Special Delivery from Heller Highwater & Co.: Turkey Omnibus
Wayward Press, Wayward Cities, Wayward Fashion
For me—and maybe you, too—the day after Thanksgiving is the start of the winter reading season. Here at Heller Highwater & Co., we have worked up a package of recent work to get you off to a great start. We have, hot off the presses, a close look at the recent history of two storied dailies, the Washington Post and the New York Times, in the age of digital distribution, Jeff Bezos, and Donald Trump. That's through interesting new books by two journalists at those papers, Marty Baron and Adam Nagourney.
We have, as the centerpiece of The New Yorker's "Money" issue a few weeks ago, my long feature on San Francisco's downtown recovery, a subject close to my heart. The city has become, as so much is now, a kind of empty jar for the display of people's preexisting ideas. To understand what was really going on, I spoke with scores of people in town—elected leaders, business leaders, small-business owners, community organizers, street-service organizers, and urbanists. What I found surprised me and, at a moment when many cities are similarly struggling, carries elsewhere.
And, for the aesthetes and the escapists, we include two summer profiles of major fashion designers, Daniel Roseberry and Pieter Mulier. Roseberry was brought up in a born-again household in Plano, Texas; now he is the design head at Schiaparelli, the small Paris fashion house with close historic ties to Surrealism. He had a vexed passage between those points. Mulier was a strait-laced Belgian architecture student who accidentally stepped into fashion and, after one of the longest and most famous apprenticeships in the business, recently became head of Alaïa. He lives between Antwerp and Paris and is now a bridge between fashion and Flemish studio art.
"All the Newspapers' Men," The New Yorker, November, 2023: https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-communications/newspapersmen-martin-baron-adam-nagourney-book-review
"Spectacular Fall," The New Yorker, October, 2023: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/10/23/what-happened-to-san-francisco-really
"Paris, Texas," Vogue, September, 2023: https://www.vogue.com/article/daniel-roseberry-schiaparelli-profile-september-2023
"Alaïa Again," Vogue, October, 2023: https://www.vogue.com/article/pieter-mulier-alaia-nathan-heller
Something for everyone; hope you find one to enjoy. And happiest holidays to all of you,
Nathan