Happy Friday!
This week, I’ve been admiring my friends’ kids on Instagram, adorably suited up for their first days of school in crisp shorts, clean sneakers, fresh fades, and body-dwarfing backpacks.
I used to obsess about my first-day-of-school-outfit. It wasn’t just about looking cool in the nausea-inducing moment of entering a cafeteria filled with unfamiliar faces. The outfit was also to convey—you know, casually—who I was and what I was into, so that the people who might become “my people” would recognize me. At different points in my academic career, this involved a t-shirt portraying André Agassi in full mullet (not ironically), Adidas shell-toes, and a Birkenstock-skimming crinkled skirt, borrowed from my older sister.
Today, when I look at school kids marching into the unknown at the summer’s end, it strikes me that the most impressive thing they wear is their brave, open smiles. I’ve been trying to muster up a bit of that bravery for myself lately.
In a moment when technology and politics drive us further into our silos of comfort and “filter bubbles,” it feels especially important. I’ve always valued community, but until I moved to a new city in my 30s, I wasn’t really aware of what it takes to build it. There are loads of practical steps, many that I’m still learning, but I think the main thing—and the hardest—is forcing myself to walk into a room full of strangers, rather than staying home, knitting, and watching Netflix.
I recently went to a ”mixer” for people who work and live in my new neighborhood’s arts district. I didn’t know anyone, and when I arrived at the wine shop hosting the event, it was packed with small groups of people chatting. I took a deep breath, scrawled my name onto a sticker with a Sharpie, and scanned the room. (For the occasion, I’d worn a blouse I bought in Spain that looks like something a ship’s captain might wear in a Maurice Sendak book.)
A woman my age—Natasha, I now know—grinned widely at me. The relief that washed over me was as visceral as that moment on the first day of sixth grade, when a boy slammed his locker, eyed my concert t-shirt, and said, “Eric Clapton—cool.”
After school, children of all ages can use a drink. I like the idea of hosting an early, kid-friendly happy hour, as Quartzy editor (and mother of two) Indrani Sen did one recent Thursday. Indrani’s dinner parties are legendary, so I was impressed to learn she kept it simple, serving store-bought chips and salsa, grilling hot dogs for the kids—and even putting an end-time on the invitation. (Genius!) Guests brought wine and Indrani stocked a cooler with gin, tonic, and limes.
“Those two hours in the late-summer sun spent drinking out of plastic cups while the kids staged dinosaur battles nearby felt truly restorative,” she wrote of the experiment. “And the best part? By 8pm, everyone had scattered and the debris from the party had been corralled into a garbage bag.”
Editors—Indrani included—often tell writers, “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” Turns out that’s good advice when it comes to hosting too. Rather than creating an Instagram-perfect barbecue come Labor Day on Monday—or nixing the whole plan because that’s too daunting—I’m just telling friends we’ll provide burgers, beer, and a grassy lawn, and they can bring sides, veggies, and a similarly chill attitude.
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Or, clams! This is more a quick party trick than a recipe. If you have access to good, fresh clams, all you need is a grill. The fishmonger at my farmers’ market sells clams already cleaned, so I just dump them into a grill pan (tin foil would also keep them from falling between grates) over medium heat, close the lid for about eight minutes, and then remove them as they start to open up. If you’re feeling fancy, snip some parsley into a bowl of salted, melted butter for dipping.
The Hélio Oiticica show at the Whitney is giving me FOMO. The Brazilian artist, who died in 1980, was part of the country’s Tropicalia movement of the 1960s—a bright, radical, cultural revolution that challenged the military dictatorship with its avant-garde, power-to-the-people embrace of popular Brazilian culture.
Oiticica famously invited people to partake in his art, and the Whitney exhibit is no different. Viewers can take off their shoes and step into multicolored booths surrounded by potted palms and sandy floors, and also try out a parangolé—the colorful capes that the artist considered unfinished until a participant put it on, ideally to dance the samba.
If you can’t get to the Whitney this month, you could channel the Tropicalia spirit by listening to albums of the era—Os Mutantes’ first one is a good place to start.
And then, let’s descend into a conversation pit. Quartz’s intrepid design reporter, Anne Quito, recently made a pilgrimage to the unlikely modernist architecture mecca of Columbus, Indiana. There, the town’s public buildings are a starchitect-designed smorgasbord, thanks to the late industrialist and philanthropist J. Irwin Miller.
For Anne the highlight was Miller’s own Eero Saarinen-designed house, which he shared with his wife, Xenia, and their five children. And the epicenter was the ”lavish, cushioned cavity” of the conversation pit in the living room. Yes, a conversation pit.
An international design craze in the 1960s, these sunken leisure zones were popular enough during the swinging Mad Men era to inspire a backlash complete with a Time Magazine screed against them. Anne recalled her own grandparents’ conversation pit in Manila, which saved their house from flooding during a 1956 typhoon, collecting rain while roofers patched a hole in the ceiling.
In a piece published today, Anne is calling for the return of the conversation pit, and I see her point. After looking at a screen at work all day, wouldn’t it be refreshing to retire to a zone designed solely for looking at each other?
Have a great weekend!
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The US Open is underway, with Venus Williams, Rafael Nadal, and Roger Federer all playing this weekend. I’m a mild tennis enthusiast, but was totally taken with the latest issue of the quarterly journal, Racquet. Racquet isn’t exactly a magazine about tennis, but rather uses the subject as a point of inspiration for artists and writers. Among its matte-finish pages, the magazine contains a history of a bygone tennis center that was once a hotspot for the black community in Fort Greene, Brooklyn; a literary exploration of Nabokov and tennis; and a nostalgia-inducing analysis (oh my god, the photos) of the late-career successes of Jimmy Connors, Bjorn Borg, and John McEnroe. If nothing else, buy it for Leanne Shapton’s wonderful watercolors of tennis players’ socks, including these exquisite pink-striped Mizunos, worn by Ivan Lendl in 1992—and echoed by Alexander Zverev this week.