Meet the Designer Making Fantastical Corsets Out of Upholstery 

WHY NOT, DON CHERRY HAD HIS SUITS MADE OUT OF UPHOLSTERY FABRIC
AND CANADIAN RED NECKS LOVE HIM

BY LIANA SATENSTEIN VOGUE March 12, 2020

Photo: Courtesy of Kristin Mallison / @kristinmallison

CORSETS ARE A POPULAR ITEM AT RENAISSANCE FAIRS, SCA EVENTS AND PAGAN GATHERINGS 

During the daytime, Kristin Mallison works at a curtain customization company, dressing windows with one-off drapery. In her spare time, the Brooklyn-based 29-year-old designer creates corsets using similar fabrics. One corset is made from a Rococo tapestry. Another corset shows blown-up florals (the type that might be on a fancy grandmother’s couch); its back is fastened by a lavender ribbon. A standout is a corset that has several tapestries fused together, including the image of a picturesque 18th-century couple strolling through a garden that is paneled with a dainty floral print.


Mallison started making corsets about a year ago for a pop-up for the arty, downtown store Café Forgot. The concept was simple: She was already surrounded by upholsteries and tapestries and knew that these fabrics could stand the test of time. “I have been working in interior design for the last two years, and those fabrics are geared towards things that are supposed to last for a long time,” says Mallison. The idea of clothes with that kind of staying power appealed to her. “Unlike [most] fashion...home furnishings last 30 years or more.”

Photo: Courtesy of Kristin Mallison / @kristinmallison

When she began to make tapestry-based pieces, Mallison would scout flea markets and thrift stores. (Using secondhand fabric was something she had learned at her program at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, which encouraged students to repurpose materials. “I was already focused on that [repurposing] and it further developed how I think about design and that approach,” she says.) She also started to use Etsy and eBay as sources. “It is easier to find weird and oddly specific materials that way than [to] go to 20 different thrift stores and not find anything,” she says. Rarely does she find enough fabric to make one corset, so instead, she will patchwork multiple parts of tapestry together, which adds a fresh twist to the pieces.

Photo: Courtesy of Kristin Mallison / @kristinmallison

Mallison often searches for fabric that will show scenic imagery of, yes, women wearing corsets. “It creates another layer of intrigue.” Another reason why Mallison has been gravitating toward creating corsets is the hyper-femininity aspect. She’s not far off from runway trends, either. The vestigial wide-hipped 17th- and 18th-century pannier popped up in several collections. And the Vivienne Westwood corset has been one of the most coveted archival pieces. “I think there is a lot of feminist politics and thinking about what it means to be feminine,” she says. To add some adjustability to the pieces, she will use ribbon to lace up the back of the corset. “I don’t think there is anything more feminine than a corset or these historical silhouettes, and I want to interpret them in a modern, more playful way that is not at all constricting.”

These Penguins Took a Field Trip Around the Aquarium, and I Will Never Be the Same


BY EMMA SPECTER VOGUE March 17, 2020
 

Photo: Getty Images

Thanks to the outbreak of the new coronavirus sweeping the globe, many of us are being encouraged to practice social distancing or fully self-quarantine if we can. Given the scale of the pandemic, you’d have to be a Pollyanna-level optimist not to let some anxiety creep in, and we’re all trying our best.

That’s why when something unprecedentedly nice happens it is imperative to seize and cling to it. To that end, when I found out that a group of rockhopper penguins at Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium had taken the building’s closure as an opportunity to go on a field trip around the premises, I let the news radiate fully through my body, bringing me a sense of peace I haven’t felt in days.

https://twitter.com/shedd_aquarium/status/1239248971006185478

“Without guests in the building, caretakers are getting creative in how they provide enrichment to animals,” the aquarium told the Chicago Tribune; in the penguins’ case, this involves waddling around to take a peek at the marine life they’ve unknowingly been sharing premises with all this time.

It’s hard to explain why exactly the penguins’ big day out hit me so hard. Ultimately, though, I think it has something to do with knowing that these sweet little creatures have no idea why they’re suddenly being allowed to have the run of the aquarium. While the rest of us hunker down, Skyping and Zooming one another in an effort to maintain our mental equilibrium, these penguins are innocently having the time of their lives, and really, who would begrudge them that?

Now Isn’t the Time to Forget About Our Climate Change Efforts



BY EMILY FARRA VOGUE March 17, 2020

Tasha Tilberg, Lindsey Wixson, and Liu Wen photographed for 

Vogue’s September 2019 issue at the Eagle Street Rooftop Garden

 in Brooklyn.Photographed by Tierney Gearson, Vogue, September 2019

The absentminded Instagram scroll looks a lot different these days. Vacation pics and shameless selfies have been replaced with glimpses of how we’re living through the coronavirus outbreak and its necessary quarantines: Health care officials are sharing their tips and expertise; fitness instructors are posting living-room workouts; chefs are sharing easy home-cooked meals; and others are posting about how we can all help those who are most at risk.

It’s a reminder of how social media keeps us connected and informed no matter where we are in the world, a fact we take for granted with every double tap. But it’s mostly a testament to the power of coming together around a crisis and taking collective action for the greater global good. In theory, practicing social distancing, washing our hands more thoroughly, and working from home can slow down this disease and eventually, hopefully, eliminate it. We’re all doing our small, if sometimes inconvenient, part, and already we’re beginning to see how our individual actions contribute to something much, much bigger than us.


For those involved in climate-change efforts, you might see a few through lines between our response to the coronavirus and our response (or lack thereof) to the effects of climate change. Climate scientists and activists have preached for decades that our individual choices and behaviors matter, whether you’re composting, ditching single-use plastic, buying secondhand clothes, or doing the precise opposite of all of those things—wasting food, relying on plastic water bottles and containers, shopping extravagantly.



For many people, of course, awareness is still the root issue; just like some of us didn’t understand the concept of herd immunity or that staying in could save lives, plenty of people still don’t realize the effects of throwing away a plastic bag or shopping at certain retailers. What we need to reverse climate change is a swell of united, all-in-this-together effort from each and every one of us, and, as we’ve learned from the coronavirus, that probably won’t happen until we treat climate change like the crisis that it is. Only when the appropriate media attention (and resulting social media attention) is given to the people being displaced by climate change, the rising water levels, the endangered species, and the dire predictions of what’s to come—natural disasters, fatalities, lost islands—will we link arms and make those crucial lifestyle changes.

It calls to mind a particular meme that made the rounds on Instagram last week: “Climate change needs coronavirus’s publicist.” Jokes aside, the takeaway is astute: Climate change needs a spotlight and sense of urgency to get us moving. “We can see with coronavirus that action did not follow immediacy [of the news]—action more closely aligned to when the stories we were told became more serious,” says Maxine Bédat, the founder of New Standard Institute. “This is why I think the media and communications are such a critical part of solving the climate crisis. We need the communications of the climate crisis to match the urgency that is the climate crisis. As the stories are told, as we have seen with the coronavirus, we, the people, will respond accordingly.”

We asked Bédat and a few other climate-change experts to share what that hypothetical response might look like. After what is looking like weeks, if not months, of social distancing, canceled events, and stressful news, their suggestions might even sound easy.

Step 1: We would dramatically shift our transportation habits.

It’s well known that transportation—by air, train, or car—is one of the top contributors to climate change. “If we took climate change as seriously as the coronavirus, our cities would be oriented around public transportation, which might include shared bicycles for last-mile transport,” Bédat offers. “Public transit would be fast, clean, and low priced and would take us to work and cultural institutions—museums, shows, concerts, or restaurants showcasing locally grown food from farms that use regenerative practices. We would also immediately change from gas cars to electric, like our stoves, and turn our power grids to renewable sources. Our appliances and vehicles would run on renewable energy too.”


“Everyone with access to renewable energy would switch,” adds Haley Boyd, a designer turned sustainability entrepreneur working on a new sourcing tool for the fashion industry. “It’s one of the easiest and most effective ways to reduce your carbon footprint, and it’s widely available and price competitive in many places. Reduced transportation and ride-sharing apps [are also better choices]. I wish UberPool and Lyft shared rides were labeled as eco.”

Susan Tarka Sanchez, a U.N. certified engineer and expert in circular product design who is also working with Boyd, adds that we have to “rethink work as we know it and what impacts that will have on transportation.” For instance, if more people begin to work remotely, which could very well happen after weeks (or months) of these #WFH quarantines, it would reduce the number of cars on the road and put less strain on public transit.

Step 2: We would make clean water a bigger priority.

“Water is already at its crisis stage, and no one is really talking about it,” Tarka Sanchez says. “The water imbalance on planet Earth is a direct correlation to climate change from emissions [created by] manufacturing pretty much everything we use, eat, wear, and do. It’s about chemistry that you do not see—and people are currently dying in this country from contaminated water. It is still the number one killer of children in the world, usually from diarrhea due to water contamination. Without clean water, we have no clean air, no food, no habitat for animals, plants, and all the creatures to drink,” she continues. “We just use way too much water and are destroying it by making all of the other stuff we use.”

Tarka Sanchez mentioned water purifiers and rainwater barrels as water-saving solutions, and you can also donate to clean-water organizations. But water use—and contamination—is something you should consider when you’re buying clothes too. Conventional cotton and denim are both among the top offenders in terms of their water use, and if you’re purchasing cheap polyester clothes, they could be made in an unregulated factory that doesn’t properly dispose of its chemicals. Polyester and other synthetic fabrics shed microplastics in the laundry too, which eventually make their way into the waterways and our bodies.
Step 3: We would change the way we care for our clothes, shop secondhand, and demand transparency from brands.

“Rebuilding a relationship with our closets [would be crucial],” Bédat adds. “Our clothing would be things that we purchased with thought—we would know that they would be worn, taken care of, and cherished for years, not just a few wears. Clothing brands would slow down the release of new items and use that time to design and develop pieces that would delight us. And designers themselves would not suffer from burnout!” she continues. “The fashion we chose would reflect not our insecurities but rather the comfort and joy we have in ourselves.”

“We don’t need to wait for another global crisis like the Rana Plaza collapse to mobilize,” Céline Semaan, the founder of Slow Factory, adds in regards to holding brands accountable for their environmental and social responsibility. “Things this serious are happening every day—we’re just not getting full support from the fashion press about them. We need to think about using our creativity and innovation to adapt to changing times. Design and aesthetics have always had deeper roots in ethics and meaning. This was once only related to status, but I see it shifting to a collective understanding of our humanity.” She continues: “The industry should be taking a closer look at systems and data so we can understand the impact of all fashion products and how they can take a waste-led, circular approach. The more information, transparency, and digestible data that is shared and embraced by the public, the more pressure the public will have on the fashion industry, demanding accountability once and for all.”
Step 4: We would fully embrace the ethos of less is more and would look to prior generations for inspiration.

“In a way, the coronavirus is climate change’s publicist,” Boyd says. “Emissions in China are down 25%. Air travel is down. People aren’t buying material goods. They’re staying local. Those are some of the most important actions individuals can take, and they look a lot like what life was like not too long ago. Some of the most important climate solutions are not novel—they’re the habits of our parents and grandparents,” she continues. “We have to eliminate the idea of waste and disposability. I hope for a future where all materials are valuable, used, and reused, [and we] care for things the way our grandparents did. As I’ve adopted a more conscious lifestyle, I keep noticing that I’m doing things the way my grandmother did—I cook from scratch, I don’t waste things, I avoid disposable goods, like using dish towels instead of paper towels.”

“With personal-care products, we do not need most of any of the stuff we use,” Tarka Sanchez adds. “We should go back to basics, like apple cider vinegar. As for clothing, people are just realizing you are what you wear. I have now gone seven months without buying anything new as an experiment and have learned how to darn socks like they did during the war and to save buttons that fall off like my mom did during the Great Depression.”


On that note, Bédat has an alternative to buying anything at all: “We would have to rebuild our relationships with each other,” she says. “Rather than the short, quick high of a cheap purchase, we can develop more meaningful and long-term ways of finding pleasure, including more connection with our friends, family, and community.”
Step 5: We would ask businesses contributing massive amounts of greenhouse gas emissions to suspend their operations.

Semaan also proposed a temporary shutdown of certain corporations and industries. “[It would be crucial to] shut down businesses and activities that directly and massively contribute to greenhouse gas emissions in the order of negative impact and magnitude, starting with energy used in buildings, schools, governments, and any public-facing infrastructure,” she says. “[They would be] put on pause until they are fully replaced with solar-powered, carbon-negative solutions. Businesses that contribute to the problem would be mandated to shut down immediately while larger solutions are explored. We would cancel all fossil-fuel extractions; replace concrete production with a circular solution, such as green concrete; [and there would be] mandatory green roofs, regenerative agriculture, and the protection of Indigenous lands. This would also include the mandatory reform of all heating and air-conditioning systems in large buildings to comply with circular, solar-powered solutions, and for the recycling of gray water in buildings to be filtered back into drinkable water. Federal funds would be diverted to emergency services around installing clean-energy solutions.”

A New Wave of Filmmakers Is Quietly Championing Reproductive Rights Onscreen

BY EMMA SPECTER VOGUE March 13, 2020

Photo: Courtesy of filmmakers

Warning: This story contains spoilers for Never Rarely Sometimes Always, Saint Frances, and Swallow.

It’s been more than a century since abortion was first addressed onscreen (in the 1916 silent film Where Are My Children?), but the pop-cultural messaging around the procedure has maintained a disappointing sameness. For years, movies from The Panic in Needle Park to Dirty Dancing portrayed abortion as a last resort or a moral stain, framing it as the worst fate that could possibly befall a woman; even late-aughts pregnancy comedies like Juno and Knocked Up addressed abortion glancingly, if at all.

Then came 2014’s Obvious Child, in which writer and director Gillian Robespierre pulled off the near-impossible: a bona fide abortion rom-com, in which a woman who chooses to terminate her pregnancy is allowed agency and given support, not to mention a romantic story line. In the film’s final scene, struggling comedian Donna (Jenny Slate) rests at home after a surgical abortion under the tender care of her not-quite-boyfriend Max (Jake Lacy); watching them cuddle under a blanket and watch Gone With the Wind felt like a repudiation of the deeply entrenched notion that having an abortion makes you somehow unworthy or less deserving of love.

Now, as reproductive rights in the U.S. are increasingly under attack—most imminently in the state of Louisiana, which defended its controversial law requiring all physicians who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at local hospitals before the Supreme Court last week—Planned Parenthood and other reproductive-health providers are working with filmmakers to paint a more complete picture of what abortion looks like in America today.

Talk to almost any writer or director making a movie that features abortion, and they’ll invariably mention one name: Caren Spruch, the senior director of arts and entertainment engagement for Planned Parenthood, who helped advise Robespierre on Obvious Child and more recently worked with Eliza Hittman, the director of gritty Sundance hit Never Rarely Sometimes Always, to tell a deeply moving story about the human cost of abortion restrictions in the U.S.

In Never Rarely Sometimes Always, which opens in New York and Los Angeles on March 13, pregnant high school student Autumn (Sidney Flanigan) and her cousin Skylar (Talia Ryder) flee Pennsylvania by bus and head to New York so Autumn can obtain an abortion. Thanks to misinformation fed to Autumn by a faith-based crisis pregnancy center about the progression of her pregnancy, she ends up requiring a second-trimester abortion—which requires a two-day surgical procedure—with little money and no place to stay in New York.

“I had no desire to make a movie about [abortion] as a moral choice or a difficult decision,” Hittman told Vogue. “I wanted to make a movie about the obstacles a minor would encounter trying to get an abortion in rural Pennsylvania, and Caren filled me in on how Planned Parenthood could help in that situation.”

With the assistance of Spruch, Planned Parenthood, and Choices, a private reproductive-health center in New York, Hittman toured facilities; spoke to medical advisers and counselors; visited a crisis pregnancy center to avoid “writing a stereotype of anti-reproductive-rights Christians”; and even took the bus ride from rural Pennsylvania to New York to get an idea of what her protagonist’s journey would look like from start to finish. “Eliza was determined to get it right,” said Spruch.

Photo: Courtesy of Focus Features

Carlo Mirabella-Davis’s thriller Swallow was released on March 6 and follows Hunter (Haley Bennett), a young pregnant housewife who lives with a disorder called pica, which creates an irresistible urge to ingest objects. Hunter is seen forcing everything from ice cubes to marbles down her throat over the course of the film, and toward its conclusion, we see her contemplatively eating french fries in a mall food court before pulling out the abortion pills a Planned Parenthood practitioner has given her and furtively swallowing two. In the film’s jarring final scene, Hunter bleeds into a toilet before looking at herself in the mirror and walking out of the bathroom, radiating something like peace for the first time.

Photo: Courtesy of IFC Films

“Abortion is just one small piece of Swallow,” said producer Mollye Asher, who, along with fellow producer Mynette Louie, worked with Planned Parenthood to craft the clinic-consultation and medication-abortion scenes. “The film represents a woman’s right to autonomy over her own body.”

In a process coordinated by Spruch, Asher and Louie met with Planned Parenthood advisers to discuss how a medication abortion works—many people are unaware that it consists of two sets of pills, one that stops the pregnancy and one that empties the uterus—and the timeline of when in a pregnancy a woman might consider that particular method.

“Just because we have an abortion in our movie doesn’t make it an abortion movie,” added Louie. “This an integral part of life for women, one in four of whom have abortions, and we didn’t want them to feel alone.”

Spruch met with Kelly O’Sullivan, the writer and star of indie dramedy Saint Frances, almost a year before the film hit theaters on February 28. In the film, O’Sullivan plays Bridget, a 34-year-old server and aspiring writer who takes a summer job as a nanny for a lesbian couple’s daughter; the film, on which O’Sullivan collaborated with director and real-life partner Alex Thompson, was based on her experience undergoing a medication abortion in her early 30s.

“This movie could be called There Will Be Blood 2,” O’Sullivan wryly wrote in an open letter to media, and it’s true that Saint Frances, while full of laughs, is unabashedly physical. Bridget bleeds near-constantly following her abortion, but it’s not painted as macabre or unduly frightening; it’s just something that happens. And while Bridget eventually allows herself to experience grief, that grief doesn’t overtake the film. “I was kind of scared of abortion because of how it’s been depicted on TV and in movies, and I wanted to portray it as something that’s not pleasant but not necessarily traumatic,” O’Sullivan told Vogue.
 

Photo: Courtesy of Everett Collection

Never Rarely Sometimes Always, Swallow, and Saint Frances all began filming at least a year ago, in times that looked slightly less dire for the fate of reproductive rights in America, but this wave of independent films is hitting theaters just as the Supreme Court is hearing its first abortion case with conservative justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh on the bench.

“When you see a character who you’ve come to know onscreen having an abortion, it engenders empathy,” Spruch told Vogue, noting that Never Rarely Sometimes Always is the first film to explore the effect of state-by-state parental consent laws on minors seeking abortions: “We’ve had the right to abortion for almost 50 years, but it’s meaningless if you don’t have access.”

As that access is increasingly threatened and President Donald Trump’s campaign promise to overturn Roe v. Wade seems poised to become a possibility, movies that chip away at abortion stigma by avoiding morality tales and folding the procedure into a larger, more complex story feel more necessary than ever.

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Aboriginal Australians Shocked by Volcanic Eruption 37,000 Years Ago Could Still Be Telling the Tale

When people reached Australia remains controversial, but the myth of a giant who turns into a volcano could be the oldest true story in the world

Ruth Schuster HAARETZ Mar 12, 2020 

Budj Bim crater lake  Peter Lieverdink / cafuego.net

No volcanoes have erupted on continental Australia in living memory. But the ancestors of today’s aboriginal Australians who had settled in Victoria, South Australia and North Queensland witnessed the odd volcanic blast and evidently lived to tell the tale – and may have been doing so for some 37,000 years.

The connection is that scientists have found evidence of an eruption at the twin peaks of Budj Bim around that time. And the experience could plausibly have been so traumatic to the early settlers of Australia that they have been recounting it ever since, suggests a paper published in Geology last month.

Some fairy tales are believed to have been kicking around Europe for as much as 6,000 to 7,000 years, possibly including the likes of the “Beauty and the Beast.”

In the Old World, the postulated antiquity of the stories is based on comparative phylogenetic analysis – employing statistical methods to genetic analyses as well as, in this case, linguistic traditions – which concluded that the tales, often significantly grimmer than they are today, spread with the Indo-Aryan languages.

Incredibly, the folk story “The Smith and the Devil” may go back to the Bronze Age – not that long after metalworking even became a thing. The devil, apparently, had been a thing for awhile.


But the postulated Australian tale is a whole other kettle of mythical fish, because it could be true. That could make it one of the oldest stories still told today that is verifiably based on an actual event.

Some time when the world was young, goes the story, four giants arrived in southeast Australia. Three set off inland, and one stayed. He then transformed his body into the volcano Budj Bim, aka Mount Eccles, and his long teeth turned into molten lava.

There is another verbal tradition among the Gugu Badhun aboriginal people. Mentioned in the journal of Quaternary Geochronology, it may describe the violent eruption of Mount Kinrara somewhere between 5,000 to 9,000 years ago. 

Aboriginal rock art paintings in Kakadu, Australia

SherSS / Shutterstock.com

Australia may seem geologically benign today (albeit afflicted with other problems). But about 100 million years ago, prehistoric Australia was studded with super-volcanoes so powerful that at least one blasted zircon crystals all the way across the prehistoric mega-island. Krakatoa and Mount St. Helens, hang your heads. That Aussie blast may have been as cataclysmic as the Toba super-eruption, which was thought to have all but wiped out early humans around 74,000 years ago. It didn’t, according to a recent study.

Anyway, that level of mega-volcanism around Australia abated, though the continent’s southeast presently features a chain of about 400 potentially active volcanoes that arose over a magmatic hot spot. The chain stretches from Melbourne to Mount Gambier, a distance of about 420 kilometers (260 miles). Happily for modern humankind, the last time any erupted – the Blue Lake and Schank vents at Gambier – was about 5,000 years ago.


Despite the best efforts of science, future eruptions remain unpredictable. Certainly any early Australian settlers living by Budj Bim were likely very surprised when the mountain blew its top, and the impression left on their shocked minds could plausibly have reverberated to this very day.

Key to the ancient-tale theory is that there likely were people in Australia when this volcanic range was still active (which it isn’t today). But the debate over when humans reached Australia for the first time and whether it really could be as long as 65,000 years ago has become quite fraught.

Changing paradigms

In 2017, a large team of scientists headed by Prof. Chris Clarkson of the University of Queensland published a groundbreaking paper postulating that modern humans had reached northern Australia by 65,000 years ago. If so, it would profoundly change the narrative of modern human evolution. Among other things, the ancestors of today’s non-African people would have had to leave Africa much earlier than the common theory, which put the exit at 50,000 years.

If people did reach southeast Asia and Australia by 65,000 years ago, their ancestors would have had to leave Africa at least thousands of years before. It takes some time to walk that far, and to cross some water en route.

Clarkson’s theory was based on excavations at a rock shelter called Madjedbebe (formerly known as Malakunanja II), which had been archaeologically explored in 1973 and 1989. Much evidence of prehistoric occupation was found, but the dating remained controversial. Clarkson et al conducted new excavations in 2012 and 2015 to try to set the record straight. 

The Glass House Mountains: actually volcanic plugs, 

remnants of volcanic activity that occurred 

26-27 million years ago Robert Myers / Bidgee

Using thermoluminescence, some finds – including more than 1,500 stone tools – were dated to around 50,000 to 60,000 years, with some margin of error. “These ages made Madjedbebe the oldest human occupation site known in Australia,” Clarkson and his team wrote. They also reported on finding hearths and a man-made pit from the time.


It all may be gospel and maybe people did reach Australia 65,000 years ago, but there is no consensus on that. One critic is Prof. Emeritus James O’Connell of the University of Utah. His underlying argument is that some data has been misinterpreted, termites may have mucked up the timeline, and there is not in fact clear evidence of such early occupation.

“While AMH [anatomically modern humans] may have moved far beyond Africa well before 50-55,000 years ago, data from the region of interest [Australia] offered in support of this idea are not compelling,” he and colleagues wrote in the U.S. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2018.

Blowing smoke

A key snag, he explains to Haaretz, is that if Madjedbebe really goes back 65,000 years – indubitably an attractive concept – it’s an anomaly in the Australian archaeological scene. The net result of a great deal of research since the 1960s has been an apparent threshold for human presence just under 50,000 years ago: “None of the exercises produced any reliable information greater than 50,000 years,” O’Connell says.

Another anomaly is the sheer density of artifacts supposedly from that very ancient time. No other Pleistocene site in Australia has anything like that, O’Connell explains – they have “a very light archaeology signature.”

Asked if it is plausible that Madjedbebe could simply have been prime Paleolithic real estate and intensely occupied, he explains that it was not ecologically irresistible 65,000 years ago. Unlike the marshy wetlands of today, the coast at the time was 300 kilometers away and the habitat was not rich.

Moreover, the nature of the ochre, points and other artifacts doesn’t scream 65,000 or even 50,000 years, he argues. “If somebody knew the archaeological record of Australia pretty well and saw a list of that assembly, and was asked to speculate about age – they would guess less than 5,000 years,” O’Connell says.

Aboriginal Australians seem to descend from people 

who arrived 50,000 years ago, and possibly more

evantravels / Shutterstock.com

Yet another argument is over human agency regarding a pit at the site, which the Clarkson team deemed to have been likely made by humans. Australian Prof. Emeritus Jim Allen and some others, writing in that same PNAS article, think the original archaeologists may have transected a runoff channel.

As for the purported hearth: it is 40 centimeters (15 inches) below the lowest artifact at the site. Secondly, it’s oddly small as Paleolithic fireplaces go: less than 10 centimeters across. Can't cook much in that. Thirdly, says O’Connell, it’s in the wrong place. The purported fireplace is by the back wall of the cave rather than near the cave mouth. “At cave sites worldwide, hearths are placed at the outer edge of the shelter or occupation area. You don’t want to smoke up the cave completely, and that’s what a hearth at the back of the site would inevitably do. So it’s probably not a hearth and if it were, it’s in the wrong spot,” he sums up.

Yet another anomaly involves conflicting results of thermoluminescence data and carbon dating. Thermoluminescence is a tricky technique that archaeologists generally outsource to people who understand how to perform it. But the bottom line is that it indicated dates of 50,000 to 60,000 years ago for the early occupation of both Madjedbebe and Nauwalabila – another postulated early occupation site. Carbon dating of charcoal fragments from purportedly early layers at the Nauwalabila site produced a series of age estimates that fell mainly in the Holocene (ergo, the last 11,000 years), O’Connell explains.

Others rebut that, saying the archaeological sequence may have been disturbed and the sample may have been “contaminated” with later charcoal. Radiocarbon dating of three organic samples from deep layers at Madjedbebe all produced dates in range of 11,000 to 16,000 years ago, O’Connell says.

But the strange thing is that one sample dated to 13,000 years ago, but luminescence dated it to well over 50,000 years ago.

Clarkson – a key advocate of the 65,000-year-old proposed occupation date – has yet to personally rebut these criticisms, though other Australian archaeologists suggest that anomalies could have been caused by site disturbance by termites. Hence, the luminescence dating could be valid and the charcoal dating could be due to burrowing insects. 

Budj Bim crater lake Mertie

“My bottom line,” says O’Connell, “is that the date for human presence at this site 65,000 years ago could be OK, but the case is very weak. Criticisms of the 2017 Madjedbebe report have not been adequately addressed by Clarkson and his associates.”

Asked to comment on Madjedbebe’s postulated age, Clarkson had not responded by press time.

Yet bolstering the case for occupation by the time of the Mount Eccles eruption: in 1947 a stone ax was found embedded in the volcanic ash from the volcano Tower Hill, which also erupted about 37,000 years ago. Being under the ash, it leads to the assumption that somebody was watching the eruption and dropped the ax (or died, who knows?).

All of which means what? That archaeological finds may be subject to interpretation; that a thrilling idea doesn’t mean it’s true; that we still don’t know when modern humans reached Australia; and that the only thing everybody seems to agree on is that when a volcano erupted some 37,000 years ago – never mind exactly which volcano – Australia was occupied. And the blast could plausibly have frightened the geologically naive people so badly that they never forgot it.

Ruth Schuster
Haaretz Correspondent

Counting Birds at the End of the World
Flying biologist Heather Wilson’s unique skills take her to the Alaskan skies


A PHOTO ESSAY BY ERINN SPRINGER VOGUE March 13, 2020

AN EXCERPT

“Do you do well in small planes?”

I don’t fully understand the question until the horizon tilts to 45 degrees, and the plane cabin hops over the wake of our jet stream. I’m in the jump seat of Heather Wilson’s Cessna 206, and until today, the smallest plane I’d been in was the commercial 40-seat Ravn Air flight that brought me here to Alaska’s Cold Bay.



Behind the yoke is Wilson, a biologist pilot for the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. She’s not your typical cruising-above-cloudline flier: With wings at 500 feet, Wilson skillfully and swiftly banks the plane towards the lagoon below, locking her eyes on a blur of flying Pacific black brant geese while she recites what she sees into the helmet-wired audio recorder.

We are here to count birds—thousands of them.



A persistent gray sky hangs heavy and low, blanketing everything beyond an arm’s length above my head.



Cold Bay has a small tangle of dirt roads connecting a few dozen free-standing houses and community centers, adorned with caribou antlers and parked ATVs. The old church, previously a military pre-fab Quonset hut with a DIY board-and-nail steeple, held its final mass in 2008 and is now used for storage.



Wilson transcribes her audio recordings in a corner table at the Izembek NWR headquarters.



After checking the weather and waiting for the 8:30 a.m. sunrise, Wilson drives Ol’ Red, a much beloved Ford, to the USFWS hangar to begin the pre-flight protocol.



“I think of the Cessna 206 as a Swiss army knife. It can do so many things well...and that makes it a very useful plane for aerial survey work,” says Wilson.

At the tip of the Alaskan peninsula, Cold Bay occupies a strip of land hugged by two tides emanating from the Pacific Ocean to the south and Bering Sea to the north. Cold Bay is 768 miles south of the Arctic Circle and 335 miles west of Honolulu: a place so remote that its permanent residents include 38 households and a rotating cast of brown bears, wolves, foxes, caribou, and lots of birds (at this time of year, about a quarter of a million).

Every fall, thousands of migratory waterfowl take refuge in the lagoons of the nearby Izembek National Wildlife Refuge (NWR) and State Game Refuge, including the entire population (roughly 160,000) of Pacific black brant geese. Peppered amongst Emperor geese, Canada geese, and Steller’s eiders, brant annually reunite with their relatives to stage, or fatten up, on the world’s largest eelgrass beds before setting forth to their respective wintering grounds. Some will travel to protected bays along the Pacific coast of the U.S., though most are headed for Mexico’s Baja Peninsula, and an ever-growing portion—about 30%—remain in Izembek due to the warming winters.

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Erykah Badu’s “Social Distancing Couture” Is the Coronavirus Response We Need Right Now


BY JANELLE OKWODU VOGUE March 13, 2020

Photo: Getty Images

 

Photo: Getty Images

Amid a worldwide pandemic, it can be hard to find moments of happiness—leave it to Erykah Badu, however, to accomplish the impossible. The iconic musician has always had unconventional style, but last night she used fashion to address the current Covid-19 crisis. In Austin to be honored with the Filmmakers & Soundtrack Award at the 20th Anniversary of the Texas Film Awards, Badu arrived at the event in a customized hazmat suit spray-painted with the Louis Vuitton logo in an ombré black and red. The outré look was decontamination chic, or as Badu put it, “social distancing couture.” Designed by the artist herself—and paired with sky-high feather and fringe boots—the one-of-a-kind piece was the talk of the evening.

Few would take the initiative to design personalized protective gear. Still, Badu’s fashion moments are less about testing out trends and more about getting her audience to think outside the box. Whether that means helping to popularize talismans and amulets in the late ’90s, starring in a Givenchy ad, or supporting fellow artists in her online store, the result has always resulted in new forms of expression. Her hazmat fashion moment is a creative way of addressing the fears and legitimate concerns people are dealing with in connection to the coronavirus outbreak.


While not the first celebrity to lean into the concept—Naomi Campbell breezed through LAX in a microporous coverall earlier this week—Badu’s look approaches the issue with a new level of inventiveness. We’ll have to wait a few months to see if Nicolas Ghesquière fills the runway at Vuitton with surgical masks and plastic gloves, but in the interim, Badu has provided a winning example of how high fashion can brighten a bleak situation. You can’t help but smile while watching her Instagram videos from the evening or seeing photographs of her dancing with presenter Parker Posey. In a moment when the news is frightening, and the response from government officials continues to be less than inspiring, uplifting creativity isn’t just nice—it’s necessary.

Behind the Subtle but Powerful Protest by the U.S. Women’s Soccer Team

BY MICHELLE RUIZ VOGUE March 12, 2020

Photo: Getty Images

The U.S. Women’s National Team is in the middle of a situation: playing for the U.S. Soccer Federation, the very organization it is suing for gender pay discrimination. And so, in an awesome act of protest, at Wednesday’s SheBelieves Cup against Japan at Toyota Stadium in Frisco, Texas, the reigning World Cup champions, including stars like Megan Rapinoe and Carli Lloyd, found a way to silently, yet powerfully, protest: They turned their warm-up jerseys inside-out, effectively hiding the USSF crest logo.

https://twitter.com/SportsCenter/status/1237894501848346624

The move came at a contentious time for the team’s legal battle, in which the female players are seeking $66.7 million in back pay, alleging they were systematically paid less than the men’s team, even as they outperformed them on the global stage (the women are four-time World Cup winners, including in 2019 and 2015, while the best the men have done is fourth place, back in 1930). In a court filing earlier this week, which quickly went viral for all the wrong reasons, USSF argued that the men should be paid more, because, biologically speaking, the male team “requires a higher level of skill based on speed and strength.”

“The job of a [men’s national team player] carries more responsibility within U.S. Soccer than the job of a [women’s national team] player,” the filing went on to say, due to “indisputable science.” Hot tip to U.S. Soccer: This does not help to prove you’re not gender biased.

USSF president Carlos Cordeiro apologized, but the damage was done. “The team was very upset, obviously,” Rapinoe told ESPN. “We have sort of felt that those are some of the undercurrent feelings that they’ve had for a long time, but to see that as the argument—sort of blatant misogyny and sexism as the argument against us, is really disappointing.”

Cut to: the jerseys being turned inside out. It was only the team’s latest act of expert protest. At their ticker-tape parade through New York last year after winning the World Cup, goalie Ashlyn Harris flew a paper airplane made from a page of the pay gap lawsuit into the victory party, shouting, “Pay us, bitch.” After the World Cup championship game in Lyon, France, fans chanted, “Equal pay!” Their lawsuit is headed to trial in Los Angeles on May 5, and if it plays out like the team’s soccer games, USSF should be concerned: These women have a way of winning.

https://twitter.com/linzsports/status/1148977018899509248

In Mexico City, a “Day Without Women”

BY KARLA MARTINEZ VOGUE March 10, 2020

A demonstrator holds an altered version of the Mexican 

flag during a rally in Mexico City on International Women’s

 Day on Sunday, March 8.Getty Images


There was an eerie quiet to much of Mexico City on Monday March 9. The city’s traffic, among the worst in the world, was much more manageable. There seemed to be fewer people in the streets and in shops of the normally busy Polanco neighborhood. Many exercise and yoga studios were closed for the day or had limited classes.

It was not because of happenstance, or even the coronavirus, which has yet to make its impact felt on Mexico. Instead it was a “day without women.”

On Sunday, thousands of women had taken to the streets of my city, not only to mark International Women’s Day, but also to protest the rising violence against Mexican women and girls. Historically, violence against women has always been high in Mexico, but in the last couple of years the amount of crimes has increased. According to Mexico’s secretary general of National Public Security, 2,833 women were killed in the period from January to September in 2019. Of these numbers, only 25.6 percent were investigated as hate crimes; the rest were registered as homicides.

Since January 2020, according to government statistics, an additional 267 women have been killed in Mexico. In the past month, violent crimes against women and children have shaken the entire nation. In mid-February, a seven-year-old girl named Fatima was taken from her school in the southern part of Mexico City after her mother was running late to pick her up. Four days later, her body was found naked and mutilated in a plastic bag. And just this Sunday, on International Women’s Day, a university student was brutally murdered in the state of Guanajuato after she dropped off a friend, a pregnant woman was shot outside of her home in Veracruz, and another young woman in her early 20s was found in an abandoned lot in Coahuila.

When young Fatima was found, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador suggested that these violent crimes keep occurring because of neoliberal policies put in place by his predecessors. Despite the fact that he was elected by an overwhelming majority who hoped for change and peace, there seems to be no plan to take on the violence in the country. Insecurity and impunity are worse than ever. According to the *New York Times,* someone is killed in the country every 15 minutes on average, and 95% of the crimes are never solved.

When plans were being made for International Women’s Day, a group of women from Veracruz called Brujas del Mar (“Witches of the Sea”) proposed a weekday strike, when the real impact could be felt. A day in Mexico without women would mean they couldn’t go to school, couldn’t go to work, couldn’t buy anything at the supermarket or from their local vendors. They couldn’t post on social media, use public transport, visit their relatives, or go to social gatherings. It was a day for people of all social classes to realize the value of women and young girls in society and their economic impact.

More than 100,000 women turned out for 

a protest march in Mexico City on Sunday,

 March 8, to mark International Women's Day

 and the beginning of a two-day strike.Cecilia Suárez

I grew up in a very traditional Mexican family, even though my parents moved to the United States shortly after they were married. Every summer was spent in San Luis Potosí with my grandparents and aunts. One of my most vivid memories was of my grandmother setting my grandfather’s clothes out every night before bedtime. She’d wake up early to make coffee and breakfast, and set the perfect table for him. Along with a housekeeper, she prepared lunch for the family. My grandfather only had to tap the table and he would have salt, or anything else he might want, brought to him—before he even had to ask. This was the norm in most middle-class Mexican families. In every family, really: The man was the center of the universe.

My parents were much more progressive. My father was a doctor, and my mother a stay-at-home, but I saw her “work” every day of her life. She never slept in until after my father died. He encouraged his daughters’ independence and the importance of never being dependent on men for anything. Despite my mother organizing his clothes and three meals, he was never one to think a woman’s place was in the home.

But Mexico remains a very traditional place, where most wives are still expected to stay at home to care for their husbands and children. It’s also a place, as the violence I’ve cited above indicates, where women’s lives are often seen as disposable.

The first women’s strike took place in Iceland in 1975, as a means for demanding more political positions in the country. In 2016, the first Latin American country to call for one was Argentina, protesting violence against women, after seven were killed in a single week. On October 8, 2017, there was a similar “Day Without Women” in the United States, and the initiative was followed in Germany, Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Czech Republic, England, France, South Korea, and Spain


My husband and I employ three women in our home, a housekeeper and two nannies for our twin daughters. On Monday, all three were given the day off. My husband made his own tea, as well as our bed, and had breakfast at the bakery downstairs from his office. My daughters attend a French school that decided to support their female employees by closing their doors. And because Condé Nast Mexico and Latin America supported their female employees by allowing them to take the day off, I spent the day at home with my daughters, answering just a few work emails and writing this article. I didn’t make any purchases, and during the one drive I did make, to drop off our nanny, I noticed that there were very few women on the streets and that those who were out, making their commute to work, seemed to be doing so awkwardly among the men going about their daily routine.

Across social media, photos were posted of newsrooms, government offices, and schools emptied of women and girls. And Mr. López Obrador’s daily morning briefing with the press had rows of empty chairs because most female journalists boycotted it.

Isaura Miranda, a biologist, told the New York Times she had carefully considered her decision to join the strike because of her responsibilities at her job. “I just realized I had to do something,” Miranda told the Times, shedding tears. “I can’t carry on with this feeling of rage and impotence over so many deaths that are cruel, without dignity.”

With many women staying home on Monday, March 9, as 

part of a citywide strike, the streets of Mexico City were 

largely populated by men.Getty Images

Enrique Torres, one of the two men who work at Vogue Mexico, told me that our office was empty for the most part, with the exception of the GQ team, and that there were few women in the restaurants close to our office, and just a sole female barista at a nearby Starbucks who said she had decided to come to work. More than a third of the city’s banks were closed because most tellers are women. Many subway ticket booths, also mostly operated by women, were closed on Monday morning. Women in the medical industry and those in security who couldn’t take the day off wore purple ribbons to show their solidarity. But many women, particularly those in the service industry (cleaning ladies, waitresses) didn’t have the luxury to stay at home. Without the support of their employers, they had to work. For them, taking a day off can have an enormous impact on their finances

I applaud all the companies that supported the initiative, including Prada, Nike, L’Oréal, The American School Foundation, and Walmart. Aires de Campo, which has a workforce that is 60% female, gave all of the women the day off, despite productivity being reduced. In Mexico City, which has a population of approximately 20 million, a large majority of the workforce was off the streets.

Studies from Mexico’s various financial institutions estimate that there will be a significant loss and the effects on our society will be felt over the long term. There will be a “before” and an “after” March 8. More than 100,000 women attended the march in Mexico City, and I truly think this will affect not only Mexican societies, but also those across Latin America, where domestic violence and crimes against women are rampant. It is essential that young men start regarding women as equals if our society is to move forward.

Regardless of gender or political parties, there was a feeling of female solidarity at the march, which is why I think that if our government doesn’t take advantage of this moment and get behind the women of Mexico, it might be the biggest failure of our current administration.

Karla Martinez is editor in chief of Vogue Mexico and Vogue Latin America.

Michelle Obama on “Imposter Syndrome,” 

Empowering Young Women, and Her Own Role Models
March 10, 2020

"I want every girl on this planet to have the same opportunities

 that I’ve had," Michelle Obama tells Vogue.Photo: The Obama Foundation

In the three years since leaving the White House, Michelle Obama, the country’s first African-American first lady, has traveled the world giving inspirational speeches, writing a best-selling book and repeatedly deflecting calls that she herself run for president.

In addition, Obama has continued to use her power to enact change via the not-for-profit Obama Foundation that she founded with husband, former president Barack Obama, in 2014. The couple have also signed a major deal with Netflix, which has seen their production company, Higher Ground Productions, working on several documentaries and drama series exploring issues that matter to them, including the Oscar-winning film American Factory.


Most importantly, Obama has made it her mission to champion women and adolescent girls around the world. In October 2018, she launched the Girls Opportunity Alliance, which empowers girls internationally through education. It’s an issue that the former first lady—who documents her journey from Chicago’s South Side to the White House in bestselling 2019 memoir Becoming—describes as hugely personal. “Neither of my parents and hardly anyone in the neighborhood where I grew up went to college,” she explained in a CNN op-ed in 2016. “For me, education was power.”


Programs supported by the Girls Opportunity Alliance will be profiled in Creators for Change, a new YouTube Originals series that will broadcast conversations on tough global issues. In honor of Women’s History Month (which runs from March 1 to 31), its inaugural episode will see Obama discuss the state of girls’ education around the world with YouTube creators Liza Koshy, Prajakta Koli, and Thembe Mahlaba.

Photo: The Obama Foundation

Here, Michelle Obama speaks exclusively to Vogue about the women who helped raise her, how she deals with imposter syndrome, and why educating girls means a better future for all of us.

The Girls Opportunity Alliance is dedicated to empowering adolescent girls through education. Why did you choose to focus on education as a path to empowerment?

“As a girl growing up on the South Side of Chicago, my access to a good education wasn’t always a guarantee. But I had a powerful advocate in my mother, Marian Robinson. She stepped in to help wherever she could—holding fundraisers for new classroom equipment, throwing appreciation dinners for my overworked teachers, and lobbying on my behalf whenever she sensed standards were slipping. Not only did my mother make sure I was learning my multiplication tables and planetary systems, her actions instilled in me a sense of my own worth: that my voice, talents, and ambition mattered. My life would look a lot different today if I hadn’t had that support.”

“I want every girl on this planet to have the same opportunities that I’ve had. But right now, more than 98 million adolescent girls around the world are not in school. That’s an injustice that affects all of us. We know that girls who go to school have healthier, happier lives, and when that happens, the whole world benefits. That’s why the Obama Foundation started the Girls Opportunity Alliance—we work to lift up the grassroots organizations and leaders around the world already doing the important work of clearing away hurdles to girls’ education in their communities. Every single girl deserves the chance to pursue her passions and fulfill her boundless potential.”

What women have impacted you the most in your own education journey?

“I already mentioned my mother Marian Robinson, who has a kind of quiet perseverance and strength that I still look to emulate. My great-aunt Robbie has been another huge influence on me. She taught me to play piano when I was a little girl in Chicago, and she gave me some of my earliest lessons in self-discipline and good old-fashioned debate. We often butted heads—I kept skipping ahead in my lesson book, itching to learn more complicated songs—but she just wasn’t having it. She believed in the value of patience and diligence, concepts that five-year-old me didn’t yet understand.

In one of my first recitals, I sat down to play my song only to realize I had no idea where to put my hands—our piano at home had chipped keys, and I’d always used them as a guide. Just as I was beginning to panic, Robbie gracefully rose from her seat in the audience and walked to the bench. She gently placed my finger on middle C. And then I played my song.

I think about that moment a lot, because I hope it’s what we can offer all girls—a chance to learn and try new things, a guiding hand to support them when they stumble, and then the freedom to express themselves through whatever medium they choose.”

You’ve spoken publicly about “imposter syndrome” and its negative impact on girls and women. How have you dealt with it and do you have any tips for overcoming it?

“Imposter syndrome is so tough. For so long, women and girls have been told we don’t belong in the classroom, boardroom, or any room where big decisions are being made. So when we do manage to get into the room, we are still second-guessing ourselves, unsure if we really deserve our seat at the table. We doubt our own judgment, our own abilities, and our own reasons for being where we are. Even when we know better, it can still lead to us playing it small and not standing in our full power.

I’ve been there plenty of times. What’s helped me most is remembering that our worst critics are almost always ourselves. Women and girls are already up against so much: The fact is that you wouldn’t be in that room if you didn’t belong there. And while negative thoughts are bound to crop up as you take on new roles and challenges, you can acknowledge them without letting them stop you from occupying space and doing the work. That’s really the only way we grow—by moving beyond our fears and developing trust that our voices and ideas are valuable.”

What steps can we all take to ensure that more women and girls are in positions of leadership?

“First, it’s on all of us to make sure every young girl has access to a quality education. We also need to give our girls the chance to discover their own voices. So often, we tell women that they should be speaking up, fighting for better conditions, and standing up all on their own to the inequity they face. But if we never give our girls the space to practice using their voices, how will they become women who know when to raise them? It takes practice to gain the confidence to make your voice heard in the world.

At the same time, we need to bring our boys and men into this effort, too. So much could change in a generation if we taught our boys to listen to girls, to see them as their equals. Because the truth is women are just as capable and qualified as men to lead. And if we give our girls the chance to become the women they’re meant to be, we really can set off a ripple effect that transforms the world.”

What is one message you would like to share with Vogue readers?

“The evidence is clear: When girls get an education, amazing things start to happen. Girls who go to school have healthier children, higher salaries, and lower poverty rates. They can even help boost their nation’s economy. When girls learn how to think for themselves, they advocate for others and find solutions to some of our world’s most pressing problems. The future of our world truly is only as bright as our girls. Investing in their education is one of the best things we can do for each and every one of us.”

YouTube Originals Creators for Change on Girls’ Education with Michelle Obama, Liza Koshy, Prajakta Koli, and Thembe Mahlaba will launch on March 17 at 9 a.m. EST on YouTube.com/Learning