Tabla de contenidos para Winter 2019 en Smith Journal

Tucked down a narrow road in the Hollywood Hills, the place was every bit as tacky and lavish as you might imagine a house owned by Prince in the ’90s to be. To my surprise, there wasn’t a massive security gate blocking me from entering the driveway. So, like the creep I clearly am, I drove right up to the Purple One’s old front door and saw what may, at some point, have been his wheelie bin. (It’s possible the bin had been replaced after Prince sold the house, now that I think about it.) Idling in that driveway, I realised I had no idea what I was doing there. I enjoyed Prince’s music, certainly, but wasn’t what you might call a superfan. And even if I were, what did…

YOU WILL NEED:  a magnet, a small zip-lock bag, a larger zip-lock bag, a white bowl, dish soap, a spoon, two white plates, a tea strainer or kitchen sieve (the finer the better), a piece of paper, a Petri dish, and a microscope. STEP 1: PREPARE YOUR MAGNET Get yourself a powerful neodymium magnet from your local magnet store (or order one online at the usual places). Any shape of magnet will work (Larsen’s is round and 40 millimetres in diameter), though one with a handle will be… handier. Place your magnet in a small, snugly fitting plastic bag. This will keep the magnet clean, and allow you to release your micrometeorites in a controlled way when the time is right. STEP 2: SCOUR YOUR ROOFTOP Half a dozen micrometeorites…

I GREW UP AROUND ANIMALS, AND OFTEN WONDERED WHAT WAS GOING ON INSIDE THEIR HEADS. DID THEY EXPERIENCE THE FULL INNER LIFE OF EMOTIONS THAT I DID? Most adults will tell you they don’t. Animals are led by instincts, they argue, while humans are led by their brains. But if we think about the things that are most important to us – love and happiness – we realise these are actually instinctual, too. On a biological level what we call ‘love’ is really a hormone called oxytocin, which we find not just in humans, but in pigs, goats – even fish. The strongest emotion we have, we share with the animals. And more similarities appear the more you look. Scientists used to believe that fish can’t feel fear because they…

A GREENER JAUNT The idea came to Dave Budge, an avid outdoorsman, when he was driving through rural Victoria. “I was just wishing I could drive through the bush without making any noise,” he recalls. “There was also this repressed guilt: I’m driving hundreds of kilometres to go out into this pristine nature, using heaps of diesel. What was my environmental impact? I was thinking about how I could put these pieces of the puzzle together, and encourage exploration at the same time.” The result was Jaunt, a new startup based in Coburg, in Melbourne’s north. Budge, a digital and technology designer by day, wants to convert old four-wheel drives into electric vehicles, and then put them to work in a car-rental network across regional Australia. “We’re trying to shift…

SUNRAY KELLEY, LIKE NATURE, ABHORS A STRAIGHT LINE. It’s a crisp spring day and the architect is sitting in the sun in the only place he’s ever called home – his nine-acre property near Sedro-Woolley in northern Washington state. It’s a natural wonderland and, effectively, a gallery of his most distinctive works – treehouses, yurts, ponds and temples constructed with the materials offered up by the land around. Kelley has built his Shire largely with his own hands, and with the hands of those who’ve passed through over the decades, from partners and acolytes to Airbnb lodgers. The swooping timber curves, incongruous parapets and overgrown living garden rooftops of his many constructions bring to mind the turf houses of Iceland if they’d been rethought by Antoni Gaudí in a lesser-known…

THE YEAR WAS 1934, AND RELATIONS BETWEEN THE U.S. AND JAPAN WERE SOURING. Worried, America dispatched an unusual peacekeeping force – a baseball team known as the All Americans – on a Japanese tour of goodwill. Among the star-studded roster were 13 of America’s most famous batters, fielders, catchers and pitchers. And Moe Berg. A mediocre catcher who spent more time on the bench than the field, Berg cut an unusual figure next to teammates Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. His presence confused commentators, who may have wondered why Berg even bothered to show up. In fact, on the night of November 29, when the All Americans were due to play in Omiya, he didn’t. Instead, Berg slipped into a kimono and headed to St. Luke’s Hospital, one of the…

WHILE TRYING TO RECREATE THE SMELL OF TIGER URINE, WOLFGANG GEORGSDORF DID ALMOST EVERYTHING SHORT OF APPROACHING THE APEX PREDATOR WITH A PLASTIC CUP. The Austrian artist, 59, quickly ruled out recruiting the tiger’s smaller, occasionally friendlier relative, the domestic cat. “Cat piss wouldn’t be as harsh as tiger piss,” he reasoned. Moreover, there was the very real risk that cat urine would inadvertently fill the room with – heaven forbid – the pleasant whiff of berries. “If you dose it down, cat urine gets you to cassis absolute,” Georgsdorf explains, “which is blackcurrant.” Both share a chemical compound known politely as ‘cat ketone’, which also crops up in Japanese green tea, hand-squeezed grapefruit juice and some wines, particularly Sauvignon blanc. As smells go, it’s not altogether unpleasant. But it…

Around 80 years ago, an insurance company employee and part-time anthropologist named Benjamin Lee Whorf came up with an idea that would rock the tweedy world of linguistics: what if the language we speak actually shapes the way we think? If your mother tongue lacked a future tense, for example, would time pass differently? If you really had 1,000 words for snow, would that change the way you experienced the cold? Whorf called his theory ‘linguistic relativity’. It’s been more or less debunked over the years, but it still inspired a bunch of people to create their own languages from scratch. Known as ‘conlangs’, these constructed languages are designed to alter a speaker’s thought patterns, making them more logical, more feminist, more creative and so on. Here are six such…

TUCKED AWAY ON THE EASTERN SIDE OF GREENLAND, BETWEEN THE WORLD’S LARGEST NATIONAL PARK AND ITS LONGEST FJORD SYSTEM, LIES ITTOQQORTOORMIIT, AN ICY VILLAGE HOME TO JUST 355 PEOPLE. It’s the most isolated town in Greenland, which makes it among the most isolated places on the planet. And while that remoteness might keep the island’s more cosmopolitan residents further south, in metropolises like Nuuk (population: 17,984), it is precisely what attracted Michael Novotny to the place. Novotny, now a professional photographer, grew up in a small city in the Czech Republic, moved to Prague and then, four years ago, relocated to Iceland for good. Since then he has been almost constantly on the move, documenting the lives of people living in the Arctic Circle. Despite his experience living in out-of-the-way…

THERE ARE A COUPLE OF THINGS THAT MIGHT PERSUADE SOMEONE TO CLIMB INTO A NUCLEAR FALLOUT SHELTER. SIRENS COME TO MIND, AS DO MESSIANIC VISIONS OF AN APOCALYPSE. FOR RICHARD ROSS, IT WAS THE PROMISE OF LIGHT. As a photographer, Ross often found himself on the hunt for interestingly lit spaces to shoot, and the planet’s notoriously dim bunkers fascinated him. “They have generated light, fluorescent light, incandescent light,” he explains. “And then they have shafts of daylight coming down from the egress and access channels.” Camera in hand, Ross spent five years scouting around for the perfect candidates, the results of which are collated in his book, Waiting for the End of the World. True to his initial vision, the book is a catalogue of uniquely illuminated rooms. But…

Photographers tend to gravitate towards picturesque or novel locations. The offices in Desk Job are neither. What attracted you to these spaces? I’m always looking for new ways to tell old stories. Workers have been a common subject throughout the history of photography, but office workers haven’t received as much attention. I think the office has been overlooked because it’s so mundane, but from mundanity comes interest, if you know where to point your camera. Not working in an office myself, I also found the setting more interesting than others might – it’s monotonous, yet fascinating at the same time. You started shooting in 2004 and only finished in 2010. How did the project evolve during this time? Initially I wanted to do a series about our relationship to the…

DURING AN EXPEDITION TO AFRICA TOWARDS THE END OF THE 19TH CENTURY, FRENCH EXPLORER LOUIS-GUSTAVE BINGER MADE A REMARKABLE DISCOVERY. He was standing at the base of the lofty, snow-covered Mountains of Kong: the daunting, insurmountable ranges that span West Africa and bless the region with bountiful reserves of gold and quartz. Gazing at a horizon said to be interrupted by towering, four-kilometre peaks, he saw “not even a ridge of hills”. The Kong mountain chain, he concluded, which stretched across all the maps, “never existed except in the imaginations of a few poorly informed explorers.” For almost a century, the wishful thinking, misplaced confidence and sloppy work of a handful of armchair Victorian cartographers had built a mountain range out of thin air, and almost every commercially produced map…