Jason Devitt

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Photo by Christian Oth

Happy First Anniversary to my beautiful wife.

It’s been a wonderful year. (I do admit that spending most of it traveling around the Pacific didn’t hurt.)

We’re in the basement of Tent and Trails, New York’s finest purveyor of outdoor equipment. I have found a pair of shoes that I think will take me through the next nine months of travel, but Summer and the salesman Will are surrounded by open boxes of hiking boots, trail shoes, and trail runners. She’s narrowed it down to two pairs. She turns to Will.

“Which do you think is cuter?”

“Get out of my store.”

“Seriously, which?”

“Look in the mirror.”

Half-hidden behind a row of mountain-climbing boots is a 12 inch square mirror, Tent and Trails’ one concession to fashion.

“I can’t really tell from that.”

“Look closer.”

Summer bends down. In very small letters taped to the center of the mirror are the words ‘You Look Fabulous.’

I have been married for ten days, and I am a happy man. Thanks to Padraig, my best man, for this first photo and for much else besides.

I have not written anything here for two months, because weddings expand to fill the time allocated to them. Every time I thought about posting, some nuptial emergency called me away. A relative who needs to change hotel rooms; the caterer balking at the design of the cake; ties that need to be bought for the groomsmen; a CD that has to be burned. Now. Now. Now.

But it was worth it. Thanks to everyone for a wonderful day, especially our celebrant Andra Miller, everyone at the Yale Club, the Park Avenue Band, our friends and families, and most of all my beautiful wife.

‘Extreme Textiles’, the title of the current exhibition at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York, suggests a desperate attempt by this branch of the Smithsonian to market herself to the ADHD generation. But it’s justified - a remarkable survey of new materials, new technologies, and new applications in what I had thought of as a moribund industry. Ropes strong enough to anchor an oil rig; bulletproof, inflatable tents big enough to hangar a fighter plane; fabric that can sense and transmit how much strain it is under; concept designs for carbon fiber skyscrapers. What appears at first to be a sampler of embroidery from the 19th century turns out to be a surgical implant, a fabric scaffold for growing human tissue.

If ‘extreme’ is justified, so is the one use I saw of the dread prefix nano. The image on the left shows a transparent mold of a human face covered by a delicate mask that was ‘electrospun.’ A charged liquid is drawn through a very fine nozzle into an electrostatic field, where it forms a fast-spinning helix. As the helix breaks up and the liquid dries it forms nanofibers. The second image shows the result under an electron microscope. The thick strands are human hairs.

Unfortunately there are no wrist-mounted versions of the spinner that would enable you to swing from one carbon fiber skyscraper to the next.

I’ve been thinking about writing a blog for four years, but there was always something else to do. Suddenly I have a lot of things to talk about: selling and moving on from the business that I founded; finally getting a greencard after eight years in the U.S.; marrying the wonderful SJ; planning a nine-month round-the-world honeymoon; contemplating another startup. And as a result of leaving said business, there are no restrictions on what I can say. So … welcome.