jamesnord.com

What is harder is to look at your little slice of success and understand that while your hard work and hustle DID matter, they wouldn’t have mattered if you couldn’t apply them to those opportunities you got, and harder still to admit that those opportunities were likely granted because of your station in society, not your innate ability. I love the influencer space because it can, at best, democratize opportunity and give chances to people based on the strength of their vision, and not the depth of their personal networks. Sadly, you don’t need to look too deep into the industry to realize that’s not what’s happening, you don’t need to listen that hard to hear the calls for a more diverse, fair system. We are putting our money where our mouth is and selecting 10 voices from the community to come to New York, stay in the Four Seasons, network with brands and influencers and learn from some of the industry’s best.

A few days ago I found myself caught in a unseasonably warm September rain while on a bike ride, and as storms so often do what started as a drizzle turned quickly into a downpour. I usually don’t ride my bike in the rain (I am a baby) Rolling past 100th street on the west side the sun started rising across the park and through the blinding, pouring rain that sunrise laid an eerie golden light over everything. The scene is begging for an analogy about storms and sunrises and hard things leading to light, but I’ll spare you all of that and say that at 7AM I saw the sunrise in the middle of a storm in the center of the world and I didn’t take a picture because honestly, you had to be there.

There was a caviar dish that did things I didn’t know food could do, each spoonful nearly disappearing in your mouth to reappear seconds later, we ate something that I described as “furry air I don’t have the language or experience to do justice to the food, but I can say that the experience was one of my favorite in New York. It was an experience that challenged by idea of what you can do with food, of what a fine dining restaurant should look like, of what can be achieved with enough ambition and talent. I find myself wanting my friends to go because I want more people to talk about it with, about the time I spent three hours trying to understand the way my friend’s brain works by eating his food.