Artisan Ethos

Costa Rica’s Ceramic Craft

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Amie and I work together, but most of my days are consumed by coffee. Especially in the March to May period, when coffee harvests are finishing and the first cuppings of the new crops are possible, my time for other activities is limited. But in June, there is more time. For the past 4+ years our shared work has included my joining her to meet artisans whose work our shops might carry. This work never disappoints, even if we conclude that the product is not a good fit for Authentica. Recently we had an afternoon together with a ceramicist we knew about, but had not yet had the opportunity to spend time with. The biggest surprise was seeing this smoke stack in the photo below.

It is rustic, and at first sight not much to look at. But listening to him tell its history you can appreciate how often in history artisans lead the way that industrialists eventually follow. This was the first smokestack in Costa Rica using technology that reduces carbon and particulate emissions. Continue reading →

Pottery Tradition & Modernity

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Mr. Biscu makes pieces using clay that comes from earth extracted from a hill in Horezu.

Chantel Tattoli reported this story from Horezu, Romania for the New York Times. Accompanied by photographs and video by Marko Risovic, her story is based on speaking to a dozen local potters using a translator:

A style of pottery made for centuries in a small Romanian town has recently become a hot commodity.

Sorin Giubega at his home, which is filled with ceramics made by him and his ancestors.

Sorin Giubega’s grandfather was a potter. So was his father. And at 8 years old, Mr. Giubega said, he started to play on a pottery wheel, too.

Mr. Giubega, now 63, and his wife, Marieta Giubega, 48, are potters in Horezu, Romania, a town in the foothills of the Capatanii Mountains about three hours by car from Bucharest.

Horezu is home to a community of about 50 artisans who make a traditional style of ceramics with methods that have been practiced for more than 300 years. Continue reading →

Miyazaki, Trees & Authentic Experience

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A photograph of children walking along a path in the woods. Two of them are holding hands.

The magazine sent the Japanese photographer Rinko Kawauchi to Ghibli Park on a day when it was closed to the public, and she took along her daughter and some friends. Rinko Kawauchi for The New York Times

Links to the writings of Sam Anderson have not appeared in our pages before, and I almost missed this opportunity because at first appearance this article does not fit the norm for our themes. But if you read to the end, it does so in one clear way. It has to do with the power of nature, trees in particular, and once you read the article you will understand (if you are familiar with our platform). You can also listen to an audio version of this article here, but be sure to see the photos in the original publication:

Spirited Away to Miyazaki Land

What happens when the surreal imagination of the world’s greatest living animator, Hayao Miyazaki, is turned into a theme park?

A Totoro-like climbing structure. Rinko Kawauchi

As an American, I know what it feels like to arrive at a theme park. The totalizing consumerist embrace. The blunt-force, world-warping, escapist delight. I have known theme parks with entrance gates like international borders and ticket prices like mortgage payments and parking lots the size of Cleveland. I have been to Disney World, an alternate reality that basically occupies its own tax zone, with its own Fire Department and its own agriculture — a place where, before you’ve even entered, you see a 100-foot-tall electrical pole along the freeway with Mickey Mouse ears. This is a theme park’s job: to swallow the universe. To replace our boring, aimless, frustrating world with a new one made just for us. Continue reading →

Give It Up For Oysters

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Among the ocean’s best filter feeders, one oyster cleans 50 gallons of water per day. Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

We have linked to stories about the environmental services that oysters provide, as well as the environmental activists who leverage those services; today a riff on those topics:

Stefanie Bassett and Elizabeth Peeples left their city lives behind to raise mollusks.

The Little Ram Oyster Co., a farm of 2 million oysters on the North Fork of Long Island, started with a Groupon.

To celebrate a friend’s birthday in the summer of 2017, Stefanie Bassett and Elizabeth Peeples joined eight other enthusiasts in Long Island City to learn how to shuck oysters at a discount. The Brooklyn couple, who knew each other from middle school in Columbia, Md., always had a love for the delicacy. But as they laughed with their friends and fumbled with their oyster knives, they also listened intently as an instructor explained the history and magic of the mollusks.

Ms. Bassett and Ms. Peeples prepare oyster cages to be put into the water. Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

“The thing that drew our attention was the positive environmental impact oysters have,” said Ms. Bassett, 42.

Among the ocean’s best filter feeders, one oyster cleans 50 gallons of water per day. New York was once known as “the Big Oyster,” but over-harvesting and poor water quality wiped out the population by the 21st century. The couple learned about efforts to bring them back to the harbor. Continue reading →

11 Years, 11 Months & 11 Days Later

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Mermaid (now in Escazu, Costa Rica), handcrafted by Rock Bottom from driftwood in Port Antonio, Jamaica

June 15, 2011 was the day we first posted on this platform, and while we have evolved since then we have remained constant and consistent in a few ways. In the daily search for something worth sharing, photos of birds from around the world have been the most constant–as in, every day since the first photo was shared by this old friend who got us started on that daily routine. Thank you, Vijaykumar, for a healthy habit-formation.

Consistent have been the shared convictions that environmental conservation, no matter how bleak the news, is worth our effort.

Maroon shaman mask with third eye for healing power (now in Ithaca, NY USA), handcrafted by Rock Bottom from driftwood in Port Antonio, Jamaica

Plenty more constantly interesting sub-topics like books and libraries, seemingly unrelated to the environment, have been the focus of daily posts; but they are related. As is artisan production, riffed upon many times in these pages, especially now that it is the focus of our day jobs.

So today, heading toward the twelve year mark posting here, a nod to an artisan named Rock Bottom. He carves driftwood in Port Antonio, Jamaica.

There is an effort in that part of Jamaica to revive and strengthen traditional crafts, and the work of Rock Bottom is a model for what we can hope to see more of. My hope is that the amazing engine of economic activity that Jamaica’s tourism sector represents will valorize his work and the work of others akin to his.

Another Year, Another Invasive Python Initiative: Inversa Leathers

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The invasive Burmese python has become the apex predator in the Florida Everglades, displacing the native American alligator. Photograph: Dorling Kindersley ltd/Alamy

We have been paying attention to this problem for more than a decade, and seen ideas like this before; until the problem is mitigated, we will continue sharing:

Could handbags be the haute couture solution to Florida’s python problem?

Invasive Burmese pythons are devastating wildlife but one firm believes turning snake leather into accessories could be a win-win

The fight to eradicate Burmese pythons from the Florida Everglades has intertwined with New York’s haute fashion scene in a project launched by a group of environmental activists who have already experienced success working with the skins of other invasive species. Continue reading →

Auchan 2000 & Authentica 2023

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The Auchan hypermarche in Cergy is at the location of the red balloon in the image above. It is a short walk from the ESSEC campus (lower center of map). Click to go to the map on Auchan’s website

On each of the occasions I have read articles about Annie Ernaux I have been reminded of the first of my five years teaching at ESSEC. During the 2000-2003 academic years I lived on campus for extended periods away from home and family in Costa Rica. My grocery shopping was at the same Auchan elegantly dissected by the woman who last year won the Nobel Prize in Literature.  During my fourth year teaching there I was completing work on a project in Montenegro that made it more convenient for our family to be based in Paris for 12 months. This turned out to be one of the most culturally enriching experiences our family ever had together. And relevant to life now.

Adrienne Raphel’s article in The Paris Review begins with her own “big retail” experience, and at first read it connects dots between our Paris time and our retail life now. For the last 4+ years we have been waking up each day looking for novel ways to succeed without following the “pile it high and watch it fly” model. So, if that resonates with you for any reason, read on:

INTERIOR OF THE WAL-MART SUPERCENTER IN ALBANY. PHOTOGRAPH BY MATT WADE, COURTESY OF WIKIMEDIA COMMONS. LICENSED UNDER CCO 3.0.

“The Dead Silence of Goods”: Annie Ernaux and the Superstore

The first and only time I went to the Walmart in Iowa City was surreal. When I was in high school, my parents’ business-oriented small press had published a book called The Case Against Walmart that called for a national consumer boycott of the company; the author denounced everything from the superstore’s destruction of environmentally protected lands to its sweatshop labor to its knockoff merchandise. So by the time I made a pilgrimage out to the superstore at age twenty-one, I hadn’t stepped in a Walmart for nearly a decade, and it had acquired this transgressive power—the very act of crossing the threshold was as shameful as it was thrilling…

Andy Hunter Scales Up Without Selling Out

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Andy Hunter, the founder of Bookshop.org (pictured here at Spoonbill & Sugartown Books in Brooklyn) developed his love for books early. “I became a reader, in the beginning, because it provided me solace,” he says. PHOTOGRAPH: YAEL MALKA

Who could resist a story about scaling up without selling out–especially when it involves an online book shop?

Our thanks to Kate Knibbs, a senior writer at WIRED, for this profile of someone who has indirectly featured in our pages without being named before.

Not to mention the photographs by Yael Malka accompanying the story:

How Bookshop.org Survives—and Thrives—in Amazon’s World

Andy Hunter’s ecommerce platform was a pandemic hit. Now he’s on a mission to prove that small businesses can scale up without selling out.

“DO YOU REMEMBER what kind of beer it was?”

PHOTOGRAPH: YAEL MALKA

Andy Hunter pauses for so long before answering my question, it’s awkward. He’s racking his brain. I’ve asked him to tell me about the night he came up with the idea that led to his improbably successful bookselling startup, Bookshop.org. As a former magazine editor, he wants to get the details right.

He remembers the easy stuff: It was 2018. He was on the road for work. At the time, Hunter ran the midsize literary publishing house Catapult, a job that required schmoozing at industry events. The night of his big brainstorm, he was away from his two young daughters and his usual evening obligations—dishes, bedtime rituals—and had a rare moment to think, and drink a beer. Continue reading →

Libreria Bookshop & Review Of Once Upon A Prime

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Click above to visit an independent bookshop whose platform for selling books online is a welcome distraction. Below, the owner of that shop (a character worth contemplating) writes a great book review. Oddly enough, we could not find, or figure out how to find, this book on his bookshop’s website.

But nevermind that, we have linked to the publisher’s blurb on the book to the left:

Once Upon a Prime review – why maths and literature make a winning formula

Prof Sarah Hart’s exuberant study of the enduring conversation between mathematics and literature is fascinating

The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries.” That’s how Jorge Luis Borges starts The Library of Babel, beloved by maths geeks and book nerds alike for the way it toys with the mathematical concept of infinity. Continue reading →

The Forest Gives Much

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Freshly harvested logs from the Menominee Forest in Keshena, Wis., marked with color to indicate each log’s grade.

Sustainable forestry is a long-running topic in these pages over the years. The previous times we have linked to Cara Buckley stories we have been enriched by the humanity in environmental stories, so here we combine her unique talent to the topic of forestry:

The Giving Forest

The Menominee tribe has sustainably logged its forest in Wisconsin for 160 years. But that careful balance faces a crisis: too many trees and too few loggers.

A tree marked for cutting. The Menominee harvest only trees that are sick and dying or those that have fallen naturally

MENOMINEE COUNTY, Wis. — Amid the sprawling farmlands of northeast Wisconsin, the Menominee forest feels like an elixir, and a marvel. Its trees press in, towering and close, softening the air, a dense emerald wilderness that’s home to wolves, bears, otters, warblers and hawks, and that shows little hint of human hands.

Yet over the last 160 years, much of this forest has been chopped down and regrown nearly three times. The Menominee Tribe of Wisconsin, its stewards, have pulled nearly two hundred million cubic feet of timber from this land since 1854 — white pine cut into museum displays and hard maple made into basketball courts for the Olympics. Continue reading →

Trashy Fashion

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Congolese artist Nada Thsibwabwa photographed by Colin Delfosse wearing a costume made of mobile phones in Matonge district, Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo. All images © Colin Delfosse

Congolese artist Hemock Kilomboshi posing in his rubber costume in Matonge district, Kinshasa. A member of the Kinact platform, Kilomboshi performs in Kinshasa’s streets to raise issues about globalisation and economic plunder in the DRC.

We featured an African social enterprise in our pages, back in the days of our Ghana work, that today’s story reminds us of. Whether on the streets of Accra, or the streets of Kinshasa, we love the creative approach. Click any image, or the title link below, to see the entire collection in the Guardian:

Rubbish fashion: street art costumes of Kinshasa – in pictures

In his series Fulu Act, Brussels-based documentary photographer Colin Delfosse captures street artists in Kinshasa, who craft striking costumes out of everyday objects found littering the streets, such as discarded wigs, wires, soda cans and bottle lids, to raise awareness of environmental issues facing the Democratic Republic of the Congo. “The statement behind their costumes is to condemn and inform about overconsumption and its side effects, namely pollution, poverty, lack of reliable investments and so on,” says Delfosse. “By capturing these images, I’m giving an echo to their crucial work.”

Congolese artist Jean Precy Numbi Samba, AKA Robot Kimbalambala, pictured in his costume made of car spare parts in the Ngiri-Ngiri district, Kinshasa, December 2019. The car market in the capital’s suburbs is mostly made of highly polluting secondhand (or thirdhand) vehicles from Europe.

 

Ever-Evolving Puppetry

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Foreground, from left: Fred Davis, Scarlet Wilderink and Finn Caldwell. Behind the tiger, from left: Andrew Wilson and Rowan Ian Seamus Magee. Nina Westervelt for The New York Times

Puppetry is a rare topic in these pages, but as cultural heritage goes, this ever-evolving form is worth at least a few minutes of reading time related to this new production:

Puppetry So Lifelike, Even Their Deaths Look Real

Members of the puppetry team for “Life of Pi” discuss making the show’s animals seem all-too-real on a very crowded lifeboat.

Richard Parker, the Royal Bengal tiger in “Life of Pi” takes three puppeteers (including Celia Mei Rubin, bottom left) to operate in the production opening at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater on March 30. Nina Westervelt for The New York Times

Fair warning: This article is riddled with spoilers about puppet deaths in “Life of Pi,” the stage adaptation of Yann Martel’s best-selling novel about a shipwrecked teenager adrift on the Pacific Ocean. He shares his lifeboat first with a menagerie of animals from his family’s zoo in India — large-scale puppets all, requiring a gaggle of puppeteers — and eventually just with a magnificent, ravenous Royal Bengal tiger named Richard Parker that takes three puppeteers to operate.

Now in previews on Broadway, where it is slated to open on March 30 at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater, the play picked up five Olivier Awards in London last year. Puppetry design by the longtime collaborators Nick Barnes and Finn Caldwell was included with Tim Hatley’s set in one award, and, unprecedentedly, a team of puppeteers won an acting Olivier for playing Richard Parker. Continue reading →

Leveraging Guarani Knowhow For Reforestation

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A Guarani man walks through a cleared patch of Brazil’s Atlantic Forest that the local Indigenous community is trying to reforest. DIEGO HERCULANO / NURPHOTO VIA GETTY IMAGES

Thanks to Jill Langlois and Yale e360:

How Indigenous People Are Restoring Brazil’s Atlantic Forest

The Guarani Mbya people are working to restore the once-vast Atlantic Forest, which has been largely lost to development. Gaining official tenure of their lands, they hope, will boost their efforts, which range from planting native trees to reintroducing pollinators.

It was 2016 when Jurandir Jekupe noticed the bees were gone.

Their nests were once common in Yvy Porã, the Guarani Mbya village where Jekupe grew up and still lives. Continue reading →

Spirit Catcher and Lumen-Less Lantern, An Art Intervention by Willie Cole

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Willie Cole in his artist-in-residence studio at Express Newark, where he has been assembling chandeliers made from thousands of used plastic bottles. Rachel Vanni for The New York Times

Recycling has been a key theme in these pages since we started. Sometimes upcycle has been the term. Of course, reuse is also interesting.

All of these are worth our attention and support.

Our thanks to Laura van Straaten and the New York Times for bringing Willie Cole’s exhibition into view:

The artist invited the community in Newark to reimagine objects that would otherwise be destined for a landfill — to look at them in a fresh, imaginative way.

“Spirit Catcher” by Willie Cole is made of thousands of water bottles held together with metal wire and sculpted to resemble a chandelier. Rachel Vanni for The New York Times

NEWARK — The artist Willie Cole has created two colossal new sculptures and generated a provocative group exhibition stemming from an unusual open call asking artists to transform objects destined for landfill into something imaginative and new. Continue reading →

All That Breathes, A Film & A Feeling

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Image posted by nswewind to twitterWith a film review titled It’s easy to focus on what’s bad — ‘All That Breathes’ celebrates the good it would be difficult to resist reading, but spoilers can be annoying; not here:

In Anne Lamott’s book on writing, she tells a great story about facing tasks that seem overwhelming. Her 10-year-old brother was doing a big school project on birds, and as the deadline loomed, he became paralyzed by how much he still had to do. His father put his arm around him and gave him a piece of advice, “Bird by bird, buddy,” he told him. “Just take it bird by bird.”

Image posted by asideshowfilm to twitterThis useful life lesson takes literal form in All That Breathes, a wonderful new documentary that arrives on HBO and HBO Max garlanded with international awards. Directed by Shaunak Sen — and ravishingly shot by Ben Bernhard — this inspiring film takes us inside the lives of two ordinary seeming Muslim brothers in Delhi who are actually extraordinary in their dedication to doing good in a city teetering on the edge of apocalypse.

The brothers are named Saud and Nadeem, the former friendly, the latter a little grumpy. Continue reading →

Good Chocolate

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‘The only way to ensure that money is going into a farmer’s pocket is to buy directly from farmers.’

‘The only way to ensure that money is going into a farmer’s pocket is to buy directly from farmers.’ Illustration: Rita Liu/The Guardian

We have been avid readers on the topic of chocolate for almost as long as we have been sharing articles on this platform:

The sweet spot: is ethical and affordable chocolate possible?

It is possible to pay farmers a premium while selling single-origin chocolate at a cheaper price – but it means companies have to transform the way it’s made

Is it possible to make an ethical chocolate bar that’s also affordable? Tim McCollum, the founder of the bean-to-bar chocolate brand Beyond Good, says the answer is yes – but you have to transform the way it’s made. Continue reading →

The Heart Beat In Greece

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Kostas Papastavros and his goats on the top of the Koziakas mountain, part of Pindus range on mainland Greece. Photograph: Vasileios Tsiolis

I appreciate the comment about the heart beat in Katy Fallon’s portrait of a particular form of pastoral life in northern Greece. It comes just as we start dreaming of making an overdue visit back to the country I would most likely choose to live, if not for Costa Rica’s strong pull:

Kostas leading the goats back to the family’s makeshift summer barn on Koziakas mountain

‘My heart beats up here’: Greece’s nomadic herders on life in the hills – a photo essay

For hundreds of years the Vlach herders in Greece and the Balkans have moved livestock to high mountain pastures for the summer months. But their numbers are dwindling as their arduous existence is threatened by soaring costs and a lack of state support

Kostas and Fotini walk with the family’s mare in front of the prehistoric cave of Theopetra village

Every spring in the Thessalian plains of central Greece, in the shadow of the mountains, an ancient and sacred migration of humans and goats takes place. Continue reading →

Authentica Manuel Antonio

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After the opening years helped us strengthen our resolve, 2022 was the year we expanded Authentica beyond the first two locations. I will feature images of the new shop, in Manuel Antonio, in a later post. For now, just a look at the signage art in front of the new shop.

An Intelligible Conversation About Artificial Intelligence

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Yejin Choi leading a research seminar in September at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

We have shared dozens of links to stories about advances in technology–especially those with application to conservation–none has touched on artificial intelligence. During my daily scanning for articles to share in 2022 I have noticed this topic more and more as a source of fear, to the point where I stopped reading them; but today’s is different:

An A.I. Pioneer on What We Should Really Fear

Artificial intelligence stirs our highest ambitions and deepest fears like few other technologies. It’s as if every gleaming and Promethean promise of machines able to perform tasks at speeds and with skills of which we can only dream carries with it a countervailing nightmare of human displacement and obsolescence. But despite recent A.I. breakthroughs in previously human-dominated realms of language and visual art — the prose compositions of the GPT-3 language model and visual creations of the DALL-E 2 system have drawn intense interest — our gravest concerns should probably be tempered. At least that’s according to the computer scientist Yejin Choi, a 2022 recipient of the prestigious MacArthur “genius” grant who has been doing groundbreaking research on developing common sense and ethical reasoning in A.I. Continue reading →

Origami At The American Museum Of Natural History

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D. Finnin/© AMNH

Folding paper was a frequent topic for us starting in 2011, but origami specifically has been featured only a few times. This holiday season at the American Museum of Natural History we add to the mentions:

The Making of the Origami Holiday Tree

One 13-Foot Tree, 1,000 Origami Models: A Spectacular Museum Tradition

M. Shanley/© AMNH

Early each year, as the days begin to get a bit longer and the first signs of spring crop up in Central Park, Ros Joyce and Talo Kawasaki, volunteers from OrigamiUSA and the designers of the Museum’s Origami Holiday Tree start planning for the year ahead.

M. Shanley/© AMNH

They begin combing the Museum’s halls in search of inspiration—going from floor to floor to decide on a perfect theme and to find just the right exhibits to re-create as origami models on the tree. Continue reading →