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Uncompensated Endorsement

A paean to what moves me

Pieces of Places: Paris

Papier Royal

I was once asked in an interview what’s one thing every man should know how to do. Without hesitating, I answered: write a handwritten thank-you note. It won’t help you survive a natural disaster, but it may get you invited back for dinner a second time.

The right pen and paper can’t make anyone a better writer, but they can make writing more pleasant. Stepping from the colonnaded arcades of the Palais Royal into Papier Royal, a new stationery store and printing press, I found myself thinking about just that.

The shop was founded by French-Moroccan creative director and entrepreneur Ramdane Touhami, whose past clients include Cire Trudon and Christofle. His signature is simulated patina: an uncanny ability to make the new seem centuries old, and the old feel uncannily fresh. He has typefaces that resemble grave rubbings, his packaging for the caviar brand Volzhenka looks unearthed rather than designed, and his ingenious teacups for the Swiss hotel Drei Berge seem to be the same ones a sunburnt early-20th century alpinist might’ve sipped after a hard ascent. Touhami is, to put it mildly, a designer’s designer, tackling the kinds of commissions creatives all over the world would kill for. I know, because I’m one of them.

With Papier Royal, Touhami seeks to revive the art of handwriting, subverting the digitization of human communication by sheer force of beauty and tactility. On display are oh so many pens and pencils from every corner of the globe. With the help of a friendly attendant who patiently indulged me as I showed him my own business cards, I picked out a black Kaweco rollerball made in Germany. Custom oak shelving holds leather notebooks handmade in the brand’s atelier, and drawers open to reveal thousands of varieties of paper.

But the shop’s true treasure is its bespoke printing business, billed as “the last master engraver practicing pendulum stamping” (timbrage sur balancier), Paris’s traditional method of making hyper-detailed monograms. The practice was on the verge of extinction when its last expert, Éric Lejeune, neared retirement a few years ago. Examples of this extraordinary technique, along with letterpress specimens from the company’s rare Heidelberg presses, are pinned throughout the shop like a lepidopterist’s hoard.

Papier Royal’s founder understands that to save a dying behavior — writing letters — someone needed to save a dying industry: printing. It’s one thing to identify a problem, but it’s quite another to actually solve it.

Touhami is clearly inspired by revolutionary movements. He runs a foundation called Radical Media Archive, for example, that preserves printed matter and ephemera from left-wing political movements. For someone fascinated by radicalism, Touhami has arrived at a surprising conclusion with Papier Royal: in an age obsessed with disruption, preservation is revolutionary.

146 Galerie de Valois, 75001 Paris, France

Rubirosa’s

What more can I say about Rubirosa’s? When I first visited in January, I wrote an effusive review of the young brand and its founder, Lauren Rubinski.

If I were compensated for the number of people I’ve enthusiastically sent to the little shop on Rue de Grenelle, I’d be a very wealthy man. And if I were a very wealthy man, I wouldn’t tell my readers, but — as the meme goes — “there would be signs.” Namely, an entire closet of Rubirosa’s original shirts in every shade of the rainbow, plus stripes. Oh, and loafers. So many pairs of loafers. Enough to shoe a centipede.

This summer, my wife picked up a butter yellow button-down and a pair of royal blue boxer shorts, while I scored a pair of soft leather loafers in a muted oyster tone. I’d wanted a pair in ecclesiastical red, but, as the brand prepares to redesign its signature shoe and shift production to a new factory, stock is running precariously low. I witnessed more than a few customers sigh and hang their heads when the shopkeeper told them they were sold out in their size.

Approaching the shop, I recognized the impeccably dressed creative director and interior designer Louis-Charles Aka, of the agency Cador Cabinet, in his signature black suit, dark sunglasses, and crisp dress shirt, looking totally unbothered by the mind-bending heatwave. Aka is responsible for Rubirosa’s superb branding and interior design. Paired with Lauren Rubinski’s colorful fashions, this partnership has yielded a brand that strikes a very particular chord among modern aesthetes, appearing with increasing frequency in style media and the Instagram feeds of the world’s well-dressed.

As I wrote in my first piece about the shop, Rubirosa’s sense of whimsy, daring embrace of color, and air of old-world opulence (à la Charvet) feel like a ray of warm light after the long dark winter of “quiet luxury” and streetwear.

Aka was surveying the progress of Rubirosa’s significantly larger new space, currently under construction next door to the original shop. The new store will offer a larger canvas to showcase the label’s re-fashioned footwear collection, shirting, pajamas, and sweaters (also in the process of reinvention, with new production in the works), while the original shop will focus on basics: boxers, socks, and a forthcoming collection of t-shirts.

There’s an old saying: whom God wishes to condemn, He first calls promising. As Rubirosa’s expands into a second shop (the fashion equivalent of a band’s sophomore album), the extraordinarily high expectations earned by the first will be put to the test. Normally, I’d say that this kind of promise comes with peril. But Rubinski — with Aka’s support — seems to be in complete command of her singular vision.

37 Rue de Grenelle, 75007 Paris, France

Thus concludes my “Pieces of Places” series. The suitcase is full. Thanks for joining me on this journey. See you in New York!

Something you should know

A sharp fact for your cocktail party quiver

A million seconds is about 12 days, a billion seconds about 32 years, and a trillion seconds roughly 31,700 years — the amount of time that separates us from the Ice Age — a reminder of the scale of a trillion, and why the fortunes of the world’s first trillionaires is so difficult to comprehend

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Uncompensated Endorsement

A paean to what moves me

Pieces of Places: London

William Crabtree & Sons

On my first morning in London, I went for a walk near our hotel in Marylebone, passing the Wallace Collection, skirting Portman Square Garden, and cutting back down a quiet bylane called New Quebec Street. It was early but already quite hot, so I walked slowly, affording me more opportunities to notice this or that.

Perhaps my slothlike pace accounts for how I spotted the understated shopfront on the west side of the street, painted hunter green, with the hand-lettered name of William Crabtree & Sons and gold letters reading Tailoring, Knitwear, and Accessories (the British equivalent of “Girls Girls Girls”) on the broad, freshly polished glass storefront.

The first item that caught my eye was an orange rope leash with leather trim. Despite already owning an orange rope leash at home, I sensed a kindred spirit, and stepped inside. The shop was just opening, and I was welcomed by Mr. James Priestley, the great-great-great-grandson of the original William Crabtree, who founded his eponymous mill in Yorkshire in 1835, and supplied fine wool to companies like the Hudson’s Bay blanket company.

The shop interior felt like the closet of a fastidious rural squire — not a cantankerous hermit in tattered Barbour and mud-caked boots, but the heir who travels in a well-tended vintage Land Rover from country to town and back with a docile black lab in the passenger seat.

We chatted while I scanned the goods: linen shirts in lovely tartans; thick rugby shirts; chore coats in boiled wool; Fair Isle sweaters; Shetland sweaters; all the sweaters. The palette was classic but lighthearted, and everything felt substantial in the hand. The fit struck the perfect balance between traditional and contemporary. In other words: perfectly wearable.

I picked up a rope leash in a natural color, and got my dose of orange in a German-made silk knit tie with a satisfyingly crunchy hand. A shop like this could only exist in London — or in the Cotswolds, where the brand has an outpost. I hadn’t expected to return to my hotel with two neatly wrapped treasures, but London is a city where temptation sometimes dresses in lambswool and loafers.

15 New Quebec St, London W1H 7RT, United Kingdom

Speciale 324

Tucked into an unassuming stretch of Portobello Road in Notting Hill, Speciale 324 is far from Savile Row, both physically and spiritually. Its sensibilities owe more to Florence, where its founders honed their craft, than to London’s style establishment. Yet among writers, designers, and the quietly obsessive (myself included), it has become one of the most exciting destinations in one of the world’s great tailoring cities.

My wife and I stayed nearby with her parents in 2024, and we fell in love with Notting Hill’s slower pace, its swirling eddies of cultural influence, and, of course, its bounty of good pubs. That mix of patience, eclecticism, and fun converges in Speciale 324, making Notting Hill a fitting home for the label. I arrived for my first visit with the sun at its zenith. Not yet acclimated to the heatwave that would persist the rest of our trip, I was melting.

To call Speciale 324 a shop is slightly misleading. It is, in every sense, a workshop. The atelier where the brand cuts bespoke coats and suiting occupies the rear of the space, where a young seamstress stood sewing at a high worktable. But the sense of work-in-progress extends throughout the showroom, where a shopkeeper sat at a large wooden table with sculptural lighting and drawers that open to reveal the brand’s signature neckwear.

Packages, magazines, and books fill every corner, while the inventory — from soft pistachio button-downs to light-washed denim to knitted cotton cardigans — feels as though it has only just left the atelier. It is the sartorial equivalent of a farmstand.

I had planned to buy another pair of jeans to complement the darker wash that I wear almost every day in the colder months in New York, and a particular button-down with light candy stripes that my wife wanted to share. But when I saw a knit cotton crewneck in oatmeal, hand-framed in Wales, with a high waist that would work perfectly with the denim, I changed course.

I can’t fully explain why, but it reminded me of the sweaters my father and his friends wore on chilly evenings aboard a Zodiac in Greece when I was a child — the sweaters I’d borrow when I inevitably got cold on those windy Aegean crossings.

Walking out with a sweater and a pair of jeans that belonged together crystallized something I’d been feeling throughout the visit. The best brands have one thing in common: they cultivate a worldview. Speciale’s collection is remarkably focused and its style restrained, yet together they suggest not only a complete way of dressing but a complete way of living. That’s what makes Speciale so compelling: you leave imagining what the founders might make next.

Footwear, furniture, luggage — even interior design — would all feel like natural extensions of the same sensibility. I hope they do it all.

324 Portobello Rd, London W10 5RU, United Kingdom

Something you should know

A sharp fact for your cocktail party quiver

According to the traditional rabbinic recipe, the Temple incense contained ingredients believed to have come from as far away as the Himalayas and Sri Lanka, a testament to the extraordinary trade networks connecting ancient Jerusalem to the wider world

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I recently upgraded my carry-on to a black Pelican ATX — a hard case with an espionage aesthetic. It barely holds a week’s worth of clothes. Packing light requires planning and monkish discipline, but rewards me in countless ways, not least by forcing me to think carefully about what really deserves to come home with me.

Within the fixed limits of a suitcase where every cubic inch is precious, I’ve developed a subconscious system of weighing whether something is worth carrying back. I favor objects that are deeply rooted in their place of origin, which, over the years, has meant tangerine-hued leather slippers from the souk in Marrakech, wasabi salt from Isetan Market in Tokyo, a custom linen Nehru suit from Burlingtons in Bombay, and so many museum postcards. In a world where almost anything can be bought anywhere, it’s rather special when something can’t be.

The next three Sundays, I’ll be sharing the things that earned their place in my suitcase over the last few weeks in Italy, England, and France. More than objects, they are wearable pieces of places I love.

Uncompensated Endorsement

A paean to what moves me

Pieces of Places: Florence

Florence is my favorite shopping city in the world. Not because it has the highest concentration of great retail — surely London, New York, Paris, or Tokyo would claim that prize — but because what it does have seems to satisfy exactly what I want and need at precisely the right moment. Among the constellation of shops that I visit each summer, each is a miniature universe of craft and tradition, design and history, and I save up each year so I can float through each of them, provisioning myself for the year ahead.

Quercioli e Lucherini

My wife and I discovered Quercioli e Lucherini, a shop specializing in undergarments and sleepwear, by chance in 2024. Over the past few summers, its Platonically perfect boxer shorts have gradually displaced my collection of threadbare Brooks Brothers relics. This June, I returned for a few more, along with a new indulgence: a set of cotton pajamas.

Founded in 1895, the shop has been witness to well over a century of life in this city on the banks of the Arno. (I’ve read that its proprietors sheltered neighbors in their cellar during Nazi bombing raids.) The ritual of shopping there still gestures toward the old world: a single specimen of each product is displayed around the store, and the shopkeeper disappears into the back and returns with paper boxes in every color and size.

I chose from crisp whites, shades of blue, and stripes of varying widths before settling on a lightweight cotton in pale blue. The shirt is cut longer than the Sleepy Jones and L.L.Bean pajamas I usually wear, with three generous pockets and a handsome camp collar.

I’ve always loved pajamas because they embody the private pleasures of dressing. Apart from my wife, dog, cat, and a few DoorDash delivery guys, almost no one sees me wearing them, which is precisely the point. They belong to the interior world I create for myself, where I have no one to perform for — nothing to do but read the newspaper, drink tea, and scratch my cat behind the ears.

Via Porta Rossa, 45r, 50123 Firenze FI, Italy

Simone Abbarchi

Around the corner from Quercioli e Lucherini is the serene and mercifully air-conditioned tailoring shop of Simone Abbarchi, master shirtmaker. My aunt and uncle, who share my affinity for all things Italian, met Simone on a trip to Florence several years ago. When Simone and his team came to Manhattan one chilly week in March, my aunt and uncle invited me to their pop-up at the fittingly named Michelangelo Hotel in Midtown.

The suite had been transformed into a temporary atelier, with a library’s worth of textile sample books from mills around the world: chambrays from Japan, Oxfords from England, poplins from Italy. After my uncle was fitted for another round of shirts — he’s a litigator, so his wardrobe should strike the proper degree of fear in the hearts of lawbreakers — he turned to me.

“Your turn.”

One of Simone’s lieutenants took my measurements while we worked through the fabrics. With my aunt and uncle’s guidance — they warned me off one pinstripe that would “make me look like a banker” — I settled on a red butcher stripe, a light chambray, and a pink Oxford. We tuned every detail, from the height of the collar to the shape of the cuffs, while notes accumulated in scribbled Italian across the tailor’s white pad.

A few weeks later, the first shirt — a “test” — arrived postmarked from Florence. I wore it everywhere: meetings, weddings, dinners. It was, as expected, exactly right. And no one mistook me for a banker.

When I returned to Florence in June, I paid a visit to Abbarchi’s workshop. A finance executive from New York was ordering enough shirts to see him through the coming year, while his children waited patiently in leather chairs, placated by the prospect of gelato.

When my turn came, Simone had me try on the shirt I’d been wearing for weeks. He looked me over for a moment through his eyeglasses before declaring, “For me, it’s perfect.” I couldn’t have agreed more. We decided on a slightly roomier cut for the chambray and added tone-on-tone pink initials to the Oxford. Ten minutes later I was back on the narrow cobbled street, with two more shirts in the pipeline.

Simone Abbarchi’s atelier epitomizes a common refrain about custom clothing: once you’ve worn something made to measure, there’s no going back.

Via delle Terme, 15 R, 50123 Firenze FI, Italy

Papini Paolo & C.

For years, my aunt and uncle — who know Florence better than any non-Italian I know — have been urging me to visit Papini, a leather shop on the Lungarno degli Archibusieri, beneath the arcades of the Vasari Corridor between the Uffizi and the Ponte Vecchio. For a few years I resisted, out of loyalty to Il Bisonte, whose famously local supply chain stretches no more than 30 kilometers beyond the city. But this summer, in need of a new wallet, I finally passed beneath Papini’s scalloped awnings.

Inside, woven belts, briefcases, leather boxes, cigar cases, and beautifully patinated vintage luggage filled the vitrines. An enthusiastic American couple was celebrating the purchase of a handbag while I wandered from case to case. Framed photographs of celebrities and dignitaries hinted at the shop’s elite global clientele — the White House and the Vatican are both longtime customers — but the atmosphere remained unmistakably Florentine: unhurried, understated, irresistible.

Leatherworking is to Florence what watchmaking is to Geneva: not simply an industry, but part of the local identity. Since the Middle Ages, Florentine artisans have transformed hides from the surrounding Tuscan countryside into everything from saddles and armor to gloves and trunks. Although many of the city’s historic tanneries eventually migrated downstream, where access to water was abundant, Florence remains the commercial and creative heart of one of the world’s great leather-making regions. Papini became part of that lineage in 1896, and still operates out of their original workshop.

After seeing my fellow Americans to the door, the woman my aunt and uncle simply call “Mrs. Papini” came over to help me. She summoned billfolds in cordovan, card cases in ostrich leather, and an exquisite crocodile wallet before I settled on a chestnut billfold in pebbled leather, embossed with the shop’s signature stag crest in one corner.

Before I left, we stepped outside for a selfie together. I walked away with a wallet, and she with a new customer for life.

Lungarno degli Archibusieri, 10 r, 50122 Firenze FI, Italy

See you next week in London!

Something you should know

A sharp fact for your cocktail party quiver

The Yankees’ interlocking “NY” logo was inspired by a Police Medal of Valor designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany in 1877

You’re reading Buzzcut, a newsletter of close-cropped commentary on travel, style, history, and nature by writer and strategist Zander Abranowicz.

Our Clippings franchise gathers a few glowing specimens of knowledge in a single format, designed for gentle reading. You can find past installments below, and access our full library of reports, reviews, and recommendations here.

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The night Bo Diddley played a Cornell frat party

Between the end of classes and the beginning of exams every May, a sort of madness descends on the campus of Cornell University. The brutal Finger Lakes winter has loosened its vise grip, flooding the dramatic landscape of gorges and forests with flowers and green and the sound of birds. The Vitamin D-starved student body emerges from fluorescent libraries and lecture halls, turning to face the warmth they’ve been denied for the last five months. One such May, in 1959, Bo Diddley and his bandmates stepped into this ephemeral world of mischief and mania to play a frat party. Like many aspects of this story, how this show came to be is something of a mystery, shrouded and apocryphal, revealed only in cryptic comments on niche music forums. One post claims that a fraternity member on the Cornell lacrosse team had encountered Diddley’s music on a trip through the South, later organizing the show. Officially, three fraternities co-hosted the event — Sigma Pi, Chi Phi, and Phi Delta Theta — at a local veterans hall to accommodate the size of the crowd. Another commenter claims that Eta Kappa Nu, the electrical engineering fraternity, was also a co-host, responsible for the performance’s famous bootleg recording. Somehow, it was Sigma Pi that received the honor of being depicted on the Animal House-esque album art of one unsanctioned pressing of the recording. In the drawing, a mass of white partygoers gathers around a band of Black musicians on the front steps of a structure that closely resembles the Sigma Pi house where many of my friends lived and partied when I was a student at Cornell. At least demographically, the illustration is accurate: there were very few Black students at Cornell at the time of Diddley’s concert. In 1963, fewer than 20 Black students were enrolled, though that number increased to roughly 250 by 1968. I have previously read stories claiming that Diddley and his band were refused lodging at local Ithaca hotels and instead stayed at the private home of a Cornell professor. While plausible, these accounts seem to have disappeared from the internet. The recording itself seethes with the raw spirit that Diddley brought to the American musical canon with his distorted guitar and iconic “Bo Diddley beat,” a rhythmic signature that anticipated the punk and garage rock of later bands like The Stooges, The Clash, and The Velvet Underground. To the virgin ears of a generation raised on doo-wop and big band, Diddley’s sound must have felt nothing less than revolutionary.

The Caribbean beach where Oppenheimer escaped the world he created

The list of men responsible for death and suffering on an epic scale is long, stretching from the Pharaoh of the Bible to King Leopold II to Vladimir Putin. The list of those who manifestly struggled with the consequences of their actions is much shorter. Among that elite club, J. Robert Oppenheimer stands alone. Unlike kings and dictators whose decisions filter through bureaucracies over years, the life’s work of the great physicist culminated in two blinding moments in August 1945. To his defenders, the atomic bomb ended the deadliest war in human history, spared countless lives that would have been lost in an Allied invasion of Japan, and preempted a Nazi bomb. To his detractors, it did so at the cost of more than 200,000 Japanese lives, introducing a weapon that would terrorize the world for generations. After the war, Oppenheimer publicly wrestled with the morality of his weapon and opposed development of the hydrogen bomb, placing himself in the crosshairs of the Red Scare. He endured years of surveillance, wiretapping, and grueling interrogations later dramatized in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. Where does a man go to escape forces as vast as the military-industrial complex and as intimate as his own mind? Beginning in the late 1950s, exhausted and humiliated, his black hair turned white, Oppenheimer found refuge with his wife Kitty and daughter Toni on St. John, then among the Caribbean’s most undeveloped islands. Raised in Manhattan luxury — with a chauffeur, three maids, and Van Goghs on the walls — he now moved into a modest cottage overlooking a remote cove. It was spartan, but charming, with a desk facing a window where Oppenheimer could scan the tropical scenery. St. John offered both seclusion from American intelligence and, according to Oppenheimer’s own calculations, one of the safest locations in the hemisphere to survive nuclear fallout. Friends recalled lobster dinners, calypso music, and barefoot dancing on the beach. Yet beneath the idyllic surface, his conscience continued to seethe. When one guest caught a hawksbill turtle to cook, Oppenheimer begged for its life, saying it reminded him of the animals killed during atomic testing. Today, a community center stands on the foundation of his former cottage, and on warm nights the sound of laughter and calypso still drifts across the bay where a god of war sought some measure of peace.

The terriers who did the foxhunter’s dirty work

When traditional fox hunting with hounds was banned in England and Wales under the Hunting Act of 2004, one of Britain’s oldest field sports entered a legally contested new era. For centuries, hunts had been governed by elaborate rituals and hierarchies, from the master of foxhounds to the terrierman, who handled small working terriers such as Jack Russells and Parson Russells. Terriermen often carried these dogs in saddle-mounted terrier boxes or satchels and released them when a fox went to ground. Their role was to locate or bolt the fox from its den so the hunt could continue, or end the hunt with a dramatic subterranean fight to the death. For generations, fox hunting occupied a hallowed place in British rural culture: an aristocratic spectacle sustained in part by the labor of working-class hunt staff. Terriermen, in particular, acquired a reputation for carrying out some of the hunt’s roughest and most controversial work. Since the passage of the Hunting Act, many traditional hunts have continued legally through trail hunting or other exempt activities, while animal-welfare groups and police have also documented cases of illegal hunting involving terriermen. In some modern cases, terriermen have traveled by quad bikes or off-road vehicles rather than on horseback. Today, the term “terrierman” is frequently invoked in debates about animal cruelty, rural tradition, and class. The terrier’s instinct to chase and pursue small game long predates those modern controversies. Dogs bred for going to ground and controlling vermin have existed in Britain for many centuries, aiding farmers, gamekeepers, and laborers in pest control long before the rise of organized fox hunting. When a terrier bolts after a squirrel in a city park or chases a cat through an apartment, it is acting out instincts shaped by that long and colorful history.

Something You Should Know

A sharp fact for your cocktail party quiver

The poet Robert Penn Warren described Thomas Jefferson as “an amanuensis for a million or so people stranded on the edge of the continent and backed by a wilderness.”

You’re reading Buzzcut, a newsletter of close-cropped commentary on travel, style, history, and nature by writer and strategist Zander Abranowicz.

Our Clippings franchise gathers a few glowing specimens of knowledge in a single format, designed for gentle reading. You can find the first and second installments below, and access our full library of reports, reviews, and recommendations here.

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The Left Bank shop that is a portrait of its worldly proprietor

A great store is a portrait of its proprietor: Calvin Klein’s mid-90s New York flagship; Sarah McNally’s Goods for the Study; Andy Spade’s menswear wunderkammers. Add to this gallery of retail greats young Rubirosa’s, on Rue de Grenelle, just south of the Seine. If Rubirosa’s is a portrait, it is a Rococo one — rendered by Boucher, who would delight in the painterly palette that greets guests inside. Spanning just 450 square feet, Rubirosa’s buzzes with staff and shoppers poring over quintessential Parisian keepsakes: poplin pajamas and shirting (available in 35 hues), sweaters in achingly supple cashmere (available in 15), and leather loafers. Without ever speaking to its founder, designer Lauren Rubinski, you can surmise a few things about her just by visiting. For one, she’s bored by the tyranny of quiet luxury. Her embrace of color — from the crimson carpet to the rainbow of wares stacked like antiquarian books in ebony shelving — is enough to make the Spartan in me want to trade my closet of neutrals for their more interesting cousins in vermilion, mustard, or turquoise. She believes culture is porous. While the aesthetic skews Old Europe — her grandfather supplied the Vatican with poplin — the store flirts with cultural influences in a way that feels both erudite and lighthearted, just right for the melting pot that is Paris. The walls are lined with portraits commissioned from an artist in Côte d’Ivoire, depicting stylish men of history, from Pavarotti to Maradona to the Congolese dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. As you shop, these luminaries of style seem to dare you to choose the bolder color, or to splurge on a pair of crocodile-embossed slippers in a pope-worthy red. She also has a great sense of humor. On the exterior, a list of exotic cities, from Monaco to Cairo, ostensibly marks the store’s global locations — a cheeky fiction true to the fantasy Rubirosa’s invites you to inhabit, if only for an afternoon.

The fish that fed Paris during the dark days of the Franco-Prussian War

Reading George Orwell’s debut novel, the semi-autobiographical Down and Out in Paris and London, I was intrigued by a passing note about the fish of the river Seine. “Too inert to look for work,” he writes, “I borrowed a rod and went fishing in the Seine, baiting with bluebottles. I hoped to catch enough for a meal, but of course I did not. The Seine is full of dace, but they grew cunning during the siege of Paris, and none of them has been caught since, except in nets.” That siege refers to the encirclement of Paris by Prussian troops in 1870, a pivotal episode in the Franco-Prussian War, culminating in a French surrender and, shortly thereafter, the formation of the famous Paris Commune. During four months of near-total isolation and deadly shortages, starvation gripped the beleaguered city. Horses, dogs, cats, and zoo animals were butchered for protein. Parks and even the Champs Élysées were deforested for fuel. The chief means of communication with the rest of France was via mail floated over the Prussian lines by balloon. At its nadir, an estimated 3,000 to 4,000 perished each week from the effects of cold, hunger, and disease. Typical of Orwell’s novel, he presents this reference to citizens desperately overfishing the Seine with an air of casual insider knowledge, ostensibly gleaned from the struggling laborers and vagabonds with whom he was living and working at the time of its writing — people for whom the privation of the siege would’ve felt viscerally familiar.

The Gerhard Richter paintings that reckon with Auschwitz

This past Wednesday marked the 81st anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the Nazi extermination complex that is the site of the largest mass murder in a single location in human history. Since the ovens went cold at places like Auschwitz, artists have struggled to respond to the singular, ineffable horror of the Shoah. For obvious reasons, this struggle is particularly acute for German artists, which makes Gerhard Richter’s Birkenau cycle so daring and so devastating. Best known for his blurred paintings based on photographs, Richter’s work had wrestled with Germany’s genocidal past since the mid-1960s, but it wasn’t until 2014 that the artist attempted a direct confrontation with the industrialized murder of the Jews of Europe. Named for the birch grove that hid two of Auschwitz’s most prolific crematoria, Richter based his Birkenau series on the only four surviving photographs of Nazi gas chambers actually in use. Secretly recorded by an inmate believed by historians to be the Greek Jew Alberto Errera — and bravely smuggled out of the camp in a tube of toothpaste by the Polish resistance — the images show the incineration of bodies and a crowd of naked women being marched through the forest to their deaths. Taking these images as his source material, Richter spent a year struggling to translate them onto four vast canvases in his signature style. Realizing that the original images were simply too powerful to recreate in any form, he ultimately painted over the drawings, resulting in the large-scale abstract works that now bear the name Birkenau. Since 2017, large photographic versions of Birkenau have been installed in the western entrance hall of the Reichstag, visible to members and visitors entering toward the plenary chamber. The original paintings are currently on view at the end of the epic retrospective of Richter’s work at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, presented alongside Errera’s four chilling photographs. While Richter’s canvases are striking, it is Errera’s photographs that most linger in my mind after seeing the exhibit two weeks ago — proof that art can only ever whisper into the void that is the Holocaust.

The scent of the secret chord

For me, Paris is the city of scents. During a 2015 visit with my parents and grandmother, we stopped by Editions de Parfums Frédéric Malle — located, coincidentally, on Rue de Grenelle, in the same space that now hosts Rubirosa’s. Working with one of the shop’s fragrance experts, I sampled the options until I came upon a scent that sent shivers down my spine: French Lover, designed by Pierre Bourdon, a mix of pimiento, angelica, and juniper, with patchouli, vetiver, and frankincense at the base. I ended up wearing it daily for a decade, and each time I put it on, I thought about that trip, and my late, beloved grandmother. So on our recent visit, open to changing my signature scent, we made our way to the Paris branch of Fueguia 1833, Julián Bedel’s spiritually infused fragrance brand, founded in Buenos Aires and based in Milan. My wife has been devoted to Fueguia since 2016, even wearing their wonderful Cactus Azul on our wedding day. Inside the shop, the brand’s hundreds of varieties are displayed neatly around a rectangular structure, organized by family, from floral to herbal to woody. I started sampling the creations, waiting for that intuitive frisson that occurs when a fragrance rhymes perfectly with my own chemistry, a feeling I’d only ever experienced with French Lover. Tagore, named for the Bengal polymath, spoke to me, but I kept searching. I finally came to Seis Acordes, of the Armonías collection. True to its title, it struck that secret chord instantly. Woody, complex, spacious, it felt both mysterious and familiar. It wasn’t until I read the engraving on the back of the glass vessel that I understood my reaction: Seis Acordes is inspired by the guitars of Leonard Cohen — their woods and varnishes — seeking to evoke “the scent of his otherworldly compositions.” The fragrance was designed to commemorate the Jewish Museum of New York’s 2018 exhibition on the great man. Cohen is perhaps my favorite artist, and the Jewish Museum one of my favorite institutions. It came home with me. Like any great fragrance, it begins with the senses, before “it comes round to your soul.”

Something You Should Know

A sharp fact for your cocktail party quiver

Paris ran a pneumatic post system from the 1860s, sending letters through underground tubes by air pressure. At its height, it spanned hundreds of kilometers and delivered messages in under an hour.

Buzzcut is a newsletter of close-cropped commentary on travel, style, history, and nature by writer and strategist Zander Abranowicz. Find the best of 2024 here, and read our previous endorsements of libraries, rainwear, the Star of David, electric bikes, Rachel Carson’s first novel, and more.

Uncompensated Endorsement

A paean to what moves me

The Buzzcut Best (2025)

Reading

• The Sabbath by Abraham Joshua Herschel (1951)

• True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen by Lance Richardson (2025)

• Jerusalem: The Biography by Simon Sebag Montefiore (2011)

Eating

• Ox tongue at Andrew Edmunds (London, England)

• Snapper at Jewel of the South (New Orleans, LA)

• Linguini with pesto and mussels at La Cantina (San Fruttuoso, Italy)

Drinking

• Iribancha Houjicha from Ryuouen (Kyoto, Japan)

• 50-50 Rose Martini at Café Carmellini (New York, NY)

• Jewel Sazerac at Jewel of the South (New Orleans, LA)

Shopping

• Transport Jacket from Barbour x Todd Snyder (New York, NY)

• Friulane Velvet Slippers from Heart to Heart (Florence, Italy)

• Modello Quattro UT4-GMT Toolwatch from Unimatic (Milan, Italy)

Podcasting

• Sapir Conversations

• Music for a While (The New Criterion)

• Ask Haviv Anything

Watching

• Bergman Island (film) by Mia Hansen-Løve (2021)

• Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light (series) by Peter Kosminsky (2024)

• Oh, Canada (film) by Paul Schrader (2024)

Listening

• Journey in Satchidananda by Alice Coltrane (1971)

• Explorations by Bill Evans (1961)

• Brahms: 10 Intermezzi for Piano by Glenn Gould (1961)

Sleeping

• The Monastery of Great Lavra (Mount Athos, Greece)

• Hotel Peter and Paul (New Orleans, LA)

• Ad Astra (Florence, Italy)

Something You Should Know

A sharp fact for your cocktail party quiver

“A groundbreaking study has found that adults can recall more detailed childhood memories after briefly perceiving themselves with a childlike version of their own face. Using a virtual ‘enfacement illusion,’ participants saw a live, altered image of their face resembling how they looked as children, creating a temporary sense of embodying their younger selves.” (Source)

You’re reading Buzzcut, a newsletter of close-cropped commentary on travel, style, history, and nature by writer, strategist, and eternal philhellene Zander Abranowicz.

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Roving Desk

A note from the field

Floating Villa of the Heart

There is the olive tree, there is the pool. Hundreds of feet below, the broad blue face of the caldera, encircled by treeless landforms, remnants of the volcano that long ago buried the island’s ancient Minoan city, terrorized Crete, cast fearsome rainstorms over Egypt, and withered crops in China. On Santorini, the gods left evidence of their raw materials — fire, water, earth, air — undiluted and sanctified for eternity by the mythic Greek light.

I call this place home. Specifically, this hotel: Perivolas. The word means “outskirts.” This is where fishermen, farmers, and shepherds once cultivated the crops that fed Oia, a cluster of white cave houses clinging, with the audacity of a mountain goat, to these wild cliffs. Oia is less a village than a vision, the kind of place invented by Marco Polo for the entertainment of Kublai Khan. I do not live here. At most, I spend a few weeks each year in Perivolas’s quiet confines, the guest of its proprietors, old family friends who’ve become family. Still, I call Perivolas home because here, I wish to be nowhere else. Its architecture, service, and setting rebuke the complexity of modern life, making anything but simplicity seem crass.

After thirty-three years, I recognize every niche, every vine of bougainvillea, every patch of reflected light across the surface of the iconic infinity pool. Some rooms I could navigate blind. There is tiny Room 8, where, in 1986, my parents spent their first night on Santorini, and where, in 2010, after graduating high school, I slept my first time here alone after backpacking down the Cyclades. With each arrival, I find more to map. Costis Psychas, steward of Perivolas, and my godfather, has a superhuman capacity to carve out evermore spacious dwellings from this inhospitable terrain. Last summer, I stayed in his latest: the Floating Villa. He says it will be his last. Time will tell.

The Floating Villa sits between two pools. Gazing out from the terrace, it seems that the entire compound is suspended over the caldera, joining the surrounding islands — Aspronisi, Therasia, Palea Kameni, Nea Kameni — as they hover in ether when the horizon fades in the afternoon light. That light. It gilds every surface like the hand of King Midas: the sculpted white plaster; the Naxian marble cut into vast, quilted slabs on the floor; the walls of black igneous rock that frame the view and muffle all suggestion of outside human life, leaving only the sound of trickling water, and a panoramic view of my childhood.

I sit on the terrace and note every detail. I want to be able to reconstruct the Floating Villa, in miniature, when I’m far away. I want to carve its sweeping arches into the interior of my being, so in moments of trouble it will invite me in, reminding me that home isn’t where I come from, it’s where I go when I close my eyes.

More information

Something you should know

A sharp fact for your cocktail party quiver

T.S. Eliot and C.S. Lewis double-dated with their wives, twice, in the late 1950s

Buzzcut is a newsletter of close-cropped commentary on travel, style, history, and nature by writer and strategist Zander Abranowicz. Find the best of 2023 here, and read our previous endorsements of libraries, rainwear, the Star of David, electric bikes, Rachel Carson’s first novel, and more.

Uncompensated Endorsement

A paean to what moves me

The Buzzcut Best (2024)

Reading

• Annihilation by Michel Houellebecq (2022)

• From Bauhaus to Our House by Tom Wolfe (1981)

• Rise and Kill First by Ronen Bergman (2018)

Eating

• Hot dog au poivre at The Portrait Bar (New York, New York)

• Liver at St. JOHN (London, England)

• Seafood at Golden View Firenze (Florence, Italy)

Shopping

• L’Elsass knife with juniper handle from Eustache (Riquewihr, France)

• Opera incense from Astier de Villatte (Paris, France)

• Rope leash from Found My Animal (Brooklyn, New York)

Wearing

• Italian wool sport coat from Todd Snyder (New York, New York)

• Trebbio leather tote bag from Il Bisonte (Florence, Italy)

• Japanese Ford Denim Standard Jean from Buck Mason (Los Angeles, California)

Podcasting

• Honestly with Bari Weiss (The Free Press)

• For Heaven’s Sake (Shalom Hartman Institute)

• The Rest is History (Goalhanger)

Substacking

• The Scroll (Tablet)

• The Free Press

• The Weekly Dish

Watching

• The Vanishing (film) by George Sluizer (1988)

• The Incomparable Mr. Buckley (documentary) by Barak Goodman (2024)

• The Terror (miniseries) by Dan Simmons (2018)

Sleeping

• Floating Villa at Perivolas (Santorini, Greece)

• Mansion Suite at The Fifth Avenue Hotel (New York, New York)

• Cavendish Hall (Suffolk, England)

Listening

• Opus by Ryuichi Sakamoto (2024)

• False Lankum by Lankum (2023)

• Here in the Pitch by Jessica Pratt (2024)

Something You Should Know

A sharp fact for your cocktail party quiver

In Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, the voice of the masked woman who saves Tom Cruise’s character during the famous orgy scene was Cate Blanchett’s

Radical Squeak

When I was a junior at Cornell, my friend’s ex-boyfriend, who had graduated a few years earlier, called me with a proposal. He was making a documentary about Wall Street’s courtship of Ivy League students and wanted to stage (and film) a protest at an upcoming Goldman Sachs recruitment event to be hosted at The Statler, Cornell’s student-run hotel. Maybe he’d seen my Che Guevara poster or stack of books by writers like Adorno, Berkman, and Badiou, and figured me for some kind of rabble-rouser. The truth is, my Marxist inclinations were largely aesthetic. I was quite comfortable under Pax Obama, and aspired to someday wear nice suits, drive a Land Rover, and live in a well-appointed country house with a pack of obedient dachshunds. I had never published a manifesto, walked a picket line, or spray-painted a red star anywhere.

Curious to experience at least one dose of subversion before graduating and shuffling to the political center, I agreed to help. My task was simple: I was to muster 15 or so operatives who could blend into a big bank recruitment event. Most of my friends were more likely to attend such an event than to protest it, but I knew just who to ask. The guy I had in mind was, at least in my eyes, the de facto leader of the radical student movement. He mostly seemed to organize peaceful protests and teach-ins on the Arts Quad, where you could come and sit between classes to plot the revolution while plucking daffodils in the grass.

The night of the event I donned a dark suit and striped tie and stepped into the crisp autumn air, listening to solemn winds rattle the molting branches of the plane trees lining Ho Plaza. I passed Willard Straight Hall, the student union building famously occupied by armed and bandoliered African American students during Parents Weekend in 1969. In a scene right out of Animal House, white students from a fraternity down the hill unsuccessfully attempted to “liberate” the hall; the occupation eventually ended, peacefully, with negotiations. I arrived at Goldwin Smith Hall, a monumental classical structure overlooking the Arts Quad, and waited on the front steps.

The director soon arrived, dressed in business formal. A short while later, my friend emerged from the darkness of the quad, stepping dramatically into the glow of the colonnaded building. He wasn’t alone. Behind him were a dozen or so fellow students, plus a few strangers whom I suspect were recruited from around the city of Ithaca. Dressed in weathered flannel shirts and wearing un-topiaried beards and long frizzy hair, they had apparently struggled with my directive to “dress like you’re trying to get a job at Goldman Sachs.” Undeterred, we marched to the hotel.

We staggered our entrance to avoid suspicion, passing through the brass doorway and by a scrum of bored bellboys, a job which I would later hold, then lose, thanks to a harmless joyriding incident — a story for another time. We turned left and walked down the red-carpeted hallway toward the ballroom where the event was underway. To my surprise, my friend was already being interrogated by university officials who apparently recognized him from previous exploits and intercepted him before he could cause any trouble. We made furtive eye contact.

Once inside, I scribbled an invented nom de guerre on a name tag and affixed it to my lapel. Scanning the room, I recognized plenty of friends from classes and parties, all dressed conservatively, their hair neatly combed, making pleasant small-talk with the Goldman recruiters. Then, I did a double-take. There was the crowd of motley recruits my friend had enlisted, pillaging the table of hors d’oeuvres like it was the last meal they’d ever have. I noticed some future bankers eyeing them with well-founded suspicion. I feared their cover was blown. But for the time being, the plan held. My comrades continued to expropriate handfuls of salami, celery sticks, and grapes undisturbed, with the urgency of harpies.

The rest of us positioned ourselves, as instructed by the director, around the room, mingling with our fellow students and trying to maintain a low profile. Suddenly, the director gave the signal. He let out a terrifying cackle that almost immediately extinguished the amicable murmur, which then started up again, albeit with a more muted tenor. The director laughed again, and this time we all joined in, stopping as abruptly as we’d started. This was our big revolutionary moment. University staff soon identified the source of the laughter, and led the director, who had started reciting a speech about greed, to the door. We followed, in silence, pierced by the collective glare of a hundred (understandably) unamused aspiring bankers. To make matters worse, we raised our left fists as we marched out, as if we were some triumphant union of miners emerging victorious from a hard-fought strike.

The follow morning’s edition of the Cornell Daily Sun featured mixed reviews of our performance. While some felt the demonstration was “really weird,” “ineffective,” and “rude,” others felt it had “very little impact,” and cast Cornell in a “bad light.” Clearly they didn’t appreciate the deep dialectical significance of our action.

I never saw the film. I have no idea if it was ever completed. But now, more than a decade later, I still chuckle when I think of those bearded, flanneled protestors storming the catering table. Did we succeed in sabotaging the Ivy League-to-Wall Street pipeline? No, but they got a good meal, and I got a good story.

Something You Should Know

A sharp fact for your cocktail party quiver

Shakers avoided eating warm, freshly baked bread as the taste was too sensuous

Personal Pantheon

A tribute to someone inspiring

Portrait of a Painter in Siena

Siena is fifty miles from Florence, but in the time it took to travel by train from the city of Dante to the city of Saint Catherine, my mind ventured much farther. I went back to my childhood in Bedford, New York, and the early days of my friendship with the man I was on my way to see: Beau Gabriel, the painter, currently in-residence at the Villa di Vicobello, a sixteenth century estate considered one of the finest Renaissance-era homes and gardens in the region.

I met Beau thousands of miles away, on the lacrosse field, when we were 11. He had straight, shoulder-length hair, rosy cheeks, a faint scar down the bridge of his nose, and an amused, knowing smile. He had a twin named Henry. I immediately wanted to be their third brother, and we soon became a merry trio. Henry went to private school; Beau to public school with me. But we did most of our learning at home, both coming from families of readers and writers. The Gabriels lived in an 1861 home built around the old one-room schoolhouse in Pound Ridge, Bedford’s slightly more woodsy sibling, with a clutch of chickens and a Norfolk terrier.

The house suited Beau: he lived, then as now, with one foot in the present, and another in the past. In middle school and high school, he practiced oboe and carriage driving. I practiced falconry. These were hardly the average pastimes of the American teen. Beau gave me permission to embrace my more anachronistic interests, a gift.

Our friendship grew in the forests around our homes, where we dressed up as guerrillas, armed ourselves with mock rifles, and went on sorties against imaginary White Russians and other perceived enemies of the people. (There is, I later learned, some precedent for these antics: in 1969 a Westchester high school teacher taught a course in guerrilla war tactics, telling The New York Times: “Revolution and guerrilla warfare are happening all over the world, and I think students in Scarsdale should know about it.”) We wore long wool military coats and other surplus garments of war to middle school — no doubt to the puzzlement of our teachers, coaches, and peers — and decoded historical references in The Clash albums.

Beau has always been an artist, with a preternaturally steady hand that produced reams of perfect illustrations — complex naval battles and cavalry charges, cherubs and charioteers — and a prolific comic series starring his vulpine alter-ego, Sly Fox the Sneak. I can still see his hand guiding a No. 2 Ticonderoga pencil over printer paper in his living room, while the fireplace hisses. We worshiped Hergé, creator of Tintin, and imitated his signature ligne claire style. Beau’s exquisite penmanship still bears traces of that great Belgian artist’s typography.

After graduating from Yale, where he sang in a Russian men’s choir and performed in a Baroque orchestra, Beau went to live in Paris. He worked for a spell at a law firm. I visited a few times, always enjoying his ensemble of peripatetic young friends around tables strewn with his ambitious dishes (I especially recall one delicious oxtail stew), bottles of wine, and ashtrays. After a few years he relocated to London to attend the Royal College of Art, and pursue his God-given talent in earnest. He set up a studio in Hackney, where once, he painted my portrait.

Loosely speaking, Beau’s practice applies the style of classical painting to the substance of modern objects, figures, and settings. One series depicted influencers in a style recalling his beloved Pontormo, bringing a timeless grace to the ephemeral icons of our moment. My first real art acquisition was a painted study from this period, a delicate rendering of a woman’s blushed, perpetually wistful face. It gazes out from the wall above our bookshelves in Brooklyn. Recently, in his series “Salt Marsh Hay,” Beau mined memories of summers spent on the Maine coast, putting lobster rolls, Igloo coolers, and oyster rakes in the hands of sylphlike denizens of landscapes evoking Mount Desert Island and Castine.

In June, I arrived in Siena and took a taxi uphill to the Villa di Vicobello, which lords over that cradle of the early Renaissance. It was designed by Baldassarre Peruzzi in the 1500s, an age of Black Death and conflict with the rival Duchy of Florence. Peruzzi was an accomplished architect of grand structures all over these parts, even contributing to projects at the Vatican, where, in 1520, he succeeded Raphael as the architect of St. Peter’s. At St. Peter's, his client was God, but here, it was the Chigi banking dynasty. Its signature domed mountains are still sculpted into impressive topiaries throughout the property.

Vicobello makes an appearance in Edith Wharton’s 1904 book Italian Villas and Their Gardens, alongside a Maxfield Parrish illustration of its exedra — a Greco-Roman style open-air recess with seating — framed by cypress trees. Of Vicobello, Wharton wrote:

“The descending walled gardens, with their different levels, gives opportunity for many charming architectural effects — busts in niches, curving steps, and well-placed vases and statues; and the whole treatment of Vicobello is remarkable for the discretion and sureness of taste with which these ornamental touches are added. There is no excess of decoration, no crowding of effects, and the garden-plan is in perfect keeping with the simple stateliness of the house.”

In other words, Vicobello was the ideal setting for Beau’s latest residency, supported by the gallerist Caspar Giorgio Williams of C.G. Williams, culminating in an exhibit now on view at the villa, with panels hung in the same airy studio space where they were painted.

When I arrived, the taxi driver couldn’t quite find the entrance to the walled estate. Beau came out to fetch me on a dirt road that cut through olive groves, kicking up dust in his paint-splattered loafers. Ever natty, he wore faded jeans, a white t-shirt, and navy cardigan, and had grown a modest beard. (His sartorial ease was a far cry from the self-conscious fashion socialites crowding in Florence for the summer edition of Pitti Uomo, the menswear fair.)

Knowing we only had a few hours quickened our pace a bit. Like boys on imaginary maneuvers in a Westchester forest, we marched through life news, asking after each other’s families, recounting recent good times and bad, sharing what books and music and art we’d been enjoying. We talked fast and walked slow, perusing the stately grounds, much the same as they were when they were inspected by Edith Wharton at the turn of the century. The roses were blooming, honeysuckle emitted its sweet perfume, and those quintessential Italian cypress drifted in the hilltop breeze. We were trailed by two dogs, a dappled English setter and its humble companion.

We ended at the jewel of Vicobello: a citrus garden, virtually unchanged since it was planted hundreds of years ago, accessible through an ornate gate. Scattered throughout the segmented space were large terracotta vases, emblazoned with the Chigi crest, housing the family’s ancient strains of lemon and orange trees. The dogs jumped playfully over the low hedgerows, stopping now and then to rest in the shade, panting lightly. Magpies circled overhead, beneath rococo clouds.

In the studio, which overlooks the storied citrus garden, evidence of an active few weeks was everywhere. Occupying the assorted panels were elegant figures, many modeled by friends, alongside Italianate motifs: bottles of wine, plastic lawn chairs, lush flora and fauna, ripe fruit. He had plenty of work to do before the opening, but the contours of an extraordinary exhibit were already deep in formation. The show, titled “Roadside Thistles,” was announced with a beautiful introduction that captured, in Beau’s own language, a nostalgic sense of this place, in a style befitting Giuseppe di Lampedusa, author of aristocratic loss and that classic lament: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” It ends:

“These paintings reach for what has already slipped away: illusive history, young memory, first love. Awareness of passing time shades reverie with sorrow, and what once brought delight now stings. But even a roadside thistle is a thing of beauty, and if that is all I can hold, it is enough.”

For lunch, Beau cooked classic Sienese fare: wild boar ragù over pici — a local pasta — plus a fresh salad, bread, and red wine. We sat in the exedra, and conversation continued to pour out of us. While we talked, it dawned on me that we were still those same children, still inventing our own reality, only now with stubble and stable relationships, inhabiting our own imitation of Tintin when possible, forging our livelihoods in art and commerce. Far from Westchester, here we were: two grown-up children, in a garden in Siena, perfectly at home in the past.

“Roadside Thistles” by Beau Gabriel is on view at the Villa di Vicobello in Siena through the end of July. You can follow Beau on Instagram here.

Sonic Landscapes

A mix, echoing my old college radio show

To accompany this edition of Buzzcut, I’ve picked 10 songs to spin in the citrus garden at your renaissance villa, on a train through the English countryside, poolside in Santorini, or on a melancholy flight back to the States.

1. Rebecca’s Theme (Water) — A.R.T. Wilson

2. World on a String — Jessica Pratt

3. Mountains, Trees and Seas — Matthew Halsall

4. Ta Nyé — Ballaké Sissoko and friends

5. License to Kill — Bob Dylan

6. At Last I Am Free — Robert Wyatt

7. Ship of Fools — John Cale

8. Lord Abore and Mary Flynn — Lankum

9. Clear Away in the Morning — Gordon Bok

10. The Dark Eyed Sailor (live) — Olivia Chaney

Listen on Spotify

Listen on Apple Music

Something You Should Know

A sharp fact for your cocktail party quiver

A final herd of mammoths survived on Wrangel Island, in the East Siberian Sea, until roughly 4,000 years ago, meaning they were still extant during the construction of the Great Pyramids in Egypt

Buzzcut Reports

A comment on some subject of interest

Animals at War

Summer night, circa 390 BC. A gaggle of sacred geese is trying to get some rest outside the temple of Juno, atop the Capitoline, one of Rome’s seven hills. Fowl are light sleepers by nature, and the restlessness of the Roman soldiers huddled around fires higher up the mount is contagious. Some of the birds cope by burying their tufted heads into their own downy backs like natural pillows. Others shift anxiously from webbed foot to foot, murmuring softly.

With the moon hidden above the clouds and absent the usual constellation of torches and candles, the darkness is total in the city below. Somewhere in that void prowls the Senones — a Gallic tribe from the Seine region of ancient France — suspiciously quiet after a spree of triumphant sacking. The Senones have reason to rejoice: just days earlier, they vanquished a legion of Romans by the river Allia, clearing a road into the heart of the fragile city-state. Only this last handful of Roman defenders remains, marooned on a flickering island in the sea of night.

Juno’s sacred geese know none of the geopolitical peril around them, but down the slope, they hear something, or someone, break the silence, and do what geese do when startled: honk. Their sudden ungainly chorus rouses the weary legionnaires, who swiftly mobilize to repel the ascending horde, and save the young republic. For letting the Senones approach the Capitoline undetected, Rome will crucify dogs near the Circus Maximus every year on the date of this battle. Geese will oversee the proceedings from gold litters, resting on cushions of purple, the most hallowed hue of antiquity, extracted from the mucus gland of a predatory sea snail.

Humans have been augmenting our own limited senses with those of more perceptive animals since long before the advent of domestication. In prehistoric times, a skill for interpreting the behavior of beasts conferred concrete advantages in survival. Birds taking flight over a forest, for example, might betray the approach of a rival band. Wild sentinels can therefore be considered the earliest animals “used” in human conflict. What came next in the evolution of war animals is foggy. Lucretius speculated in the first century BC that primitive man likely tried and failed to “enlist wild beasts such as lions or savage boars in the service of war.”

Creatures great and small have since played many parts in the ongoing story of human strife, from the vigilant Capitoline geese to the Malinois dogs now fighting for Israel in the tunnel complex beneath Gaza. War animals have always been a source of fascination for our species, bringing out a sense of childish wonder in even the stodgiest historian, and serving as fodder for many artists, from the anonymous Assyrian stone carver who embedded an armored mastiff into a bas-relief at the city of Birs Nimrud around 600 BC, to Steven Spielberg. As technology forces the retirement of more and more war animals after thousands of years of active service, we might reflect on the debt we owe to them, and consider ways to begin paying it back.

The dog was the first animal intentionally drafted into humankind’s living arsenal. Domesticated in Eurasia at least 14,000 years ago, canines were our early hunting companions, guards, bed-warmers, and even engines to pull our sleds, all critical roles in the harsh primitive world. It’s unclear when they were first sent into battle, but the oldest evidence of war dogs begins to appear circa 600 BC, simultaneously making an appearance in the aforementioned stone relief at Birs Nimrud (today in Iraq), and in Asia Minor, where the Greek military strategist and war historian Polyaenus describes King Alyattes of Lydia using trained dogs to drive the invading Cimmerians out of his kingdom and back to their haunts on the Pontic-Caspian steppe.

The historical record of the ancient world pulses with breathless anecdotes in this vein. Pliny records that one ruler of the Garamantes, a civilization occupying present-day Libya, maintained 200 war dogs that “did battle with all those who resisted him.” Aelian states that the legendary Greek hoplites used war dogs during the first Persian invasion of Greece, while Herodotus testifies that Xerxes commanded legions of Indian hounds during the second Persian invasion ten years later. On the Stoa Poikile in the Agora of Athens, keen observers will find one heroic hound immortalized beside his master after serving with valor at the fateful battle of Marathon in 490 BC.

Dogs also played unexpected, even bizarre, defensive roles. In Cambyses II’s invasion of Egypt in 525 BC, he positioned dogs as well as ibex, sheep, cats, and other creatures regarded as sacred by the Egyptians as “animal shields” at the front of Persian lines near the city of Pelusium. The tactic succeeded. Egypt’s archers wouldn’t let fly their arrows for fear of hitting the animals, Pelusium fell, and Cambyses stormed through the kingdom, crowning himself pharaoh and absorbing Egypt as a province of the Achaemenid Empire for the next 121 years.

Many of our modern breeds were born on the battlefield. The term “mastiff” describes a brawny, short-coated dog used for at least 3,000 years in bloodsporting, hunting, guarding, and notably, fighting in battle. Our Cane Corso, Boxer, Bulldog, Rottweiler, Dogue de Bordeaux, and Great Dane (among many others) all trace their lineage back to this ur-breed, which accompanied Greek, Persian, and Roman armies on campaign. Even the puny French Bulldog can claim genetic affinity with these terrifying four-legged fighters.

Dalmatians, meanwhile, patrolled the borders and islands of the coastal region of Dalmatia in modern-day Croatia, while ancestors of the Chow Chow, some have speculated, might have arrived in China with Mongol armies after emerging in northern Siberia. Irish wolfhounds, for their part, saw battle beside Celts in confrontations with Romans and Normans.

Untold other dogs of war have disappeared. The lost Molossian, or Epirus Mastiff, was Rome’s preferred breed for battle. Its predecessor, the Alaunt, was first bred by the nomads of the North Caucasus. Before fading into history, it was used by the Spanish to terrorize Amerindians, among other violent exploits.

A range of other breeds was used in war-adjacent activities, from hunting and sending messages to tracking and guarding camps. King Philip II of Macedonia, for one, is said to have used bloodhounds to pursue his enemies through the rugged Balkan range. The warlord father of Alexander the Great, however, was more known for his innovative application of that other infinitely magnetic war animal: the horse.

Under Philip, the Macedonian army began using massed cavalry charges, which devastated rival city-states like Athens and Thebes. Horses had been used in chariot warfare, skirmishing, raiding, transporting men and supplies, and scouting for as long as 4,000 years, starting on the Eurasian steppe before thundering into the Mediterranean basin. But Philip wisely wedded the unparalleled strength and speed of larger horses with the security of thick armor, the brawn of equally armored warriors, and novel formations designed to deliver both physical and psychological devastation.

At Chaeronea in 338 BC, Philip’s mounted shock tactics, directed in part by his 18-year-old son Alexander, crushed the last resistance to Macedonian hegemony among the Greek statelets, with the exception of Sparta, and positioned him to mobilize a consolidated force against the greater prize: Persia. But before he could, history’s most famous father was stabbed to death by his bodyguard — assassinated, like Lincoln, while attending theater in the capital of his realm.

Over the next 13 years, Alexander would take his father’s army, and its signature equine tactics, to dominate a spread of earth covering three continents and roughly two million square miles, a territory stretching from modern Ethiopia to Kyrgyzstan, from Romania to India. His legendary expeditions would put West and East into contact like never before, and pit the horse against a menagerie of perilous creatures, sent into the fray in fantastical and creative ways.

On its long march to the Indus delta, Alexander’s army lay siege to the city of Harmatelia, a seat of Brahman power located in present-day Pakistan. According to an account by Diodorus Siculus, written between 36 and 30 BC, the city’s defenders had treated their weapons with the venom of Russell’s viper. Even a small scratch from these poisoned blades or arrows could result in a grueling death, presaging modern biological warfare. “When a man was wounded,” Diodorus writes, “the body became numb immediately and then sharp pains followed, and convulsions and shivering shook the whole frame. The skin became cold and bile appeared in the vomit, while a black froth was exuded from the wound and gangrene set in.”

Alexander also found crafty ways to use unexpected animals to his benefit. In Persia, he affixed branches on the tails of sheep so they would raise clouds of dust, causing his enemy to inflate its assessment of Greek ranks. A similar trick was later utilized by Hannibal to spook the Roman army. The Carthaginian general strapped torches to flocks of sheep so that at night, they created the impression of thousands of campfires. Such “herd tactics” were also used extensively during China’s Warring States period, including one instance in which oxen were dressed and painted as dragons, lit on fire, and sent to trample the opposing force.

Of the exotic animals encountered by Alexander during his wars of expansion, none was so intimidating, and consequential, as the elephant. Macedonians first faced a line of battle-ready pachyderms at Gaugamela, where Darius III positioned fifteen at the Persian front. Their appearance, and spectacular trumpeting, sent terror through Alexander’s army. The night before the battle, the Macedonians made a sacrifice to Phobos, god of fear, ostensibly to frighten their opponents, but perhaps also to inoculate themselves against the enemy within.

By the time he marched into India, where elephants had been used in war since at least 1100 BC according to Sanskrit hymns, Alexander had amassed a sizeable elephant corps, but hadn’t yet met the creatures in active battle. That changed at the Hydaspes River, where he clashed with the army of King Porus and its sizable contingent of Indian war elephants, each bearing a howdah, or platform, upon which rode a mahout, or elephant master, and archers.

The Macedonians were ready. They launched javelins to slay the mahouts or blind the unfortunate beasts, sending them back to trample or gore Porus’s own foot soldiers and cavalry. The strategy succeeded. Alexander won the day, but not without losses: among the dead was his beloved Bucephalus, one of history’s most famous war horses, among a pantheon that includes Robert E. Lee’s gray American Saddlebred, Traveller, and Napoleon’s Arabian stallion, Marengo, immortalized in Jacques-Louis David’s Napoleon Crossing the Alps. In Bucephalus’s place, Alexander would welcome 150 of Porus’s prized war elephants to his side.

And yet, despite his momentum, and swelling company of war animals, Alexander knew that greater challenges remained ahead. The still-unconquered kingdoms to the east possessed vast armies of elephants, a decisive factor in Alexander’s world-historical decision to turn his army around. Back in Babylon, he anointed an “elephantarch” to command his “elephantry,” and selected a special force of these magnificent, intelligent creatures to guard his own palace.

After the young conqueror’s death at 32, and the disintegration of his empire into the Seleucids, in Western Asia, and the Ptolemies, in North Africa, war elephants became a fixture of western armies, which they would remain until gunpowder and mounting tactical challenges rendered them more of a liability than an asset. (The historian Josiah Ober estimates that during the Hellenistic age, the odds favored whichever army had fewer elephants.) Before their decline, though, elephants would help Rome conquer Greece, Hispania, and possibly Britain, while Rome’s archenemy, Carthage, would ride 37 North African forest elephants over the Alps, where all but one specimen of this extinct subspecies succumbed to the cruel alpine frost.

Were a Cimmerian horseman, Athenian hoplite, or Indian mahout transported to the twenty-first century, they would be astonished by our ways of war. Autonomous drones, cyber warfare, nuclear missiles, and so many other inventive means of combat have transformed and complicated our battlefields. In addition to the high-tech tools of modern warfare, however, our time travelers would find some familiar features. Among them, the dog.

Man’s best friend is still our best option for certain tasks in war. During the raid to kill Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, first caliph of the Islamic State, an American military dog pursued Baghdadi down a tunnel, incurring injuries when the terrorist detonated a suicide vest. Recently, only days before the Israeli Defense Force killed three hostages in a tragic friendly fire incident in Gaza, a military dog from Israel’s famed Oketz canine unit, equipped with a mounted GoPro camera, managed to record the hostages’ voices, before being shot dead by Hamas terrorists.

The end of the dog’s role in human war, however, may very well be near. Israel, among other technically advanced nations, is exploring the use of robots to spare canines the risk of charging into dangerous environments. Haaretz reports that a canine-esque walking robot called Vision 60, produced by a Philadelphia-based robotics lab, is being tested by Oketz to survey buildings, battlefields, and tunnels for IEDs and enemy combatants before humans are sent in.

It’s only a matter of time before technology sends the dog the way of the war horse, the camel, and the mule — that unsung hero of so many conflicts. These living, breathing war machines were rendered all but obsolete by machine guns and motorized transport, two features that defined the industrialized killing fields of World War I. Some 16 million animals served in that last great gasp of animal warfare, with an estimated nine million falling alongside the 40 million soldiers and civilians lost in the conflict. Dogs and pigeons carried messages, canaries signaled poisonous gasses, and cats and terriers hunted the rats that ruled the trenches.

Animals also made a stand, in diminished numbers, in World War II. The United States continued to use pigeons to convey secret intelligence; horses carried soldiers on patrol in Europe, and even saw battle in the Philippines; and thousands of dogs aided the U.S. Army, Coast Guard, and Marine Corps. Allied forces used elephants to transport supplies in the Pacific theater; while up north, the Soviet Union and Sweden experimented (unsuccessfully) with moose as deep snow cavalry animals. In one surreal misadventure, the United States considered using Mexican free-tailed bats to deposit small bombs over Japan — a project that was abandoned for the more decisive atomic bomb.

Our horseman, hoplite, and mahout might also marvel at the submarine creatures trained to fight on our behalf. Dolphins, seals, sea lions, and even beluga whales have been used for tasks ranging from assisting divers, to recovering objects, to detecting mines and torpedoes, to even killing unidentified interlopers in aquatic war zones. In 2019, fishermen off the coast of Norway spotted a beluga whale wearing a camera and tight harness with the words “Equipment St. Petersburg.” Speculation pointed to Russian espionage, perhaps an escape from the nearby naval base at Murmansk. Having become accustomed to human interaction during its training, the retired cetacean spy has remained in northern waters, where conservationists are using his story to draw attention to the moral complexity of sending intelligent creatures to war.

It’s a quirk of the human heart that we rarely flinch when soldiers are blown to bits on a silver screen battlefield, but we do when a horse or dog is killed. Animals embody innocence, and nothing disturbs the conscience like the slaughter of innocents. Aggression, intimidation, and physical force are of course the means by which many animals survive, but they do not enjoy, in any recognizable human sense, inflicting terror. Some animals engage in behaviors resembling raiding, territorial expansion, and internecine conflict, but scientists generally agree that they do not make war by any formal definition. They exist in Rousseau’s “state of nature,” beyond the nuances of human morality. We, with our many-folded brains, are simply animals with the power to choose between right and wrong, good and evil.

Animals do not choose to fight for us. To their detractors, they fit into a category of combatants without consent, alongside child soldiers, a phenomenon widely abhorred, indicative of the most lawless and brutal conflicts on earth. How, therefore, knowing all that we now know of animal sentience, and even their capacity to develop PTSD, can we justify sending them to fight?

Animals suffer alongside civilian populations in wartime, and always have. During World War II, stranded and famished Japanese soldiers subsisted on the Wake Island rail, eating the flightless bird into extinction. The Barbary lion’s last viable habitat was destroyed during the 1958 French-Algerian War, also leading to its extinction. Agent Orange poisoned decades of fish and bird populations in Vietnam and Cambodia. Examples proliferate, in every conflict on record. From habitat destruction, to sound pollution, to the introduction of invasive species, to the weakened governance of conservation areas, war is hell for humans and non-humans alike.

If the fates of humans and other animals are shared in war, there’s an argument to be made that our continued martial symbiosis is justified in the service of peace. The highest purpose of war is to maintain stability, and stability benefits all living things, whether we walk on two legs or four.

But if we wish for them to fight, and honor a record of service that extends to the beginning of our history, we ought to afford animals better protection in the laws of war. Today, international law has little to say about animals, and nations do little to fill the void. The United States counts war dogs as “equipment.” In Australia, they are “technology.” For all our monuments honoring war dogs, and even the bestowal upon them of our highest military honors, the U.S. Department of Defense continues to conduct vile experiments in “wound labs,” where dogs and other animals are subjected to various tortures to test weaponry and simulate human injury.

The same goes for “non-combatant” creatures. The Hague Conventions prohibit the destruction and seizure of enemy property, but international law scholars disagree as to whether animals constitute “property,” considering their sentience. Expanding the anthropocentric basis of international humanitarian law could, theoretically, prevent cruelty against animals in wartime.

The dove serves as our universal symbol of peace. In the Bible, the bird signaled salvation to the remnant few adrift after the great flood. Animals have a unique power to provide salvation after trauma, helping heal our hidden wounds when the guns go quiet. The American Psychiatric Association asserts that service dogs have “reduced severity of symptoms, improved mental health and improved social interactions” among veterans and others suffering from PTSD. Among the list of almost supernatural tasks which dogs can be conditioned to complete: nudging or placing its head in a veteran’s lap when they sense anxiety; positioning themselves behind the veteran to alert when someone is approaching; and even recognizing when a veteran is having a nightmare, and gently nudging them awake.

An animal’s uncanny power to make humans whole again after our disintegration into violence is reason enough for their supreme protection in law and practice. Since the beginning, animals have fought for humans. Now it’s time for us to fight for them.

It’s been a while

You might have noticed that this newsletter has been sitting fallow for a few months. A lot has changed during this unplanned hiatus. In my life, in the world.

We moved back to New York, closer to my family and to my wife’s new job. She gave me a beautiful dappled dachshund named Judd as a birthday gift. He keeps me company while I work, and on long walks in our new neighborhood. Virgin foliage is starting to soften the city’s rough edges, which I admit seem rougher after three years in the gentle confines of Richmond.

Truthfully, my ink all but froze on October 7th, and it has taken an unexpectedly long while to thaw. After the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, anything I wrote sounded absolutely irrelevant. In the months after, it seemed like arms were the only things capable of communicating the message that mattered, to Hamas and to the world. That’s changed in the past few weeks, as I found in war animals a subject worth sinking my teeth into.

Moving forward, Buzzcut will continue to claim space for highly relevant and news-breaking topics like Philip of Macedonia’s cavalry tactics, Rachel Carson’s sojourn on the Carolina coast, and medieval dancing mania. I plan to keep it a little looser in terms of schedule and format. You’ll hear from me when I have something worth saying. Thanks, as ever, for your enthusiasm.

If you’re in New York, let’s get a coffee. I’ll bring Judd.

Something You Should Know

A sharp fact for your cocktail party quiver

Greenland sharks, the world’s longest-living vertebrates, can survive up to 500 years, meaning members of the species alive today were alive at the same time as Shakespeare

Buzzcut is a newsletter of close-cropped commentary on travel, style, history, and nature by writer and strategist Zander Abranowicz. Read our previous endorsements of libraries, rainwear, the Star of David, electric bikes, Rachel Carson’s first novel, and more. Our latest book is Country Life: Homes of the Catskill Mountains and Hudson Valley.

Uncompensated Endorsement

A paean to what moves me

The Buzzcut Best (2023)

Reading

• Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner (1936)

• “Pan” by Jean Giono (1932)

• Means of Ascent by Robert Caro (1982)

Eating

• Rabbit from The Commerce Inn (New York, NY)

• Bolognese from Lost Letter (Richmond, VA)

• Ceviche from Pescadería El Charalito (Chicxulub Puerto, MX)

Shopping

• John Pawson (El Croquis) from Diamond Hollow Books (Andes, NY)

• Canasta Henequén from Taller Maya (Izamal, MX)

• Heaven Can Wait from Editions de Parfums Frederic Malle (New York, NY)

Wearing

• Barth moccasin by Paraboot

• Mock neck wool “Ghost Piece” sweater by Stone Island

• Field Cap by Abbreviated Products

Podcasting

• Gatecrashers by Mark Oppenheimer (Tablet)

• The New Gurus by Helen Lewis (BBC4)

• Tetragrammaton by Rick Rubin

Watching

• Splendor in the Grass (film) by Elia Kazan (1961)

• Ghosts of Beirut (miniseries) by Avi Issacharoff and Lior Raz (2023)

• Morning of the Earth (documentary) by Albert Falzon (1972)

Sleeping

• Doah House (Front Royal, VA)

• The Fifth Avenue Hotel (New York, NY)

• The Marlton Hotel (New York, NY)

Listening

• Blowout by John Carroll Kirby (2023)

• Surround by Hiroshi Yoshimura (1986)

• An Ever Changing View by Matthew Halsall (2023)

Something You Should Know

A sharp fact for your cocktail party quiver

The “Great American Biotic Interchange” refers to the migration of land and freshwater fauna from North America to South America and vice versa, as the volcanic isthmus of Panama rose up from the sea floor and bridged the formerly separated continents

Buzzcut is a newsletter of close-cropped commentary on travel, style, history, and nature by writer and strategist Zander Abranowicz. Read our previous endorsements of libraries, stealing cups, rainwear, the Star of David, electric bikes, and more. Our latest book is Country Life: Homes of the Catskill Mountains and Hudson Valley.

This month’s essay was first published in the Ocracoke Observer, the local newspaper of our beloved island on the Outer Banks. I’ve had a few cool bylines in my time, but this might be the best yet.

Uncompensated Endorsement

A paean to what moves me

Rachel Carson’s Coast

This June, we climbed into our Toyota 4Runner and drove on deflated tires down Ramp 72 to the pristine beachfront that spans Ocracoke’s Atlantic coast. Along the way, we stopped to let a diamondback terrapin plod leisurely across our path, and watch a tern plunge into the marsh beside us. Plowing ahead through white sand, we reached our seaside nest, and after setting up chairs and a cooler, commenced our most sacred vacation ritual: beach reading.

From murder mysteries to bodice rippers, everyone’s ideal vacation book is different. I always reach for site-specific literature. I’ve read Zorba the Greek in Crete. All the Pretty Horses in Texas. Coloring everything I encounter with context, the right read brings a sense of wonder to any destination. This summer, I packed what proved to be the perfect one for Ocracoke: Under the Sea-Wind, the first book by the great American naturalist Rachel Carson.

Under the Sea-Wind plunges readers into the natural history of the Atlantic coastline, and keeps us hooked to the last word. We meet Rynchops the black skimmer, Scomber the Atlantic mackerel, and my favorite, Anguilla the American eel, as they fight to survive and reproduce. Carson’s decision to name individual animals creates an intimacy one might never feel seeing an anonymous school of menhaden, or squadron of pelicans.

Under the Sea-Wind emerged from a landscape not far from where we sat reading, and I could feel it in the unmistakable Outer Banks atmosphere in which the book opens. In 1938, Carson’s research for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service brought her to the (then) isolated fishing village of Beaufort. Paddling creeks, picking through tidal zones, and mingling with local fishermen, she fell in love with the Carolina coast.

Beaufort also provided the perfect setting for the book she’d been working on since 1936. The project had started as a rejected introduction to a government brochure about fish, and later came to the attention of a New York publisher, who encouraged Carson to write a book entirely from the perspective of sea creatures. When she arrived in Beaufort, she found their habitat.

That’s why, if you crack into Under the Sea-Wind anywhere on earth, you’ll feel the sea breeze drifting off the surf at Shackleford Banks, that “lovely stretch of wild ocean beach” Carson chose, along with Town Marsh, as the backdrop for her first book’s first chapters. In 1985, a 2,315-acre nature reserve bearing her name was set aside in Beaufort to immortalize this connection.

Sitting on the beach, I read about Rynchops hunting for minnows, and looked up to find a black skimmer doing the very same thing. When Scomber escaped the jaws of a hundred-pound rock cod, I looked across the water and pictured the frenzy of life and death beneath the surface. By reading this book, I was learning to read my environment.

True to life, humans play an important part in Under the Sea-Wind. From pound netters and gill netters competing for shad, to seiners harvesting mullet from the shallows, Carson weaves early 20th-century maritime culture into her narrative. Later that day, cycling around Silver Lake Harbor past Ocracoke’s last remaining fish house, her words helped me imagine the hardy people who made a life here before tourists like me arrived on these shores.

The thesis of Carson’s life and career was that a sense of wonder was essential to a sense of obligation to the natural world. Under the Sea-Wind brought that sense of wonder to my (always too brief) time on Ocracoke this summer. I hope it does the same for you.

Something You Should Know

A sharp fact for your cocktail party quiver

To survive winter, bee colonies caulk their hives, minimize population size, send suicide squads out to retrieve honey stores from outer combs, and cluster around the queen, shivering their wings to create warmth

You’re reading Buzzcut, a newsletter of close-cropped commentary on travel, style, history, and nature by writer and strategist Zander Abranowicz.

Our Clippings franchise gather a few glowing specimens of knowledge in a single format, designed for gentle reading. You can find the first installment below, and access our full library of reports, reviews, and recommendations here.

Our latest book is Country Life: Homes of the Catskill Mountains and Hudson Valley.

Thank you, as ever, for your enthusiasm.

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The Louis Vuitton camp bed that (may have) helped France conquer the Congo

September 10th, 1880. The Roman-born French explorer Pierre-Paul-François-Camille Savorgnan de Brazza unfolded his stool on the banks of the Congo, and sat. A tricolor drooped in the equatorial heat, affixed to a flagpole held upright by an African porter sweating in a Breton shirt and marine bonnet. Facing the explorer, draped in a straw-colored robe, lorded King Makoko Iloo I of the Batéké, a Bantu-speaking tribe which had ruled much of the Congo basin since the time of Christ. After exchanging gifts, de Brazza began outlining his terms: French rule in exchange for protection and preferential trading status. As he listened, the king’s gaze fell on the expedition’s impressive stack of luggage, visible over his visitor’s shoulder. Noticing this, de Brazza rose and unlatched a trunk. In minutes, it had blossomed, like a nocturnal orchid, into a full-length bed. Before sailing for Central Africa, de Brazza had commissioned the piece from Louis Vuitton, the inventive Parisian trunkmaker whose monogrammed luggage still summons that age of exploration. Vuitton’s clever contraption quickly deployed an elevated canvas mattress out of one of his signature cases, without tools. Accounts (of dubious origin) have suggested that the ingenuity of this mobile furniture helped sway the king to sign France’s treaty, but this seems unlikely, even insulting, to the ancient kingdom and its ruler. Makoko was surely consumed by more consequential matters. In the service of King Leopold II of Belgium, the Welsh explorer Henry Morton Stanley was at that moment blasting a road inland around the impenetrable 32 cataracts of the Congo, deep into Batéké country. Stories of Belgian brutality had probably reached the king’s ears well before the arrival of this mild-mannered French emissary. Surrounded by family, friends, advisors, and heirs, it was the security of Makoko’s subjects (not fine luggage) which would have forced his hand as he signed away nearly 2,000 years of Batéké sovereignty in the Congo. Whatever the truth, this rare specimen from LV’s storied catalog continues to fascinate, long after de Brazza’s final rest. The explorer died en route to France in 1905, carrying an explosive report charging starvation, torture, and forced labor in the very colony he’d helped establish.

The man who painted every bird in North America from life

When Rex Brasher was eight, he resolved to paint every bird in North America. And he did. Nearly a half-century later, in the Connecticut farmhouse-studio he’d christened Chickadee Valley, Brasher applied the final stroke to the 874th watercolor of his “Birds and Trees of North America.” The series featured all 1,200 species and subspecies listed in the American Ornithologists Union Checklist of North American Birds — including males, females, and juveniles. It was a monumental feat of creative endurance rivaled only by John James Audubon, who, in Brasher family lore, once snubbed Rex’s father, a taxidermist. While Audubon famously sketched from lifeless pelts, the self-trained Brasher studied every single specimen in its natural habitat, bursting with life and song. He conducted these patient observations on freewheeling journeys across the continent, often traveling by foot for months at a time. He funded these peregrinations working as a lithographer, or playing the horses. After one disastrous gamble left him destitute, he joined a fishing boat working the waters between Boston and Portland, Maine. Undeterred, he used the time to sketch sea birds. Like so many luminaries, Rex Brasher’s road to recognition was a crooked one. Twice, he destroyed his entire archive, believing it inadequate. In 1935, he offered his life’s work to the State of Connecticut, on the condition that it be well kept. After multiple attempts to finance museum displays failed, Brasher took it back. It must have been a heartbreaking setback. Finally, in 1938, Brasher’s “Birds and Trees” was granted a suitable exhibition in the Explorers Hall of the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C. Three years later, the State of Connecticut purchased the series again, promising it would be housed in a purpose-built museum near Chickadee Valley. World War II derailed that plan, too. Today, Rex Brasher’s work has found a proper home at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center in Storrs, Connecticut. The creative agency Order recently designed an exquisite brand identity for the The Rex Brasher Association, including a gorgeous custom typeface by Emily Atwood inspired by the artist’s own skilled calligraphy.

The house that henequen built

This May, we were walking down Paseo Montejo in Mérida, capital of the Yucatán. Our eyes grazed over mansion after faded mansion, evidence of the prosperous time when henequen, a flowering plant of genus agave, made the hacendados of this region fantastically rich. As with the row of spectacular homes on East Battery Street in Charleston, built with fortunes amassed from rice, cotton, and slaves, a visit to Paseo Montejo begs a complex question: can we appreciate architectural splendor while recognizing the exploitative labor systems that facilitated such extreme concentrations of wealth (and still do)? In the case of henequen, indigenous Maya peoples were, since the time of Spanish rule, forced to toil on henequen plantations established on their confiscated communal lands. Naturally, desperate uprisings, like the 1847 Caste War, were common, and bloody. Henequen had been the heart of the region’s economic life for centuries, but it wasn’t until the Spanish-American War of 1898, which interrupted the export of cheap hemp (henequen’s chief alternative) from the Philippines, that its “green gold” made Yucatán the richest state in Mexico, and Paseo Montejo the gilded boulevard it is today. Now, the only great house to remain in its original state is Quinta Montes Molina, built in 1902 in the representative style of the Porfiriato, or the reign of President Porfirio Díaz, roughly 1876 to 1911. The presence of period furniture, finishes, and objects — from Limoges dinnerware to Tiffany stained glass windows — gives the quinta that special sense of arrested time elicited by the best house museums. Driving back toward the Gulf coast, passing the smoldering henequen fields and ruined haciendas that fed Mérida’s renaissance more than a century ago, I considered how now, as then, cosmopolitan comforts are so often built on the backs of the rural poor.

Something You Should Know

A sharp fact for your cocktail party quiver

Some believe the etymology of the term “posh” is “port out starboard home” — a reference to the most comfortable accommodations on ships between England and India

You’re reading Buzzcut, a newsletter of close-cropped commentary on travel, style, history, and nature by writer and strategist Zander Abranowicz

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“It used to be said that you could tell where the Catskills’ boundaries lay by the way the crows flew. You watched a flight of crows heading toward the mountains and when they turned aside that was where the Catskills began. The crows were too smart to fly over the Catskills—they knew that the landlords had picked the place so clean that a crow would starve there.”

From The Catskills (1972) by Alf Evers, Herodotus of the hills

In 2020 my parents sold my childhood home in Bedford, New York and resettled to our ski house in Margaretville, a two-hour drive northwest.

The change of scenery inspired my father, photographer William Abranowicz, to start documenting the properties of interesting people in that sparse and ill-defined stretch of New York known as “upstate.” He wanted to see how his new neighbors were creating civilization in the wilderness, and community in isolation, and situate their stories in the context of local history, architecture, and lore.

As this project coalesced into a book, he invited me to write brief texts to introduce each home. My role sat somewhere between ghostwriter, researcher, and author. I brought order, sequence, and color to the notes he would record after interacting with his subjects and their residences. I was also free to draw on my own interest in the region, from indigenous heritage to bizarre footnotes like the Anti-Rent War.

William and I had honed this unusual way of working during the creation of our two previous books: American Originals (2018) and This Far and No Further (2021). I say unusual because first, I’m credited as writer, but the book is voiced entirely from William's perspective. Second, I only visited two of the book’s twenty homes, relying on his images for clues I could build into each write-up from my desk in Virginia.

Country Life: Homes of the Catskill Mountains and Hudson Valley is published by our friends at The Vendome Press. It features the extraordinary dwellings of museum curators, architects, pit-masters, writers, farmers, film directors, world-famous artists, shopkeepers, activists, and many more. With 272 pages of richly printed pictures and words, we hope it inspires your own home life, wherever you’re planted these days.

A special thanks to the homeowners who graciously allowed us to share their private worlds with a curious public.

And finally, a note from my father, included in the book’s acknowledgements: “And lastly, to my mother Margaret who passed away during the making of this work. Every time I look at the pink of the sun on these mountains around me I think of her.” I know she would’ve been proud of this one.

Purchase Country Life

Below, I offer a preview of Country Life in the form of a single chapter dedicated to the house of Maria and Thomas Cole, godfather of the Hudson River School — “America’s first true artistic fraternity.” And below that, I recommend some items and tunes to get into that upstate of mind.

Country Life

Homes of the Catskill Mountains and Hudson Valley

Chapter 7: Maria + Thomas Cole

Thomas Cole is the quintessential artist of the Hudson River School, and this is an artist’s house. Perched in Catskill overlooking Cole’s beloved “blue mountains” to the west and the Hudson River to the east, the farm known as Cedar Grove served as the painter’s studio and residence from 1836 until his death in 1848. Cole was a pioneering American landscape artist, documenting the undeveloped expanses of our Northeast with sweeping views of its mountains, valleys, and creeks; skies pregnant with storm clouds; and subtle characters—picnickers, sportsmen, Mohicans—dwarfed by the worlds they occupy. These were not just pretty pictures, but powerful statements in defiance of Andrew Jackson’s destructive environmental policies. Cole’s paintings, along with the works of fellow elite artists of the Jacksonian era, were instrumental in mobilizing the federal government to take conservation seriously, and are considered a catalyst for the creation of the national parks system. The stool that once supported Cole now rests beside an easel in his studio, as if the artist rose one day to stretch his legs and never returned. A monogrammed trunk (“TC”) and the collected works of Byron reinforce the image of a man on the move. Appropriate for this astute observer of nature, the outdoors bleed into Cedar Grove in wonderful ways, with painted walls of periwinkle and terra-cotta, shells and starfish, floral tiles and carpets, and layers of pattern on pattern recalling the tangled forests Cole explored with pad and pencil. His method of sketching en plein air before committing romanticized visions to canvas back at his studio drew an entire movement of artists into the hills, notably Frederic Church, whose home is situated just across the Hudson in poetic symmetry of master and student. Cole wasn’t the only accomplished artist in the family: his sister Sarah’s paintings grace the walls as well. Stare into Thomas Cole’s works and you become drunk with the majesty of untapped wilderness. His home has a similar effect, a monument to unmitigated kinship with nature.

Read more in Country Life

Uncompensated Endorsement

A paean to what moves me

Country Life Edition

1. Beanie by Le Bonnet, for alerting hunters to your presence in the woods

2. Schwarzbier by Kingston Standard Brewing Co., for after building a stone wall

3. Denham Jacket by Noah x Lavenham, for brisk mornings at the farmers market

4. Camp Blanket by Homestedt, for fireside movie nights

5. Longjohns Ikar by Hemen Biarritz, for forest bathing in the hemlocks

6. Ultra-light Closed Clog by Aigle, for wading muck to access wild mint

7. Rail-Splitter Jeans by Filson, for chopping and stacking wood

8. The Deerslayer by James Fenimore Cooper, for porch reading with a good view

9. Type 752 Wide Rib Shawl Collar Pullover by Tender, for après-ski cider at the lodge

10. Fifty Sail on Newburgh Bay by Ed Renehen & Pete Seeger, for campfire singalongs

Sonic Landscapes

A mix, echoing my old college radio show

Country Life

To accompany Country Life I’ve assembled 10 songs that set the stage for driving Route 28, building bonfires, or swimming cold springs. One-way Adirondack Trailways bus ticket not included.

1. This is a Land — Ed Renehen & Pete Seeger

2. The Foggy Dew — Barbara Monocure

3. ‘Cello Song — Nick Drake

4. I Won’t Hurt You — The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band

5. Long Black Veil — The Band

6. Claudy Banks — Shirley Collins & The Albion Country Band

7. You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go — Bob Dylan

8. Hard Traveling — Woody Guthrie

9. I Shall Be Released — The Box Tops

10. Clear Away in the Morning — Gordon Bok

Listen on Spotify

Listen on Apple Music

Image credits, top to bottom: Thomas Cole, unknown, Andrea Raisfeld, Zander Abranowicz, William Abranowicz

Something You Should Know

A sharp fact for your cocktail party quiver

The title “Country Life” was inspired by Roxy Music’s 1974 studio album of the same name

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This month’s essay was published on my favorite environmental news platform: Heatmap. You can read my last essay for the publication, “How Birding Became Cool,” here. Heads up, you’ll have to sign in to read this article for free. Once you’ve maxed out those freebies, you’ll want to subscribe for the smartest climate coverage out there.

Uncompensated Endorsement

A paean to what moves me

How E-bikes Won My Heart

When I lived in New York, I regarded the electric bike as something of a pest. Not quite bicycle, not quite motor vehicle, a misfit mode of transport welcome neither in the bike lane nor in the street. To be sure, I benefited, in the form of fresh meals ferried to my stoop, from the intrepid delivery people racing up and down the boroughs on battery-powered bikes. But as a cyclist sharing the road with them, I’m ashamed to say they often brought out my inner Ratso Rizzo.

Keep reading on Heatmap

Something You Should Know

A sharp fact for your cocktail party quiver

Mark Twain was born in 1835 and died in 1910: both years that Halley’s Comet passed by earth (it next returns in July 2061)

You’re reading Buzzcut, a newsletter of close-cropped commentary on travel, style, history, and nature by writer and strategist Zander Abranowicz.

Knowledge is to this newsletter what fireflies are to mason jars. Our new franchise, titled “Clippings,” gathers a few glowing specimens of knowledge in a single format, designed for gentle Sunday reading. Thank you, as ever, for your enthusiasm.

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Rural Free Delivery

The historian Shelby Foote famously observed: “Before the [Civil] War, it was said ‘the United States are’ — grammatically it was spoken that way and thought of as a collection of independent states. And after the war it was always ‘the United States is,’ as we say today without being self-conscious at all. And that sums up what the war accomplished. It made us an is.” Well said, if simplistic: post-Appomattox America still had a long way to union, not only of north and south and black and white, but of rural and urban. This divide defined life down to everyday matters like mail. Until well after the war, remote farming communities were commonly excluded from federal postal routes. Championed by Southern populists and Midwestern merchants — and opposed, in classic Gilded Age fashion, by a quartet of wealthy express companies — Rural Free Delivery was permanently established in 1902 to link isolated and often impoverished communities to national arteries of information and commerce. To welcome the “great army of rural carriers” who operated this rugged new network in their own vehicles (from mules to carriages and later automobiles), farmers initially constructed mailboxes from lard pails, syrup cans, cigar boxes, and other materials on-hand. Rural delivery remains the United States Post Office Department’s most expensive endeavor of all time, as of 2022 employing some 133,000 carriers serving 80,000 routes coursing through our heartlands.

Country Home by Frederic Malle

$135 is a lot for a candle, but a lot less expensive than buying a house in the country. ‘Country Home,’ by French fragrance maven Frederic Malle, is a super-special-occasion-kind-of-gift that brings, when lighted, the warm patina of landed life to even the most industrial spaces. I can attest to this: right now it sits flickering on my desk, transforming my Spartan, echoey new office into a game warden’s cottage on the Outer Hebrides, someplace where the muddy Wellies and ash walking sticks are always at-the-ready by the door. Soot, pine, fir, leather, and styrax — I Googled it, it’s a small tropical tree — are tucked into a 220-gram column of pale wax, cupped by a white ceramic vessel that would seem invisible if not for the red interior, like a flourish by Le Corbusier. I’m weird about candles. There are few gifts I’m more excited to receive, but I never want to light them for fear of letting a good thing go too soon. With Country Home, I’ve made a deal with myself to only burn it while writing this newsletter: a little olfactory reward for putting words on the page. Strike a match, put it to the wick, and you can almost hear the sighing of the lurcher lazing by the fireplace.

Shadowfishing

Family Areidae, which includes herons and egrets, produces some of the most elegant features of aquatic scenery. Somehow, the ubiquity of these species along the rivers and shorelines near my home doesn’t diminish their aesthetic value, and spiritual intensity. I’m always awed by their grace in flight, their poise in stillness. Recently, I came across footage that added a new layer of wonder to these creatures. In it, a black heron, leggy denizen of Sub-Saharan Africa and Madagascar, practices an ingenious form of hunting known as “canopy feeding.” Using the loose plumage of its dark wings to cast shadow over the surface of the water, the bird inches forward with balletic control before snatching up its prey. Why is this method so effective? For one thing, the darkness seems to attract small fish seeking shelter and safety. Another theory posits that the shadow makes it easier for the predator to see prey beneath the water, akin to a fisherman wearing polarized lenses. In the canon of intelligent animal behaviors, I put this up there with chimpanzees using sticks to catch termites, and octopuses arranging stones of a particular color to camouflage their dens.

Rent Parties of the Harlem Renaissance

Facing high housing prices and low wages in the 1920s, black residents of Harlem and Chicago’s South Side devised a brilliant solution to make rent: charging small entry fees (between 25 and 50 cents) to attend raucous parties in their apartments. They would advertise these affairs with small letterpressed cards hawked block-to-block by printers, often featuring whimsical rhymes like “Hop Mr. Bunny, Skip Mr. Bear, If you don’t dig this party you ain’t no where!” Between 1925 and 1960, the poet Langston Hughes collected these ephemeral invites, now held amongst his papers in Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. With his keen ear for the lyricism in everyday language, Hughes integrated verse sourced from these cards into his “Simple stories,” and recalled in his 1940 autobiography The Big Sea: “Almost every Saturday night when I was in Harlem I went to a house-rent party. I wrote lots of poems about house-rent parties, and ate many a fried fish and pig’s foot — with liquid refreshments on the side. I met ladies’ maids and truck drivers, laundry workers and shoe shine boys, seamstresses and porters. I can still hear their laughter in my ears, hear the soft slow music, and feel the floor shaking as the dancers danced.”

Something You Should Know

A sharp fact for your cocktail party quiver

Albert Einstein was offered the presidency of Israel on November 17, 1952, following the death of Israel's first President, Chaim Weizman

Buzzcut is a newsletter of close-cropped commentary on travel, style, history, and nature by writer and strategist Zander Abranowicz. Read our previous reports on rainwear, ivory-billed woodpeckers, Saint Lucia, the Star of David, involuntary dancing, sailing, the Lost Cause, and more.

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When Tim Berge, friend and author of the Most Useful Information on Substack, invited me to come on his podcast to discuss a book we both love, Hunger by Knut Hamsun (1890) was an obvious choice. I’m glad to share the episode with you here. It includes spoilers, so if you haven’t read the book yet, pick up the 1970 Noonday Press edition, with a cracking cover design by Milton Glaser and translation by Robert Bly, shown above. Best enjoyed on an empty stomach.

Buzzcut Reports

A comment on some subject of interest

The Talented Insta Ripleys

What is Instagram imposing on you lately? Answering this question has become something of a game among our friends. Ads for egg-freezing services, at-home ketamine therapy, priceless advice like: “Your inner circle should discuss: Your family; Investments; Success.” We extract insights from each others’ algorithms like phrenologists reading bumps on the skull.

I offer, for instance, my Explore feed, which at any given moment will include stern portraits of Hasbulla, behind-the-scenes snapshots from The Sopranos, and Japanese snow monkeys soaking in hot springs. Every other post, though, is what you might call a “well-dressed guy.” They are usually, but not always, guys. They are usually, but not always, associated with a particular menswear or tailoring brand.

I wonder what it says about me that I’m helpless against their enticements: fine linen, denim, and tweed; vintage watches, cars, and motorcycles; antique vineyards, libraries, and eateries; martinis, steaks, and other ingestibles of a life well-lived. When I like, click, and follow, what exactly am I liking, clicking, and following? What does it say about us?

My readers know I love birds, and there is something avian about these well-dressed guys. They strut like birds-of-paradise flashing feathers in mating season. The term “peacocking” has, in fact, long been used to describe their antics, especially those who gather at the trade fair Pitti Uomo. Between perusing booths and previewing trends, they flock to piazzas to flourish their plumage for photographers who eagerly gather around like gulls to a trawler. I eat it all up.

In winter, they favor cashmere sweaters, wool blazers, corduroy trousers, and spacious parkas with fur-lined hoods. Molting these layers at the first sign of spring, they find shade in seersucker suits, Panama hats, and linen shirts, always open by one button more than yours. Some have the curious habit of sporting tuxedo slippers year-round, irrespective of context or conditions underfoot. And while they advertise a carefree disregard for the strictures of ordinary life, they are religiously devoted to timepieces, which they curate to match the occasion and “fit.”

A single well-dressed guy can sustain an entire ecosystem of photographers, stylists, editors, and admirers, not to mention the many artisans who produce their finery. They gather at oases like the 21 Club in Manhattan (recently evaporated), Harry’s Bar in Venice (birthplace of the Bellini), and Café de Flore in Paris (probably on your moodboard). Absent their own Slim Aarons, candid moments of interaction are captured for dissemination to the general public at parties commemorating collections, books, and other achievements. From the outside, peering through the foggy glass of Instagram, these functions look unequivocally fun: champagne flows, ice clinks, and soon enough, everyones’ bowties are hanging loose and it’s on to nightcaps elsewhere. Can I tag along?

Spend enough time with these guys, though, and a few contradictions sneak in to spoil the party. While urging followers to invest in clothing that lasts, they simultaneously train us to covet what’s next by modeling an ever-growing list of “essentials” for every potentiality, from opera to fly-fishing. One rarely sees them wear the same thing twice. This is particularly rich coming from the menswear scene’s prominent prep contingent. To me, the WASP uniform is about (at least the illusion of) having, not buying: clothes are to be passed down, patched, repaired, tailored. Prep is the faded Princeton sweatshirt with decaying cuffs; the ragged chinos trashed from touch-football; the hand-me-down Brooks Brothers blazer hanging off the shoulders of a younger brother. It’s what makes the costume of patrician privilege cool, not to mention ecologically sound. Well-dressed guys want us to have, and to want more.

Where did they come from? On first glance, the digital dandy is a descendent of the classical ones: Lord Byron, Oscar Wilde, Stephen Tennant and the “Bright Young Things,” elongated men-about-town in old society magazines. There is indeed a nostalgic strain in their style, their fastidiousness, and their belief in a bygone era of etiquette. Sometimes, Instagram feeds me posts by straight-up historical reenactors. If I clicked, more would follow.

But based on their frequent invocation of figures like Ernest Hemingway, Gianni Agnelli, Steve McQueen, and Paul Newman, it’s clear that well-dressed guys believe the locus of their lineage is squarely 20th-century. This is where, if I think too hard, things fall apart for me. The marriage of old-world masculinity, new-world materialism, and social media platforms flooded with cute cat videos and viral dance challenges feels strained. The very idea of self-documentation conflicts with the natural magnetism of these übermenschen, whose mystique arose from an impression of effortlessness.

If true effortlessness is inimical to Instagram, studied effortlessness (or sprezzatura) fits the platform like a deerskin glove. It is the alpha and omega of the $16.4B influencer economy. I once watched an influencer step on and off a sidewalk onto Crosby Street, over and over, as if glitching, while a photographer snapped away. To the eyewitness, it was absurd, but a single frame from the shoot would appear online as magic. Just another shopping spree in Soho! The first law of Instagram is this: a lie repeated becomes the truth. We know the influencer’s effortlessness is anything but. But it’s easier to acquiesce. We want to believe.

Why now? While equity is the word of the moment, well-dressed guys, along with their rough equivalents in womenswear, assert visible class distinctions otherwise endangered by enforced equality. While we long for a restoration of civility — lamenting the coarseness of online discourse, the hateful character of our political culture, and the collapse of traditional communities — the “gentleman influencer” promises a return to order and decency, from the loafers up. And while style becomes increasingly casual, the well-dressed guy stands athwart sweatpants yelling Stop!

I find this phenomenon noteworthy in that it somehow complicates my simple love for authentic personal style. In doing so, well-dressed guys have pointed me to a few larger truths about social media, and Instagram in particular. The platform has a way of neutering authenticity, filtering the “real thing” through its funhouse mirror into something grotesque: an eerie, almost-convincing counterfeit. An adjacent example is the outdoor fashion, or “gorpcore,” community. Whereas I believe being outdoors allows us to dissolve into something bigger, more objective, more mysterious, Instagram’s introduction of self-conscious fashion into our interactions with nature keeps us tethered to the small, the subjective, the material.

“Teddy Boys” remixed Edwardian fashion in postwar England. Japanese youth adopted Ivy League looks in the 1960s. Style has always evolved through radical interpretations of familiar influences. Social media stunts that evolution by creating visual monocultures: fall into any Instagram hole and the same images will appear with nauseating regularity. The Duke of Windsor is one frequent face in the dandyverse, though no cut of Savile Row tailoring can mask the fact that he was a Nazi sympathizer. Lady Di, JFK Jr., and Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy are also regulars. Even in death, we pursue them like paparazzi.

When we all drink from the same trough, we become the same. So how to preserve individuality in the age of influence?

Seek fresh mountain springs. Are.na is one unsullied source of aesthetic inspiration, and where I catalog images that inspire me. Museums and their digital archives are another. The Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture, whose collection is recirculated on this excellent Tumblr, is one such goldmine. Case in point: Cab Calloway’s Capezio oxfords, the inspiration, I assume, for these beautiful Visvim bucks. Books and old magazines offer an endless refreshment of imagery I haven’t encountered before. And Instagram isn’t entirely barren: accounts like @equator and @rodakis do a heroic job of facilitating the print-to-pixel pipeline, surfacing stunning and otherwise unseen scanned photography.

Find your own style gods. When you're bored with Jonah Hill’s tired hippie look and Donald Glover’s slouchy schtick is feeling old, there’s a universe of sartorial role models waiting for you. I find mine among our elders. I’m talking Greek fishermen, grumbling Italians watching construction sites, and adorable couples in bucket hats and comfortable shoes moving slowly through The Getty or The Met. @gramparents is a sincere homage to these uncelebrated everyday icons.

Don’t let clothing wear you down. Unlike virtue, action, and habit, fashion is a fragile basis to build an identity upon, prone to marinara stains and rips and shrinking in the dryer. A well-dressed bore is still a bore. Newness, like youth, is fragile. Entropy is inevitable. Embrace it. Fix what you can. Quiet the wanting quarter of your brain. The wanting is always better than the getting. Cherish old garments like old friends. Want not, cop not.

New generations are poised to carry the well-dressed flag forward, with veritable dandy Sway Houses popping up around menswear brands the world over. And why shouldn’t they? Maybe it’s enough to serve as living mannequins for beautiful clothing, helping keep old crafts, mills, and traditions alive in a throwaway culture addicted to fast fashion. Who am I to judge? We all make mythic versions of ourselves in public somehow, online and off. I, for one, use Instagram to promote this very newsletter.

And yet, I think there comes a point when we must eat of the Tree of Knowledge, and become conscious, even a little ashamed, of our own vanity: our clothedness. I’m still searching for a way to reconcile these impulses, living as an enemy of materialism and a friend of beauty. Until then, I’m left to ponder: if I drink a negroni but don’t post it on Instagram, did I drink it at all?

Images credits, top to bottom: Ivan Ehlers, @oxfordclothbuttondown, Cecil Beaton, Thibaut Grevet, Smithsonian, Rudolf Olgiati, Bonhams, The Prado

Something You Should Know

A sharp fact for your cocktail party quiver

Edward Hyde, 3rd Earl of Clarendon and governor of the provinces of New York and New Jersey, reportedly opened the 1702 New York Assembly in drag, wearing a "hooped gown and elaborate headdress and carrying a fan, much in the style of the fashionable Queen Anne”

You’re walking at your college graduation, standing at the altar, baptizing your firstborn, or landing a hard-fought promotion. But try as you might, all you can think about is Buzzcut, the newsletter of close-cropped commentary on travel, style, history, and nature by writer, strategist, and object of your thousand-yard stare Zander Abranowicz.

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This month’s essay was first published on the brilliant new climate news platform Heatmap. It attempts to answer why the subtle art of birdwatching is suddenly in. Once you make your way to Heatmap (and subscribe to its excellent newsletter), you can also admire its new identity and site, recently designed by Abbreviated Projects.

Buzzcut Reports

A comment on some subject of interest

How Birding Became Cool

When did birdwatching become cool — and why didn’t it happen in time to save me from the middle school nickname “bird boy?”

Truth is, I was fine with the light teasing I received for my teenage fixation on avifauna. It didn’t stop me from decorating the back corner of our biology classroom with clippings about Pale Male (Manhattan’s celebrity red-tail), or from earning a New York state falconry license at the age of 12, or even from watching Canada geese migrate over my high school campus while my peers ogled each other from the bleachers. Still, none of it exactly built my social capital.

That’s why lately, I’ve been delighted to see the cool kids picking up binoculars. The bird boys (and girls) won.

Keep reading on Heatmap

Something You Should Know

A sharp fact for your cocktail party quiver

Scientists are now breeding genetically modified hens who will lay only female chicks, eliminating the need for culling billions of males every year

The 19th century workers movement advocated for 8 hours sleep, 8 hours work, and 8 hours reading Buzzcut, a newsletter of close-cropped commentary on travel, style, history, and nature by writer, strategist, and rabble-rouser Zander Abranowicz.

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Stumbling Through the Western Canon

A reflection on Harold Bloom’s iconic list

Episodes from Romantic Life

I love old things. I’ll take The Met over MoMA. The Toyota skirted with rust over the Tesla with pixel-perfect proportions. The Parthenon over pretty much anything else. For this reason and many others, I love Lisbon. The Portuguese capital on the banks of the mighty Tagus has been settled since Neolithic times, making it one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities on earth. By the time we arrived for our honeymoon in September of 2022, Celts, Phoenicians, Romans, Sarmatians, Alans, Vandals, Visigoths, Berbers, and crusaders had conquered her, called her home, and deposited evidence of their passing across her seven hills. 

Of course, Lisbon wasn’t always the object of invasion. She was its issuer as well, collecting colonies from Brazil to Angola to Goa over some six centuries, siphoning slaves or sugar or spices while injecting Catholicism and capitalism in return. In Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, Portugal’s economic might factors into this unforgettable threat delivered by Thomas Cromwell to a wayward young lord drowning in debt: 

“The world is not run from where he thinks. Not from border fortresses, not even from Whitehall. The world is run from Antwerp, from Florence, from places he has never imagined; from Lisbon, from where the ships with sails of silk drift west and are burned up in the sun. Not from castle walls, but from countinghouses, not by the call of the bugle but by the click of the abacus, not by the grate and click of the mechanism of the gun but by the scrape of the pen on the page of the promissory note that pays for the gun and the gunsmith and the powder and shot.”

The remnants of this influence are etched across Portugal’s former colonies in calculable and incalculable ways. For example, the gorgeous (if slippery) calçada, or mosaic-style tiles for which Lisbon is known, also grace squares and sidewalks from Rio to Luanda, where the singsong Portuguese tongue is still heard under the equatorial sun.

The musk of loss wafts through the great cities of any dispossessed colonial power, whether London or Rome or Istanbul. Lisbon is no different, and that scent sits heavily over the pages of The Maias: Episodes from Romantic Life by Eça de Queirós, called “the greatest book by Portugal’s greatest novelist” by the only other author endowed with those superlatives, the Nobel laureate José Saramago.

The cast of de Queirós’s 1888 masterpiece are the heirs of the old families and fortunes of Portuguese aristocracy, and they all suffer from the ennui of imperial decline. As Cromwell’s “ships with sails of silk” return home with empty hulls, the monarchy drifts into obsolescence, and the sleeping giant of self-determination stirs across the realm, the true price of imperialism is exposed: that which has made Portugal rich has also made her hollow. “Here we import everything,” the character Ega complains. “Ideas, laws, philosophies, theories, plots, aesthetics, sciences, style, industries, fashions, manners, jokes, everything arrives in crates by steamship.”

The Naturalism and Romanticism of their elders, epitomized by the literary patriarch Alencar, suddenly seem feeble against the grit of an industrial, republican Europe more suited to the new aesthetics of Realism, of which de Queirós is a master. Their dreams of shocking Portugal out of its slumber never remotely materialize, the currents of convenience and custom being too strong. They dream of books they never write, challenge each other to duels that may or may not come to pass, start businesses that need no customers: their own personal Hameau de la Reine to play at participation in the modern economy. They eat and drink and smoke and gamble, hire singers to serenade them with fados, take aimless trips to the countryside. They instrumentalize the social climbers in their midst, make mistresses of the wives of their peers, wrestle with the idea of honor. They are bohemians in silk pajamas, strung between a comfortable past and uncertain future in which their class is fated to drift from power, pitting their conservative interests against their liberal principles.

The Maias is a blistering satire, yet deeply tender. It says something that despite its critique of Portuguese society, the novel is still taught in schools and cherished as a national treasure. The scale of the story initially intimidated me. My copy from the always on-point New Directions, with translation by the great Margaret Jull Costa, clocked in at 503 pages. But once I realized that every word of exposition and digression was building an elaborate web to entrap the likable protagonist, Carlos da Maia, I was hooked. The plot owes much to Greek tragedy, but moves with a uniquely modern thrust that might appeal to fans of epic soaps about the entropy that infects all powerful families, like Yellowstone or Downton Abbey. Appropriately, The Maias was adapted for Brazilian television in 2001. First reader to help me find the series with English subtitles gets a tin of Portuguese sardines.

Our last morning in Lisbon we stumbled upon the Jardim Botânico Tropical, a 17-acre oasis created in 1906 by the Portuguese royal family to harbor plant life from across the empire: Angola, Cape Verde, East Timor, Guinea-Bissau, Macau, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Príncipe are all represented in the form of palms and succulents and shrubs. Busts of “archetypal” African tribesmen and women flank crumbling greenhouses. Algae clouds the reflecting pools. It was mostly empty on the day we visited. Chickens ruffled in the dust at the perimeter of the park, and in one shaded stretch, a slender cat slinked lazily over and wove around our ankles. In the harsh midday light that flattens all human works, this garden built to bring the Portuguese empire home now felt like a memorial to a lost world, and the literature that saw it coming.

Strip Mall Dining in Central Virginia

A review of local fare

Burnt Tongue, Quiet Heart, Can’t Lose

Practice is the precursor to a good life. So said Wŏnhyo, a Korean monk of the seventh century. He believed that by changing our patterns of thought and behavior, we can define our own consciousness. A tragedy or trip can give you new perspective, but such moments are valuable only insofar as they inspire you to adopt new patterns that survive after the shock wears off. For Wŏnhyo, that moment came when he accidentally drank rainwater from a human skull while waiting out a storm in a cave. Only perception, he realized, separates a skull from a bowl.

I can’t claim that the bowl of bulgogi stew I sipped at Yewon, a low-key restaurant in Midlothian, delivered any lasting enlightenment. It’s too early to know. It did, at the very least, relieve me of a thought which had been making me uneasy. That day, I had been sensing that distraction and disruption were compromising the patterns lending goodness to my life. Wŏnhyo’s call for practice felt possible only in theory. My stew surrounded this fear with dense broth, translucent noodles, and tender beef, and forced it to submit.

Some meals force you to slow down. Sometimes slowing is enough to break a bruising pattern. To the tune of K-pop on a TV mounted in the corner, I filled my small plate with kimchi pancakes, spicy rice cakes smothered in cheese, and bits of banchan, the humble heroes of the Korean palette. Cold pilsner brewed in Seoul filled my glass and nursed my tongue, somewhat scalded from the stew, served sizzling in a heavy earthenware vessel called dolsot. Every sip and bite hollowed a small space for optimism to return. Practice is possible. But never perfect.

As we left, our friend thanked the staff in Korean. They returned courteous gestures and well-wishes. Nearly a year earlier, this friend’s parents had cooked us a true feast of Korean cuisine at their home, not far from Yewon. Kimchi stew, cabbage pancake, marinated short rib, and an unimaginable spread of other delicacies covered a low table at their house. Melancholy seasoned the meal: the next day they would pack their possessions (and cat) and drive to Austin, where her father had found a coveted job that meant farewell to Virginia, for now.

Since that singular experience and high-water mark of hospitality, Korean has quietly climbed to the very top of my list of comfort foods. With our friend’s parents living so far away, there’s solace knowing Yewon glows nearby. 1,500 years ago, Wŏnhyo urged discipline and consistency as essential to the good life, but I believe there exists an equal and opposite need for mercy and formlessness. Nights like this, spent staring into a swirling stew, with companions, in silence or low talk, practicing nothing but being.

Yewon
10827 Hull Street Rd
Midlothian, VA 23112

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Something You Should Know

A sharp fact for your cocktail party quiver

In ancient Jewish folklore, a lamb-like creature called the Yehudah sprouted from the soil connected to a stem which, if severed, would cause the plant-animal to perish