Air Mail Look

6 days ago | airmail.news | Spike Carter

WRITE Ito Bindery My desire for the perfect notepad led me to Japan—Ito Bindery of Tokyo, to be exact. Founded in 1938 as a bookbindery, the firm, now third-generation-owned, started by producing brand catalogues and expanded over the years to promotional materials and, eventually, high-end stationery. The expertise that comes with a foundation of bookbinding yields the manufacture of truly superlative handmade memo blocks and notepads.

6 days ago | airmail.news | Nina Friend

You’re unlikely to find kimbap or banchan on most Passover tables, but chef Sunny Lee’s Seder had both. Last Thursday, Lee, who opened her tiny but buzzy Chinatown restaurant, Sunn’s, late last year, hosted a Passover celebration with the Jewish Food Society and accessories brand Susan Alexandra. Elbow Bread baker Zoë Kanan made foot-long matzo boards for the dinner, and cookbook author Alison Roman’s matzo-ball recipe served as the foundation for Lee’s avgolemono-inspired matzo-ball soup.

6 days ago | airmail.news | Bruce Handy

I can’t say when I first became obsessed with endpapers, but I know the exact moment I realized they could be the subject of a terrific exhibition. I was visiting the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, in Amherst, Massachusetts, not long after Carle’s death, in 2021. A memorial retrospective included six of his glorious endpapers for books such as The Very Quiet Cricket and Baby Bear, Baby Bear, What Do You See?

6 days ago | airmail.news | Hannah Selinger

I was working at Jean-Georges, the petite and bourgeois restaurant tucked into Trump’s building on Columbus Circle, just off Central Park, where the sounds and smells of New York faded into the austere dining room. It was a room of extravagances small and large. There’s no pleasure in a four-star dining room, no joviality. You can’t be jocular with your fellow servers. There’s no room for error.

6 days ago | airmail.news | Stephen Witt

Bryan Catanzaro stuck out at Nvidia. In the hive of engineering drones at the company’s Californian headquarters, he was the dreamer. His hair was long and he dressed like a jester in statement glasses and loud, tacky shirts. He was patient and kind, and he spoke in a soothing, gentle voice. He was the only Nvidia engineer I met who had a humanities degree. In 2013, having worked at the company for a couple of years, Catanzaro was struggling.