Happy Friday!
The Four Seasons, that midtown Manhattan temple of power lunching, served the last meal in its grand Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe and Philip Johnson-designed dining rooms on Saturday. While there has been a lot of nostalgia about it here in New York, perhaps its time had come. Last year, GQ’s Robert Draper wrote about sexual assault charges against one of the restaurant’s owners, Julian Niccolini, and how the closing “marks the twilight of a singular sort of masculine power.”
Just this week, one of the restaurant’s many notable lunchtime regulars, Roger Ailes, is leaving Fox News amid a slew of sexual harassment charges. I’m pretty sure we can do without this “singular sort” of power.
Mid-century design > mid-century sexism. The Four Seasons’ landmarked interior will be protected when the Carbone team takes over with a new restaurant, but the furnishings—down to serving carts, flatware, ashtrays, Saarinen tulip stools, and Mies Van der Rohe Barcelona chairs—will be up for auction at the restaurant on July 26. You can finally get that corner table.
(Sidenote: I interviewed Donald Trump here once, when he was still a funny joke. Sigh.)
The Four Seasons reportedly kept 30 loaner blazers on hand, should a customer appear for dinner without a jacket. Tough to say what they’d do with an on-trend gentleman in socks and sandals.
Quartz’s Marc Bain attended the New York menswear shows and noted that stocking feet in sandals were rampant on the runways, as they were in Milan—and have been on the streets for a while. For men, the current style is black socks with athletic slides. For me, it’s Muji’s Missoni-ish marled knits with patent leather Birkenstocks (for an upcoming Oregon road trip, at least).
The art of the deal. (You can skip the book.) Navigating conflicts with kids can make you a better negotiator, writes Quartz reporter (and mother of two) Corinne Purtill. Researchers found when adults deal with children, we take responsibility for finding a mutually acceptable agreement, rather than getting into a standoff as we might with an equal, like a colleague, sibling, or spouse. In other words, when you’re dealing with adults, try to act like an adult.
Speaking of adults, an adult political strategist at this week’s Republican National Convention invoked My Little Pony character Twilight Sparkle in what shall now be known as the Twilight Sparkle Defense, claiming that Melania Trump’s speech was not plagiarized from Michelle Obama’s (which the Trump campaign later said it basically was), but rather contained phrases so common that even Twilight Sparkle has said them.
If you buy that, you should also know that the Weekend Update anchors welcomed “Ruth Bader Ginsburg” to their RNC skybox and found out she lives in a teapot.
Cognitive pork bun mapping. Chef David Chang, of Momofuku fame, outlined what he called the ”unified theory of deliciousness” that underlies his greatest dishes—but the theory could be applied to many pursuits.
In college, Chang learned about Douglas Hofstadter, the author of Gödel, Escher, Bach, and his concept of “strange loops—occasions when mathematical systems or works of art or pieces of music fold back upon themselves…When you hit a strange loop like this, it shifts your point of view: Suddenly you aren’t just thinking about what’s happening inside the picture; you’re thinking about the system it represents and your response to it.” (If this interests you, you’ll also like last weekend’s NYT Magazine profile of Chuck Close.)
Now, Chang seeks strange loops in places as deceptively simple as salinity, and as complex as culture, and uses another Hofstadter lesson—”isomorphisms”—or what Chang just calls “base flavors” to prove that the same familiar concepts can be expressed in different forms. Put simply, kimchi and sauerkraut are both “salty rotten cabbage.” In recognizing and embracing this truth, Chang has not only built a restaurant empire upon bridging cultures—he has also given thousands of people Proustian madeline moments that bend their perceptions with a single, transporting bite.
May your weekend be filled with delicious shifts in perception!
Halp! I love a good playlist, but I’m looking forward to full album-listening for an upcoming road trip. Fleetwood Mac’s Tango in the Night and Outkast’s Aquemini are classics, but I need more! Please reply with your favorite road trip albums—all genres and eras welcome—and I’ll spread the love in a future edition. (Albums or otherwise, you’re always welcome to reply here with feedback about Quartzy.) Also here’s the first lady of the United States singing “Get Ur Freak On” in shotgun, with Missy Elliot in the backseat (see 11:40). 🙌