. “You start to forget you’re in the city, until one of those Lenox Hill Hospital ambulances pass by.”
Because it’s in the woods and high up, she didn’t worry about being hassled by the police, but she was always sure not to stay too long or too late at night, preferring midmorning or early afternoon for safety reasons as a woman.
Ms. Pagan said she feels more self-conscious smoking on the street, because that is where children tend to be. That is “one of the weirder things about weed being legal now, because yes, you can technically just walk down the street wherever you want now and smoke, but is it not just as obnoxious as cigarette smoke?” she wondered.
Mary Pryor, 39, entrepreneur and cannabis advocate
Mary Pryor, who is originally from Detroit, moved to New York in 2005, and she has gravitated to Pebble Beach along the Dumbo waterfront when she wants to smoke — a location, she said, that resonates with Ifa, the African religion she practices.
“You come here, you talk to the water, you connect with Oshun,” Ms. Pryor said, referring to a goddess that is associated with water in her religion. She said she generally goes early in the morning and sits by herself to “just talk to my ancestors, talk out things in my head.”
Though she admits that she does nothing different now, the fact that it’s legal to smoke marijuana grants her a certain level of assurance, “to smoke and be looking straight at a police officer and be Black.”
Ms. Pryor, who is the co-founder of Cannaclusive, a collective focused on marketing and business advocacy for people of color working with cannabis, said she wants to see New York “not make the same mistakes other states have made,” highlighting access to capital as one of the many ways other states have fallen short.
Ms. Pryor, who has Crohn’s disease, described her smoking like this: “Without cannabis, I would not be able to function and be standing here.”
Colin Thierens, 34, photographer
Colin Thierens found his spot after a recent breakup. He would normally smoke while hanging out with a friend at the apartment he shared with his girlfriend. But after they split and he moved in with his parents — not fans of marijuana — he started going instead to Prospect Park.
“We could’ve smoked on the Parkway,” referring to Eastern Parkway, where he lives in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, but before legalization that left him vulnerable to law enforcement.
He took to going right after sunset to a set of benches elevated just above street level. “We didn’t even plan on coming specifically here,” he said. “I didn’t even know this was here.” Last summer during the pandemic, the spot was like a backyard for some people.
It was also shielded from the road, so the police would drive by while he and his friend smoked undetected.
Despite regularly smoking in Brooklyn, he described a run-in with the police not in the city but on a trip to New Jersey.
“I was out and about and smoking like how I smoke out here in Brooklyn.” He was stopped and arrested and ended up paying a fine.
That moment is in great contrast to his experience now.
“We’ve been doing it,” he said. “It’s just nice to not have to care at all now.”
Risa Elledge, 26, musician and part-time digital marketer
At the height of the pandemic, Risa Elledge left Bushwick, Brooklyn, to live with her musical collaborator and boyfriend in Princeton, N.J. But she still returns to Domino Park on the Williamsburg waterfront whenever she gets to the point, she said, where “I just need to get out of Princeton.” She prefers to smoke on the pyramid steps in front of the water fountain; there, she might draw or dance, taking along a small speaker that connects to a belt loop.
When she comes to the city, this park is where she starts before moving on to see friends elsewhere.
Despite the new marijuana guidelines, the change in her mind-set is still ongoing.
“With weed, I feel like it’s been OK,” she said. “When the cops are on sight, I’m just on edge, naturally.”
John Best, 64, real estate agent
“The first time I came here was in 1967,” John Best said of Washington Square Park, known for decades as a haven for smokers.
Mr. Best, who was raised in Brooklyn but now lives in Fort Lee, N.J., recalls visiting the park at around 9 or 10 years old with his mother, who worked across the street at N.Y.U.
“The hippies,” he said, “were the ones who really started the socialization and the weed smoking here in the park.”
As a young teenager, he was focused on basketball, so he didn’t partake as much as some friends, but he was impressed by the climate. He mostly came to flirt, but by the late 1970s, he said, he started to “dib and dab, and smoke a little more.”
The police, of course, were always a worry.
“If a cop came into the park, he might catch somebody at the end smoking,” he said, “but by the time he caught that person, everybody else knew that the cops were here.”
Karamvir Bhatti, 28, model and graphic designer
Karamvir Bhatti lives in Elmhurst, Queens, but she prefers not to indulge there; it’s too residential, and she wants to avoid smoking anywhere near the children in her neighborhood.
Brooklyn Bridge Park, which she enjoys particularly as the sun sets, is a spot where she feels safe smoking marijuana, but she admits it has a lot to do with her identity.
“I’m an Indian woman; I’m not Black,” she said. “Me getting in trouble for it means something different. I became really aware of that when my last partner — he was Black, and we’d go smoke and he’d be like, ‘Yo, I can’t do that wherever you want to go.’”
Ms. Bhatti said she is generally left alone when she smokes on the street — although in Elmhurst, it’s a little different. Her neighbors “don’t care if they have to stare at you, they’ll make you feel uncomfortable,” she said.
“I’m a very free-spirited person, but I’m also privileged in those ways where I was able to do whatever, whenever,” she said.
Susan Venditti, 64, retired public-school teacher
Susan Venditti recalls smoking alongside Prospect Park as a teenager in the 1970s. She grew up nearby in Windsor Terrace, and though she now lives in Staten Island, she’s been in Brooklyn lately caring for her sister in the home where they grew up.
“We always hung out on the park side,” she said. “And when we could get our $5 together and get a ride into Flatbush, we were able to buy our nickel bag.” She took her first toke of marijuana while playing hooky as a student at Brooklyn Tech High School, and she suggested that how she had been treated as a smoker over the years hadn’t changed very much. For the most part, she was beyond suspicion.
“Even now,” she said, “I would walk around smoking a joint, nobody would think it was coming from me.”
Since retiring as a special-education teacher, she has become a marijuana advocate, working with the New York City chapter of NORML, an organization focused on overhauling marijuana laws.
Regardless of what you do for a living, “there’s a time and place for it,” she said. “Just like you have to wait for a cocktail after work.”
Even with legalization, she says, the stigma remains: “When I was working, I wasn’t this open.”
She added, “I think that if I was still teaching, I would probably want to be anonymous.”
She believes that if more people are forthcoming about smoking marijuana, it will whittle away at society’s long-held negative associations.
In the meantime, she’s doing just that.
“When the law first came out, I found myself forcing myself to have a joint,” she said, laughing. “I didn’t want one, but I had to exercise my right.”
Doping out the identity of an obsessive, enigmatic Instagram poster has become a favored pastime of the scrolling classes.
It is the parlor game of the pandemic. Among a certain segment of the scrolling classes, art and literary division, firing up their tablets and smartphones each morning has taken on aspects of a whodunit. Rifling through Instagram feeds, they register with half yawns the sponsored posts and thirst traps, the Throwback Thursday selfies and banal memes of cats. All the while they are waiting to happen upon the latest clue from a particular account.
It is that of rg_bunny1, an enigmatic and anonymous, unabashedly niche figure who, since at least the beginning of lockdown, has released into the daily Instagram slipstream a daily torrent of quirky, particular images that, taken together, speak to an aesthetic that delights, confounds, fixates and infuriates in equal measures and that belongs to who-knows-who.
Modestly at first, and then in manic bursts of oversharing, rg_bunny1 has data-mined images from an impressive cultural gold mine that seem in sequence to resemble the jumbled contents of an obsessive and over-cultivated mind.
On one day, his followers may encounter, say, three rare images of the ballerina Anna Pavlova in the embrace of an actual swan. They may come upon a mug shot of the publicist Lizzie Grubman taken after her 2001 arrest on charges of intentionally backing her S.U.V. into a Hamptons crowd, followed by Julian Wasser’s iconic portrait of Joan Didion slouched against her Daytona yellow Corvette Stingray, cigarette in hand.
Followers have almost come to expect a daily dose of works by 20th-century art greats (Mark Rothko, Picasso, Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, Warhol, Louise Bourgeois, Francis Bacon) with the occasional wild card like Clyfford Still thrown into the mix. They anticipate details of paintings culled from the byways of the Western canon (from John Singer Sargent to Chaim Soutine to Édouard Vuillard) as filtered through rg_bunny’s quirky eye.
They delight in snapshots of the artists themselves; of film stars and directors from a knowledge base specific to rg_bunny1’s decidedly Eurocentric cinematic, mostly nostalgic tastes (Alain Delon, Romy Schneider, Pier Paolo Pasolini); to hypnotic video clips of Maria Callas from ancient television interviews.
“He posts incredible archival photos,” said Charlie Scheips, a writer and painter and the founding director of the Condé Nast archive. “It’s not Corbis or Getty or the common stuff you can Google and search Marilyn Monroe.”
Daily, and sometimes hourly, rg_bunny posts obscure paparazzi shots (Anita Ekberg taking aim at the paparazzi with a bow and arrow); images capturing the motley coterie of drag queens, artists and sycophants that surrounded Andy Warhol; portraits of the beautiful doomed socialite Tina Chow; of the socialite and model Penelope Tree at Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball; of Watteau pierrots; of Yves Klein as a child; of the brilliant and drunkard German artist Martin Kippenberger; of the English playwright Joe Orton wearing a jock strap.
The glacially blond socialite C.Z. Guest may suddenly turn up in a variety of moods and settings (and as painted by Salvador Dalí) followed by a run of fragments from, say, Goya’s 18th-century aquatint series, “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.”
“He definitely likes Hockney, he definitely likes old Hollywood,” Mr. Scheips said. “There are other tropes, like male nudes but not the usual stuff. One day he was posting the erotic drawings of Duncan Grant.”
If there are baseline characteristics of the rg_bunny account, they are enigmatic juxtaposition and unbridled obsession. Even those traits are snake-fascinating to a cadre of followers that, while minute (under 1,700) in comparison to that of, say, an influencer and model like Kendall Jenner (169 million), could easily pass for the membership roster of some exclusive spot like the Groucho Club in London.
Run down the list of his followers and you’ll find the painters Tracey Emin and Jack Pierson; the New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast; Luke Syson, the director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England; a smattering of European nobilities with surnames like Windisch-Graetz and Schönbrunn; fashion folk like the hatter Philip Treacy and the Schiaparelli designer Daniel Roseberry; the art photographer Roe Ethridge; the critic and curator Hilton Als; the film director Whit Stillman; and, yes, Madonna.
As the posts lit up Instagram feeds throughout the long drears of lockdown, rg_bunny scattered random clues to a possibly fictional identity — references to California, to insider London, to a swank father who favored custom silk shirts from Sulka, to stints in rehab at the Connecticut psychiatric hospital Silver Hill and to a childlike fascination with rabbits in all forms, evidenced in the name of the account, with its allusions to celebrated people nicknamed Bunny. (Bunny Mellon and Edmund Wilson, to name two.)
“Whoever it is, he or she is clearly an educated person, whether formally or self-educated,” said William Norwich, the editor of fashion and interior design at the Phaidon Press. For Mr. Norwich, doping out the mystery of rg_bunny1’s identity became a “fun society guessing game.”
“No one knows who it is, and everyone I know is talking about it — even Carl Bernstein is obsessed,” Mr. Norwich added, referring to one-half of the duo that famously uncovered the source that brought down the Nixon presidency.
Following rg_bunny1, said James Reginato, a writer-at-large for Vanity Fair, can be as addictive as bingeing on “Bridgerton” or “Gossip Girl.” “It’s a pretty fancy list,” Mr. Reginato said of his diagraming of rg_bunny1’s list of followers. rg_bunny1 scatters clues to his (or her) identity at random. Often, like all red herrings, they work to divert you from the source.
“There’s a lot of range in the list, but a lot of it is very specific,” Mr. Reginato said, referring to an art world/fashion/society matrix. “It’s fascinating because of how few reliably personal clues he leaves.”
Or are they? “You rarely get any personal information, though there are the references to rehab,” Mr. Reginato said. “You get the sense that he — if it is a he — is in recovery but still a compulsive, like he’s given up booze for Instagram.”
For Matthew Yokobosky, the senior curator of fashion and culture at the Brooklyn Museum, the rg_bunny1 account reads as “very gay and art-centric and speaks to people obsessed with things like Warhol, Callas or Isabella Blow that we worship and enjoy being reminded existed.” Like a diaristic picture puzzle built of fragments from a magpie sensibility, the account is equal parts Artforum, Tatler and Interview, and Modern Painters, Mr. Yokobosky said.
Speaking by telephone from the California desert, the painter Jack Pierson recently took a stab at identifying rg_bunny1. “I’ve decided he’s some art/fashion writer from Germany or something, somebody that, before the internet, was on local weird art TV in Berlin,” said Mr. Pierson, whose occasional direct message exchanges with rg_bunny1 ended abruptly one day when he posed the obvious question. “I asked, ‘Who is this?’” He stopped answering. It’s just annoying that he won’t ever reveal himself, although part of what I should let go of is guessing who this person is.”
If no one seems to know, many hold theories. Surely it is David Rimanelli, some said, before a Timothy Greenfield-Sanders portrait of Mr. Rimanelli, an Artforum critic, turned up on the rg_bunny1 feed. (“Uh, no,” Mr. Rimanelli said in response to a reporter’s query. “People ask me this every week.”)
Or it is the worldly and socially well-connected Los Angeles painter Robyn Geddes (“I asked if we knew each other, and he sort of evaded the question,” Mr. Geddes wrote of the Instagram sphinx, adding that “he won’t answer a question directly.”) Conceivably, it is the globe-trotting art dealer Tobias Meyer.
Or perhaps, suggested Christine Coulson, a novelist and rg_bunny1 follower, “It’s a very precocious 13-year-old.”
Like many on rg_bunny1’s list, Ms. Coulson has no clear recollection of how rg_bunny1 first appeared in her Instagram feed. Once linked to him on social media, she began to consider the account, with its torrent of posts, either a form of visual catnip or a nuisance.
“I follow, like, 600 people, and some days half my feed is rg_bunny1,” Ms. Coulson said. “For whatever reason, he has great art, great people and is clearly speaking to a certain generation,” she said, particularly when posting about characters like the Karl Lagerfeld muse Ines de la Fressange or the storied eccentric Marquesa Casati, or Andy Warhol’s business manager, the elegant and self-invented Texan Fred Hughes. “And there’s no nature, no food and no selfies, and for me that’s a big plus.”
Intrigued by personal clues that may well be diversions or feints — references to Pacific Palisades, Calif., in the ’70s, to an accidental apartment fire at the Police Building in New York, to Ian Schrager as a “dream boyfriend” — Ms. Coulson also attempted to divine rg_bunny’s identity, though without success. “I asked, of course, and there was silence,” she said.
“The truth of the matter,” said Peter Bacanovic, a digital brand consultant, “is it would take a bunch of us to track him — semantically, semiotically and actually.”
Or else it would take someone with social media savvy, an intimate familiarity with the works of Patricia Highsmith and the patience to pore through ancient blog posts on the Wayback Machine.
While scanning the rg_bunny1 account one day last winter, Alissa Bennett, a writer Vogue once called a “true crime scene zine queen,” in writing about “The C Word,” a death-obsessed podcast she created with Lena Dunham, was nagged by the sense she had seen certain of the rg_bunny1 images and motifs collated in another social media account. Working at a succession of art galleries in Manhattan, Ms. Bennett has developed an acute ability to inventory artworks in her head.
“Before he started using the Caravaggio, his profile picture was a Ryan McGinley photo that I happen to know this one guy had purchased from Team Gallery,” Ms. Bennett said. “Then he started posting all those Rineke Dijkstra photos,” she said, referring to a series by the celebrated Dutch artist depicting a young soldier in the French Foreign Legion. “Who posts Rineke Dijkstra?”
As it happens, somebody had. Turning to the digital archive, Ms. Bennett bored down into a defunct blog maintained a decade ago by an art world professional with the feeling she was playing a bizarre game of Memory. “There were so many doubles,” Ms. Bennett said.
There were the Dijkstra portraits, of course, but also a well-known 1990 snap by the British social chronicler Dafydd Jones of Brooke Astor and Iris Love attending a dachshund party, along with numerous images of dogs from a breed that is a recurrent rg_bunny1 theme. There were doubles of Karen Kilimnik drawings, of Matisse drawings, of flower paintings by Henri Fantin-Latour.
“Not just the artist but the exact work,” she said. “I mean, what are the chances of two people posting the same Tina Chow picture on the back of the same Anne Slater picture?” she said, referring to the Manhattan socialite known for her trademark blue-tinted glasses. “The selections and the flourishes were too specific. It was like something lifted from ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley.’”
In a further quirk, the old blog posts made repeated reference to biographical details uncannily similar to those of rg_bunny1, most saliently to him having been partly educated in Canada, romantically linked to an artist (now seemingly deceased) with the initials R.G., and preoccupied, of course, with images of bunny rabbits in art.
What Ms. Bennett logically did next was to write direct messages to rg_bunny1, asking if he were, in fact, who she thought. That is, an Ivy-educated arts administrator with a varied résumé notable for stints at a blue-chip contemporary design gallery, a specialized Upper East Side museum and another museum that is unquestionably world-class. “Finally, I asked directly, ‘Is this you?’” she said.
There followed a long silence before the person who either is, or is not, rg_bunny1 at last replied.
“Oh, I didn’t read this,” rg_bunny1 wrote. “Hi!”
That was the end of their exchange, as rg_bunny1 seemed to freeze in place, perhaps feigning invisibility, as prey animals like rabbits (and so many social media avatars) reflexively do.
Later this reporter also scoured the old blogs and found dozens of echoing references and images. Attempting to reach him, I wrote direct messages to another Instagram account associated with the putative creator of the defunct look-alike blog and then emails to a personal Gmail account.
For a time there was no movement at all. Then, suddenly, a flurry of messages from rg_bunny1 appeared.
“This account is most definitely not maintained” by any person with either the first or last names provided,” this person replied to me in an Instagram message, followed by another so consistent, in its arch incredulity, with the tone of rg_bunny1’s posts that it may as well have been an autograph.
“I’m confused, nonplused,” wrote rg_bunny1 before vanishing again into the Instagram underbrush.
Business and culture have conspired to kill off a passé persona.
On Monday, when the fashion world will gather in Paris for the first live couture shows since the pandemic began and assorted editors will take their socially distanced seats en masse, the front row — that power chain of often instantly recognizable individuals who set the tone for trends and style setters for the world — will look very different.
Not just because many editors and influencers have to remain in their various home countries because of travel regulations, but because so many of the most familiar faces, the women and men who have dictated style from on high for lo these many years, are no longer in the jobs they once embodied.
Emmanuelle Alt, the editor of French Vogue for a decade, with her sweep of rock star hair obscuring one eye, her skinny jeans, spike heels and military jackets? Gone.
Angelica Cheung, the editor of China Vogue for 16 years, with her asymmetrical bob? Gone.
Christiane Arp, the editor of German Vogue for 17 years, with her platinum bun and penchant for Jil Sander? Gone.
The changes in leadership of the world’s most famous fashion magazines were prompted by a consolidation of content in titles across the globe, spurring the departure (voluntary or forced) of a swath of their most celebrated editors. And though it seemed like a case of the night — or season — of the long knives at Vogue’s owner, Condé Nast, it was in fact more like the final paroxysm of a transformation that has been taking place for a long time and that permeates the entire glossy universe.
The mold of the imperial editor, established in the early part of the 20th century when Edna Woolman Chase of American Vogue and Carmel Snow of Harper’s Bazaar first claimed their fiefs, has been broken, probably irrevocably. It has disappeared with the Town Cars and, perhaps, the dodo. The last example standing is also the most famous of them all: Anna Wintour, now as global chief content officer of Condé Nast, ironically presiding over the decimation of the job she defines.
The new guard of editors (many chosen by Ms. Wintour) is younger and less familiar, but significantly more diverse, possessed of a very different aura and set of priorities.
There’s Edward Enninful of British Vogue, Radhika Jones of Vanity Fair and, at Hearst Magazines, Samira Nasr of Harper’s Bazaar — all three the first nonwhite editors of their storied titles. There’s Margaret Zhang, an influencer who took over Vogue China earlier this year, becoming, at 27, the youngest editor of all global Vogue titles.
And there’s a set of hungry, young, digitally native editors, like Lindsay Peoples Wagner of The Cut and the newly appointed Versha Sharma of Teen Vogue. They are voices demanding inclusivity and representation in ways the old guard never did. And they represent a cultural power shift that could potentially shape a lot more than fashion.
Since the millennium, fashion has famously had something of a revolving-door policy when it comes to designers, with companies swapping them out practically every three years, elevating the brand over the individual. In contrast, the front row seemed cast in amber.
Indeed, it was so unchanging that people who occupied those seats started to merge in the public mind with their positions, until their silhouette was practically a symbol and their job title shorthand for a certain type of leader: demanding, diva-like, ruling yea or nay on styles and stars with impunity; on occasion issuing edicts that verged on the absurd.
Diana Vreeland set the tone when she ran Vogue from 1963 to 1971, in part thanks to the combination of extreme personal style — black lacquered bob, slash of red lipstick — and extreme diktats. (“Rinse your blond child’s hair in dead champagne to keep it gold.”)
It was later adopted in varying ways by such names as André Leon Talley, often the only Black man on the front row, who would sweep into every show in a caftan and was known for his edicts (“It’s a famine of beauty!”), and Carine Roitfeld, the former editor of French Vogue, who wore only pencil skirts, black eyeliner and the spikiest of shoes.
And it was enshrined forever by Kay Thompson, as an editor in “Funny Face,” shrieking, “Think pink!” and Meryl Streep in “The Devil Wears Prada,” forever tossing her coat on her assistant’s desk while not bothering to learn the young woman’s name.
“Magazines were once vehicles of inspiration into which a lot of expertise was poured, and editors were celebrities,” said Joanna Coles, who edited Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan and was briefly Hearst’s chief content officer before leaving the company in 2018. “They became the human extension of their publication, arbiters of style at a time when it was completely undemocratic, and hierarchical, so they had to dress in a way that reflected the brand.”
Instead of crowns, they had hairdos. “Basically we had our own fiefdoms, so we could be empresses,” said Alexandra Shulman, the editor of British Vogue from 1992 to 2017.
It was such a potent caricature that it became part of the cartoon landscape of our times. It was almost as if in order to be the editor in chief of a major style publication, you had to adopt the persona to succeed. Indeed, the nuttier and more dramatic the antics, the more connected to the myths of the “creative” the editor could seem.
But a combination of business crises and cultural shifts has changed all that. At their best, magazines have always been a reflection and distillation of the world around them. That is still true, even as what they reflect is the fracturing of their own system.
In an age increasingly dominated by Instagram, TikTok and influencers, publishers could no longer claim to be the authoritative gatekeepers of the worlds of high fashion and Hollywood, and no one wanted to wait a month for their cultural or fashion fix anyway.
By 2017, the #MeToo movement had pulled back the velvet curtain to reveal the complicity of the fashion world in the abuse of its least powerful citizens — its models — and the noblesse oblige of the editors began to look more like exploitation and willful blindness.
Consumers, especially the younger ones, were more inclined to trust the opinions of their friends than some haughty figure in an office far, far away.
Then came the pandemic. As stores closed and shopping came to a halt, fashion advertising fell by as much as 50 percent as luxury brands, which endured their worst year in history in 2020, slashed budgets.
And then the industry was forced to confront its own history of racism, as the social justice protests spurred by George Floyd’s murder grew into a worldwide movement that prompted a reckoning inside many of the most recognizable publishing houses, including Condé Nast and Hearst.
“The fact is, most very creative leaders have a dictatorial side that rallies people, inspires them and scares them a little,” said Tina Brown, who spent the 1980s and ’90s editing Tatler, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker.
But while once that was seen as an asset, it began to look like a problem. Assistants were more likely to rebel if they had a comb thrown at their head. When Glenda Bailey, the editor of Harper’s Bazaar for almost 19 years, stepped down in 2020, it was in part because her history of tempestuous behavior, including belittling staff members, had become unacceptable to management.
It’s no longer only about “representing the ideas of one editor anymore,” said Phillip Picardi, who founded Them, Condé Nast’s first L.G.B.T.Q. platform, in 2017, before departing the company a year later. It’s about “representing your audience. It’s not so much about a cult of personality anymore.”
Nor is it even about a physical magazine. An editor’s main responsibility is no longer the alchemy of a monthly print issue, which is increasingly as much of a relic as the imperial persona; now it involves a multiplatform juggling of mutating websites, social media accounts, podcasts and other digital properties.
Little wonder, perhaps, that at Condé Nast some of the most storied positions, including editor in chief positions at Vogue Paris and Vogue Germany, are not expected to be filled at all. In April, the company published a letter from top editors outlining “a collective vision” for a sweeping overhaul of its famously hierarchical and protective global operations.
“We used to work in silos, tending to our individual titles and often competing with each other — ultimately it’s self defeating,” the letter said.
Now newer editors in chief, like Samantha Barry of Glamour (who took the job in 2018), reflect a collaborative spirit between magazines at Condé Nast. Ms. Barry called it a “sharing economy,” in which editors support one another on weekly Zoom calls with Ms. Wintour or via text messages. (Of the editors-only group chat, Ms. Jones of Vanity Fair said, “it is a great resource and it gives me great joy.”)
“I think that might be a bit different to the way it was in the ’90s,” Ms. Barry said.
But the editors are sharing content, too — cover shoots and interviews — a strategy that has been underway since 2018 and that was also employed at Hearst (where different editions of Harper’s Bazaar share content, for example) and the former Time Inc. (where the international InStyles also shared).
In practice, this has meant a marriage of the previously separate sister companies of Condé Nast and Condé Nast International, centralizing power in New York and creating redundancies. Many magazine employees interviewed for this article have been told they have to reapply for their roles, and said that their titles were expecting significant layoffs, to be announced in July.
This is not the case for titles like Vogue Scandinavia, which will have its debut in August and is one of 14 Vogues that are licensed by Condé Nast to regional partners and therefore not under the company’s editorial control. (In the curious case of Vogue Netherlands, the license is held by the local arm of Hearst.) Titles like Vogue Paris, Vogue Spain and Vogue Germany will likely fall under the control of Edward Enninful, who became Vogue’s European editorial director in December. Some top spots, like the editorship of Vogue India, are unfilled.
The cost savings are obvious, but though the internal letter said the pandemic had shown how operations can be “more decentralized, more democratic, open to more voices than we’ve been in the past,” critics of the decision charge that the planned consolidation risks the opposite: that by centralizing power in the hands of a few, it devalues local voices, cultures and nuance, and turns the editors into figureheads, often with big followings on social platforms but little actual decision-making power.
“You can’t just be a symbol,” said Ms. Shulman, of British Vogue. “If you don’t really have independence and you don’t have authority, what are you?”
Mr. Picardi, who was briefly the head of Teen Vogue, noted the risks of the “glass cliff” effect, whereby executives may be more willing to extend opportunities to a more diverse pool of job candidates at moments when there is nothing left to lose.
“It felt like we were being invited to a party, but once we got there, it was actually a funeral,” said Mr. Picardi, who is headed to Harvard Divinity School in the fall. “And we were totally ill dressed for the occasion.”
There are those who mourn the end of the empires and the loss of associated power (that’s history for you), but it is also true that with creative destruction comes opportunity — and the chance to rethink what is relevant.
It was Lindsay Peoples Wagner’s “childhood dream” to become an editor, she said. And she became one in 2018, running Teen Vogue until earlier this year, when she was named editor of The Cut. But for a long time, she didn’t think she’d get there.
“I always felt like I would never become an editor in chief, because I’ve always been incredibly unapologetically Black in any space, and a lot of what fashion has done is diversity on the surface,” said Ms. Peoples Wagner, who in 2020 co-founded the Black in Fashion Council, a group aimed at advancing Black professionals in the industry.
“I felt like an outsider, and like I wasn’t good enough or smart enough or cool enough, et cetera, because I didn’t have all the money and I didn’t have all the things that I felt like were what a traditional editor really came from.”
Today Ms. Peoples Wagner is one of the most recognizable faces of the new guard: a group of editors who may not have the same extreme personas (or budgets) of their predecessors, but also don’t really care.
Instead they care about inclusion, representation and accountability. The biggest threat to their reputation is being seen as elitist or egocentric or a bad boss — the traits most associated with the old guard of magazine editors. When younger people ask her for advice, Ms. Peoples Wagner tells them to “be hungry to do the work and less thirsty for attention.”
“It’s never been about solely my opinion or my vision,” she said. “I’ve been very explicit in this job and my last job at Teen Vogue: We’re a team. You don’t work for me, we work together.”
When Ms. Sharma took over Teen Vogue, that was the kind of editor she thought about emulating, not any of the famous “old-school greats, or however they were perceived,” she said.
“I want to be seen as a thoughtful leader — somebody who is thoughtful about the editorial decisions that we’re making, who we’re putting on the covers, and then also internally with the treatment of staff,” Ms. Sharma said. “I think that’s something the new generation of editors is more openly concerned with than the past: actually being good managers.”
The new guard isn’t made up of only millennials. Those at the top of some of the biggest magazines — Mr. Enninful, Ms. Nasr and Ms. Jones — have all worked in publishing for decades but approached their roles with a similar viewpoint about inclusion.
“I wanted to do the job as myself, not in imitation of someone else,” said Ms. Jones, who started at Vanity Fair in late 2017, and whose first priority was to “modernize the magazine” by changing its roster of cover stars, contributors, photographers and staff. “I didn’t want to try to imprint myself on some model of what an editor in chief had been, because I think that part of the goal for me was to expand the notion of who might be an editor in chief.”
The new guard also does not want the lifestyle presented in their publications to seem overly aspirational or exclusive. When Ms. Barry became the editor of Glamour, she promised coverage to any designer who extended their size range.
She followed in the footsteps of Atoosa Rubenstein, the editor of Seventeen from 2003 to 2006, who was one of the first to put “real girls in her pages, moving away from what she called the “very white and skinny and model-y and airbrushed” standard in magazines.
At the time, Ms. Rubenstein was “toeing the line between old school and new school,” she said. Her concerns over inclusivity ended with her readers, not her staff.
“I let corporate sort of handle that end of things, and my eye was almost 100 percent on the product,” said Ms. Rubenstein. “I think I would be different today.”
Still, Ms. Rubenstein said she misses the days of editors having big personalities and distinct styles. “Those were our heroes and our icons, and I don’t think that’s the case anymore,” she said. “This layer of aspiration and dreamery has lifted.”
As a pre-recession editor, she also misses her driver, her regular hair and makeup appointments ahead of TV appearances and events, her clothing allowance.
The youngest editors of the new guard have no such perks. Though they’re aware of the bottomless expense accounts and glamorous big-budget travel of old, they aren’t clamoring for that part of the job.
This month, instead of boarding a flight to Paris for the haute couture shows, Ms. Peoples Wagner is heading to the Midwest.
“I’m going home to see my family,” she said. “I need to be around regular people.”
Hosted by Daniel Jones and Miya Lee; produced by Julia Botero and Elyssa Dudley, with help from Hans Buetow; edited by Sara Sarasohn; music by Dan Powell; mixed by Corey Schreppel.
More episodes ofModern Love
What are the boundaries of an open marriage? And what are the boundaries of an open marriage when your wife’s boyfriend has an accident that puts him in a coma? Do you introduce yourself to the hospital workers as the patient’s girlfriend’s husband?
Wayne Scott and his wife, Elizabeth, have a “creative arrangement,” as Wayne puts it in his Modern Love essay. They share the children, the cats and the mortgage, but they have permission to see other people romantically.
On today’s episode, we hear Wayne’s story about an accident that tested the parameters of their marriage, and we talk to Wayne and Elizabeth about how they have navigated their relationship in the years since.
Hosted by: Daniel Jones and Miya Lee
Produced by: Julia Botero, Elyssa Dudley and Hans Buetow
Edited by: Sara Sarasohn
Executive Producer: Wendy Dorr
Music by: Dan Powell
Mixed by: Corey Schreppel
Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
Special thanks: Julia Simon, Mahima Chablani, Bonnie Wertheim, Anya Strzemien, Joanna Nikas, Choire Sicha, Lisa Tobin, Sam Dolnick and Ryan Wegner at Audm.
Thoughts? Email us at modernlovepodcast@nytimes.com.
Want more from Modern Love? Read past stories. Watch the TV series and sign up for the newsletter. We also have swag at the NYT Store and two books, “Modern Love: True Stories of Love, Loss, and Redemption” and “Tiny Love Stories: True Tales of Love in 100 Words or Less.”
At Home|The At Home and Away Summer Playlist
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/30/at-home/newsletter.html
At Home and Away
Your soundtrack for the season.
Welcome. On Monday afternoon, the temperature reached a record 117 degrees Fahrenheit in Salem, Ore. The recent heat wave in the Northwest is not “hot enough for ya?” weather or “cool off with a Popsicle” weather. It’s extreme weather — off-the-charts, as the team at The Upshot discovered when they set out to visualize the heat dome’s magnitude. If you’re somewhere excessively hot, the Well team has some advice for staying cool and safe. And The Times’s product recommendation site, Wirecutter, has recommendations for the best air conditioners and other tips for staying cool.
Whether you’re indoor-catting with the fan on high or lucky enough to be grilling outside, you might try Vallery Lomas’s take on her grandmother’s sweet tea, which you could brew while listening to the At Home and Away Songs of Summer 2021 playlist. Thanks to everyone who answered the call and sent us their personal anthems of the season. (Yes, you can still send yours and we’ll add it to the list.) I’ve been listening to the playlist for the past few days and it’s pretty great — a mix of irresistible new songs like Dua Lipa’s “Levitating” and Lorde’s “Solar Power” and summer classics like “Up on the Roof” and “Under the Boardwalk” by the Drifters.
Not all sounds of summer are found on music streaming services, of course. “I live in Kentucky where the Brood X cicadas have re-emerged and around here, at least, the song of the summer is the sound of everyone screaming when a cicada lands on their head,” wrote JD Mitchell from Louisville. For Karen Carriera in Groton Long Point, Conn., “The Hokey Pokey,” a dance favorite from her youth, will forever be her summer banger.
Cue up the playlist and let us know what you think.
Sam Sifton turned me on to the Merlin Bird ID app by Cornell Lab, a sort of Shazam for birdsong.
Take a tour of Betsey Johnson’s pink Malibu dream house.
And here’s Seals and Crofts performing “Summer Breeze” live on Burt Sugarman’s “The Midnight Special” in 1973.
Send us your song of this summer and we’ll add it to the playlist: athome@nytimes.com. Include your full name and location. We’re At Home and Away. We’ll read every letter sent. More ideas for leading a full and cultured life, at home and away, appear below. See you on Friday.
Business|Tennis Balls and Boxed Wine: What You Bought After the Covid Shot
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/30/business/covid-shot-impulse-buy.html
The 15 minutes after getting a Covid shot can be a time of profound emotion, a moment of relief or gratitude or release as you wait to make sure you don’t have a bad reaction to the vaccine.
So we were curious: If you got vaccinated in a pharmacy, did you wander the aisles while you waited, and if so, did you treat yourself to something impulsive or important or out of character?
We recently ask readers what they indulged in. We received hundreds of responses. You told us stories of celebration, practicality, and occasional mishaps — and we asked our photographer Kyle Berger to re-envision some of those stories. Here are a select few with your responses, edited and condensed for clarity.
What items did you buy during your observation period? I bought a can of Penn tennis balls and a four-pack of High Noon hard seltzers. I then went from the pharmacy to the tennis courts to meet a friend who was also vaccinated that day. We played a boozy match with sore arms, where we were both incredibly woozy and dry-mouthed. The next day was brutal.
Why did you buy these items? Celebratory! We were excited to get out in the world and be active together after getting the vaccine. We probably should’ve waited a few days before the side effects subsided.
— Thea Traff, Los Angeles
What items did you buy during your observation period? As a twist on this question, I did not buy something for myself in the moment but bought a big pile of gourmet chocolate bars for the staff giving shots. I tied the pile in a big Aqua ribbon and gave it to the man who administered my shot. I asked him to share it with the others.
Why did you buy these items? Everyone working to vaccinate our community is a hero. I’m grateful for what they do and what they put up with!
— Kari Nelsestuen, Portland, Ore.
What items did you buy during your observation period? Since lockdown, I became a chocoholic. It started innocently. While waiting my 15, I fell upon a Russell Stover display. I ripped open the cellophane of the incredible peanut clusters. I felt no guilt as I went through the box. Paying for my half-eaten dinner, the cashier offered me tissues to clean off the chocolate smears on my lips and fingers. Thank you, Moderna.
Why did you buy these items? Oh, I celebrated. I never bought chocolate prepandemic.
— Kevin Larkin, Los Angeles
What items did you buy during your observation period? Reese’s peanut butter cups and old-fashioned hair curlers!
Why did you buy these items? Totally celebratory. I RARELY eat a peanut butter cup, and because I have crazy long Covid hair I wanted to give it some pizazz.
— Gab Carbone, Lambertville, N.J.
What items did you buy during your observation period? Drakkar Noir perfume.
Why did you buy these items? I have no idea why I bought it — probably something subconscious about being able to smell things without a mask. The hilarious thing is, I haven’t worn this perfume since 2002, and it smells like a teenage version of me going to the club for the first time.
— Y.V., Miami, Fla.
What items did you buy during your observation period? Special organic “greenie” treats and bones for my dogs and a soon-regretted bag of Lay’s Classic chips I ate in the car in the parking lot. The dogs seemed pleasantly surprised — although one ended up puking a bright green puddle on my mom’s new rug soon after because of the unfamiliar snacks and a sly meal in the compost pile.
Why did you buy these items? I felt very emotional and grateful, and I wanted to spread the joy to my furry loved ones.
— Ariana Lewis, Atlanta
What items did you buy during your observation period? A die-cast 1963 Volkswagen Bus toy by Welly (blue with peace, love and flower decals).
Why did you buy these items? During the pandemic, when the walls of our house seemed to close in, I enjoyed a long-running fantasy about buying an old VW van, loading up my two small girls and heading out on the road for weeks, maybe months (an extended version of the real summer car trips I made with my mom and brother when I was a kid). As I waited in line for my first shot at a CVS, I found myself standing beside a display case of Welly vehicles — and only one of the dozens on the shelves was a VW bus. I took it as a sign of some sort — not so much that I should, in fact, buy an old van, but that our world would soon open up again.
— Diane McKay, Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.
What items did you buy during your observation period? Bota Brick boxed wine ($9.99 on sale!), matchbox toy truck for my 2-year-old, three different kinds of hand lotion, Band-Aids.
Why did you buy these items? Boxed wine for celebration (also because it was on sale). Hand lotion because my poor hand skin is tired of being washed, Band-Aids because they were just there, and the toy truck for fun.
— Jennie Eldon, Corvallis, Ore.
The aperitifs arrived as the Capri sun dipped into an orange band across the Gulf of Naples and a couple on the terrace talked about how quiet the island had become. The hotel felt empty, and its barman, in elegant suit and tie, interrupted his revelry about the prepandemic days to shoo off a sea gull deprived of its usual tourist-scrap banquet.
“The birds,” the barman explained, “are famished.”
After more than a year of lockdown, the Italian islands off Naples are also hungry for visitors and a return to the bustling summer seasons that are their economic lifeblood. In May, glamorous Capri, that Italian Epcot of jet-set dreams, and its smaller, gritty sister, Procida, which feels like a neighborhood of Naples drifted out to sea, had managed to become among Italy’s first fully vaccinated islands. Prime Minister Mario Draghi urged travelers “to book your holidays in Italy.”
Those travelers who do have a chance of hitting a rare, perhaps once-in-a-lifetime sweet spot in which thinner crowds, wonderful weather and more motivated, vaccinated hospitality make for memorable stays. To be on the islands these days is to be present for the stirring of great beauties who, having slept late, are fully rested, rearing to go and full of aspirations about what the future might hold.
But the two islands want very different things. On Capri, luxury restaurant and hotel owners thirst for a return to V.I.P. normalcy, while some residents hope a momentary relief from the cruise ships might trigger a re-appreciation of the island’s biodiversity and local culture. On Procida, where the 17th-century pastel-colored fishing village has served as the picturesque Italian postcard backdrop for movies like “The Talented Mr. Ripley” and “Il Postino,” locals are both hopeful and wary that their inoculations and a surprise designation as Italy’s Capital of Culture for 2022 will thrust them into the upper echelon of southern Italian destinations.
Despite having over time visited nearly every corner of Italy, I had never been to either. Capri’s crowds and schlock-and-awe reputation scared me off. Procida was eclipsed on my radar by its larger neighbor, Ischia. But their Covid-free status, proximity to my home in Rome, and need to get away after a brutal year all added up to it being time to go.
On that first night in Capri, my wife and I walked along winding bougainvillea-perfumed paths devoid of luxury shoppers and Limoncello-buzzed crowds. We looked nervously at all the shuttered restaurants and the clocks on our phones. Back then, curfew still fell over the island and all of Italy at 10 p.m. Like the sea gulls, we were hungry.
In the center of town, we followed some voices around a corner to the Hangout pub. Locals talked about school, and children ran around. We reluctantly ordered burgers and, as if characters in a Patricia Highsmith story, bumped into friends from Rome whose romantic getaway had turned into a reckoning over whether he cared more about her or his sailboat. Then their friend, the son of an Italian diplomat who had summered at his family villa in Capri for decades, turned the corner with his wife. We were suddenly a pod.
“Capri is coming back different, stronger,” Lorenzo Fornari, the Capri veteran, explained to me. He spoke rapturously about the Zagara orange blossoms growing atop the island’s towering Mount Solaro that he uses to flavor Solaro, the artisanal gin he had started making with local farmers.
A couple of days later I visited him in his terraced garden filled with kiwis, figs, lemons (one of which he plucked from a tree and used as a map to explain the island’s geography), wild fennel, even banana leaves.
“I swear,” he said. “Everything grows on this island.” A test batch of the spirits had just arrived from the distillery, and he dropped a sprig of rosemary into a glass of it before a final taste test. He approved and talked about how Capri needed more such sustainable projects, and how he worked with local artisans and a cooperative of farmers in Anacapri, the much larger, and less polished, part of an island, which, he said, had “a lot to offer.”
An exorbitant taxi ride across the island brought me to Anacapri, where a line of schoolchildren in uniform wished “buon appetito” to the people lunching in the garden of Gelsomina, one of the first spots on the island to serve the famously airy caprese ravioli, cheese-stuffed pasta sweetened with their garden’s tomatoes. As a waiter explained to a lone group of tourists that the island was usually overcrowded, his sister, Gelsomina Maresca, said “We are hoping that the Americans come back.” Just not too many of them, she added, as her mother cut baby artichokes in the kitchen. “Anacapri is getting bigger but we hope it will never arrive at the level of Capri. It’s too commercial. We’re authentic.”
Authenticity, of course, means different things to different people. Others in the fashionable center of the island argued that tourism and hospitality, starting with the Emperor Tiberius 2,000 years ago, was in Capri’s blood and that, for all its natural beauty, the island was not without its prodigal guests.
“What a pleasure to hear from you,” Nicolino Morgano, 64, the owner of the Scalinatella, a sumptuous boutique luxury hotel, said into the phone behind his front desk. He promised the return customer her usual room and impeccable service. Capri, he said to the woman on the phone, “is ready to give you the usual emotions.”
“People keep calling and saying they are coming and that “I want my table,” said Francesco De Angelis, 55, whose family owns the venerable La Capannina restaurant. Days before reopening, four generations of the family, all vaccinated, sat in their quiet dining room, surrounded by clean glasses, photos of famous patrons such as Dustin Hoffman, and told stories about others, including Michael Douglas and Kirk Douglas, before him. They could feel Capri’s energy coming back.
“It’s joy, joy, joy,” Mr. De Angelis said.
Italy’s culture ministry also had reawakening in mind when it chose nearby Procida, a low-slung volcanic island of nearly 4 square kilometers (about 1.54 square miles) and 10,000 people, as 2022’s Capital of Culture. Procida would “accompany us in the year of rebirth,” the culture minister said in a decision that prompted what the Procida mayor, Raimondo Ambrosino, told me was an “explosion of joy.”
Mr. Ambrosino, who was an extra in “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” said Procida, the first island in Italy to be fully vaccinated, had planned a dense schedule of cultural events that included the “regeneration” of abandoned places. The ruined 16th-century Palazzo D’Avalos, which in 1830 became a prison that ultimately held some of Italy’s most hardened criminals until it closed in 1988, would become a cultural center. The old lighthouse could be a museum about the surrounding sea life. The old medieval walled Terra Murata town at the northern tip of the island, where the Abbazia San Michele Arcangelo features a Nativity scene made from shells, could be spruced up.
But really, he said, they had no intention to make any big changes.
“We don’t have to do anything new,” Mr. Ambrosino said as he reclined in the shabby City Hall against an open window facing the sea. Maybe the national attention, government funds and additional tourist dollars could be used to refurbish the island’s many ruined buildings into new Airbnbs, he said, but there wasn’t any appetite for luxury hotel complexes. “They tried to build one once,” he said. “And it came to a bad end.”
If Capri is stained by decadence, Procida is marred with decay. But there is a Havana-like romance to its shabbiness, to the fallen plaster caught in chunks by nets above the altars or dusting the seats in the churches, to the older women with their forearms folded on windowpanes as they stare motionless at the sea, to the gray blotches left by disintegrating pastel facades that are like a Rorschach test on what type of Italy you see here. Is it run down or the real thing? Something to move beyond, or to keep at all costs?
Procida doesn’t seem sure either. The mayor acknowledges that the culture award would draw more tourists, but he says there are only so many ferries to bring them, and that the island nominated itself so that it could stay the same and “to tell our young people about our past so that they would understand they had a future.”
He saw Procida’s past, present and future as an authentic story of a seafaring people, where native sons, as they had for centuries, become fishermen and cruise and merchant ship captains. After long and often well-paid spells at sea, they would return to wild, almost imperial, gardens, fragrant with the lemon trees planted by their mariner ancestors who harvested citrus to fight scurvy at sea. But now those inhabitants favored oranges and apricots, angel’s trumpet flowers and broom. On land, they stroll unbothered down treacherous streets without sidewalks but filled with Vespas sputtering under portly drivers, tiny Ape trucks making deliveries of concrete, and hundreds of the whizzing electric bicycles, equipped with a little seat for a child or groceries, that have become the preferred mode of transportation.
“If anything,” Mr. Ambrosino said, “the Capital of Culture puts us too much in view.”
The last thing its locals wanted were crowds of tourists visiting discos, pubs and luxury boutiques to clog things up. God forbid anyone suggested they open up a tourist trap to sling coffee. “They want to be the guests. That’s why the rhythm is what it is. There’s no rush.”
But there was a rush for me. If the lack of crowds on Capri opened a brief window to see the big island as it once was, I wanted to see, and I wanted my children to see, Procida before the crowds came, before it disappeared and became, despite all the local resistance, another Capri.
In that regard, it did not disappoint. The window of our modest Airbnb was decorated with a typewriter because it was purportedly where Elsa Morante, the great Italian author, wrote her 1957 novel, “Arturo’s Island.”
“The Procidans are surly, taciturn,” Morante observed, adding, “The arrival of a stranger arouses not curiosity, but rather, distrust. If he asks questions, he is answered reluctantly because the people of my island don’t like their privacy spied on.”
All I spied through the bedroom window was a brood of hens and an incessantly noisy rooster, perched on the high branches of an orange tree. A path through the garden’s lemon groves led to a dilapidated outlook, its plaster of painted vines faded and fallen, that looked out onto the dark Chiaia beaches. To get to them, we walked through narrow alleys, down winding metal staircases or old concrete stairs as steep and straight as sluices.
We took an affordable boat ride around the island, with a stop for a dip in the cold, clear sea. To be honest, it was much less spectacular than a similar ride around Capri. There was no Blue Grotto. The Faraglioni of Procida are mere pebbles compared to the majestic rocks of Capri. The skipper in Capri had pointed out the cliff above which the Emperor Tiberius lived, and the Casa Malaparte, a favorite of fashion houses, which “doesn’t have paintings because the windows are the paintings,” he said. In contrast, our skipper in Procida shook his head at a concrete block with two tiny windows atop a small rise of Mediterranean scrub. “A squatter’s house, built overnight,” he said. “A travesty.”
At the Corricella fishing village, we grabbed fresh orange and lemon juice from La Locanda del Postino bar, where the movie was filmed. The mounds of white and brown fishing nets and lingering, leathery old men looked like props for another film. But the two fishermen bickering with one another for leaving a bucket on their boat were not acting.
“The people are going to go nuts,” said the chef at Caracalé when he finally inspected their haul of cod.
The food all over the island — from the cream-filled pastries in the form of ox tongues for breakfast to the nespolino nightcaps made from the seeds of loquats — is memorable, and compared to Capri, much more affordable.
At Caracalé, the bean and mussels soup was so good I asked if the mollusks floated in butter. (“Cream from the beans,” the waitress explained, looking at me like a crazy person.) At Da Girone, where the eponymous white-bearded owner danced with customers while his daughter took orders, the spaghetti with lemon pesto and mussels nearly distracted us from the sunset and the views of Ischia and Procida’s Vivara natural reserve, connected to the island by a small causeway that frustrated cyclists with a locked iron screen. At La Conchilglia da Tonino, the Speedo crowd walked in off the ashtray-colored sand for raw fish and pastas flavored with sardines and green peppers.
“We’re hoping that being the Capital of Culture will change things for the better,” said Sabrina Bevere, 28, a waitress at the restaurant. “We want Procida to come back stronger, and no longer be considered a minor, second-rate island behind Ischia and Capri.”
There are already a few charming boutique hotels. There’s, gasp, glamping. But change does not come easy here.
“We’re scared,” said Nunzia Frontino, 86, whose ground floor house opened right onto the Corricella harbor. She spent the morning standing on her small porch, looking out at the port through a pair of hanging pants set out to dry. She remembered when there was only one cafe, when the port was purely for fishing, when the sand stretched farther into the gulf. Now more modern aperitif bars offering artisanal beer and pink lady cocktails had opened up. A store with fabrics from India and an outlet in Rome sold dresses and bags. The pandemic had momentarily frozen things in place, but the summer, and the big year to come, promised to bring a transformative thaw. “I’m not going anywhere,” Ms. Frontino said defiantly.
Even Mr. Ambrosino, the mayor, seemed reluctant about talking up his town too much. Asked for recommendations on especially attractive spots to see, he shook his head.
“If they are our secrets, we have to keep them,” he explained. “You have to lose yourself here.”
That wasn’t hard to do. One evening, on the way to dinner, Google Maps led us astray as the side-view mirrors of Vespas, Fiats and electronic bikes nearly clipped us along the main road. We followed our phones into a warren of streets, and realized, with the help of locals who told us that we were lost, that we were indeed lost.
We finally found the Pergola restaurant, but it sat across the private property of a man with a famously grumpy reputation, judging from the reaction of the locals when he appeared. The driver of a taxi who stopped to offer us a ride actually hid behind his car door. But we explained our predicament to the landowner, and he grudgingly opened the gates of his property and led us toward the restaurant outside his back gate. Before letting us out, he took a quick detour to his garden of lemon trees. He hopped up and plucked one, as big and lumpy as a gnarled Nerf football, and gave it to my son.
He still has it.
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RADNOR, Pa.— This affluent 340-year-old township of 31,000 residents on the Main Line has long been a bastion of gentility and geniality. “The Philadelphia Story,” that arch drawing-room comedy starring Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn, was set in Radnor, and its public high school served as the inspiration for Rydell High in the film version of “Grease,” directed by a 1964 graduate, Randal Kleiser.
During the last year, however, a battle has been waged over the high school’s mascot: a Native American warrior known as the Radnor Red Raider.
Some alumni argue that there is nothing offensive about the name or the Native American imagery, adopted in the mid-1960s in honor of a beloved coach, Emerson Metoxen, a chief of the Oneida Tribe. “Red” refers to the school’s colors: red and white, meant to distinguish its teams from its Central League opponents, the Ridley Green Raiders.
But many students, with the backing of the majority of the school board, believe the moniker and the mascot are noninclusive at best, and racist at worst. The National Congress of American Indians, the American Psychological Association and the National Museum of the American Indian concur.
“Multiple studies prove that these mascots, which are stereotypes of Native American people, cause real damage,” said Paul Chaat Smith, a curator for the museum and a member of the Comanche Nation. “It affects self-image, self-confidence and self-worth, which is the opposite of the goal of the people who put forth these names in the first place.”
The controversy has revealed long-simmering conflicts within the constituency: Republicans vs. Democrats; longtime residents vs. transplants; whites vs. people of color; blue collar vs. white collar; even jocks vs. nerds. And it has brought out the high-school student in everyone involved, with name calling, finger pointing, public shaming and lawn sign stealing.
“We didn’t divide this community,” Susan Stern, the president of the school board, said during a virtual special meeting on the subject in May. “We revealed the divide.”
The school’s attachment to its mascot is obvious driving onto campus: Raider Road winds past the playing fields and buildings; the dugout at the baseball diamond reads “RADNOR RAIDERS” and school’s logo — a big “R” set in a circle trimmed with two feathers — painted large in white on a maroon wall. The enormous placard of a Native American warrior in profile that loomed over the football field bleachers for decades was only removed late last winter, when the school began a long overdue $29.7 million redesign of the stadium and fields to meet Americans With Disabilities Act requirements.
Radnor High School opened in 1893 and soon developed its team colors and symbol (which Mr. Kleiser employed for the fictional Rydell High). But the first known use of “Raiders” appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1934, according to a Radnor Township School Board report published in August 2020.
“No evidence has been found that the name or ‘red’ was inspired by or in reference to Native Americans, including the Lenape” — the Indigenous tribe active in the area — the report states. “Some believe the name may have been tied to the term ‘dry raiders’ that emerged during Prohibition.”
Chief Metoxen joined the faculty in 1943. Born in Green Bay, Wis., in 1899, he was in the Oneida Tribe’s Turtle Clan and had attended the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, a Native American boarding school in Carlisle, Pa. After serving in World War I and earning a master’s in education from Harvard, he led physical education programs and a steel company before being recruited by the Radnor school district to teach gym and coach football, basketball and baseball, guiding several teams to championships. He regularly lectured about Native American history and culture to local groups, such as the Daughters of the American Revolution and Cub Scouts, at times dressed in full Oneida regalia.
“Everyone loved him and called him ‘Chief,’” Mr. Kleiser remembered.
In the spring of 1964 — Chief Metoxen’s last season before he retired — Radnor High School’s student council held a contest to select a mascot to embody the Raider nickname. The student body chose a Native American, like their revered chief.
The student tapped to be the first “Raider” was sent by the school administration to a professional costumer in Philadelphia to be fitted in formal Native American dress: a caramel-suede tunic and pants, trimmed with fringe and beading, and a feathered headdress. The student was required to meet with Chief Metoxen to learn Native American dances, culture and heritage. During the inaugural season — fall of 1965 — the Raider appeared only at the football game against neighboring Lower Merion (one of the nation’s longest-running gridiron rivalries) and the pregame pep rally. In time, however, the Radnor Raider became a regular presence on the sideline, leading cheers and war chants.
“It was fun, I goofed off — that’s what a mascot is supposed to do,” recalled Dave Luce, a 60-year-old local entrepreneur and Radnor alum who served as the Raider in 1978. “Never a parent, never a student, never a teacher said anything about it being inappropriate. All I got was positive reinforcement.”
Back then, Radnor kids, most of whom were white — I was one, graduating in ’81 — played Cowboys and Indians and watched “The Lone Ranger” reruns on television. In the township’s elementary schools, we learned about the Lenni Lenape tribe and put on Thanksgiving plays. For athletic events, we were encouraged by teachers and administrators, most of whom were also white, to dress up in Native American-like gear and war paint.
Radnor Township School District has long prided itself as one of the top 10 best public schools in Pennsylvania — U.S. News and World Report currently ranks it No. 4 — and the high school has a 97 percent graduation rate. It also now has a far more diverse student body than during my time there. In the 2019-2020 school year, 42 percent of Radnor Township School District’s 2,661 students were BIPOC. Of those 1,138 students of color, four were classified as American Indian/Alaska Native.
In 2005, the American Psychological Association called for “the immediate retirement of all American Indian mascots, symbols, images and personalities by schools, colleges, universities, athletic teams and organizations,” citing research on the social identity development and self-esteem of young Indigenous people.
“These negative lessons are not just affecting American Indian students,” wrote Ronald F. Levant, former president of the A.P.A. “They are sending the wrong message to all students.”
As Mr. Smith of the National Museum of the American Indian points out: “There are no high school teams named Black People of Philadelphia. You don’t see the San Francisco Chinamen or the L.A. Chicanos. But you have hundreds and hundreds of Native American names.”
In Radnor, “at least since 2006, we have had concerns raised about the name and related imagery,” said Michael Petitti, the director of communications for Radnor Township School District. In 2013, the school retired the cheerleading personage, which, since Mr. Luce’s time, had acquired a cartoonish Native American bobblehead.
“This has been an issue for quite a long time and we’ve pushed it off,” Charles Madden, a board member and former co-captain of the Radnor football team, said then. “It’s bigger than the school community. It’s bigger than the high school.”
The ruling briefly “prompted a larger discussion” among board members, Mr. Petitti said. “But it did not take off. It was tabled and left there.” Radnor High School athletes continued to compete as Red Raiders, in uniforms emblazoned with the feathered logo. The marching band still played the “Tomahawk Chop” song at pep rallies and football games, and fans smeared war paint on their cheeks and noses.
Student opposition to the Raider name appeared in the school paper, The Radnorite, in 2016, and then again in 2018, when Anne Griffin, its outgoing editor in chief, condemned the “Tomahawk Chop”: “Native Americans have lived on this land for millenniums. Our ‘long standing tradition’ of the cheer is a mere few decades old.”
In early 2020, a cheerleader expressed her discomfort with the rallying cries to the school’s activism club. This led the club’s president, Audrey Margolies, Ms. Griffin and two other students, Ellie Davis and Reese Hillman, to form Radnor for Reform, dedicated to removing cultural references from the school’s mascot. They got little traction, however, until the controversy regarding the name of the N.F.L. team in Washington, following the murder of George Floyd.
“We couldn’t help but look around and see the national momentum going towards the issue of racial justice, and Native American mascots specifically,” Ms. Davis said.
Radnor for Reform was not the only such movement in the region. The Unionville-Chadds Ford School Board voted in August to discontinue the use of its high school team name, the Indian. B. Reed Henderson High School, in West Chester, had retired an American Indian mascot in 2006, but kept its nickname “Warriors.” Last winter, it replaced the imagery, inspired by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “The Song of Hiawatha,” with a knight.
This spring, Susquehannock High School dropped “Warriors” and Susquehanna Township nixed “Indians.” That left more than 1,000 school districts in the United States with Native-themed mascots, according to data from the National Congress of American Indians.
Among them is Pennsylvania’s Neshaminy School District, which according to its school board president, Marty Sullivan, has spent more than $400,000 in legal costs since 2013 to retain its nickname, the same as the Washington football team’s former name, viewed by many to be a racial slur. Earlier this month, the state appeals court ruled that the name does not violate Pennsylvania’s anti-discrimination law, and that the school could continue to use it for sports teams.
Radnor’s fellow Central League school, Ridley, adopted the Raider name in the mid-1930s to honor the Lenni Lenape tribe. In December, Ridley elected to keep “Raider.” “We haven’t had a mascot in several years,” Lee Ann Wentzel, the district’s superintendent, told The Delco Times. “The ‘Rocking R’ is our logo.”
Throughout the summer of 2020, Radnor for Reform, now 40-odd students, wrote letters to the school board. They spoke with academics, local Native American organizations and the National Congress of American Indians, then put their findings in a 40-page document. They bought old political campaign lawn signs from the League of Women Voters, painted them with the Radnor for Reform logo and “Retire the Raider” in red and white, and distributed them for free to supporters. “A lot were stolen,” Ms. Davis said. “I had five stolen from my house.”
Alumni got wind of the renaming effort and turned their Facebook page into a Raider forum. Like the concurrent presidential campaign, the debate quickly devolved into extreme polarization and mudslinging. Pro-Raiders called the Radnor for Reform students and their supporters “snowflakes.” Anti-Raiders charged that anyone who wanted to keep the Raider name, even without the iconography, was racist.
In early August, the school board held a special meeting that lasted more than four hours. Mr. Petitti read into the record some 140 letters and comments from students, alumni and community members, for and against the Raider name.
Most powerful was from Leslie Greenfield, the granddaughter of Chief Metoxen, on behalf of his descendants. “We understand that some wish to perpetuate the name and imagery to ‘honor’ my grandfather,” Ms. Greenfield wrote. However, she continued, “we would like to express our deep conviction that using Native American imagery along with the name ‘Raiders’ perpetuates racial stereotypes and should no longer be used anywhere, but particularly not in an educational setting. The name ‘Raiders’ has negative connotations — synonyms include pillager, warmonger and aggressor. In the 21st century, and particularly following the recent protests for racial justice, we all need to understand that associating raiders with Native Americans in general, or my grandfather in particular, perpetuates a negative stereotype that simply is no longer acceptable.”
In September, when Radnor schools were remote, the school board voted 9-0 to remove all Native American imagery and 8-1 to stop using the Raider name.
That set off a new wave of vitriolic exchanges on the Facebook alumni page and bullying — in cyberspace and in person.
“We’re pariahs,” said Maya van Rossum, an ’84 graduate and environmental advocate married to Dave Wood, a Radnor physics teacher and hockey coach whose mother taught preschool in the township. They have a son who is a rising sophomore and a daughter, Anneke, who graduated in 2015 and is now studying law. The family has publicly lobbied to remove the Raider name. One Facebook post suggested: “If you see this family at a restaurant, make them uncomfortable.”
Over coffee in Minella’s Diner, Anneke told of having her face painted at age 15 for the Lower Merion football game. “I thought it was OK because it was a school-sanctioned activity,” she said. “I know people who have been bullied for not wearing face paint.”
Now, nine years later, she said, “someone went into my Facebook account — I didn’t even know that photo was there — did a screenshot of it, and reposted it. And the response was, ‘So you’re racist, because you engaged in it, then.’”
Ms. Margolies, one of the Radnor for Reform founders, said that the pro-Raider side questioned the group’s motives. “The things people told us or called us: ‘White girls looking for a problem to fix,’ ‘performative activism,’ ‘You’re just doing this for your college applications.’ So much stuff,’” she said. (Ms. Margolies is half Korean, rows crew and was captain of the swim team.)
“Obviously, there are students who completely disagree, but there’s a limit to the hostility, since I might have to sit next to you in chemistry class, and we’re going to potentially be assigned together for a group project,” Ms. Griffin said. “A lot of the slurs and the vitriol that have been spewed has really come from adults — the alumni.”
During the January school board meeting, Ms. Stern compared the polemic to the riot that month at the U.S. Capitol. “I’m not at all likening anyone in our community to the people who were involved,” she clarified immediately. “I’m speaking about the dynamic.”
“That’s what made this go,” said Laura Foran, a class of 1979 graduate, 20-year employee of the school district and Keep the Raider supporter. “The president of the school board said at a public meeting that those who were for keeping the Raider name were no different than the Capitol rioters.”
The next day, there was a Change.org petition demanding Ms. Stern’s immediate resignation. It has more than 1,200 signatures to date. Ms. Stern is holding firm. “I believe then, as I do now,” she said in a statement to The Times, “that we must continue to come together as a community, regardless of our differences or disagreements, to move forward together.”
The board forged on, creating a Mascot Selection and Rebranding Committee of 42 teachers, alumni and students, including Ms. Davis, chosen from 140 applications. First order of business: soliciting the community for name suggestions.
Of the 1,315 submitted, 992 were for Raider. This was seen as “great news for the majority of the committee,” reported Cackie Martin, a sophomore committee member and alum offspring, in a Radnorite opinion piece stating she was the granddaughter of a Native American and did not consider “Raider” to be racist.
The administration reaffirmed that Raider would not be an option.
Pro-Raiders support grew more vehement. During meetings, a few people read dictionary definitions of the word “raider.” Others huffed about how much rebranding would cost (roughly $157,000, including uniforms, wrestling mats, and replacing the center of the gymnasium floor), and demanded to know who was going to pay for it (the school budget). On a Monday morning in late April, 80 to 100 students, organized in part by Ms. Martin, walked out of Radnor High School, and marched around a playing field, carrying signs reading “Change the Mascot … Keep the Name.”
Many of the protesters were members of the football team, including last season’s captain, Mark McKeon, 18. During a chat on the school’s baseball bleachers earlier this month, Mr. McKeon insisted that the football players respect their classmates’ antiracism efforts and don’t want to offend people. However, he said, “day in and day out, we bleed, we sweat, we cry for each other on the football, lacrosse and baseball field. We work really hard together for the school and for the Raider. And what we feel is that they’re trying to take that away from us — the hard work that we’ve put in.”
“We should be able to just keep the name Raider and make the mascot something like a pirate,” chimed in his friend Owen Lewandowski, 19 and the captain of the baseball team, who also protested.
Shortly after the walkout, Mr. Luce, the ’78 alum, wrote a Facebook post stating that he wholly agreed with the school board’s decision to retire the imagery. But he, too, wished the Raider name could have rebranded — “like the Oakland Raiders,” he said to me. “Some people made some positive references to me being a good Raider. And one gentleman wrote, ‘You must be white and a male.’ I was called a bigot. I didn’t respond.”
During the special meeting in May, the surely weary board heard a motion put forth by three members to reconsider the Raider name as one of the choices.
Nancy Monahan, who had been the lone vote to retain it in September, said she believed the Radnor community “fully supports retirement of the imagery,” but that the “name never had its day in court,” and excluding it from the choices was “not being inclusive.” Until the Raider “is allowed to be an option, it will continue to be an issue,” she said.
After five hours, the board voted 6-3 to not include the Raider name in the list of choices.
Perhaps one upside of the palaver is that Radnor residents have become more politically engaged. Typically sleepy board meetings now draw thousands of attendees, and four Republicans in the community are running for four seats held currently by Democrats, including Ms. Stern, that are up for re-election in November.
“We have lived here a long time but resent what’s happening to our town,” said Ms. Foran, the ’79 alum and one candidate, in a phone interview. “I don’t want to come off as a white supremacist. I want the Raider because it means something to me and because I’ve lived here for 60 years. It’s important to me. There are much larger diversity and inclusion issues in Radnor. Like, let’s get diversity on the teaching staff. Instead, we are spending all this time on a Raider name. It’s unconscionable.”
The committee whittled down the non-Raider nominees to 57, including Rangers, the fictional Rydell team name. After running the names by community focus groups — “a train wreck,” said Ms. Griffin, “made up of people who are most passionate about it and were never going to support the other opinion” — the committee cut the list to eight: Dragons, Griffins/Gryphons, Hawks, Phoenix, Rain Frogs, Raptors, Ruckus and the letter R.
From there, Radnor’s eighth to 12th graders viewed an explanatory PowerPoint in homeroom of the eight names and voted online for their top four. They chose: Griffins/Gryphons, Raptors, Ruckus and R.
On Friday, June 11, the same 1,500 students had their first round of final voting online. In the days preceding the vote, students lobbied for R, handing out “We R Radnor” buttons in school. Anti-Raider supporters claimed the R was a pro-Raider symbol, like a racist dog whistle.
At lunchtime on that rainy Friday, the Radnor for Reform foursome gathered behind the cafeteria, on their way to the senior barbecue in the upper parking lot, to reflect on how their campaign had impacted their school, their town, and their lives.
“I’ve learned how to work with people, how to listen to people, and it informed me on politics and the world,” said Ms. Margolies, who is heading to Emory University for pre-med.
“We put in the work and we made our voices heard, and our school board listened to us,” said Ms. Hillman, a rising senior who will be captain of the Radnor’s Ultimate Frisbee team next year. “And at the end of the day, they upheld the work that we’ve done, which is demonstrative of the fact that to create change you have to put in the work and stay vigilant.”
Last Monday, the students chose Raptors in a runoff with R. And one side, at least, was satisfied.
“The real way you go about political change is by doing the research, crafting documents,” said Ms. Griffin, who will study political science at Penn State this fall. “You can’t go against the system if you want to make change. You really have to work with the people who are making the decisions. That’s what we did best.”
The year 1969 was “pivotal,” says the Rev. Al Sharpton in “Summer of Soul,” a documentary about the Harlem Cultural Festival, a music extravaganza that took place over six weeks at the dawn of the Black Power Movement. “Where the Negro died and Black was born,” he said.
Now in theaters and premiering on Hulu on Friday, “Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)” is the directorial debut of Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, the drummer and co-leader of the Roots, a hip-hop group and the in-house band for “The Tonight Show.”
The acclaimed film was compiled from 40 hours of live footage from the festival, as well as news accounts and recent interviews with concertgoers and performers, including Stevie Wonder, Gladys Knight, Mavis Staples and Ray Barretto. They were all deeply impacted by a festival that took place in Mount Morris (now Marcus Garvey) Park from June 29 to Aug. 24, 1969.
Conceived in 1967 by the promoter Tony Lawrence as a series of Sunday-afternoon concerts, the festival in total drew more than 300,000 people. It attracted the support of John V. Lindsay, New York’s Republican mayor (whose guest appearance onstage makes it into the film), as well as many of the famous Black performers and activists of the era, such as Mahalia Jackson, Nina Simone, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, and Sly and the Family Stone.
Even though most of the festival was captured on film, only parts of it were aired on local television, and these concerts were soon upstaged by another festival that summer, two hours north of Harlem in Bethel, N.Y. — a festival best known as Woodstock.
The latter inspired a slew of films, notably Michael Wadleigh’s iconic 1970 documentary, “Woodstock,” and Barak Goodman’s 2019 retrospective, “Woodstock: Three Days That Defined a Generation.”
Yet footage from the Harlem festival sat unprocessed in the basement of the concert producer and videographer Hal Tulchin, who tried to garner network interest in an event that he colloquially called “Black Woodstock.” Before Tulchin died in 2017, the producer Robert Fyvolent reached out to him, and they began reviving interest in a documentary to be released on the festival’s 50th anniversary in 2019.
When Fyvolent and his fellow producer David Dinerstein approached Thompson to direct it, he responded with skepticism. How, he thought, could such a momentous event be lost to history?
By the time he saw the limited footage that Tulchin had digitized over the years, his incredulity turned into grief — realizing the cultural void that it could have filled if he and other members of the hip-hop generation knew it existed.
Thompson overcame his inexperience with the medium, and simply approached it as a storyteller, a formidable skill of his that comes as no surprise to fans of the Roots as well as to readers of his five books, including his 2013 memoir, “Mo’ Meta Blues.” (By then, Joseph Patel had signed on as a producer as well.)
In January, the film won the Grand Jury and Audience prizes in the nonfiction category at Sundance. But even more important, “Summer of Soul” feels right on time. Not only does the film remind us of the diverse cultures and people that thrive in Harlem, but it also humanizes Black people’s mourning in the face of violence and death. (Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated a year before the festival.)
And rather than present a myth of unrealized interracial harmony, the movie celebrates differences, be it in musical genres (the festival featured Latin jazz, gospel, psychedelic rock and more) or among the generations in the crowd.
Join Times theater reporter Michael Paulson in conversation with Lin-Manuel Miranda, catch a performance from Shakespeare in the Park and more as we explore signs of hope in a changed city. For a year, the “Offstage” series has followed theater through a shutdown. Now we’re looking at its rebound.
From his messy “Tonight Show” dressing room (he playfully called it “the ‘Sanford and Son’ junkyard”), Thompson spoke by video about how he immersed himself in the footage and how he hopes these performances will inspire Black artists today to be more radical and responsive to our times. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
When did you first learn about the Harlem Cultural Festival?
This is a two-parter. Part one is that I unknowingly, back in 1997, saw maybe two or three minutes of a Sly and the Family Stone performance from the festival. It was not a bird’s eye-view camera, and I couldn’t see the makeup of the audience. I saw the big giant word “Festival” behind them, and I was under the impression that this was from the ’60s and thought, “Maybe they’re in Switzerland or somewhere in Europe.” I thought that they were showing me something vintage because that was the theme of the restaurant I was at — the Little Soul Cafe in Tokyo.
Twenty years later, I received a note asking me to meet with my two future producers, Robert Fyvolent and David Dinerstein, about a Harlem cultural festival that was like a “Black Woodstock.” Instantly, the music snob in me said, “I’ve never heard of that.” So I looked it up online. It’s not on the internet, so I was highly skeptical. But, when they finally showed me the footage, I instantly recognized the backdrop for Sly and thought, “Oh God, this really did happen.” For nearly 50 years, this just sat in a basement and no one cared. My stomach dropped.
How did you approach turning six weeks of concert footage into a two-hour documentary?
I transferred 40 hours of footage on my hard drive, and I kept it on a 24-hour loop in my house. I have a device so I could watch it any time, in my living room, in my bedroom, in my bathroom. I also put it on my phone when I traveled. For five months, that’s all I watched and just kept notes on anything that caught my eye. I was looking for, “What’s my first 10 minutes, what’s my last 10 minutes?” Once I saw Stevie Wonder do that drum solo, I knew that was my first 10 minutes. That’s a gobsmacker. Even though I know he played drums, that’s something you don’t see all the time.
Why was it so important to include the experiences of people who actually attended?
This wasn’t as easy as people think. The festival was 50-plus years ago, you’re really looking for people who are now in their late-50s all the way through their early-70s, and Harlem is a different kind of place. You have to hit the pavement because so much of the social fabric of the neighborhood is community-oriented. One of our producers, Ashley Bembry-Kaintuck, even went to a swing dancing class to meet one person [the former Black Panther Cyril “Bullwhip” Innis Jr.] we identified.
Musa Jackson winds up being our anchor. He was one of the first people to respond, but he disclosed to us that he was just 5 years old when he went to the festival. He told us, “Look, this is my first memory in life. So I’m just going to tell you everything I remember.”
Given that the festival mostly predated Woodstock, why do you think it was so easily forgotten?
History saw it fit that every last person that was on that stage now winds up defining a generation. Why isn’t this held in the same light? Why was it that easy to dispose of us? Instead, the cultural zeitgeist that actually ended up being our guide as Black people was “Soul Train.” And so, I’m always going to wonder, “How could this and ‘Soul Train’ have pushed potential creatives further?”
Also lost was the context that made this festival possible in the first place. How did you go about reconstructing that?
At the end of the day, the sole purpose of this festival was to protect property. There was a riot in ’68 in Harlem when King died. And there was fear in the city that it would happen again in 1969, so there was a sense that the festival would keep Black people calm all summer. And once it served its purpose, that was it.
But your film doesn’t present it that way. For Black artists, this looks like it was the music event of the year.
Context is everything. There’s a lot of people that think that Harlem is just the Apollo Theater, Sylvia’s and the occasional incense and oil guy, but it’s so much more than that. This event was really a labor of love for [promoter] Tony Lawrence. There just weren’t festivals that catered to Black people.
We also found out that Jimi Hendrix tried to get on the Harlem Cultural Festival, but was a little too radical for them. So he shadowed the festival. For its first three weeks, he did blues performances with [guitarist] Albert King in the after-shows at night.
You conclude with Nina Simone’s performance. Why end with her?
“Mississippi Goddam” might be in the lineup, “Four Women” of course. But she’s not doing [her early pop hits like] “My Baby Just Cares for Me.” I dub Nina’s performance as some Michael Jordan Game 6-type thing. She had the most potent message, the most potent presence. I’m not saying that we all have to do message songs, but I’m actually begging for Black artists to balance the output that we have now.
How did making this film change you? Do you want to direct again?
More than anything, it helped me really come to grips with what my role and my purpose in life is, as an educator. And it really helped me in the confidence department. Now I’m ready to take on the world.
fashion review
Men’s wear designers emerging from the cocoon of safety signaled their eagerness to return to pleasure and fun.
PARIS — Everyone was so hungry for togetherness, after a year of serial lockdowns, that Paris last week seemed on the verge of exploding. Corner bars were packed, both inside and out, and so were the open-air bars on the banks of the Seine, the thump of house music reverberating against mossed stone walls. The ambient sound was of people shedding pent-up fear and anxiety with laughter and dancing.
Drinking seemed to help. Soon after President Emmanuel Macron eased restrictions on social gatherings and masking, the vase-shaped trash receptacles in the gardens of the Palais-Royal were so overflowing with Heineken empties and spent Champagne magnums that they resembled some kind of queer Parisian bouquet.
It was against this backdrop that fashion’s so-called system stirred to life again, with a few designers venturing out of their digital caves to mount live shows that instantaneously attracted hordes of young pretties of either — or any — gender disporting themselves in their glad rags.
We all know that a lot of people spent the last year dreaming about what they’d wear when they could dress up again. From the perspective of this observer, their efforts were as, if not more, exciting to observe than a lot of what was presented on video or live on runways.
That is no fault of the designers, who have been forced to create clothes for an uncertain, if not imaginary, future.
Plenty of polished stuff was turned out, like Kim Jones’s collection for Dior Men, created in collaboration with the multi-hyphenated 29-year-old hip-hop personage Travis Scott. Held in a huge tent, just as in the Before Times, set up behind Les Invalides — where Napoleon is entombed — the show reanimated almost overnight the countless creative, technical and subsidiary service trades that contribute to the creation of a runway show.
The set was ostensibly a reference to the landscapes of Mr. Scott’s Texan boyhood. At least that is how the European press interpreted the pink-sky setup. A big bleached steer skull stood at the head of the runway; ghostly faux saguaro were installed here and there and the overall palette was reminiscent of the Southwest desert. Mr. Scott grew up in suburban Houston, which, last one heard, was a place of subtropical humidity, creeping kudzu and recurrent coastal flooding — at any rate, a far cry from Monument Valley.
Never mind that. The collection leaned heavily on a slick take on suiting, Frenchly elegant in the turned up ’70s lapels, and impractically full trousers that dragged on the ground and that were ornamented at the side seams with Navajo concha details.
In an evident nod to the trend for men, particularly the more adventurous among hip-hop artists, to turn up at the Grammys, on talk shows, “Saturday Night Live” and in live performance wearing dresses, there was a good deal of emphasis on skorts. The problem with skorts — aside from the ghastly neologism — is that they’re a Goldilocks solution. If a masculine-leaning person feels an urgent desire to wear skirts in public, the least such person can do is be a man about it and commit.
Virgil Abloh did so at Louis Vuitton, where, very much in the manner of the deejaying that is his longtime side hustle, he barreled wholeheartedly into quotation. He titled the show “Amen Break” and went on to preach from the gospel of appropriation. Mr. Abloh’s commercial success at Vuitton has been so impressive (what corporate honcho wouldn’t kill to have a designer capable of producing $5,600 iridescent vinyl keepalls that sell like hot cakes?) that he has begun to dip with liberality into the genius Kool-Aid.
As if to inoculate himself against the copycat charges that have dogged him, Mr. Abloh framed his enterprise as a giveback. Pop culture has stolen so liberally and for so long from Black creativity that it makes a kind of sense that he would take cultural commons approach to other people’s ideas.
The problem is that this position serves corporations well and individual creators not so much. It might at times make for an amusing parlor game to trace the riffs Mr. Abloh adopts for his purposes back to their sources, which tend to be found in the design vocabularies of Rei Kawakubo, Thom Browne or the underrated Italo Zucchelli. Sometimes, though, he layers on his samples so densely — dresses, coats, padded skirts, puffers constructed like samurai armor, tie-dye suits, “Cat in the Hat” toppers, winter gloves for summer — that you long for him to lift the needle off the record.
And so it went. Riccardo Tisci at Burberry finally found his lane, something that cannot be easy for a designer who thinks like an architect and yet is employed by a global conglomerate with a bottom line built on trench coats and mumsy plaid scarfs. What one most admires about Mr. Tisci is that when he goes full bore into his Southern Italian heritage, he does it in an austere way, seldom caving to the clichés that have made Dolce & Gabbana godfathers of Italo-kitsch. Increasingly, he reaches into his toolbox for a plane, using it to shave off extraneous elements. Subtraction, it is worth noting, is a quality seldom seen in fashion since the glory days of Jil Sander and Helmut Lang.
Mr. Tisci lopped sleeves diagonally off a lot of the jackets and shirts in a show presented in a video ostensibly shot at some “Satyricon” seashore (actually Millennium Mills on the Royal Victoria Dock in East London). He made asymmetrical cutouts in tight garments and put guys in the unconventional halter necks that, in pure anatomical terms, are well suited to the broad shoulders typifying an idealized masculine form.
He kept the colors low-key, as he did during his decade-long tenure at Givenchy. Yet his enthusiasm for the return to normality was anything but muted. “It’s what we want today: expression, freedom, physical freedom; to be ourselves.,” he told Vogue.
It’s the pronoun in that sentence you want to take note of. Jonathan Anderson is 36, and Mr. Tisci a decade older. The Belgian designer Dries Van Noten is 63; the Californian Rick Owens is closing in on 60. To paraphrase from a recent New York Times obituary for Richard Stolley, the founding editor of People, it is axiomatic in fashion as in publishing that “pretty sells better than ugly, young sells better than old.”
Each of the designers cited understands that. Each created collections focused intently on guys just barely past puberty and in a way that stirred sympathy for a generation whose natural cadence was broken by the pandemic. Teen years, let’s remember, are like dog years.
“I was obsessed with this idea of a lost generation,” Mr. Anderson said by phone from London. “Thinking of myself at that age, I can’t imagine not going clubbing, meeting people, having friends, having sex.”
His JW Anderson show, incubated in collaboration with the photographer Juergen Teller, focused on the awkward, experimental condition of being a teenager. Precisely because the short pants, gym socks, lopsided sweaters patterned with a giant strawberry were unabashedly goofy, they made for a convincing design statement.
“I wasn’t that concerned with fashion,” Mr. Anderson said. “It was more that I was thinking about what clothes mean to people and how to make things that are playful. At the end of the day, I want to be that kid.”
In an evocative, genderless collection photographed in the fading light of day at a waterfront fun fair, Mr. Van Noten offered his refined version of the same idea. Before British Vogue made over Billie Eilish as a corseted sex bomb, she concealed her voluptuous figure under oversize clothes. Fashion in general has followed this trend, whether in the flaps that covered the models genitals in bathing suits at Prada (as in Edwardian times) or in the beautifully patterned slipcovers Mr. Van Noten draped over his human furniture.
Mr. Owens also showed his collection by the sea, live, and on the waterfront close to the apartment where he lives half the year on the Venetian Lido. In a phone interview, Mr. Owens explained his frustration at having been deprived for so long of real life encounters, of tactility, and of his hope that, as a culture, we will step forward into the future responsibly, not repeating the excesses of the Roaring Twenties (and of his own 20s, he was quick to add.).
“I hope coming out of this, we have some humility,,” Mr. Owens said.
His was a characteristically beautiful presentation, provided you find beauty in models draped in garments that look as if made to cloak some recently discovered amphibious species. Stomping across the “Death in Venice” shingle in the unwieldy platform boots that are his version of flats, models dragged the long, long hems of their trousers in the sand, all the while wreathed in artificial fog. The show was titled “Fogachine,” and its murky atmospherics reminded a viewer that, perhaps because Mr. Owens himself was raised in the dry, hot inlands of Northern California, there is always in his work a hankering for water and the sea.
In sharp contrast, the Bluemarble show was urban to its cure, held amid the strict Enlightenment geometries of the gardens of the 18th-century National Archives building (where Sofia Coppola filmed a lot of “Marie Antoinette”). Crowds of fans came out to support the 28-year-old French-Filipino designer Anthony Alvarez in his seventh show, an exuberant mash-up of street wear, elevated styling, tailoring elements and vernacular dress typical of Siargao, a tear-shaped island in the Philippine Sea where, in normal times, Mr. Alvarez travels often to surf.
“People are ready to connect again,” Mr. Alvarez said backstage. “They want to be alive, go out again, have sex, have fun, dress up.”
And it is true that almost nothing seems more welcome after a year-and-a-half of staring at ourselves in the dreadful unforgiving mirror of Zoom than the vision of exotic creatures. Perhaps that is what made it so joyful being in Paris last week at a dinner celebrating the Swedish label Acne and a new compilation of Acne Paper’s greatest hits. Held in the aisles of the Marché des Enfants Rouges, the oldest such market in Paris, the dinner featured on its guest list an assortment of fashion types: the designer Martine Sitbon; Ib Kamara, the influential stylist from Sierra Leone; Barnabé Fillion, the self-taught perfumer for Aesop; the British photographer Richard Burbridge (think Tom Ford campaigns); and, most delightfully, Raya Martigny.
Mx. Martigny is an Amazonian transgender model from Réunion Island, a tropical French department nearly 1,000 miles from the nearest land mass, Madagascar. At well over six feet, she undoubtedly commands attention in any room she enters. For the Acne dinner, Mx. Martigny appeared wearing a tie-dyed purple pantsuit not unlike one in the Vuitton show, with a plunging neckline and nothing beneath it. Her center-parted dark hair was and skinned tight to her skull. Falling to the floor behind her was a braid as thick as a hawser.
Periodically, she would give the braid an insouciant toss, somewhat in the manner of a contestant on a vogueing runway. If the category were Parisian realness, she left little doubt that realness had been served.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/29/insider/subway-tuna.html
Times Insider
Sending samples to a lab was just the beginning. The reporter behind the recent investigation talks about getting deep into the science of seafood.
Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.
It started in January, when Choire Sicha, then The New York Times’s Styles editor, posed a question to his team on an internal messaging platform that went something like this:
Who wants to buy a Subway tuna sandwich and send it to a lab?
America’s largest sandwich chain had just been sued by two Los Angeles customers who said that the meat that Subway was advertising as tuna was, in fact, something else entirely. Julia Carmel, a news assistant who covers nightlife and writes for the Styles section, volunteered to investigate. She procured 60 inches of tuna sandwiches from three Los Angeles locations, froze the meat and shipped it across the country to a commercial food testing lab that, two months later, was unable to determine conclusively which species of tuna it was — or whether it was tuna at all. She recently chronicled the odyssey in a 2,500-word deep dive, “The Big Tuna Sandwich Mystery.”
In a conversation, Ms. Carmel discussed her reporting process and how a gimmicky idea turned into a broader look at America’s food supply.
Are you a tuna fan?
I’m not a huge canned tuna person. I’m definitely more of a sushi eater. But I did eat a lot of fish while working on this article. My editors were sending me messages, too — “I can’t stop thinking about eating tuna now!”
From that first message in January to publication last week, you spent six months in Tuna Land. Where did you start?
My first step was reaching out to a bunch of labs. I said, “Hey, I’m out of my depth here, but if I wanted to get a sandwich tested to find the protein that’s on it, can you help me?” And then our Food and Drug Administration reporter, Sheila Kaplan, was helping me determine which labs were accredited, because I don’t usually do food or science reporting.
Why order tuna sandwiches? Why not get just tuna salad?
It’s an exceptionally weird thing to ask for six scoops of tuna. It would have blown my incognito status!
You shipped your samples across the country to a food-testing lab — twice, after the first ones got lost in transit. Did you ever find out what happened to them?
They made it there — someone signed for the package. But they couldn’t track it down, and they never told me what happened. I assume the ice was pretty melted once it got past one day, so whoever got or opened that was definitely not happy. I assume they got some warm and smelly tuna.
When the lab results came back inconclusive, did you consider trying again?
At that point, the story wasn’t even about the results anymore. The larger issue was not “Is this real tuna?” but rather “What does it take to find out where your food is coming from, and why is it so difficult?”
If it isn’t real tuna, is Subway to blame?
Everyone I talked to said that if it’s anyone’s fault, it isn’t Subway’s. It’s really hard to trace the process when you buy canned food. Of course, corporations should be responsible for making sure you’re getting what you’re ordering, but, in the larger picture, you’re asking them to give you the cheapest possible product, in the quickest way, whenever you want it. Do I expect they’ll cut corners if I want a $6 sandwich at 3 a.m. with these specific toppings? That’s a lot to ask for — and it shouldn’t necessarily be — but when you reframe it that way, we have such a convenience culture. We need to look at more equitable and sustainable ways of sourcing our food.
You don’t come from a science background. How did you navigate reporting a technical story?
My two anchors were Caity Weaver’s glitter article and Jonah Bromwich’s story on whether hot dogs contain human meat. I hoped to produce incredibly playful, informative reporting that took you through something you hadn’t thought about. A scientist would use a full paragraph to explain lots of this, so it was figuring out how to take a very complex thing and maintain its integrity while making it understandable to the average reader. My first draft must have been 4,000 words, so thank God for editors.
What was the most surprising thing you learned?
It’s mind-blowing that there are 15 different types of fish that can be called tuna by the F.D.A.
Million-dollar question: Is it tuna?
I think it probably is. I can’t imagine what motivation they’d have for it not to be. That said, I won’t be eating it anytime soon.