In the meantime, the brand’s offerings continue to grow. Just over a year after Christiansen’s team started selling vegetables in a parking lot in uncertain times, Flamingo Estate is unveiling a celebratory rosé called Pink Moon. The same shade of blush as Christiansen’s house, the sustainable wine is aged in acacia barrels near San Luis Obispo by the winemaker Kamee Knutson, and has notes of strawberry, hibiscus, frangipani and honey. Christiansen asked Gaetano Pesce, one of his creative heroes, to conceive an accompanying ice bucket, and the Italian designer crafted 25 editions from colorful hand-poured resin that call to mind asymmetrical ice cubes and will be available for purchase with the spring harvest, alongside seasonal produce such as green garlic, rhubarb and mulberries.

In the garden, where a crew led by Hutchison is constantly planting, harvesting and experimenting with new product ideas, a butterfly pavilion, designed for breeding endangered monarchs, is going up this month. (“Since my family is in the honey business in Australia, the topic of pollinators is an important one to me,” explains Christiansen.) Thirty-five drivers now drop off thousands of produce boxes throughout Los Angeles every Friday, and Christiansen has just completed his first round of funding to make Flamingo Estate a business separate from his agency, with plans to expand to New York. Meanwhile, work has returned to Chandelier Creative. And while most of Christiansen’s time is still taken up by talking with farmers and planning harvests and deliveries, he and his team have come back to advertising and branding projects with fresh eyes. “We have a much tighter filter on what we’re willing to say yes to,” he says. “The type of work we’re doing is so much more creatively nutritious. Maybe dipping our toe in the world of natural wonder really helped us in other ways.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/02/t-magazine/flamingo-estate-richard-christiansen.html

Viet-Cajun crawfish emerged in Houston in the early 2000s. Mr. Nguyen opened Crawfish Noodles with relatives in 2008, and since then has changed the spice blend and sauce recipe several times. For special events, he said, he occasionally uses a spice blend that includes ginger and lemongrass, a combination commonly found at Viet-Cajun crawfish places in the Gulf Coast region and in California, where the style is also popular. But garlic, onion, cayenne, lemon pepper and butter are the dominant flavors in his house recipe.

Jim Gossen, a retired local restaurateur and seafood distributor, recalls trying the butter-coated crawfish for the first time at Crawfish Noodles, not long after it opened.

“They were really good, and really, really rich,” said Mr. Gossen, 72, who helped introduce traditional boiled crawfish to the Houston market in the early 1980s. “I have no proof, but I would venture to say that today they sell more crawfish in Houston than in Louisiana.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/01/dining/viet-cajun-crawfish-houston.html

Democrats are all agog that Biden was able to pass more stimulus dollars than Barack Obama. What will make a sustainable difference, though, is whether the Biden stimulus doesn’t just rescue the poor but also propels the private sector to start new companies and create more good jobs that improve productivity and sustainably boost living standards, so that we’re not just redividing the pie, but rather growing the pie.

Despite concerns that the $1.9 trillion could drive up interest rates to levels that tank the stock market and crimp government borrowing and discretionary spending down the road, there are lots of signs that we could be headed for just such an explosion in entrepreneurship.

Consider this report from The Wall Street Journal on Friday: “After a year of economic shutdowns and other changes brought on by Covid-19, rents for Manhattan storefronts, apartments and work spaces have been marked down to their lowest prices in years. That is already bringing in new small businesses and residents, and has the potential to change the character of the city’s most-exclusive borough. … New York state as a whole saw its highest number of new businesses launched last year since 2007.”

If we do this right, Biden’s stimulus will fuel an already restructuring economy and supercharge it. With so much cheap money available, so much cheap access to high-powered computing, so many new services being digitized and so many new problems to solve, we have all the ingredients for a burst of innovation, start-ups and creative destruction.

What would Trump do if he presided over such a boom? HE’D PUT HIS NAME ON IT. That’s what Biden should do. If it comes, call it the “Biden Boom” — and celebrate entrepreneurs, capitalists, job creators, farmers and all those who work with their hands. Make clear that they all have a home in the Democratic Party, not just left-wing educated elites. That’s how you win the midterms.

Biden also needs to maximize his green aspirations. It’s not just about unleashing spending. It also about unleashing capitalism. The key to a green revolution is scale. You need a whole lot of everything — wind, solar, hydro, nuclear, batteries, efficient materials. And the only way to get that kind of scale is by leveraging the market — by getting all kinds of public-private partnerships going that reduce carbon and grow profits.

The government can catalyze these in two ways. The first is to use its buying power to drive down costs. For instance, “offshore wind used to be much more expensive than onshore wind,” explained Hal Harvey, C.E.O. of Energy Innovation, “but then the British and Danish governments stepped in to subsidize it and move it down the cost-volume curve. Now it is a huge and cost-effective resource.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/30/opinion/biden-stimulus-infrastructure.html

More than 150 female founders posted similar photos of themselves, crossing out the word “female,” and then shared what was now credibly a meme on the internet.

One was Antoinetta Mosley, the founder of I Follow the Leader, a consulting firm that specializes in diversity, equity and inclusion strategy, initiatives and education in Durham, N.C. “It was a little shocking at first, to see ‘female’ crossed out,” she said of Ms. Sumner’s post. “I immediately clicked to see what she said, and I thought it was really striking.”

Ms. Mosley, 34, said in the unconscious bias seminars she leads, she asks people to consider the way race, gender and other traits influence narratives about people’s professional skills and how they can perpetuate inequities. “When people see me as a Black woman leader,” she said, “they are assuming that my being Black and a woman influence my leadership style.”

She believes these labels can sometimes hold women back from being considered on equal footing to men. She said that being a Black woman is a significant part of her identity, but she, like most people, has far more dimensions. She believes her professional traits result most from being an athlete and the oldest of four children with driven parents.

Faryl Morse, 55, who owns the footwear company Faryl Robin, was also moved to make her own post, listing the social media lingo of “Boss Babe,” “WomEntrepreneur,” “Girl Boss” and “Mompreneur.”

“Let’s please stop adding these cute names to women who are ambitious and are going after their dreams with persistence,” she wrote. “It is not empowering any woman.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/24/style/linked-in-ashley-sumner-female-bosses.html

This is not news to those who are prominent in beauty culture. After all, they’re often famous because of social media, and when they choose to make a beauty line, it’s not just about cashing in — most of the time they feel insecure, and they use cosmetics to help themselves feel better and want to share those to make others feel better too. But this becomes a vicious cycle, and it’s hard to step back.

Michelle Phan, an early influencer and Ipsy co-founder, confused the beauty community when she stopped posting online in 2015. Two years later, she restarted her makeup line, Em Cosmetics, which she bought back from L’Oréal, and sold her stake in Ipsy. “Once, I was a girl with dreams, who eventually became a product, smiling, selling and selling,” she said in a 2017 video explaining her departure. “Who I was on camera and who I was in real life began to feel like strangers.” She added: “My insecurities got the worse of me. I became imprisoned by my own vanity and was never satisfied with how I looked. The life I led online was picture perfect. But in reality, I was carefully curating the image of a life I wanted, not had.”

Working within the system, Rae was trying to address the way that she was also torn apart by a lot of the same concern over her looks that other people had. She even built vulnerability into the branding of her makeup line. Last year, Rae and Item sold a round, orange-colored compact, and when you opened it, it had a mirror with the words “I love you say it back.” This was a riff on a popular meme, a standard-issue message of girlboss empowerment but also an acknowledgment of widespread insecurity that Rae, and the person buying the compact, might feel.

I thought that was sweet, but an intimate relationship with the idol was also what the consumer was demanding. A display of insecurity from Rae, or at least an acknowledgment that Rae might look in the same mirror and need a jolt of confidence the same way the consumer does, may be part of that. “Relatability is the No. 1 thing that makes people click ‘check out,’” Sarah Brown told me.

It was hard to tell whether Rae was truly insecure or simply using a marketing tactic to gain fans. “Everybody is insecure about their bodies, and the more our culture gets visual, the more insecure we’ll all get, and it doesn’t matter how you look objectively one bit,” Widdows, the philosopher, told me. “So it’s not implausible to think even the most beautiful celebrities might also be insecure. In fact, it’s very plausible to think they are. But to say that they suddenly stopped being insecure because they put their own lipstick on, I find much less plausible.”

Still, the psychological flytrap in this kind of rhetoric — “I want you to know your body is perfect even though you’re buying this product to look like me, and I am insecure about my looks” — was powerful, and stars other than Rae were gesturing to it as well. When I asked Camberos, the beauty executive, where he saw beauty culture today and where it was going, he said it was connected to the issue of mental health. Rae told British Glamour that she felt she was in a good place regarding her appearance lately and quoted the saying “Comparison is the thief of joy.” When asked about what she was proudest of, though, Rae said, “Just staying mentally healthy has been a really big accomplishment for me.”

It was a bit chilling to think about linking these two things, a beauty brand and mental health, especially as our era of global pandemic comes to a close and we emerge in the light, blinking, looking to create new idols. In September, Selena Gomez, who has been open about her bipolar disorder, introduced her own line, Rare Beauty. In marketing efforts, the company, which offers soft concealers, foundations and blushers, vowed that “we will use makeup to shape positive conversations around beauty, self-acceptance and mental health.” And shortly before the musician Halsey began promoting her new makeup line in early 2021, she chose to post an old photo of her emaciated body on Instagram, explaining that she suffered from an eating disorder. Kylie, too, recently put a saying from a self-help author on her Instagram — “may the dark thoughts, overthinking, and doubt exit your mind right now,” it read in part — along with a photo of a bathtub and naked legs, slightly covered in suds, against which rested a clear pink bottle from her skin-care line.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/23/magazine/addison-rae-beauty-industry.html

The coalition’s political strategy was to leverage its members’ public profiles and community connections to compensate for what they lacked in political clout. News-media interviews with group leaders, including the chefs Tom Colicchio, Kwame Onwuachi and Andrew Zimmern, highlighted the economic impact of independent restaurants and bars, which, according to research commissioned by the coalition, employ 11 million people and support another five million jobs in related businesses.

“They are such a vital part of our economy, not only with the restaurant jobs, but the supply chain,” said Senator Roger Wicker, Republican of Mississippi, an early champion of the Restaurants Act. “I don’t think it dawned on people that the reach extends as far as it does.”

Mr. St. John’s relationship with Mr. Wicker, a regular at his restaurants, was crucial in winning early support for the coalition’s cause among Senate Republicans. In the end, no Republican in either house voted for the larger stimulus bill. But the bipartisan support for independent restaurants positions the coalition to become an influential voice in Washington.

Representative Earl Blumenauer, Democrat of Oregon, said the coalition’s priority is now ensuring that the fund functions as intended. He cited the Paycheck Protection Program, which was ill-suited to the needs of many small restaurateurs, as a cautionary tale.

“We don’t want a situation where people with more lawyers and accountants and connections get in there and soak up all the money,” said Mr. Blumenauer, who introduced the Restaurants Act in the House last year. “That was part of the problem with the P.P.P.”

Bobby Stuckey, an owner of Frasca Food Wine, in Boulder, Colo., used skills developed in high-end restaurant dining rooms to become one of the coalition’s most effective influencers. He discovered he had a powerful network of contacts dating back to his days as a sommelier at the Little Nell, in Aspen, and the French Laundry, in Napa Valley.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/23/dining/independent-restaurant-coalition-stimulus-money.html

The frenzy has already led to trouble. The stock of Nikola, an electric car start-up that went public via a SPAC in June, has plunged more than 80 percent after Hindenburg Research, an investment fund, accused the company in September of lying about its technology, overstating business deals and deceptively rolling a truck down a hill in a product video. Trevor Milton, Nikola’s founder and chairman, resigned, and the Securities and Exchange Commission and Justice Department have started investigating the company.

The S.E.C. has also opened inquiries into Clover Health, a health insurance start-up, and Lordstown Motors, an electric truck start-up, which both went public through blank check companies in recent months.

On March 10, the S.E.C. warned that SPACs face distinct risks and potential conflicts of interest. The agency was particularly critical of those backed by celebrities, concluding that “celebrities, like anyone else, can be lured into participating in a risky investment.”

For now, the special purpose vehicles remain on the prowl for targets.

Jedidiah Yueh, chief executive of Delphix, a data infrastructure company in Redwood City, Calif., has experienced the interest firsthand. Mr. Yueh, who founded Delphix 13 years ago, said SPACs began reaching out last summer as his business picked up in the pandemic. The company, which helps customers process and automate data, recently became profitable and is a candidate to go public.

But Mr. Yueh said he hadn’t decided if Delphix would go public through a traditional offering or another route, such as a “direct listing” or SPAC. As he has sorted through the options, SPACs have flooded his inbox with messages almost every day. One even sent a mailer to Delphix’s unoccupied office last year while everyone worked from home in the pandemic.

Mr. Yueh said he had met with some SPACs out of curiosity. But he quickly got the sense that sponsors were telling him whatever they thought he wanted to hear. Once they learned that Delphix was profitable, “they just switch gears and talk about how easy they are to work with,” he said.

He said he had stopped responding to cold pitches and created a canned response to ward off others. The investors he met with weren’t the kind of long-term backers that Delphix wanted, he said. But in a nod to the trend of celebrity-backed SPACs, he added, “I would have taken a meeting with Shaq.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/19/technology/the-market-seems-crazy-start-ups-wrestle-with-flood-of-offers.html

“Who would have thought that outdoor space would make or break a restaurant?”

For Jose Javier Cordova, an owner of Cinco De Mayo, a taqueria that’s been open since 2000, delivery was routine; inventing an outdoor dining setup was the problem. Mr. Cordova, 54, worked as a waiter for 25 years at a formal restaurant on Wall Street before retiring to realize a long-held goal: cooking the food of his native Mexico City in his own restaurant.

“At the beginning, we put tables outside, but people didn’t like to sit in the sun,” so he invested in shade umbrellas. Rain meant buying scarce and expensive tents on Amazon, even as the restaurant was bringing in only $100 to $200 a day; the approach of winter meant building a shed.

“We are still putting in the electric heaters,” he said. “And pretty soon we won’t need them any more.”

Amid all this chaos, nearby residents began to rally around the local food businesses. About three-quarters of those who live here work outside the neighborhood, according to a 2018 study by the Flatbush Development Corporation, but with offices closed, that dynamic changed.

“People who used to commute to Manhattan were staying put, and businesses were innovating to meet that demand,” said Katie Richey, an owner of King Mother, a sleek wine bar.

Last summer, Ms. Richey, 28, and her business partner, the chef Erika Lesser, set up an outdoor stand to sell frosé — slushies of lemonade and pink wine — and then started a wine club, a cheese club and an online store. As fall set in, they persuaded the dentist next door to let them build a wooden shed over the sidewalk, decorated it with evergreen garlands and nudged the menu in an Alpine direction to project a “chalet” vibe.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/16/dining/ditmas-park-brooklyn-restaurants-covid.html

The revamped credit “is a better program — there’s more money, and it’s available to more employers,” said Shelly Abril, the head of tax compliance at Gusto, a payroll services provider. “But with that comes all this extra complexity.”

Devon Lind plans to seek retroactive 2020 credits for his workers at Blender, a collection of businesses in Spokane, Wash. Blender’s two core businesses — Photoboxx, which sells photo printing and display technology, and Smash, a mobile “rage room” where people can destroy plates — both depend on events, and sales plunged last year. The company had nine employees before the pandemic. It laid off five.

Because Blender took a Paycheck Protection Program loan, it was initially ineligible for the retention credit, but Mr. Lind now plans to seek it for two quarters last year. The credit “is really going to help us continue to retain employees as we’re gaining back business,” he said.

But extracting the most money allowed from the credit is complicated because of the way it interacts with P.P.P. proceeds — and the Internal Revenue Service hasn’t yet provided detailed guidance.

“There’s just tons of nuance in the credit,” said Andre Shevchuck, a partner at the accounting firm BPM. “We have instructed a lot of clients to first check in with their payroll provider to see how the rubber meets the road, and it may also make sense for businesses to talk to a C.P.A or a lawyer.”

Unemployment benefits

Self-employed workers are normally not eligible for unemployment compensation, but the CARES Act extended benefits to them. Ms. Holcomb filed for unemployment when her contract job temporarily eliminated her hours.

Some who collected the money are in for a tax-time shock, though: The payments are taxed as income. States are supposed to offer recipients the option of having federal taxes withheld, but in their scramble to deal with a deluge of claims, some states didn’t do it — and many people, faced with urgent bills and a reduced income, declined the option. Researchers at the Century Foundation estimate that fewer than 40 percent of unemployment payments last year had taxes withheld.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/12/business/smallbusiness/freelancers-taxes-2020.html

People in China marveled at the way Mr. Musk handled the country’s hard-nosed authorities. They have been more critical of the ways he has sometimes treated his own workers. He lashed out last year at California health officials who demanded that a Tesla factory there remain closed out of coronavirus concerns. The company has also come under scrutiny for workplace injuries and racial discrimination.

“He is a real dreamer and creator, yet he is also a coldblooded, self-absorbed megalomaniac,” Hong Bo, a longtime tech commentator in China who writes under the name Keso, said of Mr. Musk. “I admire his courage in breaking with outdated conventions, and yet I intensely dislike his trampling on the bottom lines of humanity.”

Mr. Musk and Tesla did not respond to emails requesting comment.

The frustration with Big Tech is part of a wider malaise in China. For many young people, decades of breakneck economic growth seem to have resulted in only fiercer competition for opportunities, less stability and less say over the direction of their lives.

On the Chinese internet, the term that has captured the mood is “involution,” previously used by anthropologists to describe agrarian societies that grew in size or complexity without becoming more advanced or productive.

The feeling among young Chinese people that they are fighting harder for a slimmer chance at material gain is leading them to hope to “reorganize life in a different way,” said Biao Xiang, who studies social change in China and is director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Germany.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/11/technology/china-elon-musk-fans.html