Ion's blog

The ratio of right-handed people to left-handed people is said to be about nine to one (and this dominance goes back more than a million years, apparently), so the lost-glove theory espoused by Alexandra Horowitz, a cognitive scientist who taught at Hunter College last fall, either needs work or suggests that New York is more of a lefty town than most. Last winter, Horowitz began collecting the misplaced—trampled, forlorn, snot-slicked—mittens and gloves that she saw on the street, not for the sake of research or even, God forbid, art, but out of some deep-seated altruistic urge to see them reunited with their other halves.

“It’s an overweening concern for lost objects,” she said last week—a very cold week, a great week for gloves. “The melancholy of a lost glove sitting in the middle of a sidewalk struck me as minorly tragic, for the glove and for its owner.” Horowitz, who is tall and skinny and thirty-four years old, was in her family’s apartment on Central Park West, with her collection in shopping bags on the kitchen counter: a hundred and eighteen mittens and gloves, in varying states of deformity and decay. Black wool dominated, but there was, semi-Arkishly, one of everything: brown zippered faux leather (Lower East Side), tan elbow-length nylon (Lincoln Center), a ludicrous boxing glove (center lane, Columbus Avenue). There were dozens of children’s gloves, of course, including Horowitz’s first find, a crusty blue mitten, and some thumbless things for infants (and even one for a dog). Central Park is full of little mittens, she said, especially on snowy nights, after the sledders head home. Storefronts, pay phones, subway stairs—O city of lost gloves!