On Icebergs and Status Baseball Caps
Behind the scenes of a magazine feature—plus a gift guide!
It’s a funny time of year: in my brain, it’s winter, though winter doesn’t start until nearly the end of December. The weather’s been tricky to pin down, pinging back and forth between “unseasonable” warmth, sunny skies, and dreary, chilly rain. The dahlias survived all the way into the beginning of November.
But the festive season is indeed upon us. Pies upon pies. Our Christmas tree went up this past weekend. And the glorious Vanity Fair holiday issue has hit stands—inside, I have a profile of Chloé designer Gabriela Hearst, who has become an evangelist for fusion energy in the battle against climate destruction. From the piece:
“Fusion is the main source of energy in the universe,” Hearst says, referring to the process of stellar nucleosynthesis, by which protons fuse at the core of all stars, emitting heat and light. “We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for fusion, because we are made out of dead stars.” One could say the same of her spring-summer collection, which was inspired by site visits to labs in the Pacific Northwest, New England, and the South of France, where hundreds of scientists and engineers are working to develop technology that will produce a net energy gain through fusion—an as yet unattained goal. Hearst and others refer to them as star-builders. Nuclear fusion, unlike fission, doesn’t produce long-term waste, lacks the potential for meltdown, and has the capacity to produce a lifetime’s worth of energy from the hydrogen atoms in a single glass of water—something of a climate crisis silver bullet.
For the story, I took a hard-hat tour of Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a private magnetic fusion company based in Devens, Massachusetts. I also spoke with the communications director at ITER (“the world’s largest fusion experiment”), Laban Coblentz, who wrote his Masters thesis at San Francisco State University on the interplay between subatomic physics and symbolism in postmodernist literature. In his office, which overlooks the ITER tokamak building, Coblentz has a bookshelf filled with curiosities: A magazine ad from the 50s that reads “bad kids get coal, good kids get uranium,” a stack of board games that include the titles Nuclear War and Meltdown.
At a recent reading for Lynn Steger Strong’s excellent new book, Flight (a perfect seasonal read, the literary answer to Home for the Holidays), I asked, from the audience, how she knows when a manuscript’s working. She said, basically, that the book starts to take over, so that everything she sees or hears seems to feed the novel. I loved that answer, which put to words something I’d felt but hadn’t ever verbalized. This happens to me, too—with fiction, but also when I’m working on a magazine story; formerly invisible threads seem to materialize, as though a once disorganized world has suddenly shaken into place: when I was writing about Gabriela Hearst I saw energy everywhere, and the world seemed to be serving up more symbolic anecdotes and artistic analogies than I could possibly fit in the piece.
Ernest Hemingway’s iceberg theory of writing, articulated in Death in the Afternoon goes:
If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.
I think about the iceberg theory when I’m honing down (or watching my editor trim) a too-long draft. Certain tangents and details and trains of thought sink below the surface in service of clarity and word count, but you can (hopefully) still feel them there. I also sometimes think of writing, or at least the way I write, as akin to being a marble sculptor who also has to mine the stone. You spend all this time huffing and puffing thoughts onto the page [word document] and what you are left with is a bulky behemoth that has to be chiseled down.
Here’s a fusion-tangential thought we left on the cutting room floor: An accounting of writers and artists and other creative people who have translated climate disaster into art, narrative, entertainment. Some have worked better than others. On the very good end of the literary spectrum: Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones (Hurricane Katrina); Alexandra Kleeman’s Something New Under the Sun and Claire Vaye Watkins’ Gold Fame Citrus (Hollywood and California drought).
And how about Hollywood. Almost twenty years ago, my eighth grade science class watched an ice age rapidly overtake the northern hemisphere in The Day After Tomorrow: hail the size of tennis balls in Los Angeles, mass illegal migration to Mexico. This year, Don’t Look Up swapped climate catastrophe with a planet-annihilating comet hurtling towards earth. What if this happened to you, right now? both movies ask.
But the PR problem with climate disaster has always been that it’s not a week or even months-long spiral into the apocalypse. In An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore likened humans ignoring the relatively slow creep of a warming planet to a frog in a pot. If the frog is dropped into boiling water, the story goes, it’ll jump out. If it’s placed in tepid water that’s slowly heated, it’ll boil to death. Another favorite animal metaphor for humans and climate change is an ostrich reacting to danger by burying its head in the sand. If I can’t see it, it can’t get me. But neither of these metaphors are based in fact—a frog will attempt to escape from heating water, an ostrich from a predator. In Let There Be Light, a 2017 documentary that chronicles the race to net energy through fusion, the organism to which an ITER scientist more accurately compares the homo sapien (“wise man” in Latin) is yeast: the molecules multiply as it eats rapidly through its energy source, creating the waste that will eventually kill it.
The day after I met with Hearst at her office, I visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art and stumbled upon a vast exhibition of the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher, the German artist couple who photographed the industrial architecture of Western Europe and North America, predominantly in the 1960s and 70s: blast furnaces, steel girders, coal tippers, benzene purifying plants—or, as described in the exhibition catalogue, “the disappearing industrial architecture of the West that fueled modernization and two world wars.” Rooms of black and white images depicting so much innovation, so much destruction.
Obviously, that day I was drawn to the retrospective because I had spent the day prior talking to a woman making it her mission to translate a scientific and industrial endeavor into an artistic one. But now, months later, while writing this thing about the work of editing, what stands out about the Bechers’ work is their process: they traveled around in a Volkswagen van photographing structures, but it was only once they later went through their prints and negatives that they were able to find patterns and congruencies in their work. Single photographs didn’t interest them so much; in the catalogue, one of Bernd’s notes to himself is quoted: “We collect objects—not actually interested in photography.” In 1971, the couple fleshed out this thought in a piece of writing:
The information we seek to communicate arises only in the series, in the juxtaposition of objects, whether similar or dissimilar…
In a 2015 obituary for Hilla, the writer described the stark, pared-back work they created as being “like mug shots for infrastructure.” The Tate website cites their common themes: “Overlooked beauty and the relationship between form and function. Both subjects addressed the effect of industry on economy and the environment.” It’s interesting to think of the work in terms of what it omits: people, places, the materials and elements—water, steel, coal, etc.—that serve as the structures’ raison d’etre.
At the end of the catalogue there’s a long Q&A with the Bechers’ son, Max. He’s also a photographer and, like his parents, one half of an artistic and romantic partnership. We’ll close with him, too. In the interview, he discusses critiques his parents faced—that by leaving out the workers at the plants, they were “anti-people” or “anti-union”—and other misconceptions about their work. His answers might be one hundred percent spot on. They might also involve a bit of retrospective massaging. Artistic intent (like December weather) is difficult to define. But I’ve always been most drawn to portraiture and was startled to find myself so captivated by these black and white images of industrial machines, so his answers helped clarify why that might be so.
People are so used to looking at other people. It’s a kind of human narcissism to look at each other instead of the planet we’re on. And here you have the Bechers who are looking at the world, and it happens to be that people aren’t in all the pictures. Also, these are pictures of things that people have made. An object that took many people to construct is much richer and tells you more about humanity than photos of people at a moment in time… My parents were very emotional about the objects they photographed. Some they thought were very funny, others they thought were weird or disturbing. Others they thought were just spectacular. Every picture is a commentary. If you look long enough, you see their emotional connections to all of them.
READ Ava Kofman’s investigation of the hospice hustle, Thessaly La Force’s profile of Madhur Jaffrey, and my interview with Patti Smith.
LISTEN to a smart podcast series that, through interviews with the authors, goes deep inside single passages from great books, old and new; one that explores the wild, twisting history of America’s longest standing fashion trend (prep!); and one that has long been brilliant on cultural criticism and exploration but feels particularly personal to the hosts this season, which I’ve loved.
BUY a delightful item from this niche, tiny gift guide:
Chic memorabilia for the Wong Kar-wai superfan.
A White Lotus-esque multi-use glass.
Fruity forever stamps: one part Alice Waters, one part Laurie Colwin.
A book for the writer in your life.
New personas.
A candle to burn in the kitchen.
Baseball hats for readers, “French girls,” Tribeca classicists, heirs to media fortunes.