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64

ISSUE

FEATURES

78 HERE IF YOU NEED ME Fighting on behalf of the father you love by Beth Kephart 88 THIRD EYE: LIFTING THE VEIL A trip to the mall in Saudi Arabia by Tony Sutton / photos by DougieWallace 98 FICTION: WOLVES The wolves developed a taste for Kombucha by Bud Smith

34 AI’S DESTINY The Big Nine determine the future of Artificial Intelligence by AmyWebb

46 THE MOTHER LODE AND MRS. MAISEL Becoming Shirley Maisel on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel by Caroline Aaron 58 MOULIN ROUGE! THE MUSICAL Baz Luhrman’s Film Comes to Life on Broadway by Iris Wiener 68 A MEDITATION ON LEONARDO by Dan Burstein / photos by Julie O’Connor

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64

ISSUE

DEPARTMENTS 24 TRAIN OF THOUGHT Is he a Russian spy? by TaniaHershman 104 I’LL TAKE MANHATTAN The Langham Hotel; NY Botanical Gardens

112 LIKE A ROLLING STONE Burma to St. Barths and Beyond 136 THE SEED HUNTRESS The Svalbard Global Seed Trust by SefraAlexandra 144 GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE Iggy Pop meets Femina; An International Musical Zig Zag by IsabelaRaygoza 150 LOOKBOOK Zepherina: Designs by Renea Lariviere 154 HISTORY MAKERS Country Seats and Camp Retreats of 19th Century New Yorkers by Suzanne Clary 158 BOOK REPORT East Hampton Library’s 15th Annual Authors Event A booksigning cocktail party with 100 authors 162 BUYING AND SELLING Upper East Side; Tel Aviv’s coastline promenade

172 COMFORT & STYLE Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams 178 DESIGNER’S EYE Alex Sepkus Jewelry Design

186 APPRAISED AND APPROVED Lazy CF Ranch Furniture; New Discoveries 195 INDEPENDENT SCHOOLS AND SUMMER PROGRAMS GUIDE Feature: Read-A-Palooza: The 2019 Scholastic Summer Reading Challenge 240 ALONG THE GOLD COAST A canine edibles adventure by J.C. Duffy

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INTERNATIONAL THE LUXURY CONSTELLATION

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HerschelMeadow, Rich Silver, Simone General Counsel Bruce Koffsky, Esq. Contributors Caroline Aaron, Sefra Alexandra, Elise Black, Dan Burstein, Suzanne Clary, J.C. Duffy, Tania Hershman, Beth Kephart, Isabela Raygoza, Carly Silver, Bud Smith, Tony Sutton, AmyWebb, IrisWiener Photographers JulieO’Connor, DougieWallace Cover Illustration Eva Vázquez Cartoons CamilloFerrari Web Designer AlexisTiganila DistributionManager Man inMotion LLC Advertising Sales Representatives PaulMcNamara, Bart Smidt Advertising & Editorial Inquiries (203) 451-1967 westonmagazinegroup.com @westonmagazines J.C.Duffy,BobEckstein Social Media Director

Weston Magazine, Rye Magazine, Westport Country Capitalist, Greenwich Country Capitalist, New Canaan Country Capitalist, Hamptons Country Capitalist, Westchester Country Capitalist, Long Island Country Capitalist, Litchfield County Country Capitalist, TriBeCa Magazine, SOHO NYC Magazine, The Upper East Side Magazine, Central Park West Magazine, Alpine NJ™ , and The Luxury Constellation Issue #64, are published 4 times per year by Weston Magazine , INC. P.O. Box 1006, Weston, CT 06883. Tel: 203/451-1967. Email: [email protected] westonmagazinegroup.com Copyright 2019 by Weston Magazine , INC. All rights reserved. Weston Magazine/Country Capitalist/Rye Magazine/The Upper East Side Magazine/Central Park West Magazine/TriBeCa/Soho NYC/ A lpine NJ™/The Luxury Constellation are trademarks of Weston Magazine , INC. The contents of this publication may not be reproduced either in whole or in part without theconsentof thepublisher. Weston assumesno responsibility forunsolicitedmaterials.Print subscription rate: four issues,$100.Back Issues,$10.AttentionPostmaster:sendaddresscorrections to Weston, P.O. Box 1006, Weston, CT 06883. Printed in Canada.

TRAIN OF THOUGHT

By Tania Hershman SoMany People

MANY PEOPLE FORGOT he was a Russian spy. They enjoyed his coffee. They said, “How do you make it so...?” They sipped and grinned at him and he poured and offered around biscuits, which many people found so astonishing they dreamed about them. “Those biscuits,” they mumbled to themselves in the mornings, deciding to ask him for the recipe, wanting to be there always, in his living room, where everything was best. Many people forgot he was a Russian spy. They enjoyed his conversation, he was so funny, and he had read every book they had read and every book they wanted to read but couldn’t get hold of. They said, “How did you find ...?” And he smiled and passed around more coffee, biscuits, promising he would source it for them. When they were alone, sometimes one of them would say, “But isn’t he...?” And another would immediately jump in with an anecdote, or talk about how they’d been experimenting with the biscuit recipe. “I’m nearly there,” they said, “it almost tastes like...” When the Russian spy was found not to be a spy at all, and not even to have been Russian, many people were – although they would not say so – disappointed. That he was not who he never said he had been but who they thought he was and tried to forget but never truly did, this was a letdown. His soirees began to thin, no matter coffee, biscuits. They began to dream of other things, of swings and cross-country chariot-races, of cats that stood on their legs and spoke. They lost their taste for novelty, returned to the foods of their childhoods. “We do love these,” they said to each other, passing around the hot dogs at their outdoor barbecues. Many people wondered, though, while eating burgers, laughing and talking politics, who was that person who passed them a napkin, who was that woman standing in the corner they’d known for twenty years, who was that man at the grill who had always lived next door? * --- “So Many People” was awarded 1st place in the 2018 Flash Fiction Contest of synaesthesiamagazine.com. Tania Hershman is co-author of Writing Short Stories: A Writers’ & Artists’ Companion (Bloomsbury, 2014) and curator of ShortStops (www.shortstops.info). Tania’s third story collection, Some Of Us Glow More Than Others ( Unthank Books) and debut poetry collection, Terms & Conditions (Nine Arches Press) were published in 2017. taniahershman.com

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BEFORE IT’S TOO

Late.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE is already here, but it didn’t show up as we all expected. by Amy Webb

IT is the quiet backbone of our financial systems, the power grid, and the retail supply chain. It is the invisible infrastructure that directs us through traffic, finds the right meaning in our mistyped words, and determines what we should buy, watch, listen to, and read. It is technology upon which our future is being built because it intersects with every aspect of our lives: health and medicine, housing, agriculture, transportation, sports, and even love, sex, and death. AI isn’t a tech trend, a buzzword, or a temporary distraction— it is the third era of computing. We are in the midst of significant transformation, not unlike the generationwho lived through the Industrial Revolution. At the beginning, no one recognized the transition they were in because the change happened gradually, relative to their lifespans. By the end, the world looked different: Great Britain and the United States had become the world’s two dominant powers, with enough industrial, military, and political

FROM THE BIG NINE: HOW THE TECH TITANS AND THEIR THINKING MACHINES COULD WARP HUMANITY , BY AMY WEBB. REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION FROM PUBLICAFFAIRS, A DIVISION OF THE HACHETTE BOOK GROUP.

WESTONMAGAZINEGROUP.COM 35

capital to shape the course of the next century. Everyone is debating AI and what it will mean for our futures ad nauseam. You’re already familiar with the usual arguments: the robots are coming to take our jobs, the robots will upend the economy, the robots will end up killing humans. Substitute “machine” for “robot,” and we’re cycling back to the same debates people had 200 years ago. It’s natural to think about the impact of new technology on our jobs and our ability to earn money, since we’ve seen disruption across so many industries. It’s understandable that when thinking about AI, our minds inevitably wander to HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey , WOPR from War Games , Skynet from The Terminator , Rosie from The Jetsons , Delores from Westworld , or anyof the other hundreds of anthropomorphized AIs from popular culture. If you’re not working directly inside of the AI ecosystem, the future seems either fantastical or frightening, and for all the wrong reasons. Those who aren’t steeped in the day-to- day research and development of AI can’t see signals clearly, which is why public debate about AI references the robot overlords you’ve seen in recent movies. Or it reflects a kind of manic, unbridled optimism. The lack of nuance is one part of AI’s genesis problem: some dramatically overestimate the applicability of AI, while others argue it will become an unstoppable weapon. I know this because I’ve spent much of the past decade researching AI and meeting with people and organizations both inside and outside of the AI ecosystem. I’ve advised a wide variety of companies at the epicenter of artificial intelligence, which include Microsoft and IBM. I’ve met with and advised stakeholders on the outside: venture capitalists and private equity managers, leaders within the Department of Defense and State Department, and various lawmakers who think regulation is the only way forward. I’ve also had hundreds of meetings with academic researchers and technologists working directly in the

trenches. Rarely do those working directly in AI share the extreme apocalyptic or utopian visions of the future we tend to hear about in the news. That’s because, like researchers in other areas of science, those actually building the future of AI want to temper expectations. Achieving huge milestones takes patience, time, money, and resilience—this is something we repeatedly forget. They are slogging away, working bit by bit on wildly complicated problems, sometimes making very little progress. These people are smart, worldly, and, in my experience, compassionate and thoughtful. Overwhelmingly, they work at nine tech giants—Google, Amazon, Apple, IBM, Microsoft, and Facebook in the United States and Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent in China—that are building AI in order to usher in a better, brighter future for us all. I firmly believe that the leaders of these nine companies are driven by a profound sense of altruism and a desire to serve the greater good: they clearly see the potential of AI to improve health care and longevity, to solve our impending climate issues, and to lift millions of people out of poverty. We are already seeing the positive and tangible benefits of their work across all industries and everyday life. The problem is that external forces pressuring the nine big tech giants—and by extension, those working inside the ecosystem—are conspiring against their best intentions for our futures. There’s a lot of blame to pass around. In the US, relentless market demands and unrealistic expectations for new products and services have made long-term planning impossible. We expect Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and IBM to make bold new AI product announcements at their annual conferences, as though R&D breakthroughs can be scheduled. If these companies don’t present us with shinier products than the previous year, we talk about them as if they’re failures. Or we question whether AI is over. Or we

question their leadership. Not once have we given these companies a few years to hunker down and work without requiring them to dazzle us at regular intervals. God forbid one of these companies decides not to make any official announcements for a few months—we assume that their silence implies a skunkworks project that will invariably upset us. The US government has no grand strategy for AI nor for our longer-term futures. So in place of coordinated national strategies to build organizational capacity inside the government, to build and strengthen our international alliances, and to prepare our military for the future of warfare, the United States has subjugated AI to the revolving door of politics. Instead of funding basic research into AI, the federal government has effectively outsourced R&D to the commercial sector and the whims of Wall Street. Rather than treating AI as an opportunity for new job creation and growth, American lawmakers see only widespread technological unemployment. In turn they blame US tech giants, when they could invite these companies to participate in the uppermost levels of strategic planning (such as it exists) within the government. Our AI pioneers have no choice but to constantly compete with each other for a trusted, direct connection with you, me, our schools, our hospitals, our cities, and our businesses. In the United States, we suffer from a tragic lack of foresight. We operate with a “nowist” mindset, planning for the next fewyears of our lives more than any other timeframe. Nowist thinking champions short-term technological achievements, but it absolves us from taking responsibility for how technology might evolve and for the next-order implications and outcomes of our actions. We too easily forget that what we do in the present could have serious consequences in the future. Is it any wonder, therefore, that we’ve effectively outsourced the future development of AI to six publicly traded companies whose achievements are remarkable but whose

AI isn’t a tech trend, a buzzword, or a temporary distraction—it is the third era of COMPUTING.

36 WESTONMAGAZINEGROUP.COM

financial interests do not always align with what’s best for our individual liberties, our communities, and our democratic ideals? Meanwhile, in China, AI’s developmental track is tethered to the grand ambitions of government. China is quickly laying the groundwork to become the world’s unchallenged AI hegemon. In July 2017, the Chinese government unveiled its Next Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan to become the global

idealistic visions of the future. But I’m a pragmatist. We all know that even the best-intentioned people can inadvertently cause great harm. Within technology, and especially when it comes to AI, we must con- tinually remember to plan for both intended use and unintended misuse. This is especially important today and for the foreseeable fu- ture, as AI intersects with everything: the global economy, the workforce, agriculture, transportation, banking, environmental mon-

What happens to society when we transfer power to a system built by a small group of people that is designed to make decisions for everyone? What happens when those decisions are biased toward market forces or an ambitious political party? The answer is reflected in the future opportunities we have, the ways in which we are denied access, the social conventions within our societies, the rules by which our economies operate, and even the way we relate to other people.

The problem is that external forces pressuring the nine BIG TECH GIANTS are conspiring against their best intentions for our futures. There’s a lot of blame to pass around.

leader in AI by the year 2030 with a domestic industry worth at least $150 billion, which involved devoting part of its sovereign wealth fund to new labs and startups, as well as new schools launching specifically to train China’s next generation of AI talent. In October of that same year, China’s President Xi Jinping explained his plans for AI and big >Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16 Page 17 Page 18 Page 19 Page 20 Page 21 Page 22 Page 23 Page 24 Page 25 Page 26 Page 27 Page 28 Page 29 Page 30 Page 31 Page 32 Page 33 Page 34 Page 35 Page 36 Page 37 Page 38 Page 39 Page 40 Page 41 Page 42 Page 43 Page 44 Page 45 Page 46 Page 47 Page 48 Page 49 Page 50 Page 51 Page 52 Page 53 Page 54 Page 55 Page 56 Page 57 Page 58 Page 59 Page 60 Page 61 Page 62 Page 63 Page 64 Page 65 Page 66 Page 67 Page 68 Page 69 Page 70 Page 71 Page 72 Page 73 Page 74 Page 75 Page 76 Page 77 Page 78 Page 79 Page 80 Page 81 Page 82 Page 83 Page 84 Page 85 Page 86 Page 87 Page 88 Page 89 Page 90 Page 91 Page 92 Page 93 Page 94 Page 95 Page 96 Page 97 Page 98 Page 99 Page 100 Page 101 Page 102 Page 103 Page 104 Page 105 Page 106 Page 107 Page 108 Page 109 Page 110 Page 111 Page 112 Page 113 Page 114 Page 115 Page 116 Page 117 Page 118 Page 119 Page 120 Page 121 Page 122 Page 123 Page 124 Page 125 Page 126 Page 127 Page 128 Page 129 Page 130 Page 131 Page 132 Page 133 Page 134 Page 135 Page 136 Page 137 Page 138 Page 139 Page 140 Page 141 Page 142 Page 143 Page 144 Page 145 Page 146 Page 147 Page 148 Page 149 Page 150 Page 151 Page 152 Page 153 Page 154 Page 155 Page 156 Page 157 Page 158 Page 159 Page 160 Page 161 Page 162 Page 163 Page 164 Page 165 Page 166 Page 167 Page 168 Page 169 Page 170 Page 171 Page 172 Page 173 Page 174 Page 175 Page 176 Page 177 Page 178 Page 179 Page 180 Page 181 Page 182 Page 183 Page 184 Page 185 Page 186 Page 187 Page 188 Page 189 Page 190 Page 191 Page 192 Page 193 Page 194 Page 195 Page 196 Page 197 Page 198 Page 199 Page 200

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