Kyle Chayka: You may notice we have some new branding for One Thing! Or if you didn’t, go check it out at the top and bottom of the newsletter. We’re switching it up because OT is above all an experiment, a way to try things out and have fun. There’s no set format except that we’ll publish our main newsletters on Tuesdays and Thursdays, like a biweekly special at your neighborhood corner restaurant. On other days, we might have digests like this one, collecting a bunch of timely links and observations around our themes (taste, consumerism, food, design, whatever…). Inspired by Deez Links, it’s a bit like a short Twitter feed in your inbox.
This Guardian profile is something of a crash course in British hipster food culture. First off, it’s written by Jonathan Nunn, proprietor of Vittles, an influential London food newsletter. And it’s about Nicholas Saunders, the little-known creator of deeply influential British food companies including Neal’s Yard, a boutique chain of cheese shops that’s like what you might get if Aesop made dairy instead of hand soap. Reading this will make you want to quit your life and start a dry goods store.
Neal’s Yard was less striking for what it sold than what it was: a secret village right in the middle of one of the world’s most mapped cities. Around this time, Le Roy, who worked around the corner, started to notice groups of “tattooed and beautiful people with feathers in their hair” emerging from what she had previously considered a dank, rat-infested courtyard. They were the wholefood warehouse workers, many of whom, Saunders later wrote in his autobiography, were secretly raiding the costume department of the nearby Royal Ballet Company, which they could access walking across the rooftops from Neal’s Yard.
Speaking of Jonathan Nunn and Vittles, Nunn wrote a great restaurant review (with great photos) about the tyranny of smash burger pop-ups and the need for every new food fad to be visually iconic — that is, Instagrammable. It’s worth either subscribing for this or getting your coolest friend to forward it to you.
Lorde is getting into Snow Peak: Pop stars are just like us (me). The pop star’s fav gradient water bottle is from the niche Japanese hiking equipment brand Snow Peak, which also makes amazing day to day gear. I use its duffel bags every time I travel. You cannot go wrong with any of their products, plus the stores are so fun to browse.
This new-to-me beauty website called Byrdie published a list of “plastic surgery trends” for 2024. Like, fillers are out and facelifts are in. BBL patients are asking for smaller butts. It’s morbidly fascinating, but if you’re worrying about which operations are trendiest, you might have deeper problems.
There is a density of signification in this Rachel Tashjian profile of Sandeep Salter, the co-founder (with her husband) of Salter House, a storefront and ecommerce operation that sells echt-tradwife translucent robes for homebound lounging and Italian ceramic plates emblazoned with their family motto: “Not too much.” It actually all seems like quite a lot? Prairie chore aesthetics are aspirational and Salter’s ballet poses for the photo shoot are recherché, like a throwback to modernist Manhattan socialites. (Is that why “Maestro” the movie exists?) A handful of wealthy Brooklynites might be into it but it all feels a bit perverse, and not in a cool way — the artisanal equivalent of Dimes Square.
A scorching hot hatchet job of a pan is one way to get attention as a new writer these days. While they always have a certain shock value and rhetorical liveliness about their hatred, or resentment — depending on how you see criticism. I am also, however, grateful for a careful and well-composed review sketch of a book’s potential, if it might not have been altogether realized in the critics view. I’ll spare you all further meta commentary about criticism today, but this one on Samantha Harvey's Orbital was interesting to read for its theories about the cleaving between science fiction and the literary, a topic I’m fascinated by, myself. The book actually sounds a bit more interesting than Adam Mars-Jones, the reviewer, suggests — to me at least. For more of the critic's own writing, I highly recommend Box Hill, a punchy and beautiful novella about queer kinship in the biker community in ’70’s London. — Nate Gallant
We get very selective snippets of the true breadth of movies from Japan, at least in the US, and they largely arrive into some siloed, genre-specific audience. Do you like anime? There's Demon Slayer. Actions movie? Maybe you get a Godzilla every once in a while. Are you a fan of foreign language Oscar noms? Maybe you’re lucky enough to live where they’ll show a Hirokazu Koreeda or Ryunosuke Hamaguchi film. If you’re curious as to what’s going on more broadly in Japan’s film world, though, or you’re looking for a unique movie recommendation that you can likely stream on Amazon, check out the writing of the Japan Times’ chief film reviewer, Mark Schilling. His reviews are informative and often rooted in the country’s film history, and it’s not often you find English language reviews from someone whose job it is to stand between two specific cultures as informed critic and translator. — NG
The Rubin, a relatively recent but oft-discussed art museum in downtown Manhattan, is closing its doors this fall. The museum housed an enormous and singular collection of Himalayan art, both pre-modern and contemporary, served up New Agey programming for those inclined, and supported research and curation of art from around Asia in its time. Potential questions about its collection’s provenance, real estate development, and the tenuous financial existence of museums dedicated to the collection of one very wealthy person dog the news of the closing, all thoroughly covered by Zachary Small in their great piece following the announcement. — NG
If you like this format please let us know! And always send in links or suggestions by replying or emailing onethingnewsletter@gmail.com.
have u been to brown rice by neals yard in tokyo? it’s old news as it opened many years ago but worth mentioning
Love this format. More please.