Life and Death at the Ambassador Hotel
In the depths of the AIDS epidemic, San Francisco activists transformed a downtown SRO into a center for health care and community life. The residential hotel became a model of queer kinship.
https://placesjournal.org/article/a…
The Nuns Trying to Save the Women on Texas’s Death Row
Sisters from a convent outside Waco have repeatedly visited the prisoners—and even made them affiliates of their order. The story of a powerful spiritual alliance.
https://newyorker.com/magazine/2025…
The Dubious Return of the Brutalists
Why the stark 20th-century architectural style is back in vogue.
https://thenation.com/article/cultu…
Inventing the Commons: On Alternative Technologies
If the strategy of reciprocity made it possible to survive the disaster of colonialism, it could also be a response that makes non-capitalist technological innovation possible.
https://guernicamag.com/inventing-t…
Building the Corporate Menace of Severance
Saarinen’s impeccable Bell Labs campus conveys the terror of utopian office design.
https://curbed.com/2025/01/apple-tv…
L.A.’s Cultural Crescent and the Land That Draws People to It
The two ends of Los Angeles’ Cultural Crescent—formed by the majestic Santa Monica and San Gabriel Mountains and their foothills, which ring the northern end of the great L.A. Basin—are gone.
https://commonedge.org/l-a-s-cultur…
Resident Aliens
Non-indigenous plants flourish in artist William Kentridge’s sprawling garden in Johannesburg, where he has built a clay-brick studio amid the rocky topography. And no wonder – the varied landscape and diverse flora are fertile ground for his latest work.
https://worldofinteriors.com/story/…
The Anti-Social Century
Dear Friends,
I think you can read this with a free trial...
https://theatlantic.com/magazine/ar…
A Radical (and Totally Practical) Rethinking of U.S. Housing Construction
What if the housing crisis wasn’t about the cost of lumber, labor, or land, but about bureaucracy?
https://commonedge.org/a-radical-an…
In the Wake of the Water
A Climate Dispatch from the Suburbs:
"I woke up this morning, and I couldn’t believe the sand was gone."
https://placesjournal.org/article/i…
Knitting Helps Us Embrace Life’s Messy Imperfections
Crafters across Britain speak to how knitting can help us heal, even at our most broken.
https://nytimes.com/2023/12/26/opin…
Eyes on the Border
People living in unlivable circumstances will do what they can to seek a better life, whatever is being said about them in the American media.
https://nybooks.com/online/2024/12/…
What Alice Munro Knew
The Nobel-winning author’s husband was a pedophile who targeted her daughter and other children. Why did she stay silent?
https://nytimes.com/2024/12/08/maga…
Matt Bollinger
The Realist of Fantasy
https://juxtapoz.com/news/magazine/…
Justin Torres’s Art of Exposure and Concealment
The author, whose novel “Blackouts” won the National Book Award last month, talks about sex in fiction, censorship, and the pleasure of what goes on in the shadows.
https://newyorker.com/culture/the-n…
The power thinker
Original, painstaking, sometimes frustrating and often dazzling. Foucault’s work on power matters now more than ever.
https://aeon.co/essays/why-foucault…
Joshua’s Altar and the Politics of Possession
“It is a fact that all of the land from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River was promised to the Jewish people by God in the Bible, and that is our right today as it was thousands of years ago.”
— Yitzhak Shamir, addressing the Knesset in 1991
https://noahkennedy.net/joshuas-alt…
Artificial Intelligence, Real Misery
How fields of research science are already answering the questions architecture should be asking.
https://ericjcesal.substack.com/p/a…
Garth Greenwell: ‘I didn’t read Middlemarch until my late 30s. Why didn’t someone intervene? ’
The novelist on Virginia Woolf’s luminous prose, obsessively rereading James Baldwin and why Saint Augustine is his favourite writer
https://theguardian.com/books/2024/…
Sarah Crowner: Meeting in Time and Place
One way to read my work is through its process: I’m not making an edge by literally painting a line, the hard edges are made by joining cut shapes painted on canvas with a sewing machine.
https://gagosian.com/quarterly/2024…
A Secret Masterpiece by the Father of Hawaiian Modernism
This hexagonal home, hidden on an Oahu mountaintop, is the best example of Vladimir Ossipoff’s blend of Japanese and American midcentury design.
https://nytimes.com/2024/11/12/t-ma…
The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books
To read a book in college, it helps to have read a book in high school.
https://theatlantic.com/magazine/ar…
Light and Color: The Spirit-Led Work of James Turrell
Turrell is a lifelong Quaker… His work is motivated not only by curiosity and ambition, but also by a spiritual quest.
https://commonedge.org/light-and-co…
How the Artist Barry Blitt Turns Politics Into Cartoon Cover Gold
Armed with watercolors and a “passive-aggressive” sense of humor, the illustrator finds the funny, even in ugly times.
https://newyorker.com/culture/video…
An Artist Who Chronicles the ‘Doom Generation’
The artist Paul P. is a painter whose power comes from representing a scarcely documented, in-between generation of queer life.
https://nytimes.com/2024/10/31/t-ma…
Border/Town
Bemidji, Minnesota, is a border town. Every place was, at one time or another, or perhaps is still, a border town. It depends on who you are and where you’re standing.
https://placesjournal.org/article/b…
