Remembering the designer who gave women pockets
Things I Saw This Week — Friday, June 20
Fashion
A look back:
How ‘The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’ and 1990s Black television made the Air Jordan 5 ‘Grape’ legendary
A century ago, this designer set women free. And gave them pockets.
Food (and Drink!)
Three farming-related stories:
The tiny Arkansas Delta community of Elaine, in Phillips County, is best known to the world as the site of a 1919 massacre in which white mobs killed Black farmers — hundreds, by some estimates — in one of the worst acts of racial violence in American history. The bloodshed was triggered by union organizing among Black residents who were seeking better wages and working conditions, threatening the power of the white planter class.
Now, more than 100 years later, a local group is embarking on a project that they hope will open a new chapter in Elaine: an organic farm.
Organic farming is almost unheard of in the Arkansas Delta. Most of Phillips County is farmland today, but it’s dominated by the large-scale production of commodity crops like soybeans, rice, corn and wheat, which rely heavily on chemical pesticides and herbicides. The Elaine Legacy Center, a group founded to research and preserve the history of the 1919 massacre and work for the economic benefit of the community, plans to grow organic fruits and vegetables to feed and employ locals.
And 10 hidden bars and speakeasies around the world, from Hong Kong to Japan to Poland to Argentina. (Check the comments for more suggestions and cities.)
Housing
Vienna as a model for green affordable housing:
Up on the roof, where Schublach can relax in the communal library with a view of the city and park, there are solar panels to reduce climate pollution. There's a rooftop garden full of rosemary — the greenery helps keep the building cool in summer. Thick, insulated walls reduce the need for heating and cooling — Schublach's apartment doesn't even need an air conditioner. "It's not cold in winter times. It's not hot in summer times," Schublach says. "It's very comfortable."
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About half of Vienna's 2 million residents live in social housing. Average social housing rents are about $700 for a large one-bedroom apartment, says Gerald Kössl, researcher at the Austrian Federation of Limited-Profit Housing Associations. Schublach pays more for his four-bedroom — with utilities, it's around $1,700 per month. "Which is not 'cheap, cheap,' but it's definitely affordable," he says.
Literature
A new book explores Toni Morrison’s editorial career at Random House.
In my book Toni at Random: The Iconic Writer’s Legendary Editorship, I tell the story of Morrison’s 12 highly productive years at Random House, from 1971 to 1983. Most of Morrison’s influential work as an editor was, in fact, completed before she achieved fame as a literary giant. For the writers she edited, she was not a celebrity but the person who could help them produce a better book. They admired her skills as an editor and appreciated the consistency of her deep engagement with their manuscripts. By the time she published Song of Solomon, in 1977, it was impossible to ignore her growing importance as a writer. But even then, she made a point to leverage her public persona to promote the books she helped bring into print.
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This unyielding attention to detail was among the most enduring features of her editorship and accounted for so much of her success at Random House. Not long after moving to Manhattan from Syracuse—where she’d worked at the L.W. Singer Company, a small press that specialized in textbooks—she became the lone Black editor at prestigious Random House. This single mother of two could not afford missteps. She intended to excel both as a writer and as an editor. From a book’s cover and every sentence within it to the book’s promotional strategy, she left nothing to chance.
From The Washington Post: “A popular manga predicted catastrophe — and Japanese tourism took a hit'.”
Music
A new study shows how music therapy can help the emotional health of cancer patients.
Drinking may be decreasing, but songs about drinking are not.
Pests
South Carolina's Congaree National Park uses a “Skeeter Meter” to warn visitors.
With the Skeeter Meter and educating people about safely visiting Congaree, the park has embraced their reputation for mosquitoes instead of fighting it. At least 20 different mosquito species are found in this park, which includes the largest remaining intact expanse of old growth bottomland hardwood forest in the southeastern United States. The waters of the Wateree and Congaree Rivers carry vital nutrients and settlements into this forest, which supports the growth of these large trees.
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To protect wildlife and biodiversity in the park, it will not spray pesticides to control the mosquito population. Even with the Skeeter Meter, the park is clear about your chances of running into mosquitoes, “from mid-spring until mid-fall, you will encounter mosquitoes in the park.” Visitors are welcome to use their own insect repellent, but park rangers request that it be applied in the parking lots so as to not disturb the other wildlife. During a rare two-week synchronous fireflies event during May and June, visitors must only apply DEET-based products in designated areas to keep it from harming these declining luminescent bugs.
Advice on tick protection as ticks increase.
As winters get warmer, ticks of several kinds are flourishing. Deer ticks, known for transmitting Lyme disease, are moving farther north. The longhorned tick, which came from overseas, has gained a foothold on the East Coast and begun moving west. Gulf Coast ticks have made it to states like Connecticut and Indiana. The lone star tick, which can make people allergic to red meat, is fanning out from the South and has been found as far as Canada.
And even in places long accustomed to them, ticks are becoming more numerous and active for longer stretches of each year.
Scientists in Hawai’i are dropping live mosquitoes from drones to save the bird population.
For the state’s avian species — its iconic forest birds, significant, too, to Indigenous Hawaiian culture — the main force of extinction is malaria, a mosquito-borne disease. Mosquitoes, a nonnative pest, were introduced accidentally in the early 1800s by a whaling ship. The blood-suckers proliferated across the islands and later began spreading avian malaria, a blood-borne pathogen they transmit through their bites.
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Critically, these are not your typical mosquitoes. They’re all males, which don’t bite, that have been reared in a lab. More importantly, they contain a strain of bacteria called wolbachia that interferes with reproduction: When those males mate with females in the area, their eggs fail to hatch.
Sports
An obituary on Nina Kuscsik, the first official winner of the Boston women’s race.
She was also the first woman to enter the New York race in 1970 and was one of the “Six Who Sat” — six women who refused to start the ’72 New York City Marathon for 10 minutes to protest an Amateur Athletic Union rule that the women’s race had to be separate from the men’s. She won that year and the next year as well.
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In addition to the more than 80 marathons she ran over her lifetime, Kuscsik set the American record for the 50-mile run in 1977 and won the Empire State Building Run-Up three straight years from 1979-81.
She was inducted into the Long Distance Running Hall of Fame in 1999.
Fisk’s decision to discontinue its gymnastics program, which began competition in 2023, comes nearly a year after Talladega College, the second HBCU to add a gymnastics program, ended its own program after one season of competition. After 2026, Wilberforce University, the third HBCU to add women’s gymnastics, will be the only HBCU with an operational program.