Culture

English Apple Heritage

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Today completes a trifecta of shared articles about trees, and Sam Knight gets extra thanks for the link with a part of food heritage our family is especially fond of (which led to finding the video above):

Illustration by Nicholas Konrad / The New Yorker

The English Apple Is Disappearing

As the country loses its local cultivars, an orchard owner and a group of biologists are working to record and map every variety of apple tree they can find in the West of England.

In June, 1899, Sabine Baring-Gould, an English rector, collector of folk songs, and author of a truly prodigious quantity of prose, was putting the finishing touches on “A Book of the West,” a two-volume study of Devon and Cornwall. Baring-Gould, who had fifteen children and kept a tame bat, wrote more than a thousand literary works, including some thirty novels, a biography of Napoleon, and an influential study of werewolves. Continue reading →

Tamarind, Taste Of Place

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Illustration by Giacomo Bagnara

Taste of place stories are a regular feature here; more surprising is that Madhur Jaffrey did not show up in our pages during our seven years living and working in India. Better late than never:

A Tamarind Tree’s Sweet and Sour Inheritance

My ancestor was gifted a huge orchard just outside Delhi. The fruits it produced were the taste of my childhood.

Gifts from ancestors take the darndest forms. Mine included a tamarind tree, the tallest and most magnificent in our yard. My grandfather’s grandfather—a tall, corpulent Indian, prone to indulging in fine wines, fine poetry, and fine art—lived in Delhi and worked for the British. This was 1857, a time when Indians were gearing up to fight the British. The conflict that ensued would later be called India’s First War of Independence. The British would call it the Indian Mutiny. Continue reading →

If You Happen To Be In Venice

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Work by Yuku Mohri at Japan’s pavilion. Moisture from the rotting fruit on display is converted into electric signals, which generate sounds or turn on suspended lightbulbs. Matteo de Mayda for The New York Times

It is the end of the standard work week for many, so here is an art concept to take them into the weekend, thanks to the New York Times art critics:

Given the Venice Biennale’s reputation as “the Olympics of the art world” — set in a spectacular city, no less — artists and curators here often favor grand, weighty gestures. This year’s Japan Pavilion wonderfully eschews gravitas for modesty and play, while still getting at something profound.

Mohri’s work was inspired by the rough and ready materials used to fix leaks in Tokyo’s subway. Matteo de Mayda for The New York Times

For her exhibition “Compose,” curated by Sook-Kyung Lee, the artist Yuko Mohri has created two installations of contraptions-slash-sculptures from local materials. One set, inspired by the D.I.Y. methods for fixing leaks in the Tokyo subway system, features tubes and everyday objects — like pans, rubber gloves and coat racks — rigged together and dangling through the air. The systems catch and recirculate water seeping into the pavilion, sometimes activating chimes in the process. Continue reading →

Exquisite Textiles

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“Development in Rose I” (1952).Art work by Anni Albers / Courtesy © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / ARS, 2024

Weavers got more attention during our seven years in India, but we are no less interested in the tradition today. Thanks to Jackson Arn, writing in the New Yorker, for this review:

Anni Albers Transformed Weaving, Then Left It Behind

Her textiles are quiet revelations, but even her later prints show how restraint can generate ravishing beauty.

Imagine you’d been born in 1899. Imagine living through the invention of the Model T, the jet aircraft, the liquid-fuelled rocket, and the computer chip. Now imagine looking back on all this in 1965 and writing, as though with a shrug, “How slow will we appear some day?”

In works like “Pasture” (1958), texture and almost-patterns create an overwhelming experience.Art work by Anni Albers / Courtesy © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / ARS, 2024 / © Metropolitan Museum of Art; Photograph by Peter Zeray

It takes an uncommon turn of mind to survive decades this dizzying and then sum them up with perfect nonchalance—but a lot of the greatness of Anni Albers lay in her ability to stay undizzied and keep doing her thing, year after year. Not that she was afraid of innovation; her thing just happened to be weaving, an art form that, by her own calculation, had not changed in any fundamental way since the Stone Age.

Critics reach for a few key words with Albers: “crisp,” “precise,” “mathematical.” Continue reading →

Breadfruit More Fully Appreciated

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Wolfgang Kaehler / LightRocket / Getty

Our thanks to Zoë Schlanger for this corrective. Breadfruit has appeared more than once in our pages, but never with appreciation like this:

Too Few Americans Are Eating a Remarkable Fruit

Breadfruit is a staple in tropical places—and climate change is pushing its range north.

Someplace in the lush backroads of San Sebastián, in western Puerto Rico, my friend Carina pulled the car over. At a crest in the road stood a breadfruit tree, full of basketball-size, lime-green fruits, knobbled and prehistoric, like a dinosaur egg covered in ostrich leather. Continue reading →

Children, Phones & Futures

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Photographs by Maggie Shannon

It has been our belief since starting that getting outdoors is a very good preventative medicine, but maybe that was too simple a focus. Phones have disrupted life, especially for our young ones, more than we appreciated. Our thanks to Jonathan Haidt and The Atlantic for this (podcast discussion of the research here):

END THE PHONE-BASED CHILDHOOD NOW

The environment in which kids grow up today is hostile to human development.

Something went suddenly and horribly wrong for adolescents in the early 2010s. Continue reading →

Climate Change Challenges In Italy’s Food Basket

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The inside of a rice plant about to flower. With global heating, farmers fear extreme weather events such as drought will become more frequent

Thanks to Ottavia Spaggiari for this article, and to Marco Massa and Haakon Sand for the photos. We are closer to the challenges coffee faces in the context of climate change, but we know it is a global race to find solutions:

Risotto crisis: the fight to save Italy’s beloved dish from extinction

After drought devastated prized arborio and carnaroli harvests in the Po valley, new rice varieties offer a glimmer of hope. But none are yet suitable for use in the traditional recipe

Biometeorologist Marta Galvagno at work

For most of winter and spring in 2022, Luigi Ferraris, a 58-year-old rice farmer from Mortara, a town in the Po valley, remained hopeful. Rainfall had been down 40% in the first six months of the year, and snow had accumulated thinly in the Alps, prompting an 88% drop in the amount of water coming to the Po River from snow-melt; flow in the river and its connected canals was at a historic low. Continue reading →

Villa Triunfo, Old Farm & New School

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We have shared a few posts in these pages mentioning Villa Triunfo, but now we have designed a new label for it. So, time to celebrate that. What is most important to us about the farm is that it is one of the oldest continuously operating coffee farms in Costa Rica, since its first plantings in the late 1800s.

That, and the fact that today it is also one of the more innovative in terms of pioneering hybrids that help the coffee stay fit in the context of climate change and the various challenges (such as the uniquely problematic mold that is called rust). It is the end of harvest season, when coffees in the West Valley are being processed. The red honey process used for this coffee allows all the sugars from the juicy fruit to absorb into the beans. We look forward to cupping it soon.

Is That Safari In Tanzania A Good Use Of Your Money?

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Brian Otieno

This guest opinion, written by Professor Robert Williams of the Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy Program at the University of Arizona, and published in the New York Times, should make you think twice about the safari that might be on your bucket list:

Over 600,000 tourists travel to Tanzania’s Ngorongoro Conservation Area each year, and many will catch a glimpse of the Great Migration: the famed trek of more than one million wildebeests and thousands of zebras, gazelles and other animals crossing over the Mara River into Kenya and back again. Continue reading →

Central Valley Reserve

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Central Valley coffee farms produce reliably high quality beans. A few farms produce beans of unusual quality, and we source from these farms to create a blend worthy of the name Reserve. Unlike the chocolate notes typical of a Los Santos coffee, or more fruity or floral notes from other regions, here we find a special toasted nut sensation.

The “architecture of coffee heritage” caption for the image on this label refers to the fact that this building from the 1990s pays tribute to the history of coffee in Costa Rica. It was built within a coffee hacienda, and this year thousands of coffee plants are being replanted on the property. If you have an interest in the feeling of a coffee plantation, and plan to visit Costa Rica, you could not do better than spend a few days here.

La Capilla, A Plum Assignment

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These beans, blended from a select group of smallholder coffee farms collectively known as “the chapel,” have a new illustration. This week it debuts in our shops in Costa Rica. A year after we introduced this coffee in our shops we could only guess it was to become the bestseller it now is.

During the pandemic, when the airports were shut down and there were few visitors to our shops, honoring the contracts we had with these farmers got us thinking creatively. We started offering this and a few other of our coffees for sale in the USA. Because it was a favorite in our home, La Capilla was chosen for this plum assignment. Then we knew.

Tarrazu started its qualification for denomination of origin status the same year we started roasting it, and qualified two years later. The rules are still being clarified on how to use the name, so on our labels we have reverted to the region’s traditional name Los Santos.

 

More Honey & Bees, Also

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Tarkis Ríos Ushiñahua harvesting honey from stingless bees in a tree-trunk hive, at her home in Puerto Huamán in the Peruvian Amazon, 2019. [Hannah Hutchinson]

Along with anything else to get 2024 off to a good start, an article by Andrew Wingfield and Michael P. Gilmore that we missed from last year. The topic is one that we have only briefly touched on a couple times. The wider world of honey and the bees responsible for it are topics we hope to share more of this year.

To begin, let this bring some joy:

A Sweet and Potent Harvest

Tarkis Ríos Ushiñahua teaches her daughter to divide a hive, 2022. [Dylan Francis]

For the Maijuna of the Peruvian Amazon, harvesting honey from stingless bees is bringing prosperity and empowerment. Local beekeeping might also help preserve a vast ancestral forest.When Tarkis Ríos Ushiñahua collects honey from one of her beehives, she wears no protective clothing and uses just one tool, a large plastic syringe. 1 As she lifts the lid from the wooden box housing the hive, the bees swarm. They buzz around her face, land on her back, and settle in strands of her straight black hair, but they do no harm — these bees are stingless.

The bee yard of Loida Ríos Tamayo and Saúl Peterman Mosoline, 2021. [Enrique Redondo Navarro]

The slender tip of Ríos Ushiñahua’s syringe fits neatly inside the hive’s honeypots, brownish, papery-looking pouches that the bees have fashioned from wax and plant resins. Continue reading →

Ezra Klein’s Book List

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Courtesy Of Ifixit/Via Reuters

Ezra Klein has been part of my media diet for about as long as I have been posting in these pages.

He occasionally writes opinions that are the best thing I have read in a while, and this book list is among them:

This is another end-of-the-year book list, but with a twist. These are the best books I read about 2023. They are, for the most part, voices from other years helping me make sense of our own. In a world where information keeps speeding up and thinning out, books slow time down, thickening the moment in which we live.

I spent much of the year reporting on artificial intelligence. And my thoughts returned, again and again, to “God, Human, Animal, Machine,” by Meghan O’Gieblyn. Continue reading →

The Slow Ways App, For Right Of Way Walkers

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The Slow Ways founder, Daniel Raven-Ellison (right) walks with the Guardian’s Patrick Barkham as they verify a route between Congleton and Macclesfield. Photograph: Fabio De Paola/The Guardian

The right of way is a theme we love, and now there is a technology to assist our pursuit of those rights, at least in one country.

Our thanks to and the Guardian for their coverage of this development:

Walk the walk: the app mapping 140,000 miles of public right of way

Slow Ways was set up during the pandemic when frustrated locked-down walkers drew up more than 9,000 walking routes across Great Britain. Photograph: Fabio De Paola/The Guardian

Community-based, Slow Ways has verified 60% of a network of pedestrian-friendly routes across Great Britain

I meet up with Daniel Raven-Ellison, the brains behind the Slow Ways walking network, in the darkness of a drizzly dawn at Kidsgrove railway station in Staffordshire. Our mission? To walk and verify the final 17-mile (27km) link in the route between Birmingham and Manchester. Continue reading →

Crowdsourcing & OED

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Illustration by Paul Spella / The Atlantic. Sources: Wikimedia; Getty.

The origins and uses of words have been of interest to us since early on, because the terminology around conservation is relatively young; also because words are essential to the cause. Stephanie Hayes, writing this review in the Atlantic, reminds us to keep paying attention to how we know what we know about words:

Who Made the Oxford English Dictionary?

A new book gives life to one of the world’s greatest crowdsourcing efforts.

The Oxford English Dictionary always seemed to me like the Rules from on high—near biblical, laid down long ago by a distant academic elite. But back in 1857, when the idea of the dictionary was born, its three founders proposed something more democratic than authoritative: a reference book that didn’t prescribe but instead described English, tracking the meaning of every word in the language across time and laying out how people were actually using each one. Continue reading →

Corn & Other English Words, Then & Now

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View in the “Cross Timbers,” Texas, by George Catlin, c. 1832. Smithsonian American Art Museum, gift of Mrs. Joseph Harrison, Jr.

Lapham’s Quarterly, judged here only by the rare occasions when we have linked to their work, offers gem quality items of interest, such as this essay by Rosemarie Ostler:

Corn pitcher, c. 1855. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Sansbury-Mills Fund, 2014.

Corn pitcher, Southern Porcelain Company, c. 1855. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Sansbury-Mills Fund, 2014.

The Early Days of American English

How English words evolved on a foreign continent.

English settlers faced with unfamiliar landscapes and previously unknown plants and animals in the Americas had to find terms to name and describe them. They sometimes borrowed words from Native American languages. They also repurposed existing English words and invented new terms, as well as keeping words that had become archaic in British English. As non-English-speaking immigrants began to arrive during the eighteenth century, they accepted words from those languages as well. By the time of the American Revolution, English had been evolving separately in England and America for nearly two hundred years, and the trickle of new words had become a flood. Continue reading →

More Cameras On The High Seas, Please

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A pair of humpback whales synchronized the release of bubbles to corral and consume sand eels.

This article by Ellie Duke, with photographs and video by Sutton Lynch, is a sort of bookend to another recent article. It makes one wish for more people skilled with cameras in the oceans, and fewer skilled in placing nets:

A school of bluefish forming a circle in shallow water.

The photographer Sutton Lynch is documenting a dramatic turning point off the coast of Long Island — a resurgence of sea life after decades of depletion.

Sutton Lynch rises most days before the sun, arriving at Atlantic Beach in Amagansett, N.Y., for the early-morning calm. It’s the same beach he’s been going to since he was a child, and where he worked as a lifeguard for years as a teenager. Now 23, he spends his mornings surveying the horizon. When he spots activity on the water’s surface, he sends out his drone. Continue reading →

Basketry, Craft & Art

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A coiled basket by Louisa Keyser (Dat So La Lee) of the Washoe people of Nevada, titled “Our Ancestors Were Great Hunters” (1905), with an oval degikup form, was made for the curio market. Her work comes to the Independent 20th Century fair this week. Donald Ellis Gallery

When craftwork is treated as artwork, valorization is the word that comes to mind. Not all craft is art, nor need it be; but we applaud the impetus of the Independent 20th Century fair. If this is your interest, and you are in New York City, the fair is open:

A couple recognized the Washoe weaver Louisa Keyser’s prodigious talent and spun myths to promote it. But her fortitude shines in work that today can be seen in museums and at the Independent 20th Century fair.

A portrait of Louisa Keyser, the most famous Washoe basket maker, who helped transform a utilitarian craft to fine art and was promoted at the time as a “princess” by a couple who sold her work. Donald Ellis Gallery

The Native American baskets sold in the early 1900s out of Abe Cohn’s Emporium, a men’s clothing store in Carson City, Nev., were exceptional. They were woven by Dat So La Lee, said to be a “princess” from the nearby Washoe people whose royal status permitted her alone to utilize a special weaving style.

The truth was less exciting. Dat So La Lee preferred her English name, Louisa Keyser. She was a Washoe woman, but the tales Cohn and his wife, Amy, spun about her — her esteemed heritage, her meeting with the Civil War general John C. Frémont — were myths. Continue reading →