Gear Patrol Magazine, Issue Ten: The Innovation Issue by Gear Patrol

The Innovation Issue

Wish List: The Best Stuff

How to Meditate

Should You Buy a Tesla?

The Smart Home, the Smart Way

Accidental Innovations

The Future of Gear

The Review: Samsung Galaxy Fold

Tool Kit: Astronaut Drew Feustel

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Contents The Guide

Found: Casio AT-552 Janus

100 Years of the Bauhaus

When Do Innovations Cross the Line?

Wish List

The world’s most desirable gear, right now

The State of Wearables

Born on the Battlefield

Rivian R1S Electric SUV

Dyson V11 Torque Drive Vacuum

Lotuff Raw “Rasa” Day Satchel

Patek Philippe 5235/50R Regulator

Steinway & Sons Spirio | r

Nike Adapt BB

GEAR PATRO L TH E INNOVAT I O N I SSU E

The Race to Save Coffee Before It’s Gone

Should You Buy a Tesla?

The Review: Samsung Galaxy Fold

Tested: Beer, Cycling Shoes, Earbuds + more

100

Guide to Life: Build a Smart Home — the Smart Way

Bulk Buy: Carabiners

39° 35’ 0.478” S 71° 32’ 23.564” W

Reconnect.

Montblanc 1858 Geosphere montblanc.com

CONTENTS

Features

106

118

The Future Perfect

The Future of Gear

The Car of Tomorrow promises a lot: scorching performance, clean power, the ability to drive on demand. But when connectivity enters, privacy leaves. Which begs the question: What will the car of the future cost?

Technology is transforming everything from the crampon to the cockpit. Here are the innovations shaping our future — indoors, outdoors, and everywhere in between.

138

148

Q+A: Michael Muller’s Virtual Reality

Paul Dillinger Comes Clean

The man behind the Marvel movie posters — and decades of commercial and fashion photography — opens up about his love for the open ocean, the need to improvise, and the transformative power of storytelling.

Levi’s head of innovation knows the apparel industry has some cleaning up to do — but in the meantime he’d like to change the world, writes John Zientek.

156 To Know What’s Beyond

In the brutal, frenzied history of exploration, nothing equals mankind’s push beyond the boundaries of Earth. Fifty years on, the wild early history of the NASA space program still defines the bleeding edge of of human audacity.

GEAR PATRO L TH E INNOVAT I O N I SSU E

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CONTENTS

Intel

172 Beach-Friendly Beach Gear

174

178

How to Get Better at Everything: Meditation

At Work With Nathan Myhrvold

180

182

Death to the Instant Pot

Accidental Inventions

188 New Rules of Summer BBQ

GEAR PATRO L TH E INNOVAT I O N I SSU E

198

210

Sharp and Sculpted Summer Fashion

A NASA Spacewalker’s Everyday Carry

212

216

The Conversation: Trainer + Retailer

Up, Up and Away

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

Eric Yang

FOUNDER, EDITOR IN CHIEF

@hashtagyang | eyang@gearpatrol.com

GEAR PATRO L TH E INNOVAT I O N I SSU E

nnovation can be tough to spot in real time. Contrary to popular belief, innovating is not a mythical act. The most reliable source for a lightbulb moment is far more prosaic: small, incremental improvements, and the mistakes unearthed along the way. Most of us only acknowledge innovation when it trickles into real things — things we can see, feel and experience in the context of our own lives, and whose practical merits we can vouch for through the power of our wallets. As Thomas Edison once quipped, “Anything that won’t sell, I don’t want to invent. Its sale is proof of utility, and utility is success.” In the same way, innovation can be a rather unglamorous process, so too is the affirmation of innovation through the act of buying a product and using it without irony or pretext. For Issue 10, we set out to celebrate innovation in all of its forms by looking at the products, flash points and people, both new and old, driving us toward an alternative, and hopefully better, future. Inside, you’ll find stories highlighting everything from a global design movement (the Bauhaus), to the current state of wearables. You’ll also discover stories showcasing the extraordinary impacts of unbridled ambition (NASA’s Gemini and Apollo missions), and lucky accidents (the Popsicle). Finally, there’s The Future of Gear, a grand assembly of summaries covering the trends and materials making the next generation

of products lighter, stronger, faster and smarter than ever. If you need a place to start, or end, I highly recommend it. While it’s easy to focus on the revelry of successes, I believe it’s equally to appreciate all the wonderful failures, accidents and reactive processes that, combined with perseverance and discipline, add up to what most of us also credit as innovation. Apple brought us the iPhone, but many of those early ideas were developed first in failed products like the Newton MessagePad. Pfizer set out to create a blood pressure medicine, and landed on Sildenafil — or, as you know it, Viagra — solving the affliction of sexual dysfunction for millions of men. Bausch and Lomb was commissioned by the Army to solve sun glare for pilots; their solution became one of fashion’s most enduring, stylish accessories. As for Edison? Turns out he didn’t invent the light bulb after all; what he created was the first commercially viable alternative to the gas lamp. The fact that popular culture credits him with one of the most important products in history — not to mention the sheer symbol of innovation — speaks directly to the power each of us as consumers wield in defining what is, and isn’t, innovative. The takeaway is this: whether or not the products highlighted in this issue eventually make it into the pantheon of greats is up to you.

MASTHEAD

founder , editor in chief

ERIC YANG @hashtagyang cofounder , coo

BEN BOWERS @benbowersgp

deputy editor

staff writers

issue ten contributors

head of commerce

JOSH CONDON @jpc_nyc_

TANNER BOWDEN @danger_bowden

ERIC ADAMS

BRIAN LOUIE

TUCKER BOWE @j_tb3

DW BURNETT

BRYAN CAMPBELL @businessbryan

STINSON CARTER

MEG LAPPE @meglappe

AJA MALIA COON

WILL PRICE

MARIA DEL RUSSO

store operations manager

JUSTIN FENNER

CHRIS HEALY @cl_healy

senior editor

editor , the guide

JACK SEEMER @jackseemer editors

WILL SABEL COURTNEY @willsabelcourtney STEVE MAZZUCCHI @motosandmore ERIC LIMER @ericlimer associate editor

JOHN ZIENTEK @sieben_tagen assistant editor

OREN HARTOV @ohartov

associate staff writer

content director , commerce

JACOB SOTAK @jacobsotak

TRAVIS HALLMARK

ZEN LOVE @zlo_watches

JOE MCKENDRY

managing editor , editorial operations

KAILAH OGAWA

head of marketing

ALI CARR @chasingalicarr

EMMANUEL POLANCO

KYLE SNARR @kyality

assistant editor , editorial operations

J.D. DIGIOVANNI @jdedig

LAUREN SEGAL CASSIE SHORTSLEEVE JAMES STOUT

consumer marketing manager

CAITLYN SHAW @heyitscgs

project coordinator , editorial operations

JULIUS TANAG

sales marketing coordinator

RYAN BROWER @owen_brow

CATHERINE YOO

AISHA LOPEZ @aishalyn

vice president , advertising and partnerships

cfo

ZACH MADER @z_mader

BRANDON FRANK

editorial assistant

ANDY FRAKES @andy.frakes

art director

deputy photo editor

sales director , east coast

JOE TORNATZKY @jtornatzky

HENRY PHILLIPS @henrysp

JASON DAKOTA DAVIS @KidDakota

senior designer

associate photo editor

senior account executives

SHERRY WANG @sxw

CHASE PELLERIN @chase_pellerin

MIKE BAILEY

associate designer

associate staff photographer

HUNTER D. KELLEY @type_hunter

CHANDLER BONDURANT @chandlerbondurant

ALYXANDER EFFRON @alyxeffron account executives

TIM MURRAY KEVIN O’BRIEN @_kevinobrien_

head of gear patrol studios

MONICA HARE deputy editor , gear patrol studios

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CHARLES MCFARLANE @charles_mcfarlane Gear Patrol Studios is the creative partnership arm of Gear Patrol. Select advertising in this magazine has been crafted by Gear Patrol Studios on behalf of brands to help tailor their message specifically for Gear Patrol readers. These sections are demarcated with GEAR PATROL STUDIOS. To learn more visit, studios.gearpatrol.com or reach out to us: advertising@gearpatrol.com

T H E H E L L G A P O D G R E E N + S TA I N L E S S

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ISSUE 10

Behind the Cover text by henry philips

The idea of innovation is too often conflated with the grand reveal. The auto show introduction. Countdown clocks. Steve Jobs pulling the curtain back on the Macintosh. But innovation’s true nature is typically less sexy and more iterative: prototypes; minimum viable products; “revised-finalfinal-final.jpeg” files. It’s that long road powered by little more than optimism and hard work that inspired our cover shoot. The Ava XC is an electric aircraft dreamed up by Beta Technologies, a small company whose creations are

stored in a mostly abandoned former Strategic Air Command base in Plattsburgh, New York. Beta has been relatively quiet about its product development; unlike competitors like Airbus and Bell, who have unveiled beautiful, curvy renderings of futuristic aircraft that don’t yet exist, Beta has spent its time racking up test flight hours in a craft that, technological wizardry aside, wasn’t designed to appear in the next Minority Report. Beta will debut its production aircraft in conjunction with a plan to fly the current

prototype across the country, favoring innovating over marketing and creating over concepting. That’s why we couldn’t think of a better example to live on the cover of Issue 10, our Innovation Issue. And that slightly lanky prototype looks pretty amazing under a barrage of lights, and through the lens of DW Burnett, a longtime cover contributor to all your favorite car magazines (not to mention Gear Patrol Issue Seven). We hope you enjoy. Here’s to making cool shit.

dw burnett, photographer

j o e t o r n at z k y , art director

brenden clarke, p l at f o r m p r o d u c e r

“As we started to descend, the plane began to tilt sideto-side. When red flashing lights and alarm noises accompanied the seemingly out-of-control plane, my heart rate had to have been at least 180. I looked back to see Joe quite white and Henry, our deputy photo editor, with a very nervous, very fake smile. I knew then we were in for a bumpy landing.”

special than k s

Kyle Clark Tom O’Leary Cameron Jonas Malcom Achilles Andrew Giroux

GEAR PATRO L TH E INNOVAT I O N I SSU E

“Any creative will tell you that having the whole set to yourself is great. But throw in an entire airport with acres of concrete, pre-war hangars, epic sunsets and access to a de-icing truck. You have yourself a recipe for a great cover shoot.”

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GEAR PATRO L TH E INNOVAT I O N I SSU E

The Guide

Innovation takes many forms, from an artistic movement that spawned a century of design innovation (p. 24) to the current crop of high-tech wearables (p. tk) to a lab-grown plant (p. 62) that might save coffee as we know it. Of course, certain new things are considered heresay: in some competitive circles, groundbreaking gear like a carbon fiber-infused running shoe (p. 36) is just a fancy way of cheating. Then there’s the stuff with more promise than weight, like a foldable smartphone (p. tk) that can open three apps at once, or refillable deodorant (p. 78) designed to save the planet. Innovation can be described many ways — exciting, unmooring, controversial, revolutionary — but boring isn’t one.

T H E IN N OVAT IO N ISSU E G E A R PATROL

FOUND

1984 Casio Janus AT-552 text by oren hartov photo by chandler bondurant

Wearables might be the hot category of the moment, but do enough digging and you’ll realize companies have been pushing towards integrated wearable technology since before MacGyver debuted. Just look at the AT-552 from Casio’s short-lived Janus line, which featured a gesture-control touchscreen more than 30 years before the Apple Watch. Although the timepiece sports a traditional dial, the watch crystal is actually a capacitive touchscreen on which the wearer can trace numerals and commands — e.g. “4 + 9” — with a finger; an integrated microchip performs the simple calculations (to eight places!) and displays the result on the digital LED bar at the top $2the , 9 9dial. 9 of The AT-552 was only available for one year, in 1984, and originally retailed for just $100. Today, pristine examples in good working order can top $1,200 — a steep price, perhaps, for a basic watch with the world’s most underwhelming calculator, but an undeniable bargain for a forgotten (and still entirely wearable) piece of tech history.

GEAR PATRO L TH E INNOVAT I O N I SSU E

100 YEARS OF BAUHAUS One of the most innovative art movements in history continues to influence architecture, product design, watchmaking and more. text by oren hartov

1925 FAGU S SHOE L AST FACTORY BY WALTER GROPIU S Carl Benscheidt, the original owner of the Fagus Factory, was dissatisfied with the building’s exterior and hired Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius to redesign it in 1925. The result, which included liberal use of glass and rapid fluctuations in height and contrast, were revolutionary for the time. In 2011, UNESCO declared it a World Heritage Site.

GEAR PATRO L TH E INNOVAT I O N I SSU E

prevalent across myriad disciplines: form follows function. Thus, the products that emerged from Bauhaus were stripped of nearly all ornamentation, and made from common materials that lent themselves to mass production — buildings, chairs, wristwatches and everything in between. Today, the influence of the Bauhaus is evident everywhere you look, from Apple’s iPod to the Porsche 911. Distinctly modern, relentlessly practical and admittedly polarizing, it’s a movement that continues to inform multiple creative disciplines, and a century after the school’s founding, its popularity shows no signs of waning.

1924 MT8 TABLE L AMP BY WILHELM WAGENFELD AND CARL JAKOB J UCKER An early Bauhaus design, the MT8 lamp was crafted after the central tenets of the school, using simple shapes and, with the inner components mostly exposed, eschewing ornamentation. Though unpopular on its release, the MT8 lamp is still in production today and has since become one of the most recognizable designs to emerge from the school.

p h o t o s c o u r t e s y o f t h e m o m a s t o r e , fa g u s - g r e c o n , knoll, the poli house, a. lange & söhne

No art movement in history has impacted the world of products quite like the Bauhaus. Founded in 1919 by the architect Walter Gropius in Weimar, Germany, the school’s original manifesto proposed a union of art, architecture and design via a curriculum that would “create a new guild of craftsmen, without the class distinctions that raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist.” Gropius and his fellow Bauhaus instructors — Paul Klee, Wasily Kandinsky, Oskar Schlemmer, Herbert Bayer and Marcel Breuer — preached a multidisciplinary approach to design built upon the tenets of modernism. Its central axiom has become

1925-1926 MODEL B3 WAS S ILY CHAIR BY MARCEL BREU ER The so-called “Wassily” chair was created by famed master carpenter Marcel Breuer while an instructor at the Bauhaus. Inspired by bicycle design, Breuer used tubular steel to construct the chair’s frame, which was then covered in fabric or leather. The chair, another Bauhaus icon, has been mass-produced since the 1950s.

1926-1927 NESTING TABLES BY JOSEF ALBERS Originally designed for a private apartment and crafted of solid oak and lacquered acrylic glass, Josef Albers’s nesting tables, meant to function “independently and interdependently,” brought the artist’s passion for color to an otherwise simple, utilitarian form. They were considered groundbreaking for their integration of color into furniture design and remain in production today.

1940 WRIST WATCH BY L ANGE & SÖHNE

1934 P OLI HO U SE BY SCHLOMO LIASKOWSKI

After the Nazis came to power in 1933, Bauhaus-trained architects fled Germany and settled around the world, including Tel Aviv (in what was then still Palestine) where roughly 4,000 Bauhaus buildings would eventually be built. The Poli House, constructed at a major intersection, is characterized by its unusual shape and its horizontal ribbon windows. It once housed a printing press and a shoe store; now, it’s now a luxury hotel.

This wristwatch by Lange & Söhne featured many of the stylistic components now associated with Bauhaus watchmaking: a clean dial with plenty of negative space; a stylized, Arabic font; and a long, thin handset. Other famed watch companies, such as Braun and Nomos Glashütte, would later utilize these design elements when crafting their own now-iconic watches.

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1944 SWIS S RAILWAY CLOCK BY HAN S HILFIKER Created in 1944 by engineer and Swiss Federal Railways employee Hans Hilfker, in conjunction with clock manufacturer Moser-Baer, the Swiss railway clock has since been recognized as an icon by the Museum of Modern Art. Watch- and clockmaker Mondaine’s business is built largely on the brand’s licensing and adoption of this heavily Bauhaus-influenced clock, which has been ongoing since 1986.

1946 NELSON PL ATFORM BENCH BY GEORGE NELSON

1958 IIT IN STITUTE OF DESIGN CAMPU S BY LU DWIG MIES VAN DER ROHE Developed over the course of nearly 20 years, the Institute of Design campus in Chicago proved to be one of famed architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s most ambitious designs. Named by the American Institute of Architects as one of the 200 most significant works of architecture in the U.S., the plan made liberal use of an orderly grid pattern, steel and glass for a fresh, modern aesthetic that still feels contemporary today.

GEAR PATRO L TH E INNOVAT I O N I SSU E

photos courtesy of mondaine, design within reach, iit institute of design, vitsoe, junghans, p orsche, braun

The Nelson Platform Bench has been part of Herman Miller’s furniture collection for decades. Originally crafted in 1946 by noted designer and teacher George Nelson, for his office at Fortune magazine, the bench can be used as either a seat or a surface. It has been called “a landmark of modern design” for its clean, flexible-use form.

1960 VITSOE 606 SHELVING SYSTEM BY DIETER RAM S Dieter Rams’s 606 Shelving System has been produced by Vitsoe since 1960. A modular design that can be rearranged to suit a customer’s changing needs, the 606 includes numerous shelving and cabinet options for both residential and commercial use. Simple, economical and made to last a lifetime, the system was one of the original “green” furniture designs.

1970

1962

BRAU N CAS SET T ELECTRIC SHAVER BY FLORIAN SEIFFERT

J U NGHAN S MA X BLL WRISTWATCHES BY MA X BILL In 1956, prolific Swiss designer Max Bill began a long and fruitful relationship with German watch manufacturer Junghans when he created a wall clock for the brand. A few years later, Bill designed his first wristwatch, a simple, manually wound timepiece that would later serve as the cornerstone to the entire Junghans catalog, and which are still popular today.

1963 P ORSCHE 911 BY FERDINAND ALEXANDER "B UTZI" P ORSCHE

The Braun SM31 electric shaver of the early ‘60s, available in black only, sold eight million units. In 1970, the Florian Seiffert-designed Cassett shaver — available in bright red, yellow or black — showed that colors could inject some fun into an otherwise utilitarian design.

While attending the Ulm School of Design, Ferdinand Porsche had the opportunity to learn from several Bauhaus-trained instructors, including Max Bill. Though Porsche was eventually dismissed from the school, the Bauhaus tenets of clean, uncluttered design and form after function made themselves apparent in Porsche’s most famous creation, the 911, which debuted in 1963.

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1980 ATHEN S CON SERVATOIRE BY IOANNIS DESP OTOP O U LOS In 1959, the Athenian government commissioned Ioannis Despotopoulos, the sole Greek architect to have studied under Walter Gropius at the Bauhaus, to design a large, multiuse cultural complex. Since its completion in 1980, the Athens Conservatoire has been utilized as a cultural hub for artistic performances and events, and stands as a testament to the Bauhaus’s adaptability to different types of spaces and uses.

1992 TANGENTE WATCH BY NOMOS GLASHÜT TE First released in 1992, the Tangente is Nomos Glashütte’s most recognizable design and one that’s built entirely upon the Bauhaus aesthetic. Everything from the linear typography to the long, thin lugs recalls early Bauhaus watchmaking from the 1930s. It has won numerous design awards, including the prestigious Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève.

1998 T T BY AU DI The need for aerodynamic performance in an automobile dovetails with the Bauhaus philosophy of form following function; excess ornamentation will only inhibit performance on a car. German manufacturer Audi put this design philosophy into practice most notably with its TT, a curvaceous two-seat sports car that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the 1940s or ’50s.

IP OD BY APPLE Steve Jobs once said of Apple, “The product design, the advertising, it all comes down to this: Let’s make it simple. Really simple.” The original iPod featured simple geometry, a modern, sans-serif font and little else. Even the packaging was designed to be as clean as possible. This Bauhaus-like approach now pervades the entire Apple product line.

GEAR PATRO L TH E INNOVAT I O N I SSU E

p h o t o s c o u r t e s y o f at h e n s c o n s e r vat o i r e , n o m o s glashütte, audi, apple, mercedes benz, ressence, knoll

2001

2014 T Y PE 1 BY RES SENCE Ressence’s watches, a marriage of analog and digital technology, may be the stuff of the future, but their design philosophy is decidedly Bauhaus. With an emphasis on legibility and ergonomics (there is no conventional crown to disrupt the case), the Type 1 would have been recognizable to Herbert Bayer, designer of the “Bauhaus typography” in the late 1920s.

2013 AMG VIS ION GRAN TU RISMO BY MERCEDES-BENZ A concept developed for a famed video game franchise, the Vision AMG Gran Turismo may be a supercar, but it incorporates the Bauhaus design philosophy that pervades so many of Mercedes’s automobiles. Clean lines and a lack of ornamentation make for both a beautiful aesthetic and an aerodynamic vehicle.

2018 ALU MIN U M CHAIR BY MARC NEWSON This chair, made by famed Australian industrial designer Marc Newson, looks like a successor to a design from Ludwig Mies van der Rohe from 1930. Utilizing thoroughly modern materials in a form that completely eschews ornamentation, the Newson Aluminum Chair is a study in modern Bauhaus engineering.

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Non-Required Reading text by jack seemer photo by chandler bondurant

The Bauhaus has been the subject of thousands of books and papers, most tucked away in museums and libraries. Here are three you’ll want to keep out in the open. cloc k wise f rom bottom

GEAR PATRO L TH E INNOVAT I O N I SSU E

Bauhaus Originally published in 1990, Bauhaus has become something of a definitive reference guide to the movement. A new and more compact edition, made in collaboration with the Bauhaus Archive in Berlin, has been updated with hundreds of new documents, sketches and photographs. Publisher: Taschen Pages: 552 $20

Bauhaus: Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, Chicago Hans Maria Wingler’s 1969 book clocks in at nearly 700 pages, making it possibly the most comprehensive collection of documents ever assembled on the Bauhaus, and includes excerpts from books, speeches and newspaper and magazine articles from the era, plus private letters penned by luminaries like Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Publisher: The MIT Press Pages: 662 $100

Breuer Marcel Breuer (1902 - 1981) designed some of the world’s most famous chairs during his time at the Bauhaus, but his work transcended tubular steel furniture. This meaty monograph charts Breuer’s unique design language, with a heavy focus on his brutalist architecture from the mid- to late 20th century. Publisher: Phaidon Pages: 448 $150

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G E A R PAT R O L S T U D I O S / M O N T B L A N C

Onward & Upward

Montblanc pays homage to the spirit of exploration with new additions to its 1858 Collection. Tool watches have historically been particularly important to soldiers, mountaineers and explorers. Designed for adventure, the built-in utility in these timepieces has been essential for success — or even survival — in the most extreme conditions. Waterproofness, legibility, shock resistance and the ability to withstand severe weather and temperatures have been hallmarks of the tool watch since the early 20th century. In this spirit, Montblanc’s 1858 Collection, which pays homage to 160 years of the Minerva movement, was designed to meet the demands of today’s adventurers. “Tool watches have always been associated with exploration and adventure,” says Davide Cerrato, Managing Director of Montblanc Watch Division. “Precision and reliability, when mastering the flow of time and human performance, is of vital importance.” This year marks new editions to the 1858 Collection: two 40mm automatic watches (one in bronze with a green dial and one in

steel with a black dial), a 42mm dual-register chronograph with a bronze case and a green dial, and a new version of the collection’s hero, the Geosphere, also with a bronze case and green dial. The Geosphere boasts a compass bezel and a world time movement with two turning hemisphere globes as well as markers on each of the Seven Summits, a reference to Minerva’s legacy in mountaineering. All are water resistant to 100 meters — and, with performance in mind, the entirety of the 1858 product line goes through the “500 hours test,” a simulation of three weeks of normal wear. “The way in which we have structured the product line is very much linked to this history and heritage,” says Cerrato. “We have chosen in the Minerva museum military timepieces from the twenties and thirties and used them to inspire the design of 1858 — just as much as we enriched the design with elements coming from the outdoor world.”

S E E T H E C O L L E C T I O N I N A C T I O N AT G E A R . G P/ M O N T B L A N C 1 8 5 8

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Wish List 0 1 /0 6

Rivian R1S t e x t b y b r ya n c a m p b e l l photo by chase pellerin

Before Tesla, the idea of an upstart American carmaker was a dream, and the notion it would produce only luxurious battery-powered vehicles made it a joke. But that very business model has now proliferated, and Michigan-based EV manufacturer Rivian is already drawing auto show crowds with the futuristic blend of style and innovation in its R1S. The draw of Rivian’s SUV isn’t just the staggering power — though with 754 horsepower and 826 lb-ft of torque, it will pack considerably more ordinance than Lamborghini’s 641-hp, 627 lb-ft Urus crossover — or the claimed three-second sprint to 60 mph. It’s also the car’s clever packaging and groundbreaking utility. The R1S will have the 7,700-pound towing $72 ,500 +

capacity of a Dodge Durango while still delivering a max range of over 400 miles, well outlasting a Tesla Model 3 Long Range. And with no engine or driveshaft taking up space, the low, flat “skateboard” arrangement of batteries and motors frees up huge amounts of cargo and passenger room while simultaneously delivering a low center of gravity (the better to make use of all that staggering power). Rivian’s first vehicles won’t be on the road until 2020, and with a price starting at $72,500, the R1S won’t exactly come cheap. But park a Rivian next to a Range Rover or Mercedes G-Class and it will become immediately clear that you’re not just looking at a properly handsome truck, you’re looking at the future.

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Crossing the Line In finish-line sports like running and cycling where winners are chosen by marginal gains, good gear can overshadow talent and hard work. But at what point should revolutionary innovations be banned?

photo courtesy of professional sp ort

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popperphoto

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getty images

text by james stout

As Specialized’s Director of Integrated Technologies, Chris Yu spends a lot of time around fast bikes, which is half the reason I’ve flown to Morgan Hill, California, to speak with him. But what I really want to know is how he feels about running shoes. Yu’s title puts him in a unique position to weigh in on a debate that’s gripped the running world ever since Nike launched a shoe called the Vaporfly, which features a controversial curved carbon-fiber plate and extra-resilient foam that together help propel runners forward. When Kenyan distance runner Eliud Kipchoge broke the men’s marathon world record by more than a minute, in 2018, he was wearing a pair of Vaporflys. Some runners consider them an unfair advantage. I figured Yu, who contemplates aerodynamic advantages in cycling as part of his job, could help me dig into larger questions that border on the moral, like: at what point does gear become too good? Why do we regard some technological advancements as innovations, but others as cheating? Cycling’s governing body, the UCI, has its own answer. Back in the 1990s, before bike companies had wind tunnels for development purposes, an amateur cyclist named Graeme Obree built his own bikes using parts salvaged from old washing machines. His designs gave him a more aerodynamic body position, which he used to break the prestigious one-hour record on two separate occasions. Two of Obree’s riding positions were later banned from the sport, and the UCI now maintains a strict list of criteria, from tube thickness to saddle setback, for what constitutes a competitive bike. That list

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GEAR PATRO L TH E INNOVAT I O N I SSU E

France competitors were banned from racing on custom 3D printed handlebars made just for them, even though the use of any technology not commercially available has long been banned in the sport. One-off gear seems to cross a line for many people, Yu included. “Cracking down on the prototypes, that’s a good thing,” he says. “It’s a fine line of access, we’re talking huge volumes of cash for that stuff.” (Winners of a major marathon can take home upward of $200,000.) But still, there’s a follow-up question: who’s making the prototype, and does it matter? Even though Graeme Obree didn’t have a dedicated bike designer imagining wild new shapes for him, and even though he made his own bikes from old parts, they were nonetheless prototypes. One wonders if Vaporfly critics would feel differently had Kipchoge fashioned the shoe himself, from scratch.

In 2015, Specialized turned a blind eye to the UCI when building the aptly named fUCI (can you guess what the F stands for?). The prototype featured a giant rear wheel, acting as a flywheel, a motor in the bottom bracket and an aerodynamic fairing in the form of a motorcycle windscreen.

photos courtesy of specialized, nike

determines which innovations can and cannot leave Specialized’s California headquarters. Yu acknowledges that shoes like Nike’s Vaporfly make a difference, but says it’s “not really technically different to a new foam with a better spring rebound.” With bikes, though, a piece of equipment’s aerodynamic advantages grow the faster a rider goes, magnifying small advantages. Of course, in road racing, there are more advantageous ways to fight the effects of wind drag, which is why the sport is so much fun to watch: no amount of slick gear can overcome tactics, teamwork and timing. The issue of prototypes is more fraught. Though Nike sells the Vaporfly to the general public, the sneaker worn by Kipchoge during his record-setting run was not the same running shoe. It had a different midsole design and outsole, and it was very likely custom fitted for him. It was only this year that Tour de

Though Nike sells the Vaporfly to the general public, the sneaker worn by Kipchoge (pictured) during his record-setting run in Berlin was not the same running shoe. It had a different midsole design and outsole, and it was very likely custom fitted for him.

The original Nike Vaporfly featured a curved carbon-fiber plate and extraresilient foam called ZoomX.

Of course, top speed or fastest time or highest score is never the only consideration for a sport. All the various governing bodies consider aesthetic concerns, too. Downhill mountain bikers would be faster in spandex speed suits, but those were officially banned a few years ago, likely because nothing kills a gnarly vibe like dressing up like the Power Rangers. The ultra-light, ultra-expensive and technologically advanced bikes in the Tour de France aren’t necessarily the fastest bikes available — recumbent models, with their negligible drag coefficient, are quick as hell. Shame they look like human-powered Weinermobiles. It just goes to show that the rules that define any sport are, at some level, arbitrary, but no less necessary because of it. “You need some kind of rules if you want to define a sport,” Yu says. An incredible number of factors go into making an elite athlete; gear is just one example. There’s also discipline and hard work — genetics, too. In a competitive arena, someone has to determine what makes a bike and what makes a shoe, and where those lines stop. In the meantime, enjoy every competitive advantage offered to you until someone says you can’t, and if your bike has the correct tube thickness, non-structural fairings and properly sized tires, then, by all means, ride on.

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G E A R PAT R O L S T U D I O S / L E AT H E R M A N

One-Handed Wonder

Leatherman’s latest series of tools makes opening as simple as a flick of the wrist. Some 35 years ago, Tim Leatherman created the multi-tool in his garage, and his namesake brand has been defining the category ever since. With its most recent development, the new FREE series, evolves the device to make use as simple as possible. Cleverly employing magnets, these tools can be opened and closed using a single hand, removing the need for ubiquitous, cumbersome nail knicks. Those magnets don’t just make it easy to open — they also reduce wear to increase the lifespan of the product. First launching with the P-series, both the FREE P2 and FREE P4

anchor around a centralized set of pliers. The P2 boasts 19 tools in total, including wire cutters, spring-action scissors and four types of screwdrivers, while the more robust P4 has a whopping 21, including a saw and an additional serrated knife blade. Made of 420 stainless steel, these tools are lightweight and durable. And, like all Leatherman goods, they are guaranteed for 25 years. While the inherent utility has never been in doubt, the new easy-open access in the FREE series makes Leatherman’s handy multi-tools more accessible than ever.

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So, What Are You Wearing?

Wearables have come a long way from the simple fitness trackers of a decade ago. Not only are they lighter, smaller, more powerful and more capable, they’re finding new homes beyond the wrist. But are we really ready to wear so much tech? text by tucker bowe photos by chase pellerin

To understand how dramatically the wearables landscape has changed, just flash back to 2009, when Fitbit launched the original Tracker. The tiny clip-on device could report how many steps you’d taken, calories burned, your sleep patterns and — well, not much else, actually. Still, it was a revelation at the time. Now it seems quaint. The technology’s watershed moment came in 2015, with the unveiling of the Apple Watch, which showed not only that people were willing to shell out hundreds of dollars for a sophisticated wearable, but also that the balance of power in the category had shifted from fitness and outdoors manufacturers like Fitbit and Garmin to tech behemoths like Apple. Today, many of the major players in the wearables industry are smartphone makers. Apple, now with AirPods to sell alongside its Apple Watch, remains comfortably on top. “According to my estimates. Apple is selling

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approximately 45 million wearable devices per year, bringing in nearly $15 billion of revenue,” says Neil Cybart, an industry expert for Above Avalon, an Apple analysis website. “No other company comes close to these numbers.” But wearables in 2019 aren’t limited to the wrist, or the ears. As innovation continues apace, companies are starting to compete for other real estate on the body. Many of today’s wearables perform similar tasks — fitness tracking and health monitoring, notifications for phone, email and text, quick access to select apps — so design and marketing play a major role in a product’s success. But no matter where a wearable is designed to live, in order to survive it needs to strike a particular balance between innovation and everyday usability. That’s easier said than done, especially when you venture beyond the wrist. Here, the challenges facing a category trying to lure you in head to toe.

Wristband Wearables: Differentiate or Die The wrist remains the most coveted spot on the body for wearables makers, and for good reason. It’s where we’re most accustomed to wearing accessories (thank the prevalence of the wristwatch for that), easy to access but also easy to ignore. That makes it an ideal spot for a fitness tracker and also, now, for potentially life-saving activity-monitoring devices. In a sign of Apple’s ambition, the Series 4, the first Apple Watch to offer fall detection and heart screening, expands the potential market for a $400 health-screening smartwatch beyond fitness freaks into a massive (if decidedly less sexy) market: the elderly. Apple wants to make a tracker for everyone. Other brands, those without a billion or so consumers with an iPhone already in their pocket, have gone in the opposite direction with more specialized products. Garmin focuses on durable, purpose-built wearables designed to help specific athletes — cyclists, swimmers, hikers, golfers and others — train and perform better. The company’s lightweight Forerunner series of smartwatches, for example, is packed with features for the serious road racer, from lactate threshold and V02 max estimates to ground-contact time balance, stride length, vertical ratio and more. For hikers and trail runners, the company offers a still-more-targeted

wearable option with its rugged Fenix series. Even the OG name in fitness trackers, Fitbit, diversified after sales began to soften a few years ago. In addition to its signature Charge, currently in its third generation, the company now trumpets low-cost smartwatches, starting at just $160, a training app, a smart scale and the Ace 2, a tracker for kids aged six and up. But the market for wrist wearables has outgrown the arm. Garmin, Suunto and other smartwatch makers also manufacture chest straps, power meters, eyewear and more — a new product ecosystem offering more accurate data tracking (the wrist isn’t the best place to monitor heart rate, after all) for more dialed-in training. Even companies without a smartwatch, like Wahoo, are all-in on the accessories game. But no matter the product strategy, the goal is the same: to create products the consumer integrates into daily life. “We want our products to be increasingly indispensable to the customer, where literally the more they wear it, the value multiplies,” says Phil McClendon, who leads Garmin’s consumer product manager team. For this reason, when it comes to valuable wearable real estate, it’s going to be hard to beat the wrist: convenient, articulate and fashion-ready.

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Your Face: The Final Frontier Smart eyewear is a fascinating niche within wearables, defined in equal part by huge hype and public failure. Google Glass, Magic Leap, Microsoft HoloLens, Snap Spectacles: all busts. But that hasn’t stopped companies both new and established, including North, Vue, Vuzix and even Intel, from throwing their products against the wall — or, rather, the face. But even with all that attention, it’s clear neither companies nor consumers have nailed down exactly what the category should be. Entertainment? Gaming? Education? Or maybe some combination of all three? Whatever it is, the consensus is that it needs to wear easily. “Eyewear is a medical device and a fashion accessory,” says Jay Sales, dirctor of Advanced Technology at VSP Global, the largest healthcare company in the world. “You wear it on your face. So anything that is too clunky, too heavy or too difficult to wear will of course affect the adoption rate.” VSP Global recently released Level, a pair of eyeglasses much like any other but with activity-tracking functionality built into the temple via several sensors and a battery. For those who wear glasses every day, it makes the adoption of a health tracker essentially frictionless. The future of facial wearables seems to be devices that provide defined value and look very much like glasses — not like facial wearables. “Smart eyewear has slowly reached a maturation point from the days of explosive hope and hype to more of a focus on users’ true needs,” Sales says. The category is trying to outgrow the realm of tech geeks and early adopters, into the mainstream; as these devices become less dorky and conspicuous and more streamlined, focused and fashionable, that might finally become a possibility.

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Smart Clothing: Still an Awkward Fit Despite the attention of seasoned professionals, wearable technology just doesn’t hang right with the apparel industry. Perhaps the highest-profile example so far is the Project Jacquard collaboration, in 2017, between Levi’s and Google, which delivered a denim jacket with one sleeve woven with capacitive threads that can respond to simple smartphone commands — swipe up or down on the sleeve to play or pause music, or read a text message. It’s basically a $350 jean jacket with a smart sleeve that can survive up to 10 washes. There are other, perhaps more practical applications. Wearable X, in New York, makes smart yoga pants with haptic sensors that lightly vibrate, to encourage wearers to either keep moving or to hold a position; other, more granular feedback comes via the companion app. Ambiotex offers sports shirts woven with sensors to provide athletes with real-time data. Wearable tech hasn’t had the impact on the apparel industry that it’s had elsewhere, because the use case for most garments doesn’t lend itself to wearables’ purpose of adding value while becoming indispensable; civilian clothing, whether it’s a jacket, a shirt or a pair of shoes, isn’t worn every day, let alone 24-7. Without the ability to continually collect data and offer ever-more-specific feedback, smart clothing will always face limited utility (the possible exception: uniforms of all types). It’s hard to say right now whether the next few years will unveil the innovations that overcome those obstacles or if the category will simply up and die. When it comes to the potential for wearables, it may be that the eyes are truly bigger than the torso.

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Wish List 02 /0 6

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Dyson V11 Torque Drive text by will price photo by chase pellerin

Dyson has become the Apple of the vacuum world, with the company’s new releases (and notable absences) acting as a de facto compass for the entire industry. But when the British housewares manufacturer debuted a high-tech cordless vacuum equipped with an LCD screen, the direction was anything but clear. Do vacuums really need digital displays? No, obviously, they do not. But the screen is more than just a dust-busting novelty. It’s there for three reasons: to monitor and display battery levels; allow you to toggle between Eco, Auto or Boost modes; and alert you to any blockages or maintenance needs. Whether that’s worth a $100 price bump is a personal choice, but for cordless-vacuum users prone to running out of battery life, a countdown timer makes the V11’s 60-minute run time much easier to manage. Plus, the screen wasn’t the only upgrade; Dyson also bolstered its top-of-the-line offering with incremental spec gains — more suction, more battery life, improved air filtration and a slightly quieter motor. $70 0

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Active Duty Every great product has a story to tell. For these ubiquitous inventions, it starts on the battlefield.

te x t by ta n n e r b o w d e n tucker bowe b r ya n c a m p b e l l oren hartov will price jack seemer john zientek photos by chase pellerin

Aviators Dive Watches GPS Active Insulation Instant Coffee Drones Jeeps

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Aviator Sunglasses Salt Optics Francisco Sunglasses, $460

After World War I, the Army Air Corps contracted Bausch and Lomb to create sunglasses that helped mitigate eye strain in fighter pilots at high altitudes. And whether or not you’ve seen an original pair, released in 1936, you’re certainly familiar with the shape: thin metal frames and convex, tear-drop lenses that block a significant amount of incoming light. Originally called “Anti-Glares,” the style was rebranded “Ray-Ban” (sound familiar?) after release to the public in 1937. The classic aviator design has since been widely co-opted for everyday use, but the style is still in use by military pilots. Most brands offer civilian consumers nothing more than an array of lens color options, but the Francisco aviators by Southern California eyewear brand Salt Optics feature a titanium frame and temples, and lightweight, scratchand abrasion-resistant polarized lenses. They’re significantly lighter than traditional models but offer better eye protection. Those upgrades are reflected in the price but not the style; more than eight decades on from the original Bausch and Lomb models, the military-inspired design remains essentially unchanged. — JZ

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Dive Watches Panerai Radiomir California PAM00424, $8,000

The 1920s saw several developments to water-resistant watch design, but it wasn’t until the following decade, in 1936, that a prototype timepiece presaging the modern dive watch was unveiled. That watch, commissioned by the Royal Italian Navy from Panerai, in Florence, was dubbed the Radiomir, and it sported several features that are now hallmarks of the dive-watch genre: a large, legible dial; a robust case; and a strap long enough to fit over a wetsuit. The Radiomir also featured a new, radium-based compound for the hands, and indices that gave off a constant glow and allowed the time to be read underwater. (Modern dive watches feature similarly luminous but less radioactive materials.) In 1938, Panerai updated the Radomir with a new dial and reinforced wire lugs; the watch was refreshed again, in 1940, with integrated lugs. Though neither iteration featured a rotating bezel like those first seen on Rolex Submariners of the 1950s — and now inextricably linked with the dive-watch style — they paved the way for timepieces that would accompany civilian scuba divers to the world’s great reefs and Wall Street CEOs to the world’s great steakhouses. This modern version, the 47mm Panerai Radiomir California, with the original’s gemlike contour and bold simplicity, is equally at home at both. — OH

GPS Wahoo Fitness Elemnt Roam GPS Bike Computer, $380

The world runs on GPS. It’s in our cars, in our pockets. Tens of millions of computers all over the world use GPS to determine the time. But despite its ubiquity, GPS is a shockingly recent invention: the first commercial model didn’t hit the market until after mobile phones, CDs and Nintendo. Back in the early Seventies, the U.S. Department of Defense was looking for a reliable means of electronic navigation. The DoD started using satellites to triangulate the location of handheld receivers — at the time, these weighed around 35 pounds apiece — but it wasn’t until almost two decades later, in 1989, that the world got its first consumer GPS receiver: the Magellan NAV 1000, which cost

$3,000, weighed 1.5 pounds and required six AA batteries to run for just a few hours. Times have changed, fast. The U.S. Air Force currently operates 31 satellites orbiting the Earth at 8,700 mph, and receivers now weigh less than a hockey puck. Take the new Elemnt Roam, from Wahoo Fitness, a relatively affordable and incredibly lightweight bike computer (just 3.3 ounces) capable of setting routes, notifying riders when they’ve gone off course and providing expedited turn-by-turn directions home. And even with its 2.7-inch color Gorilla Glass display, the device will last 17 hours between charges. In our quest to know exactly how far we’ve gone, we’ve come a long way indeed. — JS

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Active Insulation Houdini Wisp Jacket, $320

In the early part of this decade, the U.S. military submitted a development brief for a new type of insulation: as warm as down but highly durable, wind-resistant and quick drying. Also, it had to be more breathable than any known insulation so that soldiers on the move wouldn’t have to fuss with dumping layers. In 2013, materials manufacturer Polartec unveiled Alpha, a fluffy insulation that checked every box. Working with designers at Patagonia, Polartec built Alpha into the Protective Combat Uniform Level 3A Jacket, a layer that became standard issue for every active Special Operations Forces operator. “Active insulation” — the term Polartec coined to describe Alpha, and how we categorize the stuff today — caught on immediately among outdoorsy types, who coveted it for vigorous

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cold-weather pursuits like hiking and ski touring. Patagonia led the movement with its Nano Air jacket, a close facsimile of the military model (except in bright colors instead of camo), and pretty much every company with a synthetic puffy jacket in its lookbook followed suit. Polartec’s newest take on active insulation is Alpha Direct, an even fluffier and more durable material that calls to mind Grandma’s hand-knit sweaters, and integrates into jackets, like the Wisp from Swedish outdoor company Houdini, without the need for a liner. Alpha Direct is warmer, lighter and better at wicking body moisture than first-gen Alpha, so high-octane athletes (tactical and otherwise) can focus on more rigorous missions, and not their clothes. — TB

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Instant Coffee Voila Instant Coffee, $16

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Before the U.S. got into WWI, three American companies produced a total of 6,000 pounds of instant coffee per year. After America entered the conflict, General Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Forces on the Western Front, ordered production be ramped up — by an additional 20,000 pounds. The instant coffee doled out to GIs was nostalgia-inducing and inexpensive, but it was invaluable for another reason: chemical warfare. Speaking to a coffee trade publication after the war, a U.S. War Department representative noted that rolling kitchens weren’t considered safe after Germany’s use of mustard gas; thus, tiny packets of pre-rationed, water-soluble coffee that could be made in

a trench with little or no heat became the chief delivery method for caffeine (and morale) at the front. Notable for an above-average caffeine content, lower sugar levels and lower quality standards, old-school instant was typically made with robusta beans. Most traditional methods of manufacture involved the superheating of already-brewed coffee, evaporating the water and leaving only dried crystals. Kickstarted in 2016, Voila is an instant coffee for the new era. Produced with specialty-grade beans that are ground, batch-brewed and frozen at ideal extraction temperature, it has the nose and taste you’d expect from a high-quality coffee, anywhere, anytime, in an instant. — WP

Drones DJI Mavic 2 Pro, $1,499

The first pilotless winged aircraft was developed in 1918, by British forces looking to destroy German Zeppelins, though it was never put to use. During WWII, the Germans created the “Fritz X,” a remote-controlled bomb — and the first proper military drone — to attack warships. Both examples leveraged radio-controlled technology similar to what’s used in today’s drones. Drone use for combat surveillance didn’t take off until the ‘80s and wasn’t a widespread military tool — including for lethal purposes — until after 9/11, and it was only in 2006 that the FAA issued the first drone permits for civilian and commercial use. Parrot created the first quadcopter in 2010, after which

manufacturers like DJI started adding advanced cameras and technologies like subject tracking and object avoidance. The drone business, a $40 million industry in 2012, is worth well over a billion dollars today. Drones are popular for racing, filmmaking, oil and mineral surveillance, real estate photography and disaster relief — but the technology has most come into its own with aerial photography. The DJI Mavic 2 Pro, for example, features a Hasselblad-designed camera that shoots incredibly detailed photos and videos, with DSLR-levels of control even while hundreds of feet in the air. Consider it your weapon of choice for superb shots from on high. — TB

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2020 Jeep Gladiator, $33,545+

Sales don’t lie: the SUV is now the most popular passenger vehicle sold around the world. Drivers love them for their ample cabin and cargo space and the high-riding sense of invincibility. But while the sport utility vehicle is resurgently popular, its origins go back several decades to a go-anywhere people-carrier developed for use during World War II and still in production in various guises today: the Jeep. In 1940, the U.S. Army gave specific instructions to companies vying to produce its new reconnaissance vehicle: the prototype had to be a tough, fourwheel-drive machine with at least 600 pounds of payload capacity, at least 6.25 inches of ground clearance and a minimum of 85 lb-ft of torque from an engine that could run for long periods at low speeds without overheating. Willys-Overland won the contract but couldn’t build the trucks fast enough on its own, so many examples of the

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original Jeep — known at the time as “U.S. Army Truck, 1⁄4-ton, 4×4, Command Reconnaissance” — were actually produced by Ford. (The Jeep brand is currently owned by rival Fiat Chrysler Automobiles). Over 700,000 Jeeps were produced during the war, for every branch of the U.S. military as well as Allied forces from Australia, Canada, Great Britain and New Zealand. After VE Day, the greater public was turned on to the versatile recon vehicle. AMC made the first civilian version — a straight line can be drawn from that truck to the modern Jeep brand — and the basic idea has spawned everything from the Ford Bronco to the Toyota Land Cruiser. So consider that, no matter what SUV you’re eyeing in any part of the world, the basic DNA traces back to the original Willys Jeep. It gives another dimension to the idea of a “go-everywhere” vehicle. — BC

photo courtesy of jeep

Jeeps

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G E A R PAT R O L S T U D I O S / D A N N E R

Light & Mighty Built for Adventure, Danner’s Trail 2650 is the brand’s lightest hiker to date — a marriage of comfort, support and breathability. For more than 80 years, Danner’s name has been synonymous with tough footwear. Since building its foundation in the logging industry, the brand has evolved to become a trusted source for hikers everywhere. Born from that same time-honored commitment to quality and durability comes the Trail 2650. Available in both men’s and women’s styles, it’s Danner’s lightest hiker to date. Made using ultra-lightweight EVA foam midsoles, one pair weighs a mere 24 ounces. Agile and airy, they are also mighty. Those super-light midsoles are formed around

TPU shanks and coupled with Vibram’s unparalleled outsoles, equipped with Megagrip and deep, multidirectional lugs. This combination makes Danner’s newest hiker able to tackle a variety of terrains with ease. But beyond offering equal grip to a traditional boot, the Trail 2650 is also highly breathable thanks to a mesh liner and perforations on the upper. An even greater complement: Danner took the traditionally heavy internal heel counter and moved it to the exterior with its EXO Heel System, making the feel softer yet highly secure. It’s featherweight, but the evolved Trail 2650 packs a punch.

S E E H O W T H E T R A I L 2 6 5 0 FA R E S I N T H E W I L D AT G E A R . G P/ D A N N E R 2 6 5 0

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Lotuff Leather Raw “Rasa” Day Satchel These days, New England is more famous for its sports teams and lobster rolls than local leatherwork, but Lindy McDonough, creative director of Lotuff Leather, is working to change that. Together with a team of creatives — many are graduates of the famed Rhode Island School of Design — McDonough has helped set a new bar for premium American-made leather bags and accessories from Lotuff’s Providence, RI-based studio. $2 ,0 0 0

text by john zientek photo by chase pellerin

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Take the Raw “Rasa” Satchel, a roomy travel bag made from uncorrected vegetable-tanned leather. It features a flap closure, doublestitched nesting handles, a double-layer leather bottom and solid-brass hardware. And because the bags are hand-burnished, no two are exactly the same. Each handmade bag is a unique embodiment of craftsmanship and the artist’s touch.

For us, innovation must always serve function. For example, raising our bezel by 2 mm has improved the grip. Just a little. When you care about watches, just a little matters a lot.

Aquis Date Relief

The Race to Save Coffee

Demand is booming as suitable farmland disappears, leading to a terrifying question: Even if coffee is around in 20 years, will you be able to afford a cup? text by will price i l l u s t r at i o n s b y k a i l a h o g awa

Lucile Toniutti, a molecular coffee breeder with the nonprofit organization World Coffee Research (WCR), wants you to know the cup of single-origin you ordered this morning might not be on the menu tomorrow. “It’s difficult to talk about sometimes with coffee drinkers, you know,” Toniutti says. Last year, more coffee was harvested than ever before in history. Traditionally tea-drinking nations, like China and Japan, now also have booming coffee cultures. Some projections indicate global coffee demand could still double by 2050. But by the same year, thanks to rising global temperatures, roughly half of the Earth’s land suitable coffee-growing will no longer be viable for coffee farming. In other words, to keep pace with demand, producers will need to grow twice the coffee with half the space. “We’re going to have less coffee, higher prices and coffee that is ... lower on the quality scale,” said Dr. Tim Schilling, WCR’s founder, in an interview with a nonprofit called Crop Trust. “If everybody is okay with the fact that we are going to be paying $10 to $15 a cup for crappy coffee in thirty years, that’s fine.”

But there’s hope. It comes in the form of a lab-grown variety of coffee called the F1 hybrid. Unlike crop staples like rice, of which there are more than 500,000 known varieties, barely 125 different varieties of the coffee plant have been found. Of those, we only drink two. This has led to what can be described as a “genetic bottleneck,” in that the plant’s gene pool is too shallow to effectively adapt to the world changing around it. “Without a big gene pool, every change in an ecosystem has the chance to cripple the plant. Basically, it’s extremely fragile,” Toniutti says. F1 hybrids possess what she calls “hybrid vigor.” The concept of the F1 hybrid isn’t new. It was conceived in the late 1990s, and the first varieties were planted in the early 2000s, albeit with less-advanced methodologies and scientific instruments. Today, WCR is able to identify specific strings of genetic and molecular code that indicate disease resistance, crop yield, high cup quality and more, helping them to select the best two parents with the most biologically diverse DNA set. The result is the modern

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F1, which grows faster, bears fruit a year earlier and is less susceptible to disease. But hybrid breeding isn’t easy, or cheap. The coffeea plant is a self-pollenizer, meaning it has both male and female reproductive organs. Every seedling offspring is inbred, which precludes them from being true F1 hybrids. “They carry recessive and dominant traits from past generations,” Toniutti says, “this dulls the strengths of the F1.” For now, the only way to produce F1s is through cloning and in vitro fertilization. Both methods are expensive to perform, which means the plants command a high price. According to George Howell, a longtime flag bearer for small coffee farmers, the math doesn’t add up. “The cost is multiple times higher than just taking a usual seed to plant,” Howell says.

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“From a farmer’s perspective, that expense is too high to justify. The question becomes, can it be made affordable, and is it going to be one of those monopolistic things where we’re always paying a fortune for it?” So what happens if people like Toniutti can’t crack the code? Hannah Neuschwander, Toniutti’s colleague at the WCR, suggests looking to El Salvador, which as recently as 2012 was among the brightest and most well-supported coffee origins in the world. Then political turmoil, gang violence, drought and a rust leaf outbreak struck the country in quick succession. Today, El Salvador produces 70 percent less coffee. “That’s the risk if we can’t get these hybrids out,” Neuschwander says. “Origins will start dropping like flies, and the wealth of producing nations will vanish.”

There’s hope, and it comes in the form of a lab-grown variety of coffee called the F1 hybrid.

Should You Buy a Tesla? Elon Musk’s company is the hottest brand in cars. But is a Tesla right for you and your lifestyle? We’re glad you asked. text by will sabel courtney

SPEED YES SELF DRIVING

INFOTAINMENT

You’re gonna buy it anyway, huh?

ELON IS A GOD

Uh, Teslas can’t actually drive themselves yet.* *While many companies have made lofty promises about self-driving cars, experts say the technology is still many years away from commercial use.

Which of these is most important to you?

YES

START

Okay, why do you want a Tesla?

Do you have a garage? I LIKE NEW TECH

HERE

GREEN IS GOOD

YES, TESLA

WAIT, OTHER PEOPLE MAKE GOOD EVS?

> 200 MILES

Have you considered something else?

How far do you normally drive?

< 200 MILES

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The Audi E-tron, Jaguar I-Pace, and Nissan Leaf Plus all go 200-plus miles on a charge. And there are many more EVs on the way.

Have you considered other high-performance sedans or SUVs?

NO, DO THEY MAKE ELECTRIC VERSIONS OF THEM?

YES!

YES

Are you okay with planning trips around Supercharger stations?* *Tesla has 1,441 highspeed charging stations, called “Superchargers,” across the U.S., but they’re generally located near major highways and in cities.

YES

NO.

Is it cold where you live?* *Cold weather lowers EV battery capacity. If you can’t plug in overnight to keep the battery warm, you risk losing a ton of range.

T ES L A RIVA LS WORTH THE WAI T

While Tesla still is considered the leader when it comes to EVs, any of these three could have what it takes to knock the California carmaker from the top spot. BMW INEXT

P OL ESTAR 2

P ORSC HE TAYCA N

BMW’s still playing its cards close to the vest with this oddly-named car, only showing camouflaged examples and abstract concept versions. But the carmaker has a few tidbits to reveal: a crossover, arriving in 2021, with a range of up to 372 miles; a new generation electric powertrain; and SAE Level 3 autonomous driving capabilities that will allow the car to drive itself under select conditions.

While Polestar’s first car was a limited run plug-in hybrid coupe that cost $155,000, the Volvo spinoff’s second vehicle is a clear attempt to tackle Tesla’s small sedan head-on. The 78-kWh battery lets it travel 275 miles on a charge, while dual motors combine for 408 horsepower. The well-equipped launch edition will cost $63,000 — right in line with a loaded Model 3. It’s expected to enter production in 2020.

The Taycan might not be on sale yet, but there’s enough information to make Tesla fans nervous. Porsche says it zips from 0 to 62 mph in “significantly less than 3.5 seconds”. An 800-volt charging system gives it an edge over Tesla’s best-in-class Superchargers, pumping 50 to 60 miles of range into the car in just four minutes. Also, world-famous rally driver Walter Röhrl says he’s never felt performance like the Taycan’s. Look for it later this year.

Instead of: Tesla Model X

Instead of: Tesla Model 3

Instead of: Tesla Model S

WAIT...

Wish List 04 /0 6

Patek Philippe 5235/50R Regulator Regulator clocks, which separate hours, minutes and seconds into different displays, came about in the 18th century as highly accurate machines that people used for reference when adjusting other timepieces. Since then, the regulator display has made its way onto a handful of wristwatches, though more as a horological flex than for any practical purpose. Our favorite new example is Patek Philippe’s 5235/50R, $51 , 825

text by oren hartov photo by chase pellerin

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introduced at Baselworld 2019. Patek updated an existing reference, 5235G, with a rose-gold case and two-tone dial — but, being one of the world’s preeminent luxury watchmakers, purposefully complicated matters by combining the regulator display with an annual calendar. It’s an elegant execution that makes a bygone innovation feel surprising and thoroughly modern.

Visit & shop Montblanc.com

THE NEW FRAGRANCE FOR MEN

AVAILABLE AT MACYâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S & MACYS.COM

THE REVIEW

Samsung Galaxy Fold

Under rigorous real-world scrutiny, the ingeniousbut-flawed Galaxy Fold bends but does not break.

text by tucker bowe photos by chase pellerin

The Galaxy Fold made me nostalgic. Not because a folding phone is old-fashioned, but because it’s a novel design at a time when smartphones have become anything but, typically nothing more than the same functionalities ported to ever-thinner slabs of screen. But every time I pulled the Fold from my pocket on the subway and unfolded the already huge, bright screen to the size of a small tablet, I noticed more than a few double-takes. It’s been years since a new smartphone has been able to turn heads. But if the Fold’s defining feature is an eye-popper, it’s also been a mitigated disaster. You’ve likely read the story: As soon as the $1,980 smartphone made its way into the world, its signature 7.3-inch folding screen, well, broke — either from over-eager prodding, the stresses of daily use or both. Those problems, though, aren’t universal; my Fold showed no signs of coming undone during the week I lived, commuted

and worked with it. Nonetheless, Samsung recalled all review loaners early, pushed back the release date and offered refunds to pre-orderers. (Fortunately, it wasn’t literally dangerous, as with the company’s exploding Note 7, and Samsung claims it can fix the screen issues in time for summer release.) Screen snafu or no, the Fold was always going to be a niche product. A foldable smartphone isn’t something everyone needs, or can afford. But the form factor has its appeal among inveterate multitaskers salivating at that truckload of RAM — and the expansive screen that lets you run three apps at once — as well as early adopters who want a conversation piece in their pocket. The novelty is appealing. Yes, the Fold sports all the best features from Samsung’s flagship S10, but any amount of capability bows to the Fold’s originality. There’s never been a phone quite like this; my hands were drawn to playing with it, exploring the

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phone’s sheer usability, like being able to watch YouTube videos while perusing my Gmail inbox and Spotify playlist. But ultimate multitasking potential was limited by drawbacks, like only supporting one audio stream at a time. But that giant, beautiful OLED screen is meant for more than just multitasking. The Fold is essentially a tablet for your pocket: watching Game of Thrones was certainly an upgrade from viewing on an iPhone XS. And with over seven inches on which to play, the ever-more impressive roster of mobile games, especially battle royales like PUBG and Fortnite, have more room to unfold, with more space for on-screen controls that could give a (small) competitive advantage to players better than myself.

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Plus, the signature crease comes in handy when reading anything actually shaped like a book. The Fold’s front screen is a bit lackluster compared to the full article, its main purpose seemingly to goad you into opening the full screen. But common apps like Gmail and Google Maps seamlessly jump from the front to the main screen when you unfold — wandering my way through Manhattan I was able to keep tabs on my general location with a glance at the front, while unfolding when necessary for greater context. These features might seem like small change relative to the Fold’s exorbitant price, and for the most part that’s true — especially because the phone’s far from perfect.

Screen snafu or no, the Fold was always going to be a niche product.

THE FUTURE OF BUYING AND SELLING WATCHES STOCKX .COM/ WATCHES

StockX is an independent marketplace and is not affiliated with any watch brand, nor is an authorized dealer. All brand and model names are the trademark of their respective owners.

The crease down the center is still visible under some light, and it’s roughly twice the thickness of every other smartphone, which makes it a pain to slide into your pocket. Also, I was never really able to open the Fold one-handed; the magnets were too strong. Despite the kinks and the price, my time with the Fold convinced me that the premise of a folding phone remains sound. Shrinking a tablet-sized screen down to smartphone dimensions and allowing it to fit in your pocket is extremely cool. That’s why everyone is trying to get it right. Huawei’s Mate X, also scheduled for release this summer (trade wars notwithstanding), sports its main screen outside a clamshell fold, rather

than inside; it’s an interesting alternative, but given the fragility of Samsung’s folding screen you’d be right to be nervous about shelling out for one just yet. There’s still a lot of experimenting to be done. iPhone-level sales were never in the cards for the Galaxy Fold, even before the screen issues. It’s too expensive, and its flagship tricks aren’t quite life-changing enough to justify the price tag. But it looks and feels like a radical departure from the endless parade of identical smartphones. That’s key: the Fold itself might have stumbled, but the concept has promise. It’s just a question of who will execute it best.

Samsung Galaxy Fold Processor: Snapdragon 855 Rear Cameras: 12-megapixel wide-angle (f/1.5 to f/2.4); 12-MP telephoto (f/2.4); 16-MP ultra-wide (f/2.2) Front Camera: 10-megapixel selfie (f/2.2) Weight: 9.48 ounces Battery: 4,380 mAh Storage: 512GB $1,980

Samsung wants you to take advantage of the Fold’s 7.3inch display, which is primed for multitasking. It allows you to have not one, not two, but three apps open, all at once.

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Despite the kinks and price of the Fold, the premise of a folding phone remains sound.

Thousands of new products pass through the Gear Patrol office every year. Here’s a quick look at the gear our team’s running through the wringer. 75

S P ECIA L IZ E D S-WO R KS EXOS

L E ATHE RM A N F R EE P2

PA N DO M OTO M 65 CAMO BL ACK

GA RM IN M A RQ AVI ATO R

HE L M M

B E ATS BY DRE P OWER BEATS PRO

T RA EGE R IRO N WO O D

DO GF IS H HE A D C RAFT BR EWED ALES SLI GH T LY M IGHTY

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text by ta n n e r b o w d e n tucker bowe josh condon j . d . d i g i o va n n i justin fenner andy frakes zen love will price

photos by chandler bondurant henry phillips

Excellent fit around the heel cup. Well-ventilated for riding in hot weather.

Hard to put on. The upper lacks substance to balance the sole’s stiffness.

Specialized used titanium, nylon, carbon fiber and Dyneema, a superlight fiber that’s 15 times stronger than steel, to create the lightest cycling shoes ever put into production. Each S-Works Exos shoe weighs a mere 150 grams (that’s less than an iPhone X) and finds its form with a non-stretch upper and single Boa dial. To be clear: these $500 shoes are not the best choice for weekend rides to the coffee shop; the S-Works Exos were built for speed, not comfort, and casual riders can find plenty of quality alternatives for far less. But hardened cyclists used to spending cash to trim precious grams will see a shoe with the performance bona fides to match the price. — AF

$500, specialized.com

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The clever integration of magnets allows for easy one-handed use with all 19 tools.

Pliers aren’t spring-loaded.

The Free P2 can be summed up simply: it’s a Leatherman Wave, with magnets. That’s not as gimmicky as it sounds. The magnetic construction allows DIYers to brandish the pliers open like a butterfly knife, locking into grip mode with a satisfying click. The Free P2 is made of stainless steel, weighs just 7.6 ounces and has 18 other tools — including four screwdrivers, a can opener, knife, scissors, an awl and wire strippers — all of which swivel open with tiny nubs (instead of those annoying fingernail nicks) and snap securely into place. —TB

$120, leatherman.com

Stylish fit. Solid construction and huge pockets. Remarkably comfortable.

Could use more integrated ventilation and high-visibility materials.

Pando Moto, out of Lithuania, integrates high-tech materials and lightweight safety components into stylishly functional motorcycle gear. The new M65 Camo Black jacket is made from a mix of midweight jacquard fabric and abrasion-resistant, stronger-than-steel Dyneema; it’s a comfortable three-season option despite only minor ventilation (though the black-on-black colorway gets hot in direct sunlight). It has CE-approved Knox soft armor at the shoulders and elbows, cavernous pockets at the hips and chest (plus an interior document pocket) and corduroy detailing at the cuffs and collar — a nice contrast to the slightly glossy material. Everything on the jacket snaps or Velcros shut. The removable padding is so well incorporated it’s almost impossible to tell it’s there, on or off the bike. Still, even a few touches of hi-viz would help this blacked-out field jacket feel safer at night. — JC

$389, pandomoto.com

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Unique and thoughtful features for real-world enthusiasts.

Titanium scuffs easily. The negative display is less legible than a positive one. Pricey.

Built to feel more like a traditional watch than a wearable, the Marq Aviator proves smartwatches can have both technology and personality. It harnesses Garmin’s navigation expertise to expand the capability of a pilot’s watch; features include a worldwide aeronautical database, weather radar, time-to-destination tracking and an emergency button that finds the fastest route to the nearest airport. You can even choose a digital Horizontal Situation Indicator display, like you’d find in a plane’s cockpit, with compass readings, current flight track, and time to waypoint readings. It takes a chunky case to house all this tech, and the 46mm-wide by 14.7mm-thick case is large indeed, but it’s surprisingly wearable thanks to its lightweight titanium construction. Garmin’s Marq collection offers similarly specialized smartwatches for fitness, hiking, boating and driving enthusiasts, each with its own set of high-tech, purposeful features. — ZL

$1,950, garmin.com

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Sulfate-, paraben- and triclosan-free. Antiperspirant formula indeed works.

The canister is bigger than your average drugstore deodorant, reducing its travel appeal.

Helmm is one of a handful of grooming brands trying to help guys use fewer plastics. To that eco-friendly end, it sells a refillable nickel-plated zinc canister covered in Horween leather that feels far more luxe than anything you’ll find at the drugstore. Sign up for regular deliveries of recyclable cartridges, filled with one of four scents and two formulas (antiperspirant or deodorant), and the company estimates you’ll reduce your deodorant-specific plastic consumption by 60 percent. The products have a great texture and indeed combat sweat and odor as well as your current trusted brand. But with all the zinc mining, leather tanning and cardboard shipping boxes necessary to put the product in your hands, one has to wonder whether it’s any more eco-friendly than recycling an empty Speed Stick. — JF

$28+, helmm.com

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Sears and smokes effectively. Rubber wheels make it easy to roll around.

Temperature maxes out around 500. Requires a nearby outlet or a lengthy extension cord.

Traeger’s Ironwood line furthers the promise of pellet grills: to improve convenience without sacrificing flavor. The new feature here is something the company calls WiFire, which lets you control the grill via Traeger’s smartphone app, and it works whether you’re connected to the local Wi-Fi or not. The Ironwood also comes with an improved pellet-pushing drivetrain that’s more powerful and precise; it can hit meat-smoking temps (225 to 250 degrees Fahrenheit) in seven or eight minutes — and stay there. As with all pellet grills, though, max-temperature issues eventually arise. If the Ironwood could climb higher than 500 degrees Fahrenheit, enough to put a proper crust on steaks and chops, it add undisputed performance to pinpoint control. — WP

$1,200, traegergrills.com

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Only 95 calories and 3.6 grams of carbohydrates. Tastes like a real IPA.

Bitter aftertaste, limited distribution until fall 2019.

Craft beer has become so big that something called “craft light beer” is considered a bona fide category, rather than a punchline. The surprising thing is, it ain’t half bad — at least not when it tastes like this nice IPA from Dogfish Head. Slightly Mighty clocks in at just 95 calories and owes its skinny stature to monk fruit extract, an artificial sweetener, like stevia, used by the brewery to balance out a reduced malt bill. The beer pours amber-brown and carries classic IPA notes of citrus and pine. It won’t be the tastiest thing you drink this summer, but it might be the easiest on the waistline. — JD

Pricing varies by state, dogfish.com

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Comfortable. Sweat-resistant design stays secure in the ear. Extremely long battery life.

Too-large carrying case. No wireless charging.

Apple doesn’t make sweat-resistant AirPods but it does own Beats by Dre, which recently released Powerbeats Pro. The fourth installment in the Powerbeats lineup is first to get the true wireless treatment, and it gets the best tech from Apple’s second-generation AirPods — an H1 chip that allows hands-free Siri access and faster switching between devices — while delivering a sporty, sweat-resistant design and longer battery life — nine hours — not to mention a more dynamic soundstage. The two biggest knocks on the ear buds cancel each other out, almost. The lack of wireless charging feels like an oversight and the carrying case is bigger than pocket size. But that extra-large case also provides an incredible 24 total hours of juice, so it’s much easier to forgive the bulk. And mid-stride there’s no doubt: these are the best workout headphones ever made. — TB

$250, beatsbydre.com

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Wish List 05/0 6

Steinway & Sons Spirio | r text by jack seemer photo by chase pellerin

Hi-fi is a word used to describe things like turntables and receivers, not pianos. But when you consider the definition — “a piece of electronic equipment for reproducing sound in a clear and accurate way” — it’s the perfect descriptor for Steinway & Sons’ self-playing Spirio series. Steinway & Sons launched Spirio in 2015 to address the problem with most self-playing pianos: lack of feeling. While self-players can hit the right notes for a rendition of Chopin’s Piano Sonata No. 3, even the good ones lack the sonic depth and texture listeners would enjoy from a live performance. A Steinway Spirio, meanwhile, can replicate recorded keystrokes with an accuracy of 1,000 velocity gradations — that’s highly technical jargon for performances that are “utterly indistinguishable from a live recording,” according to the company. Earlier this year, Steinway introduced the Spirio | r, $152 ,00 0 +

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which ups the ante with live-performance capture and playback. Seasoned pianists can edit their recordings on an iPad app, with the option to alter note dynamics and duration — or even delete certain notes altogether — and then review the new recording as the Spirio | r plays it back flawlessly, note for note. If a $150K self-playing piano sounds like a gimmick, maybe this will change your tune: the Spirio adds a layer of technological wizardry to what is already a world-class instrument in its own right, from a 166-year-old brand whose name is synonymous with “piano.” Each Spirio takes some 300 craftsmen around 11 months of meticulous construction to build at the company’s New York facility; the result is not just a Steinway, but a Steinway capable of reproducing the beauty, power and emotion of a Lang Lang performance at Carnegie Hall, anywhere, anytime.

G E A R PAT R O L S T U D I O S / T E D B A K E R

All-Day Fresh No matter what may come, a suit that’s wrinkle-free, water resistant and devoid of stains is the one to have. Ted Baker first introduced its pioneering Endurance Collection in 1999. In this latest generation, the line of suits ticks every box for the modern man on the move. The entire collection is built to withstand stains, creases and water. And as expected with Ted Baker’s brand DNA, there is no lack of attention to detail: The jackets are equipped with breathable mesh panels inside and rubber tabs on the inner pockets, as well as printed linings and branded lapel pins. While the Super 100’s fabric is technical enough to get you through a modern day on the go, the cut is a classic, slim-fit, so any item from this tailored collection will last through the seasons.

C REAS E RECOV ERY

WATER R EPEL L EN CY

STAIN RES ISTANC E

It rains more than 150 days per year on average in the UK, which is just one reason why London-based Ted Baker can be trusted to integrate water repellency into its suiting fabrics. Droplets of water bead off in a flash, whether you’ve spilled some or you’ve gotten unexpectedly caught in the rain. It’s also quick drying, and unlike many other weatherproofed materials, the fabric is naturally breathable to keep you feeling comfortable throughout both even-keeled and humid days.

There are numerous reasons why crease recovery is something you want in a suit fabric. Maybe you have to run around all day to client meetings. Perhaps you constantly have to live out of a suitcase. You might cycle to work. Or, like many of us, you are in and out of a chair for most of the day at the office. Whatever your lifestyle is, wrinkles are not a good look. The Endurance Collection’s use of Super 100’s natural stretch yarns ensures that with every stretch and pull the suit fabric will always bounce back into shape and look as sharp as it did in the a.m.

Of course, you want to avoid spills and stains at all costs any day of the week, and with suiting, that desire is even greater. Despite it all, things happen. Thankfully, to that end, Ted Baker uses a special treatment on its unique, merino wool fabric for the Endurance Collection, making these suits highly resistant to stains. There’s no need to lose your manners, but it is one less thing to worry about while in transit with your morning coffee or during a client lunch.

PERFORJ ENDURANCE PERFORMANCE WOOL SUIT JACKET $499 PERFORT ENDURANCE PERFORMANCE WOOL SUIT TROUSERS $239 O T TA S AT I N E F F E C T C O T T O N S T R E T C H S H I R T $ 1 5 5 D R AW E R F LO R A L S I L K T I E $ 9 9 J O S E F L I Z A R D R E V E R S I B L E L E AT H E R B E LT $ 9 5 G E A R . G P/ T E D B A K E R P E R F O R M

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GUIDE TO LIFE

Build a Smart Home, the Smart Way text by jack seemer

These days, anyone can use their phone to turn on the lights. But a real smart home goes beyond parlor tricks. Building a capable, connected home takes a bit of planning, a touch of know-how and more than a little restraint â&#x20AC;&#x201D; not to mention a reliable internet connection. Choosing the wrong virtual assistant or investing in a doomed startup can turn your smart home real dumb, real quick, so study up on everything you need to know to put your connected home at the top of the class.

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Beef Up the Broadband

Can you imagine walking into a house without WiFi? Neither can Alexa. Strong, reliable internet is the first building block to any good smart home. Here, three things to consider.

Speed

P RO TI P To avoid lag when you’re streaming Netflix, Facetiming or playing video games, lower the resolution of your security cameras, which consume more data than the average smart home device. Downgrading from 1080p to 720p will limit the strain on your home’s internet connection without throttling performance.

Lightning-fast internet is not make-or-break when it comes to building a functional smart home. Asking your virtual assistant to turn on the lights or play the Bee Gees doesn’t require a whole ton of bandwidth. Video is a different story. Security cameras and smart doorbells can devour data, depending on your quality settings — even if they only need data when they sense movement. If you start getting hiccups while streaming Netflix, consider upgrading your network speeds with your ISP, or making sure your router’s up to date.

Coverage Apartment dwellers can typically get away with a single wireless router, but people who live in larger homes with multiple floors or thick walls will be left high and very dry. A Wi-Fi extender, like those made by TP-Link, can help fix trouble spots, but the best way to guarantee blanket coverage is with a mesh network that builds a network out of multiple nodes instead of a single router. Eero, an Amazon-owned company, is at the head of the pack along with Google Wi-Fi, though Netgear’s Orbi line is a solid alternative if you feel better trusting your homework to a company that doesn’t traffic in targeted advertising.

Security Every connected device from lights to thermostats introduces a new entry point for hackers. Protect your network with a strong, unique password and change the default code of every gadget you bring home. If you want to get serious, isolate smart home devices on a guest network. Whether Big Tech respects your privacy is a different question entirely, but products from companies like Google and Amazon offer better, longer-lasting support than cash-strapped startups. And always, always install software updates religiously.

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Keep It in the Family Building a smart home isn’t quite as simple as buying a bunch of devices and plugging them in — you have to make sure they all work together. You may have happened into a bias towards one family of devices or another, and that’s fine! But if you’re making the decision in a vacuum, here are the pros and cons to consider before committing.

Amazon Alexa Amazon was the first company to conquer the smart home, even if companies like Google and Apple have found their strides. That means Alexa is compatible with a large number of third-party devices, with dozens more all the time. It also has the unique ability to order groceries and other items from (surprise!) Amazon. Alexa isn’t as smart as its competitors when it comes to search or conversation flourishes, but for users who just want to turn on the lights with a voice command, she’ll do just fine..

Google Assistant Google’s answer to Alexa is newer and more powerful, and it also works with a large number of third-party devices. But users who have an Android phone (which also features deep Google Assistant integration) will reap the full benefits. Gmail and Google Calendar users will find particular utility as well. Google Assistant can set appointments or dig through your email to find upcoming flight info. Voice-ordering from Amazon Prime would be the cherry on top, which is probably why it’s exclusive to Alexa.

Apple Siri Of the big three, Apple’s smart assistant, Siri, is the least open to mingling. That means it’s awesome for people who have Apple products (HomePod, Apple TV) or use its services (Apple Music) but a harder sell for everyone else. HomeKit, Apple’s bridge between different devices, does indeed work with many devices, but you need an iPhone or iPad to take advantage of its power.

P RO T I P Unlike Google or Amazon, Apple does not make money on data. If you’re concerned about privacy, or cautious when it comes to the prying eyes of Big Tech, Apple’s barrier to entry might just be worth the climb.

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Walk Before You Run Smart homes are supposed to make life easier, but with every new device comes a new potential problem. Will guests know how to turn on the smart bulbs in your bathroom? Will an internet outage render your video doorbell blind and mute? Here are a few things to keep in mind to keep your smart home from growing into a techno-prison.

Own + Upgrade

Play the Long Game

Many appliances already in your house, from your floor lamp to your Xbox, can be smartened up with affordable add-ons. Wemo Smart Plugs from Belkin start at just $35 and let you control just about anything from your phone, and a $35 Google Chromecast turns any TV into a smart one.

That clever gadget you saw on Kickstarter? Odds are it will flounder on its way to market if it isn’t abandoned in a few years or, if it’s any good, acquired. Err on the side of gadgets from big-name companies with a no-going-back investment in smart home tech, plus money enough to pay for security upgrades and continued support.

A Novel Resistance Do you really need a microwave you can talk to? As a general rule of thumb: Avoid buying products unless you can name the specific problem they solve for you. You might be able to find a use for a smart gadget you don’t actually need, but it quickly becomes a chore that costs you money and counterspace. Cover the obvious bases first — lights and door locks are a good place to start.

P RO T I P When it comes to building a smart home, the elephant in the room is installation. Who wants to rewire a doorbell to test a fun new gadget? Battery-powered devices like the Arlo Ultra security camera are on the rise and for good reason: they don’t take half a day to set up.

Brands You Should Know You already know the biggest players in the smart home game, like Google and Amazon, and probably their offshoots like Nest Labs and Eero. Here are a handful of other notables you’d be wise to keep on your radar.

August Home Founded in 2012 by Jason Johnson and famed industrial designer Yves Béhar, August makes understated door looks and doorbell cameras that look smart, too. Specialty: Door locks and doorbell cameras

Ecobee Ecobee’s Wi-Fi-enabled thermostats use remote sensors to monitor the temperature throughout your house and adjust the heat accordingly. The company is technically still private, but Amazon invested more than $60 million last year. Specialty: Thermostats

Lifx When Lifx landed in 2012, its offerings were the only smart lights that, unlike Philips Hue, didn’t need a hub to work. Its energy-efficient, multicolored bulbs connect straight to Wi-Fi. Specialty: Lights

Wyve Labs Wyze Labs now makes a handful of different devices, including an $8 smart bulb, but its bread and butter is security. It made waves with its introduction of WyzeCam, a $20 security camera that undercuts pretty much every device from Nest Labs. Specialty: Security cameras

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Wish List 0 6/0 6

Nike Adapt BB text by meg lappe photo by chase pellerin

The Adapt BB isn’t Nike’s first or most famous crack at self-lacing kicks: when Michael J. Fox slipped into a pair of futuristic, auto-fitting (and Swoosh-branded) hightops in 1989’s Back to the Future II, the Oregon-based sneaker behemoth became synonymous with self-lacing sneakers. Nike finally delivered the technology from the realm of sci-fi in 2016, with the $720 Hyperadapt 1.0, which recreated the movie sneaker’s Did you see that? trick of self-lacing, at least for the fashionable (if not performance-oriented) crowd. Now, with the Adapt BB, Nike is making the technology available to athletes as well as hypebeasts, with a true basketball sneaker P R I C E $ 350

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that includes the brand’s self-lacing tech as a feature, not a gimmick. The shoe was designed by Tinker Hatfield, whose portfolio includes the Nike Air Max and thirteen different Air Jordan silhouettes. It looks like any other Nike slip-on (it features the brand’s signature Flyknit upper) but stores various preset tightness levels controlled by an app — or, mid-game, by two buttons on the midsole. Nike calls the Adapt BB’s self-lacing technology “the future of the game.” That much remains to be seen, but what’s for certain is no one on your local court — or possibly any court — could claim a more high-tech pair of kicks.

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100

BULK BUY

Carabiners Take them off the mountain. t e x t b y ta n n e r b o w d e n photos by chase pellerin

Carabiners are for climbers, right? Sure, they’re essential kit for ascending K2 or leading up El Cap. But take them off the mountain and the uses multiply like Yellowstone tourists in July. Clip one of these metal loops to a water bottle and it will never leave its perch in a backpack or tote. Use them with straps to secure large stuff in a pickup bed, or one by itself to collect stray belts in your closet. It’s a natural keychain and perfect for hanging plants. Use a jumbo version to walk several dogs at the same time or to carry a cart’s worth of grocery bags in just one trip. The strongest carabiners — or D-Rings, to use the military term — are rated in kilonewtons (the standard is 20kN, a force of 4,500 pounds, when closed) while the most rudimentary, and perhaps most versatile, are simply labeled NOT FOR CLIMBING.

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This Week In Gear LETâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S TALK SHOP. gear.gp/ThisWeekInGear

New Episodes Drop Every Saturday

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Berti has a long history of steel, fire, and skilled hands. It was founded as an artisan workshop by David Berti in 1895, and today, under the guidance of his great-grandson Andrea, it continues its practice of artisanal knifemaking in the Tuscan countryside, 25 miles north of Florence, Italy. Knives starting at $310

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The Future does not need to be invited, as anyone who has driven a Tesla Model 3 (p. 106) can tell you, but some innovators, like Hollywood’s virtual reality pioneer Michael Muller (p. 136) and Levi’s head on innovation Paul Dillinger (p. 146) are hurrying it along, anyway. No matter where we go from here, the Future of Gear (p. 118) will be there to meet us. But some discoveries will forever stay forefront in the history books, like mankind’s wild sprint to break the bounds of Earth and discover the Moon. (p. 26)

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by josh condon

photos by chandler bondurant

THE FUTURE PERFECT

THE CAR OF THE NEAR-FUTURE PROMISES TO BE FAST, QUIET, CLEAN AND ABLE TO SHUTTLE US WHEREVER WE WANT TO GO, ALL BY ITSELF. BUT WHAT WILL IT DEMAND IN RETURN?

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he future is smart. It’s learned to sneak up on us so that we don’t overreact and start lighting things on fire. When the news hit that self-driving cars were not only real but heading our way, fast, we were too busy chasing cartoon holograms on our phones to care much. Our collective response to a sci-fi dream going back a hundred years was a collective, petulant shrug. The future, being smart, chose to reveal itself at a time when we are easily delighted with technology and almost never impressed by it. But it’s not just autonomy, whenever that comes, that’s changing the car. It’s electrification, battery power with instant torque and dirt-cheap energy; it’s the erosion of the ownership model and the rise of a connected car that can communicate with other vehicles on the road and the surrounding infrastructure. The idea of what a car can be has never been so up in the air, even back when the automobile was first invented.

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Most people don’t care. They just want to get to work and back. But the promise of the American automobile has always been freedom — the idea that at any time you can head off into this huge wild country under your own steam, beholden to no one. Can that dream survive in a rolling computer packed with sensors, constantly monitoring you, relaying not just your location but where you stopped for lunch and what you’re listening to on the radio? I want to know what we’re trading for it, this safe, connected, convenient, hardworking car of the future, so I’m heading to California, spiritual home of the American road trip. I’ve sourced an old fast car, sleek and elegant and utterly brainless, to drive from LA to Silicon Valley, and the absolute newest, most futuristic vehicle on the market to drive me back. In between, I want a glimpse of what we’re being promised in this shiny deathless future — and what, exactly, we’re expected to give up for it.

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Part 1: Los Angeles to Fremont 1987 Mercedes-Benz 560 SL

In the sunset days of Reagan’s Morning in America, before Straight Outta Compton and what we know as the internet, when you could still smoke on planes and get shot at the Berlin Wall, a brand-new 1987 Mercedes-Benz 560 SL offered modern amenities like power windows and a cassette player. It came with a large, sturdy German engine and a thin metal key to start it. Safety technology consisted of seat belts, anti-lock brakes and an airbag. At the time, it cost around half the price of a new home in the U.S. This is the car I pick up 32 years later in a leafy residential stretch off Wilshire Boulevard, in LA — a low, polished black sled with the moneyed swag of a horsebit loafer. The cockpit is airy, delicate, like the greenhouse canopy of an old Zero fighter plane. The inside is covered in well-massaged leather and shiny old wood. There’s a 227-horsepower V8 in the nose and rearwheel drive out back, and the car jumps like a spooked cat when you stomp on the gas. We point it north from LA, towards Bakersfield. The coupe barrels through the hot air like a hurled brick. The 560 SL was

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born before the modern art of aerodynamic modeling and it’s better for it, the beltline so low your arm can’t help but hook itself out the window. The windshield’s curved glass frames the world like a viewfinder. Age has robbed the seats of their posture; they sag, and the leather bakes immediately in the heat. On our way out of LA, we scroll the AM/FM dial, trying to guess our way to some period-correct ‘80s music but settling for whatever comes through clear. The radio grows shy as we move inland through the hot, kaleidoscopically brown parts of southern California. I shut it off and listen to the car instead. The motor has a soft steady chug and the suspension sighs over fast crests. The tires drum a constant low hum into the cockpit and any adjustment fills the space with the clack of buttons and dials and levers. Even mostly alone in the midday desert, the car has the false quiet of a city apartment. The 560 SL settles into a nice canter around 80 mph. I settle in, too, watch my arm turn sunburned as McFarland becomes Delano becomes Pixley becomes Tripton. I cast around the cabin at the var-

F RO M TO P The small, sunlit and elegantly layered cabin of a 1987 Mercedes-Benz 560 SL coupe; it’s hard to beat the clean design and visceral feel of analog gauges, even if the feedback is less than exact.

ious surfaces — metal, leather, veneered wood, glass, plastic, cloth — and at the handsome, analog gauges and the thin needles that hover at some vague approximation of speed and RPM. Uninterrupted hours of highway driving require a sort of meditation, an ability to maintain concentration through stillness, because there’s almost nothing to it: minute adjustments to the wheel or the gas, the occasional glance in a mirror. But within the stillness there’s a subtle conversation taking place between me and the Merc. I say where to go and how fast to get there; the car tells me about the condition of the pavement, any irregularities or debris in the road, available tire grip. Even with hydraulic assist, the rack-and-pinion steering is hardly more complicated than a simple wheel and axle, but it offers something the most advanced cars on the market today cannot: a physical connection to the road, linked from the tires through a series of rods, knuckles, joints, pistons and shafts, up through the steering wheel and into my fingers. The steering is fuzzy and wanders after grooves in the pavement. The steady sound of the chugging engine let’s me know it’s breathing well; the travel of the brake pedal indicates how much stop is left in it. Enthusiasts venerate these sensations but most people can’t translate them, like trying to explain the taste of good wine. The degree and detail of this feedback separates a good car from a great car from a sublime one — but it’s also work. The baseline attention and constant microadjustments needed to keep a car on course becomes tiring, and as we make our way past Fresno I feel the first fuzzy creep of fatigue. We drive through Herndon, through Fairmead, turn west on the 152 just south of Chowchilla, stop at one of the thousands of fueling stations in the state and perform the familiar rituals: swipe the card; pump the gas; wander past the burnt coffee. It’s a pristine example of the modern American gas station, a wide, bright, depressing junk food aisle with a side hustle in cigarettes and lottery tickets. It’s not a place meant for lingering but I’m thirsty and the car’s hot. I get a couple thumbs up from Leno fans for choosing something old

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We now go on vacations and retreats and social media fasts just to unplug the way the average American commuter did five days a week some thirty-odd years ago. and sufficiently difficult. The Merc has less horsepower than a new six-cylinder Toyota Camry, and all things being square any modern crossover will utterly thrash it around a racetrack, but when I stretch I can still feel the road in my hands and the churn of the engine under throttle. After five hours in the car, its personality has vibrated into my bones — the long brakes and loose steering, the way the suspension dips and rolls through corners. I told it where to go and how fast to get there, and it gave me 227 horsepower and a four-speed automatic to use as I pleased. Back on the road the FM picks up staticky blues as we roll into Fremont, the

This page, clockwise from left: Still life of an American gas station; Merc on the haul; an endangered metal fuel cap; Kettleman City Supercharger Station.

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music pulled out the open windows and tossed into the breeze. It strikes me that if I tossed my phone out alongside it I would be nearly in the wind. The old Merc’s airy, delicate cabin is a bunker of its own sort, utterly impenetrable by phone or email or text. Once, back when no one could call you if they didn’t know where you were, cars were a moving target, hard to hit. Now, we go on vacations and retreats and social media fasts just to unplug the way the average American commuter did five days a week some 30-odd years ago. But I’m tired when I park the car in the sprawling lot, so I pull out my phone and drop a pin to the car’s location, since it won’t do it for me. Technology ain’t all bad.

Part 2: Fremont to Los Angeles 2019 Tesla Model 3 Performance

Pinning the throttle in the Tesla Model 3 is something like what hitting hyperspeed looks like on TV: there’s a silent whump and then at some point you realize you’re pulling a stupid face with your mouth hanging open and you’re maybe in another zip code. Before we get into anything else, the weird shape or the “self-driving” or the hermetically clean interior, it should be noted that the Tesla Model 3 Performance is a car you can drive mercilessly, viciously and without sympathy. It’s delightful, stupid, knee-slapping fun: all-wheel drive, beefy regenerative brakes, an extraordinarily low center of gravity. It’s one of the most aerodynamic production cars in the world, with instantaneous torque and a dedicated track mode developed by racing champ Randy Pobst. It embarrasses supercars on the drag strip and can smack around high-priced sports sedans on a road course, all for around $60K. If Enzo Ferrari or Carroll Shelby had ear-

ly access to the Model 3 they would have never pursued internal combustion. Like using a stopwatch to time an explosion, it’s hard for human senses to comprehend just how fast the car is. The entire idea of the Model 3 hovers into the uncanny valley between car and not-car, with a slight — no doubt purposeful — spaceship vibe. Seen in the wild, a Tesla appears slippery and dense, ovoid but aggressively planed. There is no grille because the battery-powered car has no engine; instead, there’s a wide, fat lip to lift air over the body. It turns out the car of the future is not a smooth missile like the ‘56 Oldsmobile Golden Rocket concept or a windswept stealth fighter like the 1970 Vauxhall SRV, but an expensive computer mouse with the face of a bullfrog in a wind tunnel. There is something sexy about the Model 3, but it’s not a car’s sexiness — it has the sleek, minimalist allure of a beautiful smartphone or wireless speaker.

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F RO M L E F T, CLOC KWISE The Model 3 Performance, recharging at Kettleman City Supercharger Station; the Tesla app keeps you updated on vehicle charge status in real time, even over a Double-Double Animal Style; the Screen demands constant attention.

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Inside, the car is cool and hushed and almost completely unadorned under the tinted panoramic glass roof. There are no gauges, buttons, dials, knobs, switches or hidden storage compartments. There is no key — the key lives on your phone, locking and unlocking the doors automatically, among many other tasks — and no vents or speakers to be seen within the smooth, colorless expanse of vegan leather. In fact, the interior has only one feature: the Screen. The Screen is a 15-inch horizontal tablet, the size of a platter for serving tomahawk steaks. It’s beautiful, rich in color and detail, softly glowing. Nearly every interaction with the Model 3, from the radio to the seat coolers, calls, texts, vent controls, vehicle diagnostics, security and charging port access, is done through the Screen. It feels high-tech and, at 85 mph on a six-lane highway, utterly terrifying, because there’s no way to use the huge touchscreen and its labyrinth of sub-menus without completely ignoring the road. The Model 3 has a novel solution to the attention problem: it offers to drive. I depress

a steering column-mounted stalk twice, engaging Autopilot. On the Screen, a wheel icon glows green to confirm the system is engaged. The car is now driving, using a combination of automatic cruise control, emergency braking, lane-keep assist and an assortment of additional cameras and radar sensors, and I have been relegated to monitoring status. So I sit and observe the car as it attempts to figure out things like traffic and lane closures. For long stretches, the car is utterly capable, keeping pace with traffic, navigating bends in the road, even switching lanes when I engage the turn signal. I watch the wheel juke and twitch and am struck by how little movement happens during the normal commute. For all the fidgeting, singing, eating, drinking, talking and stretching that takes place inside a car, the mundane act of commuting usually requires only the smallest and most subtle human inputs. At other times, the Model 3 is hesitant, easily confused, at one point slowing almost to a stop on the freeway rather than

As close as I can figure, Autopilot works as well as a nearsighted 12-year-old, which qualifies it as a staggering technological achivevement.

accelerate past a slow-merging hatchback. On several mystifying occasions the system tosses off an irritated bong and all of a sudden gives up, disengages. As close as I can figure, Autopilot works on the highway about as well as a nearsighted 12-year-old, which on the one hand qualifies it as a staggering technological achievement and on the other means I’m hardly tempted to take a nap while it’s in charge. Still, I find myself surprisingly willing to let Autopilot take the wheel for a spell, when I’m sleepy or bored or I just want to play with a bright glowing screen for a minute. Hell, that squinty bugger got us most of the way to Tesla’s Kettleman City Superchargers three hours south, and it planned the whole route to boot. The grass outside the Kettleman City Supercharging station is very green and all the blades are exactly the same height, because it’s fake. The door is locked with a keypad; when you arrive, your phone sends the passcode to unlock it. It’s spacious and cool inside, with a barista selling espresso

drinks, a playpen for kids, plentiful outlets and comfortable chairs for efficient telecommuting, like a business class airport lounge in Burbank. It’s comfortable enough to spend an hour and 14 minutes, precisely how long the phone key tells me it will take to recharge, but there’s an In-N-Out Burger within walking distance so time is passed there, instead. I track the charging on my phone and time my return exactly to the moment it’s complete. The Model 3 delivers me back to LA in around seven hours, including the charging, and I’m about as fresh when I get out of the car as when I got in. This is the great shouted promise of the autonomous, electric, connected vehicle: the car will do the work for you — and it will, and it will delight and amaze. The only catch is that the car needs to remove you from the decision-making equation when it sees fit, and you get no say. The starkest example of what we’ll give up in our artificially intelligent future is

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The car of the future will give you the feeling of escape but will never stop watching you; it will never let you truly get lost.

this: you can drive that old Merc straight into a wall as fast as your courage and runway allow, but the Tesla won’t let you do it. Neither will a modern Mercedes, or Volvo, or anything with emergency braking. The simple computers that controlled things like electronic fuel injection (quicker acceleration, on demand!) have grown so powerful they now outrank the human driver. Computers determine how much throttle the car uses and how much steering; when to add to or subtract from your speed, or braking. I spent a lot of time in the Model 3, wrestling with the steering wheel, trying to determine who’s in charge. It’s not an argument I can win. In the car of the future, the need to drive will be replaced with the freedom to answer emails. The car of the future will give you the feeling of escape but will never stop watching you. It will never let you truly get lost. It can seem a sad, silly thing to mourn the ability to run a car headlong into a wall because you want to, but freedom lost is often lost forever. It requires mourning, all the same.

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THE FUTURE IS You can already see the broad outline of the forces that will shape the future of everything from cars and watches to fitness, the home, even the great outdoors â&#x20AC;&#x201D; artificial intelligence, nano-scale 3D printing, Big Data, pure-input recyclability. But the specifics might surprise you. From manufactured spider silk to cars that talk to bridges to neurostimulation training for a better bench press, everything is on track to get stronger, faster, smarter and more connected â&#x20AC;&#x201D; including you.

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COMING

THE FUTURE IS AUTONOMOUS

THE BIG IDEA

Tomorrow’s Transportation Is Silent, Shared and Seamless Someday, they’ll come for our steering wheels. And with 35,000-plus auto-related deaths each year in the United States alone, it will be a safer world when they do. But despite the projections of some (extremely optimistic) prognosticators, that future is likely decades away. That doesn’t mean transportation will be the same in 10 years. The revolution, in fact, has already begun. Humans may be stuck driving ourselves for the foreseeable future, but you won’t have to own a car to get around. For years, car-sharing services like Car2Go and Zipcar have offered urban dwellers the convenience of a car on demand. Bike-sharing programs and one-way electric scooter rentals offer even cheaper short-haul transportation alternatives, while ride-hailing apps like Lyft and Uber have made getting a ride as easy as queuing up a podcast. As these services continue to expand, owning a vehicle might only be for those willing to put up with

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the inconvenience — that is, enthusiasts. But if you do get a car in the future, it will likely be electric. After decades as a novelty, EVs are on the cusp of widespread adoption, and the charging infrastructure is ramping up in anticipation. Not only that, many of the newest models from Tesla, Audi, Rivian and more are actually fun to drive, cool to look at and fast as hell. This slow electric slide is about to pick up the pace. Carmakers plan to invest more than $90 billion — yes, billion — in EVs and their associated technologies in the next decade. The Volkswagen Group’s planned onslaught of EVs — 22 million new electric cars on the road before 2030 — will be a seismic shock to the automotive ecosystem. Combine that with the dozens of upcoming electric models from General Motors, Ford, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Nissan and many more, and the car buyer of 2029 might have more electric options than gas-burning ones.

Q U O TA B L E

“Privately owned, human-driven cars? The lessons of the Boeing 737 Max crashes mean driver assistance will evolve toward Airbus-type ‘driving envelope protection’ systems, like Toyota’s Guardian.” A L E X R O Y, AUTONOMOUS VEHICLE EXPERT AND FOUNDER OF THE HUMAN DRIVING A S S O C I AT I O N

TRANSPORTATION

D E AT H O F A (C A R ) S A L E S M A N

The car dealership model has long dominated the industry. Now, Tesla and others are looking to change the game. If you’ve ever bought a new car, you almost certainly did it the same way your parents did decades ago: walking into a dealership, arguing with a salesperson and then signing some paperwork with a cheap plastic pen. While it’s dead simple to buy pretty much anything else online nowadays, going to a licensed automotive dealer is still pretty much the only way to pull the trigger on a new ride. In many places, there are even state and local laws to make sure it stays that way. Then came Tesla. As the California-based carmaker took aim at gasoline’s dominance, it also tried to bowl over the traditional sales model of moving cars from company-owned showrooms by letting customers purchase cars online. The move sparked court battles with states like

North Carolina and Texas, where restrictive rules ban direct sales of cars. But Tesla’s not giving up; so far, the company has carved out an online sales foothold in 19 states. Other carmakers haven’t gone quite so far — at least not yet. Still, many are experimenting with novel ways to minimize the traditional dealership role. Hyundai now lets customers complete much of the purchase paperwork online. Volvo bundles lease payments, insurance and other fees into flat-rate packages like cell phone plans, designed to let owners swap cars each year. And Porsche, BMW and Mercedes-Benz are testing vehicle subscription services where people exchange cars the way we once did Netflix DVDs. The only question is, who’s going to sell us our protective undercoating in the future?

Mirrors in the Rearview What do you call a car without mirrors? The car of tomorrow. Audi’s E-tron already swapped its side-views for cameras and screens, following in the footsteps of ultra fuel-efficient prototypes like the VW XL1. In the quest for perfect aero and next-to-negligible drag, every other electric car could be next.

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PROTOTYPE

Genesis Mint In the automotive world, more size has traditionally meant more prestige. Large is luxurious. But as city populations rise and urban vehicles are forced to share more of the road with an increasing number of pedestrians, bikes, scooters and other vehicles, that notion will have to change. The Genesis Mint, barely the size of a Mini Cooper, is designed for that spacesaving tomorrow. The electric concept is small, but it doesn’t shrink: traditional three-box proportions are vacuum-packed

around the tiny frame, giving it the taut, elegant look you’d expect from a much larger luxury ride. Inside, expansive windows and roof glass give the illusion of roominess, despite the tiny footprint. A concept for now, the Mint has showroom ambitions, and Genesis brand boss Manfred Fitzgerald wants to see them fulfilled sooner rather than later. It likely won’t be the only one of its kind. The future may not be bigger, but hopefully there will be a bit more room for everyone.

C H AT T Y C A R S , TA L K AT I V E T O W N S

Autonomous vehicles aren’t just a big deal because of all the driving they’ll do, but also all the talking. Self-driving cars will share what they see with each other — and with smart infrastructure like bridges, traffic signals and buildings — in real time. That day is still many years away, but the FCC has already carved out a chunk of radio frequencies for use by future cars to share information about traffic and weather conditions. Of course, your car might already be talking with the world around it. In 2017, Cadillac standardized a system that allowed its CTS sedan to communicate potential dangers to other CTS models within a thousand feet. Audi recently unveiled a trial program in which certain

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models can receive information from traffic lights, a program the carmaker has already expanded into new cities, with new functionalities — like how fast you need to go to catch the next green light — since launching in 2016. The real magic will happen when we have thousands of networked cars, connected buildings and mountains of data. Analyzing it all at supercomputer speeds will give autonomous cars virtual omniscience, which could lead to the sorts of revolutionary advantages promised by autonomous proselytizers: a 90-plus percent reduction in traffic deaths, hundreds of billions of dollars saved in productivity and medical bills, and a virtual end to traffic jams.

p h o t o s c o u r t e s y o f v o l k s wa g e n , t e s l a , g e n e s i s , v o lv o

Cars that can communicate — with each other, and with surrounding infrastructure — will change the way we drive, until we don’t.

THE FUTURE IS

FITNESS

DIAGNOSTIC

THE BIG IDEA

Data Is Your New Trainer

above

Naked Labs’s rotating weight scale and body scanner take four million points of data to give you a 3D visual of your body.

Fancy equipment and perfect form are great, but the future of fitness is built on data. Startups like Peloton bring personalized workouts into your living room, with Bluetooth heart-rate monitors keeping tabs on how hard you’re pushing every second of the grind. With the advent of motion-tracking software and depth-sensing cameras, like those found in Mirror and Tonal, trainers can accurately critique your form using nothing but raw camera footage. And thanks to an uncannily perfect digital model of your body from Naked Labs’s at-home body scanner, your gear will fit better than you ever thought possible. Brands like Superfeet and New Balance already use 3D biomechanical scanners to evaluate movement patterns for shoes and insoles to create an exact fit; as 3D printing

spreads, custom-fit shoes could become something you order online, so perfect and so cheap you’d never wear anything else. The number-crunching won’t just apply to external things like form and fit — what’s going on inside your body will get the Big Data treatment, too. We’re already living through a quantified revolution with the rise of ever-smarter fitness trackers, like the Apple Watch, which can perform electrocardiogram tests right from your wrist. If long-rumored technologies like through-the-skin glucose measurement clear the FDA, they could invent a new generation of personalized nutrition programs and fitness regimens more in-depth than anything a personal trainer can cook up today, with artificially intelligent trainers providing more detailed feedback than a human ever could.

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Q U O TA B L E

“People will realize tracking data is useless if you can’t turn those insights into actionable strategies to modify lifestyle. The focus will shift from data collection and algorithms to behavior-change science.” M AT T D E L A N E Y, H E A D O F I N N O VAT I O N AT EQUINOX

The Forever Running Shoe Adidas’s Futurecraft.Loop sneakers won’t just be made of fully recyclable thermoplastic polyurethane, they’ll also be made from their ancestors. At their end of life — typically 300 miles — you’ll return them (Adidas will send you the packing materials and pay the shipping) to be washed, ground down to pellets and recycled into a new pair. Meet the new shoes, same as the old shoes.

The Big Business of Listening to Your Gut Your digestive system is packed with crucial information about your health, and Big Data wants to start crunching the numbers. From tablets to hydrogels, sports nutrition is changing fast in search of a quick, clean fuel that won’t disagree with an athlete’s stomach. Every human body digests carbs, salts and fats differently, so no single solution works for everyone. But soon, an app could tell you exactly what to eat and when, based on a program created exclusively for you and based on reams of your biological and physiological data. “Technology is moving faster than both science and nutrition, and athletes will be more informed about what’s happening in their bodies through devices that not only monitor heart rate and power

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output, but also dehydration, calorie deficit, blood pressure and more,” says Chris Streight, VP of business development at Osmo Nutrition. Electrolyte supplement company Nuun imagines a future where wearables monitor the body’s changes in real time. Experimental digital pills with built-in Wi-Fi can already track and report the contents of your stomach to your doctor. Someday, a similar device may ping your phone, which will nudge you to drink some water or eat a salty snack, depending not just on your particular biochemistry and food intake, but your exact performance goals, as well.

PROTOTYPE

Villency Design VR/AR Headset

photos courtesy of naked labs, fusionetics, apple, villency design

Three of the most popular indoor cycling bikes at Peloton, Soul Cycle and Studio Three were designed by the same man: Eric Villency, CEO and lead designer of Villency Design. Now, Villency is working on a wireless VR/ AR headset that could transport your workout from the living room into cyberspace. Resembling a pair of ski goggles with red-

tinted lenses, the headset connects with an infrared camera to track and record your movements, allowing for highly accurate real-time corrections to your box squat or downward-dog form. “It creates not just a stimulating, interactive experience, but also the possibility to inform and coach the user,” Villency says.

THE PERS ONAL TR AINER INSIDE YOUR PHONE

Pro athletes use exclusive apps to stay injury-free. Weekend warriors could be next. You may not have a multimillion-dollar career on the line, but amateur athletes get hurt just like the pros, and have a harder time affording a physical therapist. Soon, you may be able to download physio help right to your phone. Fusionetics, a customizable exercise app that evaluates you from head to toe, identifies your strengths and risk areas with a simple, five-minute exam that includes push-ups, squats and a range of motion tests. Pulling from a library of foam rolling, static stretching, isolated activation

exercises and integrated functional reeducation, the app prescribes a routine that won’t just keep you fit, but will lower the risk you’ll hurt yourself doing it. At the moment, access to the app and its methodology are restricted to those working with a primary hospital system or a major brand like Under Armour, or playing for a pro team that pays for the service. But everyday athletes are the obvious downstream target market for this cutting-edge technology — once the pros have worked out the kinks.

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THE FUTURE IS S U S TA I N A B L E

THE BIG IDEA

Sustainable or Bust

Making kit for people who love the great outdoors involves a paradox: a certain amount of gear is required to properly explore the world’s natural wonders, but all that raw material has to come from somewhere and no amount of carbon credits can put it back. The best solution, for now? Use recycled materials as much as possible and donate profits to causes aimed at lowering carbon emissions. Some companies merely gesture at eco-friendliness — and charge a premium for the hot air, to boot. But a meaningful charge toward recycled-everything is already underway. Patagonia is preparing to make all of its technical outerwear from 100 percent recycled materials. PrimaLoft is developing a synthetic insulation that’s not only recycled, but biodegradable. REI will require every brand it sells to remove harmful chemicals from their products and adhere to ethical sourcing practices. All of this before the close of 2020. And where does all that recycled material come from? Increasingly, right from our closets. In 2017, Patagonia established Worn Wear, a program to buy back its own products to repair and re-circulate them in its shops. Arc’teryx has plans to institute a similar buyback system. In 20 years, throwing clothes away could be as taboo as littering is now. And as buyback provisions spread from everything from sneakers to jackets to backpacks, that recycling could be great for your wallet as well.

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Q U O TA B L E

“The incredible technological advances I’ve seen in our future are almost exclusively adding to the outdoor experience, not substituting it. Mother Nature is hard to replace.” CYRUS SCHENCK, FOUNDER OF SKI COMPAN Y RENOUN

GOODBYE , GEAR SHOP

Amazon and other online retailers have already changed the nature of buying, well, everything. Can local gear stores survive the onslaught? In case you didn’t notice, the internet happened. First, online retailers carved chunks out of brick and mortar; then, Amazon gobbled up online retail whole, and now the company makes its own outdoor gear like tents, backpacks and more. But labels that can’t compete on scale have different technological tricks up their sleeves. Mountain Hardwear and retailer Moosejaw are using augmented and virtual realities to let shoppers pitch digital tents in their yards (or at a virtual Yosemite campsite) to better understand sizes and features before putting in orders. With online sales eating retail’s lunch, what will become of the local gear shop? The value may not be in the product it stocks but the knowledge. Trail-adjacent stores have long act-

ed as waypoints where local wisdom is shared, and soon that could be the primary business model. Look no further than cycling brand Rapha and its “clubhouses,” which are half meeting spot, half showroom, and nothing like a department store. The shop of the future could be a hub for classes, consultations, repairs, movie screenings, and a cup of coffee or an IPA. Shops will still carry some equipment, of course, but just the things you didn’t know you needed. Sophisticated prediction algorithms meshed with good old-fashioned expert judgement will let your local store specialize its stock instead of using its limited space to try to out-Amazon Amazon. As for current trail conditions? Asking the bum behind the counter is a remarkably future-proof strategy.

EXPLORATION le f t

Ultralight, elastic and amazingly strong, spider silk is the ideal apparel fiber, if only it could be produced at scale. Biotech startup Spiber Inc. created a synthetic version of the stuff, and Japanese apparel maker Goldwin recently used it to build the world’s most futuristic ski jacket.

PROTOTYPE

photos courtesy of rapha, goldwin, salomon

Goldwin + Spiber Synthetic Spider Silk Ski Jacket Despite strides towards sustainability, most outdoor technical gear is still constructed from synthetic polymer materials made with earth-unfriendly petroleum. That will have to change. Japanese apparel maker Goldwin and biotech startup Spiber engineered a potential solution: a ski jacket constructed of synthetic spider silk. Adidas and Bolt Threads have used similar textiles to make shoes and even ties, but nothing quite so sophisticated or practical as a full jacket. Thanks to Spiber’s proprietary microbial fermentation and spinning processes, the garment’s biodegradable and petrochemical-free fabric mimics fibroin, the key ingredient in silk and spider webs. The company believes it’s close to producing the material on a commercial scale, and if it’s anything like actual spider silk — ultra tough, light and elastic — it could lay the foundation for the future of outerwear.

S OME THING FOR E VERYONE

One Size Fits All is on its way out. The future is all about hyper-specialization. It wasn’t so long ago that we had road bikes and mountain bikes, and that was that. Now there’s an ever-growing spectrum of bicycle types (and motorized e-variants) that expands every season: fitness bikes, cross-country bikes, downhill bikes, gravel bikes. Once considered niche models, these are all now fullblown categories. It won’t stop at bikes, either. The product gaps in camping, backpacking, trail running, mountaineering and rock climbing gear will soon fill in. More people are adventuring than ever, drumming up demand for every use case. Meanwhile, 3D scanning makes custom-fit gear a

feasible alternative to identical assemblyline churn. Companies like Salomon can already make shoes from a scan of your feet, for a hefty price, but robotic manufacturing promises to make the process cheaper. And with machine-learning algorithms that can crunch mountains of data about human biomechanics, trail geography, weather patterns and more, the possibilities go far beyond a perfect fit. Want a shoe built for trails specific to the geography of Chamonix, or a customtailored wingsuit to complement the summertime air currents of the Tetons? Coming right up.

Everything Connected Phone buried in your bag, stuck behind zippers and Velcro? Queue up your tunes with a flick of the wrist. Woven circuitry, threaded right into your digs, will make wearable tech out of jackets and jeans instead of demanding room on your wrist.

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THE FUTURE IS PERSONALIZED

THE BIG IDEA

Bespoke for the Masses First, the internet let us order straight from the warehouse instead of shopping store shelves. The next step? Straight from the factory. Nike By You and Vans Customs already let you create unique remixes of existing styles, but that’s only the beginning. While a few brands are offering made-to-measure suiting online now, the barrier to entry for a perfect fit has gone from significant to a speed bump. Image recognition can increasingly pull a flattering fit from just a photo, while laser-cut patterns allow for designs in a nearly infinite variety of sizes. Assembly line automation could offer an array of material options as well, from making your favorite jeans a bit stretchier to adding performance extras like water-repellent finishing to your next overshirt. Fully automated robot tailors are still in early testing at companies like Original Stitch, but the promise is obvious: upload some photos of yourself to an app, choose your style and materials, hit “Buy” and wait for your bespoke suit to show up at your door (maybe delivered by drone). And suiting is one of the most difficult applications; the same technology will more easily apply to jeans, chinos, button-down shirts, tees and more. While the clothing of the future will be highly personal, vintage clothing will still have its place, and may be easier to find than ever. The used-clothing market has boomed to a multibillion-dollar industry in the last decade thanks to apps that circumvent the traditional hunting in a second-hand store. Big labels like Levi’s and H&M, in an attempt to get in on the action, have instituted buyback programs for used garments, sometimes refurbing the piece in-house before upcycling to a new buyer. Someday soon, your favorite brand’s grail-worthy vintage pieces could be listed for sale right next to its newest releases in the online store.

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Q U O TA B L E

“The relationship that brands have with their customers will be more serviceoriented than transactional. We’ll see a huge rise in leasing and rental of clothing, but when that clothing comes back it will get renewed, and go back out again for use.” N I C O L E B A S S E T T, COFOUNDER OF THE R E N E WA L W O R K S H O P

STYLE

above , le f t to ri g ht

p h o t o s c o u r t e s y o f o r i g i n a l s t i t c h , n o d u s wat c h e s , r e n e wa l w o r k s h o p , l e v i ’ s , pa n e r a i

San Francisco-based shirt brand Original Stitch offers fully customizable styles that are handmade in Japan; the proliferation of low-cost 3D printers and CNC machines has allowed for rapid prototyping and production in the watch world.

A L L T H E Q UA L I T Y, N O N E O F T H E Q UA N T I T Y

New manufacturing tech will let small watch brands produce quality on par with the big brands. So-called microbrands, usually comprised of just a passionate watchmaker or two, face an uphill battle to match the quality of larger legacy manufacturers because they don’t have the scale to keep costs down. But thanks to AutoCAD software that can visualize designs before a single scrap of metal is used, and CNC machines that replace a factory’s worth of tooling, small brands are starting to punch well above their weight in terms of fit and finish. “We are starting to see smaller brands gain access to the proper machinery required to meet the quality standard of the brands that cost four to five times more,” says Wesley Kwok, cofounder of Los Angeles-based boutique brand Nodus Watches.

“As the global economy continues to grow, this equipment will become increasingly more common, and we will start to see quality across the board go up.” CNC machines are still a serious investment, up to $150K for a readily available piece of equipment, but desktop 3D printers are making it almost trivial to prototype new components. As customizable bits of metal become less expensive to make, a new era of tailored watchmaking becomes possible. Brands like Undone already allow customers to choose dials, straps, hands and more from a pre-selected list of parts — could completely customizable movements be next?

Demand and Supply There’s nothing worse than making something nobody wears. Brands like Gustin, Undone and Taylor Stitch crowdfund their newest pieces before production, securing demand for funkier experiments up front. It’s a low-risk and crowd-pleasing model that gives fashion fiends input into the design process.

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PROTOTYPE

Levi’s 3D Printing Technology Finding ways to make clothes with less labor and fewer materials is great for corporate cost-cutting, but consumers won’t put up with an inferior product just so a brand can save a few bucks. But simplified construction with no quality downside may be on the way. While experimenting with 3D printing technology, Levi’s figured out how to create a denim jacket with all the visual signatures of its classic Trucker jacket but without the need for complex sewing. Using the Autodesk Pier 9 Workshop, the new piece is made with a 3D mold based on a topographical scan of the source jacket. The result is a design that’s almost indistinguishable from the original but made with far fewer pieces of denim and a fraction of the cutting and stitching. Jackets distressed with 3D-printed molds won’t be on shelves anytime soon, but they show how a high-tech approach can preserve the most important aspects of an iconic design while reducing both materials and labor. Eventually, every link in the supply chain will rely on 3D printing technology.

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I T ’ S A M AT E R I A L S T H I N G

The toughness of steel, or a nice bronze patina? The answer may soon be “yes.” Stainless steel has long been a go-to for watch cases. It’s durable, cost effective and resistant to corrosion. But soon, that won’t be enough. New alloys combine the most desirable qualities from different materials, creating hybrids that are, say, extra strong and also super light — a huge benefit in the watch world. Assuming, of course, a watchmaker can figure out how to shape and manufacture the stuff. IWC’s Ceratanium features titanium’s light weight and biocompatibility (it’s less irritable to a wider range of skin types than, say, gold) with the hardness and scratchresistance of ceramic. Carbotech, used by Panerai, achieves extreme durability by melding thermoplastics with thin

sheets of carbon fiber at high pressure, while Girard-Perregaux’s carbon glass integrates pigmented glass fibers in a carbon frame, with the result being 100 times stronger than steel. The future of watchmaking materials seems wide open. Take bronze, a current favorite of designers because of it’s ability to develop a unique patina over time. Right now, the price for that aesthetic upgrade is durability; bronze is not nearly as tough as steel. But 10 years from now, who knows? As-yet uninvented hybrids could allow watchmakers to experiment in unpredictable ways while enjoying the best of all worlds. In that future, everyone wins.

HOME

THE FUTURE IS CONNECTED

THE BIG IDEA

A Truly Smart Home Must Also Be Effortless

What makes a home? Is it your bed, your art collection, the size of your TV? The number of bedrooms or maybe the number of plants? You might say it’s the sum of all these things. The next generation, when asked the same question, won’t point to things at all. People won’t lose interest in products, of course, no matter how minimalist the utopian vision. Savvy chefs will always have a thing for cast-iron skillets and there’s no technology yet known that can replace a simple desk chair, let alone an Eames. But if the current home experience is defined by a physical framework — walls, and all the stuff we keep stored between them — tomorrow’s will be shaped by something more intangible: an interface. Soon, the home will no longer be an amalgam of smart accessories. It will itself be a sprawling networked accessory, with everything inside working together as part of the

greater ecosystem. Intelligence will become an invisible layer: moveable, customizable and, most importantly, predictable. The contours of today’s smart home have already started to shift. We have deadbolts that unlock with apps and lights that turn off with words. Ambient computing has made the home multimodal, and it will become more so, controlled not just by touch and voice but gesture and emotion. Google famously hired writers from Pixar and The Onion to make its virtual assistant more personable, with the long-term goal of building an emotional rapport with the user. And Amazon is reportedly working on a wrist-bound wearable, code-named Dylan, that can read human feelings. Ready for a home that senses that you’re amped up and adjusts the lighting and music to help calm you down before bed? It’s coming, whether you like it or not.

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Q U O TA B L E

“With personal computing, a lot of habitual moments in the home became extremely personal — communicating, enjoying music, bingeing on shows. Because of ambient computing, the things that went into personal devices are allowed to come back and be communal again.” M A R K S P AT E S , PRODUCT LEAD, SMART SPEAKERS, GOOGLE

TVs Take the Long View Are vertical TVs a gimmick? Samsung doesn’t think so. Earlier this year, the tech giant unveiled a QLED TV called Sero that can toggle between horizontal and vertical orientations, thus imitating what we see when we look at our smartphones. As consumers continue casting content from smartphone applications, Samsung’s betting people will one day use TVs more like projectors than standalone devices.

BOOZE WITHOUT BORDERS

Alcohol is coming to your doorstep — but not without a fight. Drinks delivered to your door hardly seems high tech, but as anyone who’s tried to buy alcohol online in the last decade can attest, it’s a segment of the otherwise booming service economy that’s taken its sweet time to age. After Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal government left the matter of alcohol sales to the states, many of which quickly enacted laws that let them take a cut from every step in the process — from distillers selling booze to a distributor, to the distributor selling to the retailer, to the retailer selling to you. In other words, the future of direct-de-

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livery alcohol is being jacked up by the tax man. But his grip may be weakening. In the last year, Kentucky, Michigan and Illinois have all loosened up, to drinkers’ benefit. In Tennessee, the Supreme Court is getting involved regarding a common law that prohibits out-of-state retailers. Drizly, the closest thing to an alcohol Amazon, just raised $35 million in venture capital funding. And now Amazon has joined the fight against the 90-year-old tradition, enlisting a small army of booze industry lobbyists to push its delivery interests. Cheers to that.

PROTOTYPE

Bosch PAI

One might fear that the trend of “guided cooking” — a mix of apps, AI and recipe instruction — will lead to the end of kitchen skills altogether, a world where we scroll through dinner options like Netflix shows, machines handling dinner prep with robot arms. It doesn’t seem impossible. More likely (and less terrifying) is something like Bosch’s “Projection and Interaction” (PAI) project. An augmented reality kitchen tool that hooks onto your kitchen counter, Bosch’s

digital assistant helps you cook with an array of 3D sensors and an interactive projection display. Place a chicken underneath, and it measures the meat’s thickness, brings up recipe options for your perusal, determines cook time and preheats the (Bosch-compatible) oven. Everything is gesture controlled, so no need to worry about greasing up a screen (or knocking it into the soup). It’s not the set-and-forget-it future promised by The Jetsons, but it could be the most useful tool in the smart cook’s kitchen.

PLUG IN TO TUNE OUT

photos courtesy of nuki, google, bosch, bose

The end of analog sleep is nigh. For millennia, humans have fallen asleep with the turning of the Earth — bright, rousing mornings leading to cooler, sleepy nights. In the span of a century we’ve all but buried that rhythm under an avalanche of sensory input that’s not exactly conducive to restful slumber. But technology is trying to mend the cycle it’s broken. Free apps like SleepScore track your sleep and provide reports and recommendations for improvement. Bose has its wireless “sleepbuds” that mask noise by playing soothing, pre-loaded noises. The latest Sleep Number mattress detects when you start snoring, then

gently adjusts your body to relieve pressure on your chest. Even Dyson took a brief detour from vacuums to release a new lamp that matches its glow to the sun’s brightness in your timezone. The gadget market believes there’s room for improvement when it comes to old-fashioned slumber. “Most people still sleep as we did in the middle ages,” says Matteo Franceschetti, whose company Eight Sleep makes a temperatureadjustable mattresses controlled via smartphone app. “We have technology everywhere, but I still spent twenty-five years of my life on simple foam — analog, disconnected.”

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THE FUTURE IS FRICTIONLESS

THE BIG IDEA

Virtual Assistants: Less Virtual, More Personal Ten years ago, voice assistants didn’t really exist. Apple didn’t introduce Siri for the iPhone until 2011. Amazon didn’t invite Alexa into the kitchen until 2014. At first, these assistants couldn’t do much more than relay the weather, set an alarm, or answer some rudimentary questions — but they’re getting more lifelike by the minute. Want to buy groceries, make dinner reservations, translate something written in Spanish or even screen your calls? Just say the word. Nearly a quarter of U.S. households own some form of smart speaker, and every tech giant now produces a suite of the gadgets in every shape and size — which means, right now, millions of people are speaking to smart speakers at home, and millions more are carrying one around in their phone, computer, even headphones. So what will Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri be like in 10 or 15 years? Don’t expect a sentient AI (not that you’d want one), but advancements in natural language processing will make it hard to believe you’re talking to a machine. Rather than robotically executing simple, specific demands, the assistant of the future will be able to converse like a person — much more like an actual assistant than a voice-controlled computer. Laptop conked out? Siri could get on the phone with customer service while Google takes notes at meetings and Alexa secures dinner reservations and calls you an Uber. And unlike with human assistants, there’s no such thing as overtime.

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Q U O TA B L E

“If anything, I think we’ll engage less directly with productivity apps. Instead, we’ll rely on them to observe and respond to us. Whole workflows will be initiated and completed to keep our lives on track without us knowing.” I VA N Z H A O , CEO AND COFOUNDER OF PRODUCTIVIT Y TOOL NOTION THE BIG PUSH FOR LESS TECH

After decades relentlessly integrating connected tech into daily life, are we finally ready for a break? It’s safe to say you own a smartphone. It’s safe to say everyone you know owns one, too, and all of you use them all the time. But should you? The benefits of the connected world at your fingertips are obvious; the negative effects, not so much. Recent studies have shown that excess smartphone usage can strain interpersonal relationships and reinforce addictive behaviors, and that light emitted from the screen can impact sleep schedules. Despite the rush to create enough content — videos, articles, apps, games and more — to fill every waking minute of your time, the idea that technology should be ever-present is under scrutiny. In response, the U.S. Department of Health has developed strong recommendations for the amount of screen time kids should have, and tech companies are responding with new

programs that push back on the notion of the always-connected consumer. Apple has introduced Screen Time into its iOS operating system, a feature that tracks smartphone use and gives parents control over their children’s gadgets. Amazon has attempted the same with its “Kids Edition” tablets, which feature similar controls. The desire to log off is already showing up in hardware design. The miniature Palm phone harkens back to the tiny designs of a decade ago, while the sales pitch for the number-pad-only Light Phone is that it purposefully can’t be called “smart.” It might not be long before we see a thoughtful resurgence of flip phones, reinvented with a high-tech sheen, but with the guiding philosophy that less tech, less prevalent and less often, really is more.

PRODUCTIVITY PROTOTYPE

Halo Mind

photo courtesy of halo

“Mind over matter” is a nice motto, but neuroscience is trying to make it real. Take the Halo Sport, a headset that shoots a low-level electrical current into an athlete’s motor cortex to stimulate muscle contractions. The training device has been worn by Olympians, professional cyclists and pros in the MLB, NBA and NFL. Even the Department of Defense is interested in the application for fighter pilots and snipers. Today, elite athletes; tomorrow, maybe you. Halo Neuroscience is also working on a neurostimulation model to help everyday folks improve focus and memory. The device, which looks like a sleep mask, aims similar electrical currents at the prefrontal cortex, the home of complex cognitive behaviors. Development is in the early stages, but given the recent advances in brain stimulation technology, “thinking cap” could be a much more literal term 10 years down the road.

A LWAY S J U I C E D , N E V E R W I R E D

The future of charging is less plug-and-play, more Wi-Fi. A gadget with a dead battery is no better than a brick, but keeping all your devices powered typically means a tangled nightmare of cords. Cutting-edge wireless charging now lets you throw your smartphone, headphones or tablet onto a slab of plastic — on your desk or in your car — that brings them back to life, no plugin required. But the universal standard on which the most popular devices currently depend is far from perfect. Modern wireless charging uses induction coils to transfer energy, so your gadget needs to be perfectly placed or it won’t get any juice. In the future, that

won’t matter. Companies like Energous and Spansive are developing charging tech that works over the air. For now, the nascent tech relies on a hub station that can charge specially outfitted devices from as far away as 15 feet. This type of wireless-charging-on-steroids could become as common as WiFi, blanketing your whole home or office in a field of invisible power that keeps your phone and computer topped off at all times. The old plug-in cable will still be the fastest option for the foreseeable future, but soon you may only need to untangle one for an emergency.

Email is Dead; Long Live Email Big Tech has been gunning for email for years, trying to axe it in favor of shiny new communication- and project-management apps. The venerable electronic mail system has survived every attempted hit. Airtable? Google Inbox? Slack? Miss, miss, and miss again. Email’s future no doubt includes a continued string of attacks, but like it or not, you’ll still be BCCing in 2029.

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MICHAEL MULLER 360 DEGREES UNDER THE SEA

The photographer-explorer on the challenges of taking the world deep-sea diving in virtual reality, for the good of the planet. interview by stinson carter i l l u s t r at i o n s b y j o e m c k e n d r y photos by michael muller

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ou might not know Michael Muller by name, but you know his photographs. If you’ve seen any Marvel movie poster over the past half-dozen years, he shot it. As a Hollywood-based fashion and commercial photographer of 30 years, he’s shot portraits of the most iconic actors, musicians and athletes on the planet — Pitt, Pharrell, Kobe — plus countless editorial features and ad campaigns. But Muller’s true passion is found beneath the sea, at the juncture of his professional craft, his conservationist alter-ego and the birth of

the new medium of virtual reality filmmaking. An ex-snowboarding-photographer-turned-superhero-shooter may sound like an unlikely Cousteau. But Muller compensates for his lack of a scientific background with indomitable energy and a knack for leveraging his network to carve new paths. Between diving expeditions, Muller spends his days in an editing bay, on land, working on his upcoming 10-part underwater VR documentary series, tentatively titled Into The Now, coming late 2019.

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What is your backstory as a photographer?

How do you go about filming VR underwater?

What kinds of challenges do you have to overcome?

I started shooting when I was fifteen, with snowboarding, in the Eighties. I got published and was shooting big bands and famous snowboarders for brochures and ads. Moved to Colorado, did a full season there, and then I moved to LA when I was nineteen and started turning my lens towards models and actors, kept shooting musicians, rose through the ranks of professional photography, and started shooting for all the big magazines, commercial photography and advertising work. Which is what I’ve done pretty much my whole career.

VR is a medium in its infancy, so technology’s moving really quickly, and on several occasions I’ve had to create cameras for rigs that didn’t exist, because we’re going where no one’s gone before. So that requires recruiting lots of engineers to shoot VR. [Because of how close the lenses have to be to stitch the footage together], that adds a whole other dimension when you go underwater, because you’re dealing with ports, the bubbles around the lenses — so it’s required me to really go outside the box and find companies that are willing to manifest [the] dream. If you look at the trajectory of the equipment we’re using, it’s getting smaller and smaller, so you go from using a 120-pound camera to a ninety-pound camera to a seventy-pound camera; from three feet high to two feet high to one foot high. The technology’s getting better, the cameras are getting smaller, low-light capabilities are getting better. But for the most part, we’re dealing with very big, heavy housings. But they work, and that’s what matters.

From the moment the idea comes into your head, you’re faced with challenges. Because first it’s, Oh, that doesn’t exist, and then the challenge is to make it. And then you make it. Is it going to work? You’ve got an erector set of cables and cameras, you’ve got to figure out where the problem is, and you’re out on location and the sun is beating on you. Or you’re getting on an airplane with eighty cases. When we used to do still and motion shoots, we’d bring maybe thirty, forty cases — now we’re bringing sixty to eighty cases. And then there’s the problem of data. These VR cameras are just chewing through terabytes, so you have to get fifty-terabyte hard drives — and multiple ones, because you’ve got to do backups. Then you’re out in the field and you have problems with the camera. One camera down means the whole dive is over. You can’t use any of that, so you’ve gotta go down and re-do that dive. You just do the best you can to roll with it, like Shackleton did. Just like the explorers hundreds of years ago. You just adapt

How did that turn into underwater VR? I have always had personal projects, and fifteen years ago I had a huge fear of sharks, so I wanted to go photograph a great white. It changed my life and altered the course of my photography career. I started shooting a lot more ocean stuff and committed my free time to that. I was gonna wrap that up about three years ago; I felt like I’d done everything I could. And then VR came along, which puts me where I’m at now.

What’s the VR documentary series you’re currently working on? It’s a series shown in 360 VR, similar to a Blue Planet-type series, where we have crisscrossed the planet and documented holy grails of underwater activities — the must-sees of ocean life. All the cool ocean stuff, so that people can experience it almost in real time from their own three-dimensional POV.

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“BIG BRANDS ARE USUALLY A COUPLE YEARS BEHIND WHAT WE’RE DOING BECAUSE THEY HAVE TO MAKE THINGS ON A MASS SCALE.”

THE GEAR Mares Scuba Equipment

Patagonia Wetsuits

Aston Martin DB11

“I only dive with Mares, I think they’re the best. My whole kit is Mares.”

“When I was diving in the Arctic, shooting orca and humpback whales, everyone was in dry suits except for me and my cameraman, Morne Hardenberg. We were both in Patagonia wetsuits, because they’re that good.”

“It really is a piece of fine art on wheels. I’ve shot and owned a lot of cars, and I think it’s the most beautiful car created. It’s like a drug. I feel dopamine dropping every time I get behind the wheel.”

GoPro Fusion VR Camera “It’s a great camera to clamp onto the boat to get that topside footage. If you’re looking to get a camera to start testing the waters of VR, this is your camera.”

IWC 50th Anniversary Ceratanium Aquatimer

Phase One IQ4 150MP Camera “The camera I use for all of my superhero shoots. It makes the costumes look incredible because of all the detail it captures with 150 megapixels — and the detail within the detail.”

“I’ve been wearing IWC for twelve years, and of all the watches in the Aquatimer series, this is by far my favorite.”

DJI Drones

Leica SL

“Drones take out the $1,500-per-hour helicopter cost of doing aerials. They also allow us to fly places the helicopter can’t go, and to get closer to animals without scaring them. They’re a great tool.”

“I use the Phase One in the studio; the Leica I use when I’m on location and outside. It’s an incredible camera for the size and the weight, forty-seven megapixels, and it’s a Leica, so you’ve got amazing lenses to work with.”

Vrtul 1 Stereoscopic VR Camera “I partnered with Vrtul to make this first underwater stereoscopic VR camera. It had its challenges, but it got the job done, and what it created was a game-changer.”

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Oculus Go VR Headset “For two hundred bucks, it’s the best VR headset you can get, and the resolution is better than Rift.”

Master & Dynamics MH40 Headphones “Whenever I’m giving people my VR to watch, I always give them Master & Dynamics headphones.”

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Boxfish 360 VR Camera “The best monoscopic underwater VR camera available on the market.”

RED Hydrogen Phone “You can watch 3D on the screen without glasses. You can also film in 3D from your phone, and you can get a housing to film underwater 3D.”

RED Epic Dragon Camera “I shoot all my 2D motion on a RED — the living one-sheet movie posters, the Aston Martin commercials, as well as on my expeditions. It’s my workhorse for any type of 2D video.”

and say, All right, let’s land our ship here. It takes a team of people that have one single-minded purpose to get this mission accomplished, whatever it takes.

How do you find the equipment you use? What companies do you develop it with? Big brands are usually a couple years behind what we’re doing because they have to make things on a mass scale. They’re slow-moving glaciers. We need to be fluid and constantly evolving, so we’re the R&D grunts — the bigger companies see what we’re doing, see there’s a need, and

then jump in. You have to go to the one-guy shops, the small engineers. That said, I’ve worked with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA engineers, so I’ve been lucky to work with some smart people to tackle how to get cameras or lights to work underwater, at depth. The underwater world of image-making is small, everyone knows each other. And then you go to the VR world, and it’s really small.

How has your technology changed since you started filming? Three years ago, the only way to shoot underwater was with a camera called a 360

Rise, which was a ball of six GoPros. That’s what I used to shoot my first proof of concept, and my takeaway from that expedition was, I need to make a new camera system, one that doesn’t exist, because I’m not making the Blue Planet of VR on GoPros. I mean, they’re great cameras, but I knew technology was going to evolve, so I knew I had to capture footage that would live four years from that point, that would live today or two years from today. So I set out to find people that could make stereoscopic, high-quality VR camera housing. They proceeded to make the Vrtul 1, the camera system we shot the primary footage for our series on. Nine months later, we came out with the V2, which was smaller, and [has] nine cameras instead

“I’M NOT A THRILL SEEKER, BUT THERE’S ALWAYS SOMETHING FUN TO GO OUT AND TRY.”

of thirteen. And it’s continuing to evolve. We’re now working on making a camera system that’s a fifth the size, a fifth the weight, with incredibly advanced cameras — the same cameras that go up on the space shuttle. They’re about sixty to seventy thousand dollars per camera, and we’re going to be using seven of them.

What is your vision for the future for VR filmmaking? It’s limitless. It has uses for medicine, for philanthropy, for empathy, especially whether it’s dealing with refugee work or lack of food, drinking water, any issue that our planet faces. It’s a great way to shift people’s perceptions because it hacks your

brain. People really feel they’re underwater with a whale in front of them, to the point where they continually reach out and try to touch the animals that they’re watching. You don’t see people in a movie theater trying to reach out towards the screen — but put a headset on, and that happens all the time. So it has a powerful way of implementing change or shifts of perception. Which has been my goal for fifteen years, for sharks — trying to change people’s perceptions of that particular animal, undo what Jaws did.

How can VR help with conservation? I screened Into The Now for a group of sixth graders a few days ago, and every single one of them was just blown away and excited and smiling. That’s more rewarding than anything. That’s why I do it. This new generation is very tech savvy. Ask any parent, their kid knows how to operate their phone better than they do. Which is cool, but on the flipside this generation is not going out into nature like we did. They’re plugged into a T1 line, so they’re not plugged into the river running outside in their backyard. And that’s true for adults, too. We’re becoming more urbanized, everywhere you go around the world. Nature keeps us in balance. It keeps us in check. If we’re not seeing what’s going on in nature, we turn a blind eye. A lot of people won’t go swimming with great white sharks or go on sardine runs, so if I can bring it to them and let them experience it, it’s a powerful way of introducing nature to them, and hopefully planting a seed that gets them off the couch, going on an adventure, experiencing it for themselves. There’s no substitute for the real thing. As cool as VR is, there’s still a drastic change from seeing a whale shark in a headset to swimming up next to a real, seventy-foot

whale shark. Engage in the planet. Life is short, we live on the one planet we know of that has an ocean, and we know more about space than we do about our own ocean.

What excites you, after all you’ve done? It’s a huge planet, and as much as I’ve done there’s still so much left to do. I dove Cuba for the first time. Cuba’s been off limits to us. Russia, for the most part, has been off limits to us. We know little about it. I was just telling my dive team, There’s gotta be great whites off Russia, right? How cool would it be to go to Russia? Because that hasn’t been documented, at least not that we’ve seen. Tens of thousands of miles of coastline off Africa that’s very remote. I’m not a thrill seeker, but there’s always something fun to go out and try. I don’t necessarily know what that is yet, but I’m about to turn fifty years old, which means I’ve got another decade or two left of health, and there’s way more to do than the time I’ve got left to do it.

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WASH FIT RINSE

REVOLUTION text by john zientek photos by chase pellerin

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As Levi’s head of innovation, pau l d i l l i n g e r has given himself the impossible task of transforming the global apparel business into a cleaner, more ethical, more sustainable industry. And he might just pull it off.

“Do you know how to sew a button?” Paul Dillinger, Levi’s senior vice president of Global Product Innovation, asks me the question near a sewing machine on the second floor of Levi’s Eureka Innovation Lab in a nondescript warehouse in San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill neighborhood, just blocks from the company headquarters. Before I can answer, Dillinger bounds down the stairs, out of sight, and soon returns with buttons, needles and thread. He grabs a pair of scissors and shears off a length of selvedge canvas in a single smooth movement before getting to work, sewing and lecturing simultaneously. “In 1997, the state of California stopped teaching conventional home ec,” he says. Dillinger is tall and lanky in a denim jacket and black beanie, with sharp blue eyes and a dark, close-cropped beard. “Home ec and shop got turned into seven different vocational tracks, and now every school teaches all seven. But basic life skills aren’t part of it,” he says, threading his needle. Back when he lived in New York, Dillinger tells me, he gave similar button-sewing lessons to friends during weekly poker nights at his apartment. Paul Dillinger grew up in a small logging town in Washington state, near Mount Rainier. He decided to become a designer at just 12 years old after seeing a fashion segment on The Phil Donahue Show. He spent his teens teaching himself sewing and patternmaking, eventually receiving a BFA in fashion design from Washington University in St. Louis. For postgraduate work, Dillinger received the first-ever Fulbright scholarship for the study of fashion, in 1994,

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attending the Domus Academy in Milan. It was at the Domus, under the tutelage of design luminaries like Anna Zegna, Philippe Starck and Andrea Branzi, where Dillinger absorbed the idea that every design decision should be validated by research, which remains core to his work. After his MFA, Dillinger moved to New York City. For the next 16 years he worked at a succession of competitive brands, including Calvin Klein, DKNY, and Martin + Osa. He quickly noticed similarities. “They manufactured at the same factories, offered the same fits and finishes, with minor deviations, and were sold at the same price points at the same retailers,” he says. As retailers began pushing for tighter cost margins, Dillinger saw profits being prioritized regardless of the effects on the supply chain, or on consumers. Disillusioned, he dropped out of the fashion world and joined the faculty as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts at his alma mater, Washington University. In the two decades since he graduated, the school had affected a noticeably more sustainable facade — no plastic water bottles for purchase on campus, waste disposal marked specifically for “Landfill” rather than “Garbage” — though despite the nod toward eco-friendliness, Dillinger noticed a disinterest from students in other issues facing the apparel industry, from child labor and sweatshop practices to the lessons of the American Labor Movement, and so he focused his academic attention on conceiving the most sustainable system possible for the fashion industry.

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A pair of jeans found at an abandoned mine in Calico, San Bernardino County, California; the style and text on the inside pocket bag date the jeans to the late 1800s; a laser at the Eureka Lab can distress a new pair of jeans in seconds.

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On the main floor of Eureka Lab, bolts of denim are stacked in tall racks for easy access. The huge blue rolls come from mills across the world and are made almost exclusively from cotton.

Later that year, Dillinger got a call from Doug Conklyn, a former colleague at Martin + Osa who had recently taken a position as senior vice president of design at Dockers, in San Francisco. (The Dockers brand is owned by Levi’s.) Conklyn was calling to offer a job — a return to the fashion industry, but also an opportunity for Dillinger to explore his personal interests from within the company. “He’s quite simply the most brilliant and creative designer I’ve ever known,” Conklyn, now Speedo’s senior vice president of design and merchandising, tells me later by phone. “Paul is that rare individual that looks at things in so many different dimensions simultaneously. I haven’t seen it duplicated.” Dillinger worked at Dockers for three years, during which time he attended the First Movers Fellowship Program at the Aspen Institute, a 60-year-old think tank for values-based leadership. (Dillinger describes the Fellowship as, “You go to the Aspen campus and engage with the brilliant people they have, and just literally bump into Madeleine Albright and have a conversation around the implications of

the common economy on global security policy.”) He introduced an academic, research-through-practice methodology to Dockers’ clothing design in the form of the Wellthread program, which explores and showcases cutting-edge sustainability solutions through small collections each season. It was, and is, a revolutionary approach. “One of the genius things the company has done with the Wellthread model is to allow it to exist at the smallest industrial scale, so that any idea we put through that model can be proofed through the gears of a major supply chain, but never at such scale it puts the ideas themselves at risk,” Dillinger says. On the second floor of the Eureka Lab, over the hushed whir of machines and the sounds of sewers putting finishing touches on custom garments for the upcoming Coachella festival, Dillinger frames the scope of his mission by first admitting the apparel industry’s dirty secret: it’s one of the world’s top industrial polluters, producing more CO2 in a year than all international flights and maritime shipping combined.

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According to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, the dyeing and treatment of textiles accounts for 20 percent of industrial water pollution globally; greenhouse gas emissions from textile production in 2015 were equivalent to 1.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide. More alarming is that, according to management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, 60 percent of all clothing produced winds up in incinerators or landfills within 12 months. People, meanwhile, are buying new clothes at a staggering rate; according to McKinsey, “clothing production doubled from 2000 to 2014, and the number of garments purchased each year by the average consumer increased by sixty percent.” When Levi’s offered Dillinger his current position, in 2014, he saw a chance to implement the Wellthread program and similar initiatives on a larger scale. Levi’s is one of the world’s biggest apparel companies, with a reported net revenue of $5.6 billion in 2018. “There’s probably no better soapbox to try to convince the industry to change its ways than Levi’s,” Dillinger says. For many brands, adopting a sustainability narrative involves a misleading if not cynical focus on a single sustainable component — say, recycled ocean plastic — which can be marketed to eco-minded consumers even if it does nothing to extend the life cycle of the overall garment. But at Levi’s, Dillinger had the mandate and the resources to consider a massive, full-system redesign. He knew the hard limitations behind feel-good sustainability stories (fabrics made from reclaimed bottles, for example, can’t be recycled when snaps or zippers are added, and can release microplastics into the waterways when washed) and he wanted to create something better. “There’s an abundance of bullshit in this space,” Dillinger says. “Don’t tell me you value recycling and haven’t considered the recyclability of the garment.” On the main floor of Eureka Lab, bolts of denim are stacked in tall racks for easy access. The huge blue rolls come from mills across the world and are made almost exclusively from cotton. To a typical denim lover, this alone is the very image of sustainable fashion. But there’s more to

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“PAUL IS THAT RARE INDIVIDUAL THAT LOOKS AT THINGS IN SO MANY DIFFERENT DIMENSIONS SIMULTANEOUSLY. I HAVEN’T SEEN IT DUPLICATED.”

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The spacious concrete floor at the Eureka Lab is painted for organizing seasonal collections; vats of natural indigo, warmed with lamps, sit next to a row of washing machines; an employee chooses a thread cone for work on a prototype.

jean-making than denim. The other components, from pocket bags to the tag, are of equal interest to Dillinger’s work, as they’re often made from less sustainable materials that can severely compromise the recyclability of “pure inputs” — like cotton and nylon that can be reused over and over again. Take elasticity. Most people now want jeans that stretch, at least a bit. Manufacturing stretchy jeans typically requires taking cotton, a pure input, and blending in a small percentage of elastane. At that point, the new material can’t be recycled. And dyes, hardware, even thread material can further complicate or negate

the recyclability. This spring, Levi’s quietly released a line of garments designed with 100 percent cotton Thermadapt fabric. The thread starts as a polyester core wrapped in cotton, which is woven into denim. The polyester is then dissolved out and recaptured for future use. The resulting fabric looks like a heavyweight jean but is 30 percent lighter than traditional denim; it also wicks moisture from the body and provides enough insulation for year-round wear, which means stores don’t have to chuck it in the Sale bin at the end of a season. The machines that produce Thermadapt aren’t located in San Francisco, but

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Eureka Lab does house an array of scientific instruments for testing fabric and a room full of hi-tech wash and dye machines. As we walk past vats of natural indigo and a row of big, blinking contraptions for garment dyeing and ozone bleaching, the conversation shifts to hemp. Hemp is superior to cotton in many ways; it’s resistant to pests, requires little water and has a short growth cycle. But it isn’t widely used in the clothing industry, mostly because industrial apparel machines are calibrated to accommodate cotton’s natural stretch, which hemp doesn’t have. Rather than creating a new manufacturing system, Dillinger wanted to process hemp so that it felt and acted like cotton. The result: cottonized hemp, recently introduced by Wellthread, which is produced using little energy or chemical processing and can move through a supply chain similarly to cotton. In keeping with Dillinger’s research-

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through-practice ethos, Levi’s produced the Wellthread cottonized hemp collection after his team learned how to process, spin and weave the thread — but notably before they figured out how to color the material. In upcoming seasons, cottonized hemp will be incorporated into Levi’s indigo denim and finished with a range of washes, but in the meantime, the collection features only white garments. “It’s exciting to be able to talk about cottonized hemp, to signal that one of the world’s big brands is saying, ‘Something new has happened here,’” Dillinger says. Of course, the fashion industry is full of bold and misleading claims, but when Dillinger proclaims something truly new, people notice. “Paul is one of the rare honest voices in our industry,” says John Moore, designer and cofounder of wardrobe essentials brand Outerknown. “He’s never afraid to speak the truth about his own work.”

During a debate at the Museum of Modern Art, in 2017, Dillinger won over a room of fashion heavyweights while arguing the position that people should stop buying clothes. And he asks me a question — one that he explicitly puts on the record as his opinion and not that of the mega-brand that employs him, but that is no less antagonistic to his industry for being rhetorical. “Why on Earth would you try to use sustainability messaging as a mechanism to sell more product, when in fact the quantity of product being sold is a problem?” The belief that people should buy less is an odd position to hold as one of the most influential executives at the world’s largest denim brand. Dillinger mentions the Levi’s Wellthread x Jacquard by Google jacket, which he showed me back in 2017, in Manhattan. The jacket features a touch interface on the left wrist paired to the wearer’s phone, allowing on-the-go access to navigation, messaging, music, and

more. The idea of Wellthread x Jacquard is that the jacket itself remains unchanged from season to season; instead, it’s the digital functionality that’s upgraded with new features, challenging Levi’s to devise ways of adding and monetizing digital value rather than simply producing more stuff. “I know this season’s Jacquard has zero environmental footprint, because the season’s Jacquard is simply the addition of new abilities that keep you from losing your phone at the bar, or your jacket at the bar.” And while Dillinger’s role encourages him to experiment with emerging technologies, like working with textile technology startup EvrNu to produce jeans from garment waste or using bacterium to dye clothes the right shade of blue, his most radical thinking may be in his simple, humanistic approach to the thoughtless consumption cycle in which people treat clothing like entertainment, habitually acquiring and discarding garments. From a manufacturer’s standpoint that can mean “just making things that last for a very long time,” Dillinger says, because people are less likely to trash clothing that isn’t falling apart. But more than that, it’s about teaching people how to find value in what they already own — how to use it, repair it, reuse it. “Our closets are stuffed full of value that we’ve been trained to ignore,” Dillinger tells me.

“It’s cheaper to buy a new pair of cargo shorts than it is to take your shorts and get a waistband taken out because your waist has changed since last summer,” he says. “Your clothes become a burden to own because you don’t know how to take care of them. I get why people throw them away to get something new. We’ve made it really cheap to buy something new.” This point, about the feverish, unsustainable consumption cycle, is why Dillinger stops everything to teach me how to properly sew a button. We practice with the sun falling in through high windows onto the painted concrete floor, and I consider just how many millions of cheap, disposable shirts and pants and shorts and sweaters have been tossed because someone can’t sew on a new button or fix a hole, and can’t even be bothered to pay someone else to do it because that garment can just be replaced with a few mouse clicks and twelve bucks plus tax. Sure, it won’t last two seasons, but it will arrive tomorrow. Maybe sooner. “You’re not creating tension between the surface of the fabric and the button,” Dillinger tells me, demonstrating the technique. His method is considered, practiced. He secures a thread shank with double knots. “It’s a much more durable way of sewing a button,” he says. The way he explains it, it sounds downright revolutionary.

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Swatches of fabric pinned to a board near where sewers customize garments for Coachella; Dillinger explains the most effective, durable way to sew a button; experimentation in all forms at the Eureka Lab.

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TO KNOW WHAT’S BEYOND text by eric adams photos courtesty of nasa

Just eight short years after Alan Shepard piloted the Freedom 7 into the void for a brief, 15-minute flight in space, NASA astronauts climbed down from a rocket ship and set foot on the Moon. In that interlude, scientists and engineers had to solve some of the most complex technical challenges ever known to man: rocketry, orbital mechanics, applied physics within the alien conditions of another planetary body. We still marvel at the achievement. These are boundary markers that remain unsurpassed by our species a half-century later, though the space program’s impact — on science, technology and the human imagination — still reverberates today.

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June 3, 1965 Gemini IV

In 2019, this image feels almost nostalgic. But in 1965, before the invention of the Sony Walkman, it was a mind-warping achievement the likes of which humanity could barely fathom. Here, astronaut Edward H. White II floats in the microgravity of orbit, conducting experiments in extravehicular movement. His gold-plated visor protected him against the unfiltered rays of the sun, while the Hand-Held Maneuvering Unit — also known as a “zip gun” — seen in his right hand helped him to steer himself outside the Gemini spacecraft.

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Apollo 8 Launch

Apollo 9 and 10 Assembly

December 12, 1968 Sending humans to the Moon and back took stages â&#x20AC;&#x201D; both figurative and, in the case of the multi-stage rockets used for transport, literal. In the space of barely a decade, NASA progressed from suborbital flights lasting mere minutes to a successful landing on the lunar surface. That effort required $112 billion (in 2018 dollars), thousands of engineers and technicians around the country, and lots of innovative new hardware.

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December 3, 1968 Different missions come together in close proximity. Here, cranes lift the first stage of the Apollo 10 Saturn V rocket for placement on the mobile launcher, while in the foreground, the mated command, service and lunar modules (the latter enclosed in an adapter) for Apollo 9 await their own final rocket positioning.

March 6, 1969

Astronaut Russell Schweickart During Apollo 9 Astronaut Russell Schweickart uses a Hasselblad with an 80mm lens and 70mm SO-368 Kodak Ektachrome film. Each camera was customized by the manufacturer to be resistant to the extreme conditions of space, fully functional in microgravity and easy to use even when wearing the heavy gloves of an astronautâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s suit.

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August 20, 1965 Gemini Mission Equipment

The Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions were heavily documented using the most advanced photographic equipment of the era. The goals were scientific, documentary and technical in nature — the latter to help engineers on the ground study the missions and hone the equipment between flights. Here, camera equipment prior to loading aboard Gemini 5.

THE GOALS WERE SCIENTIFIC, DOCUMENTARY AND TECHNICAL IN NATURE — THE LATTER TO HELP ENGINEERS ON THE GROUND STUDY THE MISSIONS AND HONE THE EQUIPMENT BETWEEN FLIGHTS.

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August 23, 1966 Earthrise from the Moon

Unmanned probes gathered data ahead of the lunar missions, analyzing radiation and scanning for possible landing sites. They also sent back stunning images thanks to massive, innovative camera rigs. Based on military reconnaissance technology and developed by Boeing and Kodak, they were capable of exposing multiple frames simultaneously, developing film and scanning the results, then transmitting the images back home via radio. The stunning images helped scientists better understand the lunar terrain, and teased the public as to what awaited the Apollo astronauts. This image from Lunar Orbiter 1 represents the first-ever photo of Earth from lunar orbit.

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FLIGHT DIRECTOR GENE KRANZ FAMOUSLY ORDERED HIS TEAMS TO BE “PERFECT” FROM THAT DAY ON. January 27, 1967 Apollo 1 Ground Test

In this shot, the crew of Apollo 1 approaches the command module for a routine ground test. It ended in tragedy when fire erupted inside the capsule, killing astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee. The tragedy delayed subsequent missions, but ultimately served to strengthen the resolve of the astronauts, engineers and support personnel to improve the work, and push on: in the wake of the disaster, NASA discovered the capsule had dangerous design faults and determined the oversight of the program’s development was grossly insufficient. Flight director Gene Kranz famously ordered his teams to be “perfect” from that day on.

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Date Unknown Lunar Landscape in 3D

Some familiar technology arrived on the Moon in unrecognizable forms thanks to the hyper-specialized retrofits needed to achieve scientific or mission success. This unusual camera (pictured on the opposite page) captured closeup 3D images of the lunar surface; an astronaut simply placed the device over an interesting area — every mission specialist had geology training to help them identify notable details — and squeezed the trigger to capture a pair of stereoscopic images. Internal lighting and fixed-focus lenses ensured proper exposure with each shot.

The 3D camera was developed by Tommy Gold, a controversial but highly regarded astrophysicist who argued before Apollo 11 that the lunar surface would be composed of fine dust, which proved completely true. (Controlling lunar dust was in fact one of the biggest challenges for astronauts on the lunar missions.) Gold’s camera generated highly detailed images, like the one seen here, which allowed him and other scientists to study the undisturbed composition of the Moon’s uppermost layer.

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Buzz Aldrin Disembarking from the Apollo 11 Lunar Module

Astronaut Footprint on the Moon

July 20, 1969

The Lunar Module — the craft that actually landed on the Moon — was the first human-carrying spacecraft designed to operate entirely on another world. Its construction therefore didn’t need to factor in Earthly concerns like aerodynamics and friction; its spindly legs were just strong enough to handle the Moon’s lesser gravity, and they could splay out all the time. The Apollo 11 astronauts stayed on the lunar surface less than a day and brought back 47 pounds of lunar material while leaving behind the lower half of the lander, scientific instruments and the U.S. flag, among other objects.

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July 20, 1969

One of the hundreds of footprints left behind by astronauts, each of which likely remains exactly as it was 50 years ago due to the airless environment.

INTEL

Okay, time to chill out â&#x20AC;&#x201D; either at the beach (p. 172) or at the griill (p. 26). If you need more dedicated focus, you can check out what meditation has to offer (p. 174), or maybe dig into what a bread scientist plays with at work (p. 178). Is it as interesting as what a NASA spacewalker brings to the office (p. 210) everyday? Who knows? We just want to know what sort of accidental innovations (p. 182) happen in space ...

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THE GREEN WAVE

FAC I N G PAG E

OUTERKNOWN NOMADIC VOLLEY TRUNK $68 PATAGONIA STRETCH PLANING HYBRID SHIRT $89 TEVA HURRICANE XLT2 SANDALS $70 SUNSKI FOOTHILL SUNGLASSES $58 OUTERKNOWN CRUSHABLE CAP $32 ORIS DIVERS SIXTY-FIVE WATCH $2,100

photo by chase pellerin

Your beach-day kit should be casual, not careless. Many sustainably minded brands make gear from recycled materials, including ocean plastics, so you can enjoy a smaller footprint while feeling the sand between your toes.

NOMADIX STRIPES RETRO TOWEL $40 MANDA ORGANIC SUN PASTE AND SUN CREME $32 EPPERSON MOUNTAINEERING PACKABLE PARACHUTE TOTE $130 HYDRO FLASK 32 OZ WIDE MOUTH BOTTLE $40 BUREO AHI PERFORMANCE CRUISER SKATEBOARD $195

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HOW TO GET BETTER AT EVERYTHING: MEDITATION text by cassie shortsleeve i l l u s t r at i o n s b y e m m a n u e l p o l a n c o

It’s not just yogis and gurus who benefit from quiet time dedicated to focusing on the present moment: elite athletes and corporate strivers alike practice meditation for its performance benefits. The mind-body discipline has long been known to boost concentration, reduce stress and help with a good night’s sleep. But dedicated training can also produce faster, better decision-making thanks to increased adaptability and insight. It’s a simple, effective way to step up your game, no matter what that game is. Pause, take a breath, and read on to learn your TMs from your FAMs from your oooooommmms.

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Go Deeper The Book Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom, from Rick Hanson, Ph.D, a neuropsychologist and meditation instructor, offers research-backed tools to help you strengthen your brain. The Technique Observe clouds floating through the sky; when thoughts, worries or distractions pop into your head, attach them to the clouds and watch them drift away.

OPEN MONITORING MEDITATION (OMM)

The App Insight Timer offers OMM meditations to practice absorbing a situation without overthinking or distraction.

Best for: CEOs Open monitoring meditation involves “watching” your thoughts and feelings without becoming attached to them, maintaining a non-reactive and non-judgmental awareness of the present moment. It’s been a favored technique of CEOs like Arianna Huffington and the late Steve Jobs. Recent research suggests OMM practitioners can control their states of consciousness and attention, and according to Michael Gervais, a high-performance psychologist who works with the NFL’s Seattle Seahawks, long-term repetition can help identify which thought patterns are beneficial to performance — and which ones are worth discarding. Plus, OMM can promote divergent thinking, which is conducive to creativity.

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FOCUSED ATTENTION MEDITATION (FAM) Best for: Athletes

Go Deeper

Focused attention meditation increases mindfulness by turning your concentration to your breath. By focusing on a simple target, like the in and out of your lungs, it’s easier to notice when your mind wanders says Christina Heilman, Ph.D, C.S.C.S., and author of Elevate Your Excellence: The Mindset and Methods That Make Champions. “Focus is a huge part of athletic performance,” Heilman says. “Wherever your focus goes, everything follows.” Learning to ignore irrelevant cues allows insight as to what’s important in the moment, whether that’s hydration or a subtle shift in the opposing team’s defense. Elite performers such as Olympian Kerri Walsh Jennings and pro golfer Rory McIlroy practice FAM.

The Book The Mindful Athlete: Secrets to Pure Performance provides insight from George Mumford, coach to NBA championship teams and legends like Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant. The Class The UC San Diego Center for Mindfulness offers mPEAK, a performance-driven mindfulness session for high-level athletes. The Device Neurofeedback headsets like Versus and Muse measure brain activity and display your current focus levels on a corresponding app. The goal: learn to harness your attention at its peak, and refocus in times of distraction.

“Focus is a huge part of athletic performance. Wherever your focus goes, everything follows.”

TRANSCENDENTAL MEDITATION (TM) Best for: Moguls

Go Deeper

Transcendental meditation improves mood, attention, focus and emotional intelligence, and can promote a state of inner peace. “A lot of us are stuck because we don’t take time to reflect,” Heilman says. A TM session allows time to process experiences and learn from them. Long-term transcendental meditators show significantly higher blood flow to the brain regions used for adjusting behavior and focusing attention. One study showed school staff in San Francisco who practiced TM enjoyed better moods, higher emotional intelligence, and increased adaptability and stress management skills.

The Book Super Mind: How to Boost Performance and Live a Richer and Happier Life Through Transcendental Meditation tells readers how to get more done and achieve peak performance. The Technique While only certified TM instructors can provide approved transcendental meditation training — with a price tag of $800 or more — anyone can benefit from 20 minutes spent sitting quietly, eyes closed, relaxing the mind. The App Use Oak to time your TM sessions, and watch your tree avatar grow the more you meditate.

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AT WORK

NATHAN MYHRVOLD text by will price photos by lauren segal

These days, Nathan Myhrvold, 59, mostly makes food, but it wasn’t always that way. The polymath studied four different fields of physics and collaborated with Stephen Hawking at Cambridge before founding a software startup that was bought by Microsoft, where Myhrvold spent a few years as Bill Gates’s CTO. Myhrvold is listed as a coauthor on hundreds of patents. His newest creation is Modernist Cuisine, the most scientifically

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exhaustive cookbook company ever. Myhrvold’s titles — Modernist Cuisine, Modernist Cuisine at Home, Modernist Bread and the forthcoming Modernist Pizza — represent the height of research in their respective categories. “We’re the guys who bake bread in a waffle iron just to see what happens,” Myhrvold says. “We can’t get by accepting what’s already been done wholesale.”

Sous Vide Circulator “I think we were one of the first organizations to seriously experiment with this tool back in the day. It’s good for applying a gentle, consistent heat — to make tough or delicate meat tender and whatnot. Nowadays, if I’m making a spot prawn pizza, I’m not going to put the prawns in the oven, I’m going to cook them sous-vide.”

Blow Torch “Traditional cooking picks a single technique [then] tries to compromise elsewhere. To cook a steak where the outside is brown and appetizing and the inside is done perfectly, you’re better off in almost all cases cooking the inside one way — a sous-vide, a combi-oven — and separately cooking the outside.”

Wine Refrigerator “Wine fridges are great for fermenting sourdough bread. You could proof bread in a refrigerator, but it’s too cold and takes too long to develop. We did extensive testing and determined [the best temperature to be] fifty-five degrees Fahrenheit, which is a wonderful coincidence.”

3-D Pizza Scanner “There are different ingredients and techniques that increase or decrease the volume of a loaf of bread or puffiness of a pizza. But how do you measure that directly? How do you tell that objectively? By god, we made a scanner. It’s accurate to a small fraction of a cubic millimeter.”

Digital Thermometer “If you’re on the hot line at a steakhouse, training involves two hundred steaks or so; after that, maybe you won’t need a thermometer to track temperature. No amount of regular practice, pressing on the meat with your thumb or whatever else, will make you capable of gauging temperature. Honestly, I don’t understand why you wouldn’t use one.”

Induction Burners “My absolute favorite heat source for cooking in a pan. Boiling water, cooking in a sauté pan, frying food — nothing beats induction. The way induction works, you wind up making the pan hot, but not the room hot. You can also control it more precisely than with a gas or electric stove.”

Rotary Evaporator “If you follow a recipe and it says to thicken something by boiling it down on the stove, what you’re concentrating is going to taste cooked. Raw flavors taste radically different than cooked flavors, and rotary evaporators let us concentrate those.”

Electric Knife “I would never use one of these to slice a turkey but they’re fantastic for slicing bread. Reason being, you typically cut bread with a serrated knife, which is basically a saw. You have to move the saw back and forth perfectly or else you get an inconsistent cut. With an electric knife, one stroke and you’re done.”

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COUNTERPOINT

DEATH TO THE INSTANT POT

All good cooks know the power of simplicity. But simple doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t mean brainless.

text by maria del russo photo by chase pellerin

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As an Italian-American woman, I’ve been cooking since I was tall enough to stand on a step stool. For Christmas last year, instead of an expensive bag or shoes, I asked for an expensive Dutch oven and a cast-iron skillet. When I’m feeling especially stressed, or sad, or overwhelmed, I retreat to the kitchen. Cooking is how I show love and how I escape, losing myself in the process of preparing a meal. And that‘s why I think we need to pile all of the sous-vide machines and Instant Pots in a mound and burn them. Over the past handful of years, it’s become so that I can’t mention a meal I’ve made or a recipe I want to try without someone telling me about the fancy (and definitely bulky) new gadget they’ve bought. The story is the same whether it’s an Instant Pot or an air fryer. First, friend plunks down money, sometimes hundreds of dollars. Next, friend uses new gadget with vigor, usually for about a month. Finally, inevitably, the shine wears off and the miracle gadget exists only to occupy valuable cooking space and collect dust. Someone at brunch recently asked me if I have a rice cooker, and I found myself answering, You mean a pot and some water? in full screech. There are only so many times you can hear the same story of time, space, and money wasted before something snaps. (For the record, they had no retort.) Of course, there are kitchen tools I think qualify as actual innovations. I adore my immersion blender. I couldn’t cook without my Dutch oven. And if someone asks me to roast a chicken without an instant-read thermometer, they’ll be served an undercooked bird. But these tools are as useful to the professional as the novice. The gadgets I take umbrage with are those that take the skill out of cooking. I dislike Crockpots, Instant Pots, rice cookers, sous-vide machines and those weird molds you crack eggs into in order to poach them. This isn’t misplaced snobbery; it’s quite the opposite. Cooking doesn’t have to be some

I’m all for things that make cooking easier and more accessible, but not dumber. If you want to save time, learn some recipes and reacquaint yourself with that old, well-made pan in the back of your cupboard. insanely complicated undertaking. The recipes that get me the most praise are typically the unfussy ones: The delicious sauces, comprised of four ingredients and some spices, that bubble over the stove for an hour. The seasonal ratatouille that involves nothing more than chopping up vegetables and letting them mingle in a pot. The perfectly seasoned steak seared over a ripping hot skillet. These recipes don’t involve dozens of obscure spices or a kitchen the size of a laboratory — just a little time, effort and patience. These bulky, trendy gadgets, on the other hand, perpetuate the idea that cooking is inherently complicated and time-consuming, and do nothing to actually teach the user how to cook. They lull the user into complacency and reward the bare minimum. I find that sad. It makes me cringe to realize that cooking is no longer considered an essential skill, and that there’s social currency in claiming yourself too busy to pull together a meal. Kitchen innovations that take the knowledge out of cooking help to reinforce this nonsense, and actually divorce the cook from their meal. When I know I’m going to be making a ratatouille, spending my time chopping and dicing each vegetable by hand, I take care to pick the best veggies available. The same impulse doesn’t exist when you’re chucking things into a Crockpot before running to work. Good meals are best made with simple in-

gredients and a sturdy set of pots and pans. A good cook can get by, forever, with: a castiron skillet, a Dutch oven, two small pans (sauté and sauce), a good set of knives, a slotted spoon, a cookie sheet, a roasting pan, a ladle, two spatulas and a regular spoon. Most of my cooking is done during a threehour window on Sunday. I make sauces, stocks and other bases, like rice or quinoa, by throwing some ingredients into a pot and letting them simmer. While that happens in the background, I prep as much as I can for other meals. I chop vegetables that can be cut ahead of time, like broccoli or brussels sprouts. Or I roll and fry meatballs so they’re ready to be sauced and served later over spaghetti squash, or alongside some greens. After a few hours of prep work, I’m always halfway to a decent meal throughout the rest of the week. When I’m ready to eat, I just assemble some puzzle pieces. When the stock is already made and the vegetables already chopped, making soup comes down to boiling. Putting together any pasta dish with a pre-made sauce is the definition of simple. I’m all for things that make cooking easier and more accessible, but not dumber. If you want to save time, learn some foundational recipes and reacquaint yourself with that old, well-made pan in the back of your cupboard. You’ll surprise yourself with what you can create. That’s where the true innovation in cooking lies: with the cook, not the gadget.

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ACCIDENTAL INNOVATIONS words by will sabel courtney photos by chase pellerin

Invention isn’t always planned. These five iconic items started life as something else entirely.

POPSICLES

According to legend, in 1905 an 11-year-old named Frank Epperson left a cup of water and lemonade mix on his porch through a cold night, the stirring stick still inside. True or not, Epperson trademarked “frozen ice on a stick” in 1923, and the Popsicle was born. Since then, frozen sweets on handles have become a summertime staple, tweaked and copied by countless brands, but the original endures in the freezer aisle to this day, along with its Creamsicle and Fudgesicle spin-offs.

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POST-IT NOTES

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In the late â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;60s, 3M scientist Spencer Silver wanted to make his own super-adhesive, but wound up with something entirely different and seemingly useless: a reusable glue that was only slightly sticky but responded to pressure. When Silverâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s colleague Art Fry used the substance to affix a bookmark to a hymnal, the Post-It Note was born. Today, the ubiquitous office supply has expanded into an entire brand, including dozens of varieties in myriad sizes, colors and adhesion strengths.

THE SLINKY

In 1943, naval engineer Richard James was trying to invent a spring for stabilizing shipboard instruments when inspiration struck for a different product entirely. After accidentally knocking one spring from his shelf, James watched it hop from obstacle to obstacle all the way down to the floor, where it coiled neatly back onto itself. After a little work â&#x20AC;&#x201D; and naming help from his wife, Betty â&#x20AC;&#x201D; the Slinky was born. Since then, more than 300 million have been sold around the world.

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SUPER GLUE

In 1942, Harry Coover Jr. and his team of scientists were looking for a material to make a new type of gun sight when they stumbled upon cyanoacrylate. It wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t much good for the sight; it stuck to everything it touched. But Krazy Glue, Loctite, and other super glues made from the fast-acting adhesive have found plenty of uses in subsequent years: everything from sticking model airplanes together to woodworking to suturing wounds. (Just donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t put it on cotton or leather, as the combination can spontaneously heat up and burn.)

PLAY-DOH

Back in the days of coal-fired heat, Noah McVicker’s nontoxic putty was perfect for erasing soot from wallpaper. When Americans began switching to other, cleaner fuels like electricity, the substance seemed useless — until a schoolteacher convinced McVicker to turn it into a children’s toy. In the eight decades since, over 350,000 tons of the salty modeling clay have been churned out in more than 50 colors, along with hundreds of associated products. There’s even Play-Doh-scented perfume.

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NEW RULES OF THE SUMMER COOKOUT photos by chandler bondurant prop styling by aja malia coon f o o d s t y l i n g b y c at h e r i n e y o o

A cookout is a social gathering, a laid-back celebration around a cooking fire with good music, food and drink, family and friends. But the feast itself was once much more of a production: meats marinated days in advance; waking up early to light the coals; shuffling between kitchen and grill, pulling drinks and snacks together while tending to the flames. The traditional image of the hardworking host sweat-drenched over open fire is rustic, romantic, and almost completely impractical nearly all the time.

T R A E G E R I R O N W O O D 6 5 0 , $1, 200

The modern party thrower wants no less spectacular results, but with a vibe thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s more effortless than exacting. That means high-tech connected grills, side dishes ordered via app, a simple speaker setup that works indoors and out, and more Wi-Fi coverage than an airport lounge so guests can post that perfect shot of the pork shoulder. This is a summer get-together as itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s supposed to be: refined, relaxed, with a focus on actually attending the party, not just feeding it. Sound your speed? Just follow these seven simple steps.

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BRING THE HIGH-TECH HEAT

Which is better suited to the backyard cookout, charcoal or gas? As it turns out, neither. Gas grills are quick to light but lack the smoky, rich flavors a natural flame imparts; charcoal hits those notes but demands frequent coddling to manage temperature, smoke and flame levels. The ideal solution, then, would involve some combination of the two. Enter the pellet grill. (Or should we say re-enter the pellet grill; the technology has been around since the ‘70s.) Fueled by natural wood pellets, a firebox, onboard computer and an array of fans and temperature sensors, pellet grills were once seen as a gimmick. But modern versions let you monitor internal temperatures and control ignition, temperature, smoke output and more using sophisticated smartphone apps. It’s the ideal blend of usable technology and cooking craft: it won’t transform a novice into a pitmaster, but it provides the knowledgeable cook a far more expansive tool kit.

ON THE EASY SIDE Sides are essential, but they should be simple. Avoid elaborate presentations that keep you in the kitchen for longer than a few minutes — a cookout is more about socializing than a show-stopping gumbo. You could stick with traditional make-aheads like potato salad and coleslaw, but really, shouldn’t you let someone else worry about the sidekick stuff? That’s why food-delivery apps like Grubhub and Uber Eats exist — everything’s as close as a few taps on your phone, giving you more time to focus on the rest of your to-do list.

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KEEP IT FLOWING You could spend half your party prep on booze calculus: the right number of drinks cooled to just the right temperature with the perfect amount of backup to keep everyone refreshed, relaxed and ready for more. Stefano D’Orsogna, cofounder of NYC hotspot Sonnyboy, shared some pro planning tips from his time throwing barbecue bashes back home in Australia.

Cool Under Pressure

Y E T I T U N DRA H AUL , $400 Y E T I IC E , $15+

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Pre-chill everything you can — including the cooler, if possible. Start with a layer of ice at the bottom, then add a row of beer, evenly spaced. Another layer of ice, another layer of beer, repeat until you’re almost full. Make sure to leave room for the wine, which goes up top on its own layer of ice.

Bottoms Up

Stacks on Stacks

No matter what you’re packing in the cooler, don’t leave empty space — ice lasts longer when it’s packed to the brim, says Matt Pittman, owner of Meat Church BBQ in Texas. Pittman also swears by reusable Yeti Ice packs. “They’re a cheap investment that makes a huge difference,” he says. For a more thorough chill, line them along the bottom of the cooler, below the first layer of ice.

When it comes to stocking booze, it’s always better to be overprepared. For lunchtime events go with beer and cider — three to four per person — with the option for wine. In the evening, offer a cocktail (or better yet, punch; see the next page). Plan on two servings each, plus two to three beers per person per hour, depending on your crowd. For wine, go with one bottle for every four people, and keep the red wine chilled in the cooler along with the white and rosé.

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Punch It Up Everyone loves a good mixed drink, but pity the host stuck mixing them. Instead, throw together a batch of D’Orsogna’s Blind Man punch and let the guests bartend themselves.

Makes 15 servings 30 oz. Four Roses Bourbon 4 oz. fresh lemon juice 4 oz. simple syrup 15 oz. mango puree Mix it all together and serve over ice. D’Orsogna recommends an extra kick like they do at Sonnyboy: “We add a half-ounce pour of red wine as a float,” he says.

U LT IM ATE EARS M EGAB L AST, $250

HEAR, HEAR

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Don’t dismiss the simplicity — or surprisingly good sound — of syncing a few portable Bluetooth speakers together and streaming from your phone. Popular manufacturers like Bose, Sony and Ultimate Ears have added the feel of multi-room functionality with speakers that skip Wi-Fi, linking instead over Bluetooth to play music in tandem. Powered speakers require more setup and labor, though they let you travel freely with your phone and incoming calls and texts

won’t ping into your playlist, as with synced portable speakers. These need to stay connected to a power source, so they’re not quite as rearrangeable, but they’re larger and they sound better. As with the portable options, if you have more than one of the same powered Bluetooth speaker, you can sync them together to amplify the sound. Plus, many of the larger models include jacks for a subwoofer and microphone: instant karaoke.

SOUND GARDEN People move around at an outdoor party, which means there’s no one-size-fits-all answer for a speaker setup. You’ll have to consider things like size, layout and furniture. Still, there are some general rules for helping your sound stretch its legs.

Position speakers on hard surfaces to eliminate extra distortion from shaking.

Speakers work best when played close to ear height; in mixed company, cover a range by placing on surfaces between 36 and 60 inches high.

Arranging speakers against available walls will improve bass response, but don’t get closer than a few inches or you’ll muddy the mid-range.

UP YOUR RANGE Even at a great party, people are on their phones: checking on a game, posting to Instagram, calling an Uber for more refreshments. But cookouts typically mean distance from a Wi-Fi router, and distance from a router usually means crappy Wi-Fi. A Wi-Fi extender solves the problem. The device plugs into the wall and basically bounces the signal into parts formerly unknown — including a backyard. Guests are happy, and you don’t have to send anyone into your bedroom to check out a YouTube video. The powerful but inexpensive TPLink AC1200 is a solid pick for the job. It will set you back forty bucks, or less than you’ll spend on mixers. T P -LI N K AC1 200 W I -F I RAN G E E XT E NDE R , $40

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LOOK SHARP, BREATHE EASY Tending the grill isn’t a button-up affair — you want a wardrobe that’s relaxed and breathable. That means lightweight, natural-fiber garments made from cotton or linen (and embrace a bit of pattern if you’re so inclined). Plus, summer’s no time to skimp on sunglasses. Invest in polarized lenses, an optical upgrade that reduces glare off flat surfaces, especially handy if you’re grilling by a pool or large windows. Not all polarization is created equal, however. Acrylic-based lenses are typically cheap and scratch easily; mid-tier polycarbonate is more durable and fully impact-resistant but includes some distortion. The highest-quality polarized lenses, made from high-end mineral glass, come from just a few factories in the world, including Barnerini in Italy and Nakanishi in Japan. Looking for a new pair? Consider a seasonally-minded translucent frame. The style is less formal than solid-color frames, and a good complement for a laid-back wardrobe. On your feet, high heat, hot coals and sizzling meat mean closed-toe shoes are a must. But you don’t need to sacrifice the comfort of sandals. Low-profile, warm-weather slipons are ideal for hours around the grill, and a leather or suede construction can stand up to a spilled dish or even a stray ember. Styles that are easy to pull on and kick off, like espadrilles, make for easy trips in and out of the house. A simple, classic silhouette, like traditional Turkish sandals or Venetian loafers, compliments a range of warm-weather outfits — and will still be in style for many grilling seasons down the road.

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cloc k wise f rom top le f t

ri g ht , top to bottom

DAV ID KIND CLOVE R SU N G L ASS ES, $ 340 EYEVA N WEBB SU N G L ASS ES, $41 0 RA EN REMMY SU N G L ASS ES, $ 1 70

F RY E CHRI S VE N E T I AN LOAF E RS, $228 RAN COU RT & CO. VE N E T I AN LOAF E RS, $260 SABAH BE I RU T BL ACK S HOES, $ 1 95

this pa g e

Snow Peak Quick Dry Aloha Shirt, $269 Bellerose Drawstring Trousers, $140 facin g pa g e

520 W 28th St

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CUTTING EDGE styled by john zientek photos by chase pellerin

Summerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s relaxed but still sharp with clean lines and sleek, technical materials.

this pa g e

Nanamica Alphadry Club Jacket, $385 Hamilton 1883 Band Collar Shirt, $195 Tecovas Lizard Belt, $95 Shockoe Atelier Selvedge Jeans, $225 Lucchese Jonah Boots, $795 facin g pa g e

300 West 57th Street

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this pa g e

Jacques Marie Mage Roy Sunglasses, $895 Saint Laurent Denim Shirt, $890 Alex Mill All-Terrain Short, $95 facin g pa g e

Roy and Diana Vagelos Education Center, 104 Haven Ave

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this pa g e

Eyevan 7285 775 Sunglasses, $565 Nonnative Denim Jacket, $745 Mollusk Hemp Pocket Tee, $44 Goldwin Stretch Chino Trousers, $260 Chamula Cancun Huaraches, $121 facin g pa g e

Barclays Center, 620 Atlantic Ave

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this pa g e

District Vision Yukari Sunglasses, $199 Saint Laurent Flannel Shirt, $690 facin g pa g e

The Oculus, 185 Greenwich St

this pa g e

Veilance Monitor SL Coat, $750 Lady White Co. T-Shirt, $99 (2-Pack) Leviâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Slim Taper Fit Jeans, $80 Justin Cherry Creek Belt, $65 facin g pa g e

The Met Breuer, 945 Madison Ave

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TOOLKIT

DREW FEUSTEL text by will sabel courtney p h o t o s b y t r av i s h a l l m a r k

It’s safe to say no one on Earth has quite the everyday carry of astronaut Dr. Drew Feustel. With 61 hours and 48 minutes of EVA — that’s “extravehicular activity,” NASA’s shorthand for spacewalks — under his belt, the 53-year-old seismologist has spent more time in space outside of a spacecraft than all but two people in human history. His first outing came 10 years ago, on the final mission to repair the aging Hubble telescope, where he wrestled with stripped screws and frozen bolts in the cold expanse. Feustel has since returned to orbit twice more, logging a total of 226 days spent outside Earth’s grasp. “We take time pretty regularly to look out at the Earth,” Feustal says of his spacewalks, which are nonetheless filled to the minute with tasks. “It’s pretty magical.” Despite the utter silence and zero gravity, spacewalks aren’t cakewalks. They can stretch for up to eight hours without breaks, and astronauts have to stay sharp the whole time; any mistake can be catastrophic. To reduce the chance of mishaps, tools are modified for use with astronauts’ bulky suits — enlarged, reformatted and usually fitted with various straps and connectors to keep them from floating off into the void. When he’s not zipping around the planet at north of 17,000 mph, Feustal, a die-hard car guy who’s snapped shots of F1, IndyCar and MotoGP race tracks from space, spends his time working on more earth-bound go-fast machines like his classic 1973 BMW 3.0 CS and a Euro-spec ‘85 BMW 535i. You can see shots of his cars — and his trips to the International Space Station — on his Instagram account, @astro_feustel.

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“I ALWAYS HAD THE THOUGHT IN MY MIND: THIS IS NORMAL. THIS IS WHAT HUMANS DO.”

PI STO L G R I P TO O L ( P GT) – USE D TO DR I V E BO LTS TO S P ECIF IE D TO RQUES DUR I N G SPAC E WA L KS

BO DY R EST RAI N T T ET H ER ( B RT) – AST RON AUTS USE T H I S TO O L TO H O L D T H E I R SUIT IN PL ACE AT A WO R KSI T E DUR I N G A SPAC E WA LK

M U LTI M E TE R – FO R M EASU RIN G VO LTAG E , CUR R E N T, RES ISTA NCE, TEM P ERATU RE, A N D P R ESSUR E

SA FE TY T E THER – TETH ERS ASTRO NAU TS TO THE S PACE STAT I ON DU R I NG SPAC E WA LKS ; H AS 85 FT O F CA BLE T H E IN N OVAT IO N ISSU E G E A R PATROL

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THE CONVERSATION

TRAINER & ENTREPRENEUR as told to meg lappe photos by chase pellerin

Matt Johnson was the president of the EF Education First Pro Cycling team for 10 years. A former competitive cyclist on the European circuit, Johnson used feedback from elite athletes to inform The Feed, a retail site that curates the best performance products on the market and explores cutting-edge topics from holistic training modalities to hardcore nutrition hacking on its blog. Joe Holder holds many titles: Nike Master Trainer, creative director of wellness for SmartWater and founder of Ocho System, a company he created to treat athletes holistically through a range of modalities. As a former college football player whose career was cut short due to injury, athlete wellness is a cause Holder believes in. We asked Johnson and Holder to discuss their own nutrition routines, the best way to fuel athletic performance right now, and what the future holds for performance-based nutrition. This conversation has been edited and condensed for space and clarity.

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Matt Johnson: Joe, coffee or tea?

JH: Plant-based gang life.

Joe Holder: Tea. Ginger tea.

MJ: Morning vitamin routine?

MJ: Oh, ginger tea. I don’t drink coffee, I focus on green tea. Caffeinated or uncaffeinated?

JH: I take some sublingual B12, zinc. I have turmeric, spirulina, chlorella added to my smoothie. I have some Cordyceps and then I probably have some vitamin C.

JH: Uncaffeinated. MJ: Do you have any caffeine in the morning? JH: I like to cycle caffeine, but if I do have it, I’ll have an espresso. MJ: How much water per day? JH: I try to get a gallon. MJ: I’m Canadian, so I’m doing the conversion in my head. I don’t know what a gallon is. I sort of hate drinking water, so I always use low-calorie Nuun tablets in the water. I go from barely drinking thirty-two ounces of water in a day to sixty-four or ninety-six ounces. Do you add anything to it, or just straightup water?

MJ: And anything specific in that [supplement] regimen because of the plantbased diet? JH: The B12 for sure. The zinc, as well. The other stuff is mainly for general stamina. I’m just super into adaptogens right now, experimenting with them, so I do the mushrooms — ashwagandha, rhodiola. I mean, ginger is the OG of adaptogens. MJ: And on the ginger front, can you just do raw ginger? Like, is that effective, or is it not concentrated enough?

JH: No, I just try to do straight-up water. Room temperature if possible.

JH: It’s not, for me. I just try to have four to six cups of ginger tea a day, so I make a mix. I slow boil lemon peels and raw ginger. But if I’m really trying to level up, like in harder training sessions, I will take capsules.

MJ: Are you plant-based or a carnivore?

MJ: I should try that. If I’m in a real endur-

“People want simplistic, easy answers, even though nutrition and the human body are the hardest things to figure out.” ance training day or a high-intensity training phase, I’ll use Sur AltRed, which is this sort of super-concentrated betalain beet extract product. I use HVMN Kado — it’s like their daily Omega-3 supplement, which I really like. I use Tart Cherry from VitalFit, just as a daily inflammation reducer. And I just started the Mack Daddy of anti-aging supplements, Eternus, from Neurohacker Collective.

m at t j o h n s o n

JH: I’ve never taken the powders. The powders often don’t sit well with me. I’m interested to try the Sur AltRed after this. The beet juice supplementation and nitrous oxide supplementation is about figuring out the best ways to utilize the strategic diet, utilizing proper breathing strategies and then bringing in the supplements when need be. MJ: When do you stop eating before bed?

p o r t r a i t s c o u r t e s y o f m at t j o h n s o n a n d j o e h o l d e r

JH: Three hours. MJ: I totally agree with that. If I focus on the eating window, I try to stop eating at six-thirty or seven, because I’m all about the early dinner and relatively early bed. Now, setting an eight-hour eating window is trending. We’re seeing the keto crowd look at it and say, Let’s combine these and start the eating window with a higher-protein, lower-carb diet for the first meal or two. Traditionally, the keto guys were terrible endurance athletes over the long term. Now they’re doing the carb-refueling window, taking in a bunch of carbs at the last meal to restock glycogen levels overnight. That seems to me to be the most efficacious of all the trends that we see out there. I’d love your thoughts on that, Joe.

joe holder

JH: I’m a big fan. What I’ve seen best results with is doing a brief period of the ketosis diet or something similar during low-intensity states in which you’re really trying to base-build for endurance-oriented sports, even marathons. What you’re hinting at is

just strategic carb-cycling built around the training schedule to produce best results. MJ: Do you have any other sort of pre-bed nighttime routines, from a supplement standpoint? JH: Probably about an hour before bed I’ll have magnesium. I tried valerian root for a bit, which worked really well but it put me in a dark place, like wild mood swings, so I had to stop. Maybe some ashwagandha and CBD. MJ: From our experience with CBD, a sublingual is probably the best way to go because of the increased bioavailability versus a gel cap. What’s interesting is the dosage you need; there’s this minimum threshold that’s different for every person. And if you’re taking it on an empty stomach, you can reduce that dosage. My favorite CBD is a mid-afternoon tea with some CBD honey. Have you done any honey before bed? Has that been effective? JH: No, actually, I’ve never tried honey. MJ: A lot of the biohackers talk about that, right? Refiling liver stores and things like that. JH: The only thing I’ve experimented with are grape juice and arginine, and I’ve noticed some benefits with that. MJ: Yeah, we realized that we had access to all this information [at The Feed], what worked or what didn’t work, but the everyday athlete didn’t even know how to hydrate or use energy gel. JH: The first issue is most people don’t understand what science is. It doesn’t exist in a vacuum. People want simplistic, easy answers, even though nutrition and the human body are the hardest things to figure out. They’ll try to extrapolate one small thing, and then they’ll just try to make that a blanket [statement]. “Eggs are bad” —

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eggs may be bad for some people, but for certain individuals, there may be a benefit. You see these hyperbole moments that try to demonize certain foods, but everything needs to be looked at in a continuum. MJ: I believe the same thing. We brought in a team chef for the cycling team that would cook [a low-inflammation diet] for all the athletes at events like the Tour de France. Other teams were still pounding pasta. And we saw huge improvements by focusing on the diet. What do you think the future of supplements looks like? JH: There’s a difference between supplements for performance and for health. A lot of times people either mess up the dosage or the frequency; they’re not going to see any performance benefits. Caffeine is the easiest example. Most people don’t use caffeine correctly during their races to have any true performance benefits — just a little bit more cognitive clarity. For my marathons, I’ve seen how to use caffeine appropriately. It typically needs fifteen to thirty minutes to kick in, and then you’ve got to get a pretty high dosage, depending upon your body. A lot of people don’t get nearly as much caffeine as they need per kilogram of body weight. MJ: When I look at supplements, I start with safety. We don’t want anything that’s not well researched and efficacious. The problem with CBD is there’s so much hype and noise. Before we started selling CBD, we said, We can’t rely on what the vendor’s telling us, even the most reputable vendors — we need to test all of them. The results are shocking. Of a hundred products we tested in the CBD space, less than ten percent were within five percent of what they said was in the product. And some were no more than olive oil or MCT oil. JH: I have a buddy whose brand made me customized [CBD] blends. All his stuff is small-batch, he would test it and send me the actual numbers and what was in it. I noticed a difference using it. For me, it was all about sleep, anxiety and travel. Some topical delivery systems seemed to make a difference, especially around marathon training. But it does go back to what you were talking about earlier, when you send some of that stuff out to get tested and there’s nothing in it. It’s not that the active ingredient doesn’t work, it’s

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Holder takes sublingual B12 (above) before bed to help promote cell growth. Johnson drops a Nuun tablet (below) into his water to help him drink more throughout the day.

that the company isn’t giving you the supplement with the ingredient in it! It’s crazy. In the past two years, you’ve seen changes in delivery systems, like with Amp Sports Nutrition lotions and Maurten hydrogel, but the core components of each have been around. Carbohydrates have been known to increase exercise performance since the Fifties. It’s not that this stuff has to be exceedingly new; the main issue is that nobody’s taking it right. The next big step in the industry is going to be increasing consumer knowledge about how to utilize them to maximum results. MJ: Yeah, fifteen years ago sports drinks had tons of carbs in them and it was impeding people’s ability to hydrate, making them sick. They were falling apart. Maurten comes along, creates a product that starts out as a liquid and converts to a hydrogel as you drink it. The carbs — glucose, maltodextrin — are encapsulated into this gel that doesn’t digest in your stomach, it’s primarily digested in your small intestine. You don’t get sick to your stomach, you still get your hydration and

you can take four to five times the amount of carbs than before. It’s like starting the second hour almost as fresh as you were in the first hour.

Johnson adds Beekeeper’s Naturals B. Chill Honey to his tea for an afternoon pickme-up. Each $50 jar packs 500mg of hemp extract.

JH: The future of supplements is going to involve reconceptualizing what actual supplements are. It doesn’t have to be pills and powders. There’s a very interesting research study about female athletes eating a Mediterranean diet versus a Western standardized diet [for] four days leading up to a competition — the diet acted as a supplement, like a true ergogenic aid, to improve their 5K times. MJ: I think the biggest thing with diet is reducing inflammation. I’m not surprised that a Mediterranean diet would lower inflammation markers. JH: If everybody cut out the sugar and understood how to properly carb-cycle — that at the proper moment, especially for athletes, sugar and carbs are your best friend — it’s just about knowing how to use them properly. I think that that’s kind of right on trend.

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FUTURISM

Scooters are a pretty cool solution for urban mobility. Air taxis are cooler. Imagine using your phone to hail one for a lift across town — or all the way to the beach. Examples like those from Vermont-based Beta Technologies (on this magazine’s cover) or the Lilium Jet, pictured here, promise three-dimensional transportation solutions. Lilium, out of Munich, has prototyped a remarkably simplified aircraft without the need for a tail, rudder, gearbox or propellers. What Lilium Jet does have are 36 electric jets, gull-wing doors and panoramic windows that let you take in the view of the traffic you’re missing. Coming next to the category: autonomous flight capabilities, and a morbid new form of range anxiety.

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photo courtesy of lilium

ELECTRIC AIR TAXIS