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Overlapping copies of “No Finish Line.” (Photo: Weston Colton. Courtesy Nike)
Overlapping copies of “No Finish Line.” (Photo: Weston Colton. Courtesy Nike)

Nike Imagines the World 50 Years From Now

February 14, 2023
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From its classic swoosh logo, to its signature Air Jordan silhouette, to its legendary “Just Do It” tagline, to its recent 50th anniversary video short by Spike Lee, Nike knows how to expertly engineer and craft its brand down to the tiniest detail, and how to subtly zoom out and in to the zeitgeist.

Yet, when it comes to books, the Beaverton, Oregon–based behemoth has never put out a true cult classic—until now. No Finish Line (Actual Source), the brainchild of Nike’s chief design officer, John Hoke (the guest on Ep. 61 of our Time Sensitive podcast), extends out of Nike’s 50th anniversary celebrations last year and puts forward a sort of Nike design manifesto for the next five decades. Featuring an introductory essay by Hoke; a series of provocative and projective texts by the writer, editor, and former Herman Miller global brand director Sam Grawe; and far-future speculative fiction by Geoff Manaugh (the guest, along with his wife and partner, Nicola Twilley, on Ep. 33 of our At a Distance podcast), this slim, red-covered paperback—an “anti–coffee table book,” Hoke calls it—is all at once evocative, generous, ambitious, literary (but unstuffy), and punk. Substantive yet easily read in a single sitting, it is an invitation to ponder time: the ancient past, the present, and the distant future—all through the lens of humanity. And, of course, of Nike.

Designed by the London firm Zak Group, the volume has a vintage vibe, in the vein of a Penguin Classic, that looks even better with a crease down its spine. (Something about its retro feel led me to think of Ridley Scott’s iconic “1984” Apple ad for the original Macintosh computer.) This is a book to throw in your bag, to take on the subway, to shove in your back pocket, to leave at the gym. Says Hoke: “We want it dogeared, we want it annotated, we want it passed on.” Unlike Nike: Better is Temporary, a recently published Phaidon title (also by Grawe) that charts Nike’s phenomenal products and path to the present, No Finish Line presents a giant, moonshot leap into the future. Also addressing certain pressing, climate-related realities, it offers a realistic yet hopeful outlook.

Here, Hoke discusses the strikingly, refreshingly avant-garde project.

The cover of “No Finish Line.” (Courtesy Nike)
The cover of “No Finish Line.” (Courtesy Nike)

Reading the book, I noticed two words in particular pop up several times: “relentless” and “harness.” I was wondering what these words mean to you. How do they describe the past, present, and future of Nike?

That’s a great observation. To begin with, I think about “relentless” as a mindset of Nike that has always existed, which is this notion that we are about the progress of sports and the progression of athletes within the landscape of sports. It takes a relentless mindset to continuously and repetitively push hard against the status quo, and the boundaries that have always existed. We have always been a company that relentlessly leans into those thoughtful constraints and says, “No, we’re gonna push against that.” I think “harnessing” is taking that relentless activity that we do at Nike, and giving it to athletes, and then seeing what unfolds.

I also appreciate how you write about the iconic Nike orange shoebox as a “portal.” I was hoping you might elaborate on that a little bit.

The idea was that the box itself is far more than just the vessel. It’s a representation. When you receive a box at Nike, and you open the lid, and you look down on these products, you’re actually looking down at fifty years. That progression of thinking is delivered in this particular box, at this particular moment, knowing that it has a connection—a lineage—back to the beginning, and it also has a projection going forward.

If I was really truthful, Spencer, what I would tell you is that it was my Don Draper moment. Did you ever watch Mad Men? [Laughs] Remember when he’s like, “This device isn’t a spaceship, it’s a time machine”? To me, it’s not a box, it’s a portal.

I’m obsessed with the notion of a portal in general. Design, at its best, is often a portal. In 2020, I published a book about memorials [In Memory Of: Designing Contemporary Memorials], and all the memorials I chose to include in it I viewed as portals. It’s interesting to hear you talk about a box in that way. It’s almost like a tribute to the past, but also a portal to the future.

As much of the nostalgia that we were talking about at Nike last year, meeting our fifty-year mark, it was as much about looking forward—as much about aiming a telescope, and then, using that metaphor, “Hey, we’re never done.” There’s a design lineage between the timeless, the timely, and the future. That became crystallized in my mind of what to do—both celebrating, looking backward, but also unleashing the future. We’re at this unique moment in time, and I was lucky enough to have been here for thirty years when Nike turned fifty last year.

We get to do both things. We get to stop and celebrate, but also, we’re back at it. We’re going into our fifty-first year. That portal is, I hope, ever-expanding.

The book also references the ancient past. Toward the beginning, there’s this image of a Paleolithic hand ax. I was wondering, how do you think about that object within the context of Nike?

Part of the human experience is that we’re one of the few mammals that’s lucky enough to be wired to understand the power of a tool—and what a tool can do in terms of advancement and progression, whether that’s an ax or an arrowhead. It’s that uniquely human act of understanding your constraint and understanding your context, and saying, “We can do better. We can make the ax sharper, we can make it lighter, we can make it—”

A better grip.

Exactly. This may seem a bit of science fiction, but it’s also deeply rooted in our humanity. Which is: We are wired for progress. We understand tools. We’re reaching this age where the tools are amazing. It’s incredible what’s coming. So how do we leverage what those tools are and stay really grounded in our humanity?

The last thing I’ll say about that, because I love that you picked up on that: That tool is specifically a physical tool. It’s in your hand. You’re chopping, or you’re creating activity. And these are tools that we’re creating [at Nike] that go on peoples’ bodies, to stay wired to their biology, to stay innately human, and yet push that possibility and that potential farther and broader than we’ve ever thought possible.

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An interior spread from “No Finish Line.” (Courtesy Nike)
An interior spread from “No Finish Line.” (Courtesy Nike)
An interior spread from “No Finish Line.” (Courtesy Nike)
An interior spread from “No Finish Line.” (Courtesy Nike)
An interior spread from “No Finish Line.” (Courtesy Nike)
An interior spread from “No Finish Line.” (Courtesy Nike)
An interior spread from “No Finish Line.” (Courtesy Nike)
An interior spread from “No Finish Line.” (Courtesy Nike)
An interior spread from “No Finish Line.” (Courtesy Nike)
An interior spread from “No Finish Line.” (Courtesy Nike)
An interior spread from “No Finish Line.” (Courtesy Nike)
An interior spread from “No Finish Line.” (Courtesy Nike)
An interior spread from “No Finish Line.” (Courtesy Nike)
An interior spread from “No Finish Line.” (Courtesy Nike)
An interior spread from “No Finish Line.” (Courtesy Nike)
An interior spread from “No Finish Line.” (Courtesy Nike)
An interior spread from “No Finish Line.” (Courtesy Nike)
An interior spread from “No Finish Line.” (Courtesy Nike)
An interior spread from “No Finish Line.” (Courtesy Nike)
An interior spread from “No Finish Line.” (Courtesy Nike)
An interior spread from “No Finish Line.” (Courtesy Nike)
An interior spread from “No Finish Line.” (Courtesy Nike)
An interior spread from “No Finish Line.” (Courtesy Nike)
An interior spread from “No Finish Line.” (Courtesy Nike)
An interior spread from “No Finish Line.” (Courtesy Nike)
An interior spread from “No Finish Line.” (Courtesy Nike)
An interior spread from “No Finish Line.” (Courtesy Nike)
An interior spread from “No Finish Line.” (Courtesy Nike)
An interior spread from “No Finish Line.” (Courtesy Nike)
An interior spread from “No Finish Line.” (Courtesy Nike)
An interior spread from “No Finish Line.” (Courtesy Nike)
An interior spread from “No Finish Line.” (Courtesy Nike)
An interior spread from “No Finish Line.” (Courtesy Nike)
An interior spread from “No Finish Line.” (Courtesy Nike)
An interior spread from “No Finish Line.” (Courtesy Nike)
An interior spread from “No Finish Line.” (Courtesy Nike)

There’s this line in the book: “The key driver of design at Nike has always been data.” Which is something you talked about on your Time Sensitive episode last year. I feel like so much about designing at Nike, from what I understand, is about how you use these new, cutting-edge tools—algorithmic design, parametric modeling, machine learning, DALL-E 2, whatever. What are some of the more breakthrough examples at the moment that you can cite, that are exciting you, that the team is thinking about and interacting with and exploring?

As designers, we have to realize that data does not dream. We do. Source material is exponentially going to be a part of the future. It’s knowing how to curate that information, and being able to have an intuition beyond the empirical data, and start to extrapolate the things that we see—that a human might see—that perhaps an A.I. might not see. I find that to be, basically, the grounds of the future of what design is. The value chain between an idea and output is shrinking rapidly with the greater use of things like DALL-E 2 and other A.I.

In the book, A.I. is described as a tool to dream with.

I’ve said before, “The good news is that the future is always unwritten, and the better news is that it’s never unimagined.” DALL-E 2 is a human’s imagination on rocket fuel, basically, and my imagination never sleeps, so to have to have a partner and a co-conspirator that’s sitting right there, that I know won’t do anything until I prompt it or I intend to use it, and to see what it’s coming back with—and the breadth and pace of this—I’m still grappling with it, to be honest with you.

But I’ve also had a chance to see where it’s going. What happens is, designers become more about curating and adjusting parameters, and still editing and beautifying. I’m incredibly excited. It’s such an advancement for our company, because it takes the data and puts it in its rightful place, and then empowers designers to make the choices that designers make, but far faster and with much more fidelity.

Another interesting angle of the book is that it’s also asking in a genuine way, How do we acknowledge and address the climate crisis? Obviously, it cites the Space Hippie as one example in this area. But there’s also Nike’s commitment to net zero emissions; there’s Nike’s thirty percent drawdown by 2030 of greenhouse gas emissions. Fifty years from now, whether it’s through recycling, upcycling, biomaterials, mushroom leather, whatever, where do you see the bulk of Nike’s materials coming from?

Just speaking off the cuff and really speculatively, I would presume that virgin material would be something that is never used. That we would have unlocked the ability to reimagine matter, over and over again. Nike would be a leader in the economic ecology of constant reimagination of matter. I’ve said it before: “Making matter matter more because it’s reimagined all the time.” That lets us serve citizen athletes and citizen consumers as citizen designers.

This is maybe a poetic way of thinking about it: Everything that we do as designers is to be reclaimed and reimagined. There would be very, very few “heirloom”-type pieces that would stay with people for emotional connections and reasons. You would be engaging in a service economy and exchanging materials back and forth. We, as humans, would begin to replicate some of the power of nature.

My hope would be that, if we’re here in fifty years, we would have cracked that code, and we would have taken a leadership position that we were proud of. That there was no compromise. That there was a full-throated agreement that we need to change what we’re doing. And that change can be super productive: to continue sports, to make the planet more livable, and to drive the expressions of design in ways that I couldn’t describe right now.

This book largely gets away from corporate-speak and leans into: How do you talk about a major, global company such as Nike in a way that’s actually intimate and human and not ignoring the extreme realities facing our planet right now and in the future? Very often climate issues get brushed under the rug by major corporations, but here they’re explored in a way that’s projective, forward-looking—

And hopefully, if I can add to your thought with optimism, [they’re explored] in a way that also shows that Nike was not powerless in this fait accompli. That we were action-oriented, and we called [the climate crisis] what it was, and we decided to make further investments as a company, both in innovation and design, to meaningfully make change.

We started this book project years ago, and I think one of the coolest things we decided was that, while many companies would put out this giant, glossy coffee table book that was meant to be viewed, we said, “No, this is an anti–coffee table book. This book is meant to be read and reread, and consumed as an optimistic speculation on the future.” Because we still want to sit and go, “That was cool, but the future is unwritten. And we’re gonna go figure it out.”

I love that you bring up this almost-literary factor to it, because one of the things that stood out to me as I was finishing it was the reference to Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s 1933 essay In Praise of Shadows. Of course, that has become such a cult text. I can imagine No Finish Line will one day become its own sort of cult text, too.

A part of it is also my own fascination with the role of science fiction. At its best, it becomes a predictive course of, “Oh, this, this can happen!” It also puts several questions in front of you—questions of utility and beauty, and the role of society in the future, and now more than ever the role of technology. What the book is striving to anchor back on is that, wherever we go, [Nike is] going to be this biological piece that is going to be there.

In Praise of Shadows is ninety years old this year, so it’s fun to imagine No Finish Line ninety years from now. There are so many timeless lessons in In Praise of Shadows—and obviously, certain things in it that haven’t aged so well—but I think it’s interesting when you think about how a text endures, and how certain ideas remain core and essential.

It becomes referential. When you read it, it’s there with you. Whether it’s in the conscious or the subconscious, it’s there. It becomes a part of the journey.

That and many other books and films have always been references to me, whether that’s Metropolis or Blade Runner or Star Wars. They’re in our collective subconscious. They become central to the narrative of where the future is going to be. That, to me, is an exciting part of the book as well: the acceptance of the unknowing, where this all goes, because who could predict a pandemic three, four, five years ago? And who’s going to be able to predict the disruptions that will inevitably be in front of us? I hope that this is a treatise about resilience and humanity. The relentlessness and the uptake of that—the harnessing of that—is super important. For our company, anyway.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

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Courtesy Jill Singer

Sight Unseen’s Jill Singer on Why She Doesn’t Actually Consume That Much Design Content

Home is unequivocally where the heart is. But in a world that far too often embraces soulless or downright bland furniture and interior design trends, it may not always look like it. Which is where the pathbreaking work of Jill Singer and Monica Khemsurov, the co-founders of the online design magazine Sight Unseen, comes in.

Photo: Andrew Zuckerman

A Start-Up Is Monitoring Space Junk to Enable a More Sustainable Space Economy

In February 2009, some 500 miles above the Siberian tundra, a defunct Russian satellite and a U.S. communication satellite collided with massive force and shattered to pieces. Circulating low Earth orbit at speeds north of 20,000 miles per hour, the two instantly broke into thousands of fragments of aluminum and titanium space junk. Of these bits of debris hurtling at hypervelocity, only a fraction of them were large enough to be accurately tracked. And of those roughly 2,000 fragments that have been tracked, they’ll continue circulating for anywhere from 20 to a hundred years or more from the time of impact.

Le Bernardin’s apricot sorbet and chamomile ice cream, infused with Nature’s Fynd dairy-free cream cheese. (Courtesy Nature’s Fynd)

A Microscopic Fungus From Yellowstone’s Hot Springs Is Spurring a New Culinary Movement

Born beneath the hot springs of Yellowstone National Park, a microscopic fungus is spurring a new culinary movement. Fy, short for “Fusarium of Yellowstone,” has sprouted into the limelight as a sustainable alternative for conscientious diners, and has begun to germinate in menus and stores across the United States.

Courtesy Artisan Books

Ghetto Gastro’s Jon Gray on “Durag Diplomacy” and the Beauty of the Bronx

Over the past decade, the Bronx culinary collective Ghetto Gastro has—through a combination of creative finesse, clever tactics, linguistic gymnastics, and food alchemy—risen up in the worlds of art, fashion, and entertainment, serving up a new, raw form of cultural ambassadorship. Unofficial representatives of their home borough, the group’s co-founders, Jon Gray (the guest on Ep. 2 of our Time Sensitive podcast), Pierre Serrao, and Lester Walker, practice what they call “durag diplomacy,” bringing the Bronx to the world and the world to the Bronx. The trio’s scope and impact is vast, from collaborating with French luxury house Cartier on a “Bronx Brasserie” pop-up in Paris, to launching kitchen appliances with Target, to cooking with Wolfgang Puck at this year’s Oscars. An unabashed gastronome and the group’s self-described “dishwasher,” Gray has the agility and energy of a frontman: Currently an artist-in-residence at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, he’s perhaps best known for his 2019 TED Talk, which has been viewed nearly two million times. Serrao and Walker are seasoned chefs with backgrounds in top restaurants, including at Cracco in Milan and Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s now-closed Spice Market in New York, respectively.

A view of the “Slow Show” performance. (Photo: Anne-Sylvie Bonnet)

With “Slow Show,” Choreographer Dimitri Chamblas Emphasizes the Mysterious Power of Slow Movement

What gives a physical movement meaning? There are myriad answers: context, shape, intention. For internationally renowned dancer, choreographer, educator, and creative director Dimitri Chamblas, there’s another, primary answer: speed. “If I go to shake your hand, you would understand because of the movement, but also because of the speed of it. If I do it super fast, it’s an offense. If I do it super slow, you won’t understand where I am going. The identity of the movement is given by the speed of it.”

Courtesy Phaidon

Danish Design Firm HAY Heralds Its 20th Anniversary With a Superb, Highly Tactile Book

While the Danish design firm HAY is just celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, it has achieved a rarefied place in the design lexicon that’s more often associated with brands many decades older. This standing is defined, in part, by being often imitated, yet maintaining a certain level of quality and integrity. HAY originals can always be told apart from those trying to knock it off.

Courtesy Aedes de Venustas

A New Perfume Translates the Greek Island of Corfu Through Kumquat

Growing up in the Midwest, I wasn’t exposed to the widest range of foods. True to the Scandinavian heritage and harsh winters of the region, I remember a hearty, meat-and-starch focused cuisine, one meant to warm and sustain through the cold and dark. As I got older, I started expanding my palate, and I can remember many firsts: my first pho, my first dosa, my first doro wat. But out of all these first experiences of more far-flung tastes and flavors, none stands out in my memory as sharply as my first kumquat.

An array of Baudar’s wildcrafted vinegars. (Courtesy Chelsea Green Publishing)

“Culinary Alchemist” Pascal Baudar on the Art of Foraging and the Craft of Vinegar

Pinning a single job title on the award-winning food expert and forager Pascal Baudar is no easy task. A self-described “culinary alchemist” who cans, dries, smokes, ferments, steams, and pickles cactus buds, harvester ants, and other obscure flora and fauna, Baudar is the go-to source for Los Angeles–based chefs Curtis Stone, Josiah Citrin, and Ludovic Lefebvre, as well as cocktail maestros, including Matt Biancaniello, seeking these delicacies. “The majority of chefs use 30 wild ingredients, maximum,” Baudar says. “We deal with four hundred and fifty-six.”

Courtesy Strange Attractor Press

A New Book Explores How, Via X-Rays, Banned Albums Made It Into the Cold War–Era U.S.S.R.

The bad news is that this particular set of X-rays won’t be covered by your health insurance. The good news? Discarded hospital film of broken bones can defy a communist regime, deliver banned music to the masses, and endure as art.

Photo: John Cairns. Courtesy the Bodleian Libraries.

An Exhibition at Oxford Highlights the Sensorial Splendor of Books

In 1940, Dorothy Kunhardt published a book that would forever change the way young children read. Pat the Bunny, an interactive book full of activities such as touching the sandpaper of “Daddy’s scratchy face,” playing peekaboo with a piece of cloth, or gazing in a mirror, imbued the act of reading with a new form of sensory engagement. Today, “touch and feel” books for babies and children are almost required reading—their cellophane stuffing produces a satisfying, A.S.M.R.-level crunching sound, while the use of faux rabbit fur or horse hair offers an exhilarating tactile experience. As we age and our reading comprehension sharpens, the books we pick up prioritize a single sense—sight—their stories seemingly locked away in lines of text.

The Sculpture Gallery at The Glass House. (Photo: Michael Biondo)

Robert Stadler Has a “Playdate” With Philip Johnson at His Glass House

It’s a serene, bluebird-sky day, a slight chill in the air, and I’m walking with the Paris-based, Austrian-born designer-artist-provocateur Robert Stadler along a central pathway on Philip Johnson’s 49-acre Glass House estate in New Canaan, Connecticut. We’ve just exited the property’s whitewashed, brick-floored, glass-ceilinged Sculpture Gallery, a transfixing space of light and shadow built in 1970 that’s home to works by artists including Michael Heizer, Robert Rauschenberg, and Frank Stella. Now, for one of the first times ever, a temporary installation by a contemporary artist—Stadler—is being shown among the sculptures of these art-world giants.

Photo: Marco Galloway

Willo Perron’s Debut Furniture Show Makes the Case for a “No Coasters” Design Movement

With everything he does, the Los Angeles–based designer and creative director Willo Perron always considers the macro and the micro. From the L.A. headquarters of Roc Nation, to Stüssy stores around the world (including in Kyoto, Milan, and Shanghai), to the set build-outs for Rihanna’s and Drake’s latest tours, to album art for those same artists, to the branding and art direction for the non-alcoholic aperitif company Ghia, Perron has an adroit ability to work across many scales.

The “shite” (primary performer) in “Makura Jido” (“Chrysanthemum Boy”). (Photo: Yutaka Ishida. Courtesy Japan Society)

Ever Heard of Noh Theater? Our Primer to Three Major Productions Arriving in New York City This Fall

Two winters ago, I picked up a copy of Penguin Classics’ Japanese Nō Dramas, a volume of two dozen translations by Royall Tyler I’d been meaning to read since tearing through Yukio Mishima’s Five Modern Noh Plays a decade previous. I had moved into a New York City gem (an apartment with a fireplace), and with Covid cases skyrocketing and temperatures dropping, I decided that a winter fireside with a handful of centennia-old ghost stories (cat in my lap, or reading aloud to a friend) might carry me away from the pandemic—from Brooklyn, 2020—to somewhere entirely distinct.

Cover of “The Seed Detective” (left). Adam Alexander (right). (Courtesy Chelsea Green Publishing)

“Seed Detective” Adam Alexander Imagines a Better World—Through Rare, Endangered, and Unusual Vegetable Varieties

For British author, TV gardening producer, and “seed detective” Adam Alexander, the supermarket serves as perhaps the finest symbol of our modern food systems and their discontents. Of course, there’s undeniable quantitative material abundance, with aisles upon aisles of vegetable varieties—chopped, pickled, canned, and fresh—all that one could imagine within the confines of some idea of a generic palette. But it arrives at a qualitative price, and not just in terms of flavor, but also in context, in our ability to see this food as a part of our own story—as a connection to the land we live on or a cornerstone of the traditions we uphold. Vegetables are more than just so many anonymous pounds on a scale. “This strong connection with the land and what we grow and what we put in our own mouths has been lost, especially in the U.K.,” Alexander says. “To me, it’s really important that we try to reconnect and recognize that these vegetables are part of our human story and, in that way, we can do a lot to serve rare and endangered varieties.”

Courtesy Assouline

Why Audemars Piguet’s Royal Oak Remains One of the Most Enduring Watches Ever

Designed in 1972, at a time when a luxury watch made of steel was still a radical concept, Audemars Piguet’s nautical-inspired Royal Oak captured the “stealth wealth” style of the moment, mirroring the cutting-edge ethos of the French fashion scene (think: Hubert de Givenchy, Yves Saint Laurent, Emanuel Ungaro, Pierre Cardin), as well as the era’s groundbreaking architecture, such as Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano’s inside-out postmodernist Pompidou Centre in Paris, completed in 1977. “To me, the Royal Oak is a work of art that happens to be a watch,” says British GQ editor Bill Prince, author of the new book Royal Oak: From Iconoclast to Icon (Assouline), coming out October 12. “It’s one of those works of culture that has managed to cut through time, in the sense that it was born of an era, but it already had the criteria to be bigger than the era.”

Courtesy Olivia Sammons

A New Zine Highlights the Poetry and Beauty of Food

Each of us has our own individual way of following the changing of the seasons, a private choreography in relationship to the calendar. For interior designer and prop stylist Olivia Sammons, the produce available from the farms, orchards, and markets near her family’s Hudson Valley home marks time for her, leading her forward through the year. “I spend so much time thinking about food,” she says. “What I’m going to eat, where I’m going to find it, which orchard has the best blueberries.” This focus led her to create the new zine Is My Favorite Flavor, which just launched its first issue, appropriately titled Summer! Is My Favorite Flavor, at the design-focused Head Hi bookshop and café in Brooklyn.

Photo: John C. Hawthorne. Courtesy Alex Tatarsky.

Alex Tatarsky on Art as a Means to Live Out the Absurd

It’s late August, and I’m walking on Grand Street in Lower Manhattan. It’s one of those summer evenings that’s cooler than expected, a pleasant foreshadowing of fall. I’m on my way to discuss compost with the artist Alex Tatarsky, and as I head east from the subway, I pass through the dense, networked scents of the edge of Chinatown: the briny tang of fish markets, the sweet snatch of a fresh egg waffle from a rolled ice cream shop, the yeasty cloud that floats around the famous bialy shop. Approaching Abrons Art Center, where Tatarsky is doing pick-up rehearsals for an out-of-town run of their show Dirt Trip, this close-packed olfactory landscape opens up into something with more space: a faint vegetal whiff from a small vacant lot, the not unpleasant chemical tang from a passing truck, and beyond these, the smell of a certain rot rolling in from the East River.

Courtesy Blue Note Records

An Album of Cover Songs Honors the Legacy of Leonard Cohen

Though nearly six years have gone by since Leonard Cohen’s passing, the long shadow cast by his legacy as one of the 20th century’s most esteemed and idiosyncratic singer-songwriters shows no signs of lifting from the public’s imagination anytime soon. From the enveloping warmth of “Suzanne,” to the high drama of “Hallelujah,” to the chilling minimalist and gospel juxtaposition of his swansong “You Want it Darker,” Cohen managed to constantly reinvent himself, leaving behind the rare achievement of a musical body of work whose most impressive moments exist across eras.

Courtesy OMA

For a Tiffany & Co. Pop-Up in Paris, OMA Designs a Literal Jewelry Box

Hiring a world-class architecture firm to design a tiny temporary retail space may seem an extravagant choice, but given the high aspirations of Tiffany & Co.—especially now that it’s owned by the French luxury conglomerate LVMH—it makes sense for the American jewelry company’s Paris debut under its new French banner.