Skip to main content
A brown ant on a white background
Photo: Andrew Zuckerman

The Sophisticated, Scent-Centric Language of Ants

Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder

May 1, 2021
  • Share:

“Apparently some people can’t smell dead ants,” a stunned TikTok creator says in a post she made last November. “Dude, huh?” The video went viral, amassing hundreds of comments and replies that debated whether or not the fallen insects emit an odor, and if so, what it smells like.

While most responders had never associated ants with scents of any kind, it turns out that many species of the critter give off foul-smelling stenches when crushed or in danger. “There’s a whole bouquet of different scents and odors that are associated with ants,” says Clint Penick, a professor and principal investigator in the Penick Lab at Georgia’s Kennesaw State University, which studies the lives of social insects such as ants, bees, and termites. Citronella ants, for example, release a subtle lemony savor when squished, while trap-jaw ants produce a chocolate aroma. When threatened, carpenter ants spray formic acid, a vinegar-scented substance that can burn predators and ward off bears. The main reason people think they can’t smell ants, Penick says, is likely because they’ve never taken the time to try.

But the redolences our noses detect offer only the faintest whiff of an ant’s universe, in which scent is a primary form of language. “Ants rely on chemical communication,” Penick says. “They have one of the best senses of smell of any life on earth.” Highly sensitive chemical receptors cover an ant’s antennae, detecting pheromones (the chemical scent signals that animals produce) made by dozens of glands on their bodies. Ants use various mixtures of the substance to identify threats, members of their colonies, trails to food sources, and even the quality of those food sources, allowing them to create and participate in sophisticated social structures that have striking parallels to human society, such as architecture, social immunity, and the maintenance of armies. The next time you see one of these insects on your counter, consider giving it a closer look—and maybe even a friendly sniff.

# Animals# Science# insects

Keep Reading

A collective house near the Catholic mission on the Catrimani River in the Roraima state of Brazil, photographed by Claudia Andujar in 1976. (Courtesy the artist)

culture

nature

future

The Cosmovision of the Yanomami People and the Violent Forces That Threaten Them

Entering “The Yanomami Struggle” exhibition at The Shed in Manhattan’s Hudson Yards, I find myself standing before a vast arrangement of photographs, some crisp and hyperpigmented, others blurred and grayscale, all suspended from the ceiling as if parts of a room-size mobile. After a moment of taking in my new environs, the subjects of the closest set of imagery come into focus. To my left is a diptych of a lake overcast by a stormy sky and a boy floating face up along a cerulean-blue river. To my right is a black-and-white collage of children traipsing across a rainforest floor. Directly ahead of me is the most arresting photo of them all: a lush canopy of trees, all a psychedelic fuschia, with a thatch-roofed hut inlaid therein. The flourishing scenes before me are a far cry from the barren, wintery stretch of the High Line I’ve just walked along to get here. I’ve somehow traversed a portal, and have arrived in another world.

One of three versions of Thomas Ball’s sculpture “Emancipation Group” on view at “re:mancipation.” (Courtesy the Chazen Museum of Art and the Colby College Museum of Art)

culture

future

Sanford Biggers, a Collective of Artists, and a Museum Interrogate a Problematic Abraham Lincoln Monument

Nearly 150 years ago, on April 14, 1876—the eleventh anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s death—Frederick Douglass spoke before a gathered crowd in Washington, D.C.’s Lincoln Park for the dedication of a new monument. Sculpted by Thomas Ball, the statue, known as the “Emancipation Memorial,” depicts an expertly tailored Lincoln holding a copy of his Emancipation Proclamation as a muscular and barely clothed freedman kneels beneath him. “Friends and fellow citizens,” Douglass said, “I warmly congratulate you upon the highly interesting object which has caused you to assemble in such numbers and spirit as you have today.”

Lesley Lokko. (Photo: Murdo Macleod. Courtesy the African Futures Institute)

culture

future

Lesley Lokko Positions Africa as a Laboratory for Harnessing the Vast Possibilities of the Future

For Lesley Lokko, plurality comes naturally. Born in Scotland to a Ghanaian father and a Scottish mother, and moving frequently between Ghana and the U.K. during her youth, the architect-scholar-novelist has long navigated these countries through an insider-outsider lens. As the curator of this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, titled “The Laboratory of the Future,” she’s bringing exactly this outlook to the main exhibition. On view from May 20 through Nov. 26, the six-part presentation will put the spotlight on Africa for the first time in the Biennale’s history—with more than half of the contributors hailing from Africa or from the African diaspora. The timing of Lokko’s Biennale appointment is not so coincidental: In 2020, she founded the African Futures Institute in Accra, a new architecture school and research institute that, as with her Biennale show, positions Africa as a laboratory for harnessing the vast possibilities of the future.

Jonah Takagi. (Photo: Erik Benjamins. Courtesy Marta)

culture

Jonah Takagi on Media as the Place Where the Practical Meets the Personal

Jonah Takagi comes across as laid-back and casual, but the truth is, he keeps pretty busy. The bulk of his time is split between New York City, where he runs his namesake design studio, and Providence, Rhode Island, where he teaches a Herman Miller–inspired furniture design course at the Rhode Island School of Design. When he’s not designing or teaching, he’s up in the foothills of Vermont’s Green Mountains, developing a newly acquired plot of land, or back at home in Brooklyn, engineering his own tube amplifiers and other hi-fi audio equipment.

Cover of “Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life” by Dacher Keltner. (Courtesy Penguin Press)

culture

nature

Dacher Keltner on Why We All Need Daily Doses of Awe

For the past 20 years, Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, has been teaching the slippery subject of happiness. Now, at last, he believes he has landed on a profoundly simple, scientifically proven method for achieving it: “Find awe,” he writes in his extraordinary new book, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life (Penguin Press).

Karl Lagerfeld in 2014. (Photo: Christopher William Adach)

culture

A New “Cultural Biography” on Karl Lagerfeld Illuminates the Person Behind the Image

Few people in history have managed to maintain an image as precise and immutable as that of the late fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld. Invariably uniformed in jet-black sunglasses and high-collared white shirts, his hair always neatly pulled back and powdered white à la eighteenth century French bourgeoisie, Lagerfeld made of himself something of a walking portrait, over time reaching icon status. His nearly seven decade–long career was nothing short of revolutionary, from creating brand-defining collections for houses including Fendi and Chloé; to launching his eponymous Karl Lagerfeld label in 1984; to helming Chanel as creative director from 1983 until his death in early 2019—a period during which he wholly revitalized the legendary French house, propelling it into modernity.

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

culture

future

Nike Imagines the World 50 Years From Now

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.

The classic “Blue Marble” image of the Earth, taken by the Apollo 17 crew on Dec. 7, 1972. (Courtesy NASA)

culture

nature

future

Marina Koren on Rethinking the “Overview Effect”

Marina Koren, who covers science and space exploration as a staff writer for The Atlantic, realizes her job doesn’t sound real. “But I promise it is,” she says. “When I tell people I’m a ‘space reporter,’ they’re not quite sure what to do with that. But space is a beat.”

Cover of “Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory” by Janet Malcolm. (Courtesy Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

culture

The Piercing Prose of the Late Janet Malcolm

When Janet Malcolm first wrote for The New Yorker in 1963, her debut wasn’t in the form of the piercing prose she became known for, but instead a slim poem titled “Thoughts on Living in a Shaker House.” On the surface, it may seem an odd starting point for Malcolm, who would become one of the foremost writers about—and shrewdest observers of—psychoanalysis, the law, and journalism, and who would remain a New Yorker staff writer until her death, on June 16, 2021, at age 86. But the poem’s lines are indeed pure Malcolm: plainspoken, cutting in their clarity, and—save the use of the words “lineaments” and “epicene”—generally unpretentious. Consider the poem’s second stanza: “This house is full of pegs and sense,/A kind of grudging elegance/Informs each piece and artifact/Come down to use preserved intact.”

Pieces in Brush’s “Wave” series of steel objects. (Photo: Takaaki Matsumoto. Courtesy Rizzoli Electa)

culture

Remembering Daniel Brush and His Immaculate, Otherworldly Objects, Paintings, and Jewelry

The first time I ever set foot in the Manhattan studio of the practically indefinable artist-metalsmith-painter-engineer-philosopher-poet Daniel Brush, who died on Nov. 26, 2022, at age 75, he was looking directly at me through his jewelers loupe, which was firmly fastened around his head, just as I exited off the elevator. I found it quite peculiar, at the time, to not be able to clearly see his face or look him in the eyes, but eventually, as I got to know him better (and once the loupe came off), I understood it to be a pragmatic form of protection. With those magnifying glasses on, he was in his happy place. He felt safe, comfortable, at home. Himself. This close-up view was how he saw things. He looked at the world, and the cosmos at large, in microscopic detail. Daniel intimately understood that the largest truths could be found in the most minuscule of places.

An Yu. (Courtesy Grove Atlantic)

culture

The Eerie, Dreamlike Piano Melodies Behind An Yu’s Latest Novel

An Yu’s latest novel, Ghost Music (Grove Atlantic), tells the story of Song Yan, a former concert pianist whose domestic life starts to cave in when her husband refuses her pleas to have a child. Beginning with unsolicited parcels of mushrooms arriving at her door, Song Yan’s world devolves into the phantasmagorical as she is slowly led to the discovery of a long-vanished musician, the once world-famous pianist Bai Yu. Throughout the story, eerie, dream-like piano melodies guide the reader between the real and surreal, and between Song Yan’s conscious and subconscious.

Courtesy Anne Helen Petersen

culture

Anne Helen Petersen on Keeping Media All Around—But at Arm’s Length

Anne Helen Petersen resides on Lummi Island, a small land mass in the Puget Sound seven minutes off the coast of Washington by ferry. Just over nine square miles large and home to a mere 900 residents, Lummi is known to be the quietest of the islands in the Sound. Up above, seagulls soar and squawk; down below, ocean waves slosh onto stony shores. Residents spend their time hiking, boating, or strolling along the serene coastline, or catching up on the local goings-on via The Tome, the island’s newsletter, which arrives in their (physical) mailboxes once a month.

The cover of “Question Everything: A Stone Reader,” co-edited by Simon Critchley and Peter Catapano. (Courtesy Liveright)

culture

Simon Critchley on the Sheer Delight of Questioning Everything

When the Covid-19 pandemic arrived, and with it, the lockdowns of March 2020, I sat at home in Brooklyn Heights, alone, and watched as friends swiftly decamped to homes upstate, in the Hamptons and Connecticut, and beyond. One even moved to Miami. I have family in Colorado, and considered driving cross-country to be with them, but a part of me felt it was important, for whatever reason, to just stay put—not to flee the city, but to embrace it in one of its more precarious moments. For weeks, I listened to nonstop sirens wailing over the Brooklyn Bridge, along Cadman Plaza, and up and down the B.Q.E., and in them, I heard death. The banging of pots and pans at 7 p.m. each day to honor healthcare workers—heartwarming as the gesture was—felt to me more like a signal, a way for neighbors to say, “I’m still here. I’m still alive.” At times, the in-between silences felt almost deafening. There was so much grief and sadness in the stillness.

Aerial view of the new Son Bunyola hotel in Mallorca, Spain. (Courtesy Son Bunyola)

culture

Five Trendsetters on Their Most Anticipated 2023 Travel Destinations

The old’s been rung out, the new’s been rung in. We’re now all looking out on the year ahead, thinking about what it might hold, and where it might take us. This latter question, we realize, is quite literal for a lot of people, particularly with the tide turning on travel restrictions and peace of mind slowly being restored to the masses. 2023 is forecast to be the year when, for better or worse, travel will make a full return to its pre-pandemic patterns.

Washington Square Park in New York City’s Greenwich Village. (Photo: Spencer Bailey)

culture

A Walking Tour of Greenwich Village With Architecture Critic Michael Kimmelman

It’s a late afternoon in early November, nearing dusk, and I’m sitting with Michael Kimmelman, the New York Times architecture critic, inside the West Village outpost of Daily Provisions, a café from the New York City restaurateur Danny Meyer. A sort of contemporary town square, Daily Provisions is exactly the kind of place that Kimmelman, who’s widely known for his egalitarian, public-oriented prose, would consider from a development and urban design perspective: its impacts on the streetscape and the neighborhood, the community around it, and the city beyond. (In 2016, he wrote about another Meyer establishment, Union Square Cafe, unpacking the implications of the then-new location and layout of the legacy Manhattan restaurant.)

Clockwise from top left: “The Essentials” from Eleven Madison Home, Ikebana Kit Box from Space of Time, “Conversations with Noguchi,” Ghetto Gastro Ancestral Roots waffle and pancake mix, Gohar World Host Necklace, Rice Factory New York rice, Papier d’Arménie “Discovery Box,” and Michael Kimmelman’s “The Intimate City.”

culture

Eight Distinctive and Delightful Gifts for the 2022 Holiday Season

A few years ago, some days after my birthday, a cardboard shipping tube appeared at my door, beige and unassuming, addressed to me but with no sender information listed. Upon discovering its contents, I was in tears—I knew immediately who had sent it and what was meant by it. It remains the best gift I’ve ever received, and it’ll stay with me for a long time.

“Ilan's Garden” (2022) by Doron Langberg. (Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro)

culture

As Art Basel Turns 20, Miami Art Week Enters a New, Slightly Less Hyped-Up Dawn

That the first work of art I saw during this year’s Miami Art Week was a newscast seems somehow appropriate in our precarious-yet-emerging-from-Covid present. “How do we make sense of things in today’s age of misinformation and sped-up media ecosystem?” the artists behind it, from the civic-engagement coalition For Freedoms, appeared to be asking. “And really, what’s the difference between art and the news?”

Installation view of “Young Lords and Their Traces” at the New Museum. (Photo: Dario Lasagni. Courtesy the New Museum)

culture

Theaster Gates’s New Exhibition Poetically Prods the Meaning of a Museum

What’s the purpose of a museum—and who decides which objects are worthy of value, attention, and care? These two questions, along with decades of inventive and collective artmaking, are at the core of “Young Lords and Their Traces” at the New Museum, the Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates’s first-ever museum survey exhibition to be staged in New York City (on view through February 5, 2023).

Installation view of “RE_________” at the ICA Philadelphia. (Courtesy the ICA)

culture

nature

At the ICA Philadelphia, Sissel Tolaas Presents Smell as a Poetic Provocation

Walking into the cavernous first-floor gallery of the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Philadelphia—where “RE_________,” an exhibition by the Norwegian-born, Berlin-based artist Sissel Tolaas is currently on view (through Dec. 30)—feels like stepping into a scientist’s laboratory, if the scientist it belonged to had also studied minimal sculpture. There’s a wall of small vials printed with the artist’s name, each containing a bit of clear liquid. Plastic tubes and metal piping run high along the gallery, carrying who knows what to who knows where. Others descend from the ceiling towards concrete reservoirs that have been raised from the floor. One of them is disgorging, drop by drop, a bit of unknown liquid. In the center of the room, an assembly of large flasks, some of which are bubbling, releasing visible vapor into the air, surrounds a huge pillar. Beyond it is a long, multilevel plinth covered in small objects; in the center of the floor, an assemblage of glass sculptures, seemingly empty.

A view of Auster’s performance “Sound Mo(ve)ments.” (Photo: Destiny Mata)

culture

Sara Auster’s Sound Baths Are a Tonic for Our Tumultuous Times

Experiencing true silence is probably impossible. The closest I’ve come is perhaps my 30 minutes inside Doug Wheeler’s “PSAD Synthetic Desert III” (1971), an installation presented at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2017 that gave visitors an experience of near-soundlessness. Stepping into that carefully designed chamber at the apex of the museum’s rotunda, the air felt thick and flat, like everything had suddenly been smothered under a heavy velvet curtain. It was so silent that, after a moment, I could hear the sound of my own blood pumping. I was suddenly aware of my body in a new way. The sound of it maintaining itself was coming through a different kind of physical channel than the regular, everyday hearing I was used to. This produced a simple, but lasting revelation: Hearing, as a perceptual act, is a physical phenomenon.

Photo: Zeph Colombatto

culture

Sound Is at the Core of Musician-Turned-Ceramicist Kansai Noguchi’s Vases and Vessels

From his Tokyo studio, Japanese artist Kansai Noguchi crafts striking, one-of-a-kind ceramic vases, vessels, and painted canvases that make a bold first impression that invite the eye to linger on their mesmerizing visual contrasts. His preference for working in a limited palette is obvious, and is inspired by ceramics of Japan’s Jōmon period (10,500–300 B.C.), considered among the oldest pottery in the world. Noguchi’s approach isn’t just about visual aesthetics; equally present in his pieces is their ability to possess “sounds of music.”

Courtesy Tertulia

culture

This New App Gives Readers a Place to Convene and Connect

How or when do we talk about the books that move us? Perhaps at a dinner party. With a bookstore clerk or librarian. Maybe on Twitter or Facebook. Raving to a friend.

Courtesy Jill Singer

culture

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

culture

nature

future

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)

nature

future

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

culture

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)

culture

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

culture

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

culture

nature

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)

culture

nature

“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

culture

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.

culture

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)

culture

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

culture

future

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)

culture

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)

nature

future

“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

culture

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

culture

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.

culture

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

culture

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.