Tabla de contenidos para Spring 2019 en Smith Journal

AS A STUDENT AT HARVARD IN THE 1980S, LOUISE HARPMAN RAN ON COFFEE. Hardly a unique trait, perhaps. But unlike her classmates, Harpman found she was almost as enamoured with the plastic lids plonked on her takeaway cups as she was the caffeine they housed. There was something about the different designs – the very fact that there were different designs – that made the lids alluring. And so she started collecting them. Later, at Yale’s architecture school, Harpman met fellow student Scott Specht, who was also, for some reason, hoarding the things. They combined forces; the pair (who went on to found a design firm in 1994) now owns the world’s largest collection of coffee lids. Sorting through the more than 500 items in their stockpile (which was recently…

DAYLESFORD, A SMALL TOWN IN THE CENTRAL HIGHLANDS OF VICTORIA, HAS A HISTORY OF MAGNETISING PEOPLE. Settlers and prospectors flocked to the area in the mid-19th century, attracted first by the region’s gold, then by its rejuvenating natural spas. Before them, Indigenous nations sought out these same mineral springs, which they prized for their healing powers. Today, the town retains its status as a place of healing and wellbeing, albeit with a more bourgeois bent: day spas, massage parlours, psychics and chef-hatted restaurants line its streets, drawing in tourists from across the country. Most come from the upper middle class: electric car-driving, land-developing, six-figured folk seeking the quietude of the Highlands, the native flora and peace of the Australian countryside, the quaint charms of a too-cute-to-be-true rural outpost. But on…

When John Blundstone and his wife Eliza started a boot-making business in Hobart in the early 1870s, it was a question of necessity as much as anything else. A wild and rugged harbour town located on the forbidding edge of the already forbidding Australian frontier, Hobart demanded better footwear than could be reliably imported from the British homeland. The early Blundstones were hardy, hobnailed things, designed to survive a life spent trudging through rocky and mud-strewn farmland. But their reputation for steadfastness saw the market expand northwards onto the Australian mainland. When Australia joined World War II, it was Blundstone that was chosen to make the more than 500,000 pairs of boots required by the Army. (Rumour has it that American soldiers were so jealous of the durability and comfort…

THERE WAS SOMETHING FISHY ABOUT THE BOATS BOBBING DOWN THE RIVERS OF ARKHANGELSK OBLAST, IN RUSSIA’S NORTH-WEST MEZENSKY DISTRICT. During the twilight years of the Soviet Union, amid a countrywide shortage of materials, wooden boats were rapidly being replaced with metal ones. On the snowy slopes of Mezensky forests, people were suddenly lugging around a surprising number of metal sleds. The metal sauna was particularly suspicious. In a sense, it would take a rocket scientist to figure out what was going on. Three hundred kilometres south, in the closed town of Mirny, lay the Plesetsk Cosmodrome, a military facility built in the late 1950s. Over the following decades, thousands of satellites and spacecraft were launched into orbit from the site, and their jettisoned boosters, engines and other rocket parts had…

WHAT LIES BENEATH There’s something unnatural about Dillon Marsh’s photographic series For What It’s Worth. It’s not the stripped-out mining landscapes – we’re used to those. It’s the impossible metallic spheres sitting dead centre, staring you down, challenging you to question their absurd, perfect presence. These spheres, Marsh’s own CGI contributions, are scale-model renderings of the precise amounts of minerals – gold, diamond, platinum and, as in the above photos, copper – extracted from these landscapes. “South Africa’s got a long history of mining,” the photographer explains of the project’s origin. “A lot of the wealth of the country is built around it. I’d been reading about early copper mines, and I started thinking about how much effort they had gone to, to remove the copper from the ground. They…

“YOU’RE NOT GETTING IT,” THE ENGINEER LAUGHS. “WE’RE USING WATER NOBODY NEEDS.” Sonam Wangchuk, 52, tucks his bare feet under a pair of wiry legs, adjusts his glasses, and explains it again. For the better part of the last hour he’s been telling me about the work he’s done to irrigate the mountainous desert around us. In a region with scant water – less than 10 centimetres of rainfall a year – he has built a dozen man-made glaciers: structures that gather ice in the winter and slowly melt in the summer, releasing nearly 10 million litres of runoff to struggling farmers in the process. That’s right: man-made glaciers. “It’s a leap of faith,” Wangchuk admits in an office-bedroom at his experimental school outside Leh, the capital of Ladakh, a…

IN AN OFFICE, A MAN SITS BY A TABLE. A GOLDEN DIVING HELMET RESTS ON ITS SURFACE, BEHIND A GOLDEN CEREMONIAL CUP AND A GOLDEN BOWL. The man, if his three-piece suit and trophy collection haven’t given it away, is an executive. Or at least he was when Susan Ressler took his portrait. The year was 1979, and while it’s not hard to imagine the resulting image hanging in a corporate lobby, the shoot wasn’t done at the behest of his employer. In fact, Ressler wasn’t even meant to be there. “I would just go into these buildings,” the 69-year-old photographer remembers, “take the elevator, get off on a floor and walk around opening doors. I’d go in if the place looked interesting.” Ressler, then a graduate student at the…

You’ve self-published a book on amateur design, titled Halletmek. What does that word mean? It’s a Turkish verb that means ‘to solve, to take care of, to handle’. It’s about quickly dealing with a situation or a problem – not in the neatest way, but the most practical way. My definition of halletmek is about repairing broken things and modifying objects to provide an unmet need or overcome municipal rules and prohibitions. How did you first encounter the concept? It started with a street food stand I noticed as I was walking through Istanbul. The stand caught my attention because it had a lot of makeshift elements – so many problems and problems solved in one small area: windows fixed with tape and ropes, a stool modified to be rainproof,…

Though travelling the world in your early 20s is a rite of passage for many, the gap year experience can conjure up unsavoury images of wild kids on raucous bus tours of Europe. After his own youthful sojourn through Asia, however, Canadian Bruce Poon Tip was inspired to start G Adventures, a small-group tour company and social enterprise for more conscientious travellers. “I founded the company back in 1990 with nothing more than two credit cards and a burning desire to create an authentic, sustainable travel experience,” he says. G Adventures has since grown from a one-man show to a 2,200-employee company, offering over 700 trips to all seven continents. Though there’s nothing wrong with lounging on a yacht in Mykonos, Poon Tip’s larger mission is to inspire more people…

LOST SPIRITS, AS CO-FOUNDER BRYAN DAVIS IS AT PAINS TO POINT OUT, IS NOT LIKE OTHER DISTILLERIES. This is evident from the distillery experience itself: guests are treated to a fully automated, Disneyland-style tour that sits somewhere between an alcoholic ghost train and Willy Wonka’s factory. (Davis, who worked in amusements parks in his early 20s, essentially built the place by hand.) Yet despite being booked out months in advance, the tour is probably the least interesting thing about the place. Because behind closed doors, Davis and a team of chemists, computer scientists and mechanical engineers are challenging spirit-making’s most closely held orthodoxies, one patent at a time. Davis, 38, is the first to admit he’s an unlikely figure to be leading the upheaval of an age-old industry like distilling.…

IN 2017, PRESIDENT TRUMP LAID OUT WHAT MIGHT QUALIFY AS THE MOST AMBITIOUS GOAL OF HIS PRESIDENCY: LAUNCHING A CREWED MISSION TO MARS BY THE YEAR 2033. Whether that plan comes to fruition remains to be seen. (An independent researcher commissioned by NASA concluded the schedule was “infeasible”.) But so long as a mission is at least pencilled in, experts have decided they may as well start making a list of what to pack for the trip. Water is obviously a must, as are food and a decent supply of oxygen. Annalea Beattie, a director at the National Space Society of Australia, wants to add a fourth item to that list: a sketch pad. This isn’t entirely the idle wish of someone with little regard for extra baggage fees. Beattie,…

When English financier-turned-photographer Richard James Daniels moved to the Philippines, he tried in vain to find a soccer game to watch. “I travelled to all the local bars in Cebu, the second largest city in the Philippines,” he says, “but couldn’t find a single football match. Every TV was showing basketball.” Daniels quickly realised basketball isn’t just a sport in the Philippines: it’s closer to an addiction. The game arrived after the Spanish-American War in the late 19th century – a real slam dunk for U.S. imperialism – and rapidly dribbled its way into the country’s psyche. These days, over 40 million Filipinos (around 40 per cent of the population) shoot hoops regularly – Nike even considers the Philippines its third largest basketball market, after China and the U.S. Rough-built…

WINDOW SHOPPING MEANS SOMETHING TOTALLY DIFFERENT WHEN YOU’RE A BUSH KID WITH BIG PLANS FOR HERMITRY. “That was one of the first things we did; we went to the tip shop and bought a heap of windows,” Jess Rettig says. “The cool ones with checks through them, those we picked up gradually, but for the big plain windows we got a couple of massive pallets of glass; Matt built frames for them and put them in.” Rettig’s partner, Matt Stevens, is handy twice over: he’s a carpenter who’s now doing his second apprenticeship in boatbuilding. A few years ago, the two locked eyes at a Sea Shepherd volunteer meeting, got chatting and that was it. Within 10 days Stevens moved into Rettig’s sharehouse in Fern Tree, at the foothills of…

We won’t be offended if you scribble over this article. While some see doodling as a sign of boredom, we understand how it can help improve memory, relieve stress and unlock your unconscious. (That’s if the almost illegible scratchings of doctors and scientists in academic journals are anything to go by.) Plus, doodling will put you in good company. Specifically: the company of the world leaders and artists who absent-mindedly turned out the following sketches. Each offers a peek into the minds (conscious or otherwise) of these well-known figures, and serves as a reminder that no-one – no matter how important or busy or famous – is above an idle scribble. They’re a small selection of the vast doodle collection amassed by David Schulson of Schulson Autographs, now showcased in…