A Celebratory Take on Audre Lorde’s Brave, Hard, Unconventional Life
“Survival Is a Promise,” a new biography by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, is an unabashed homage to the poet known for her political commitment and community building.
https://nytimes.com/2024/08/20/book…
There Is Design in Everything
Two exhibitions highlight the history, politics, and radical ambition of modern design in mid-20th century Cuba and Latin America.
https://placesjournal.org/article/l…
The Secret to Tom Wolfe’s Irresistible Snap, Crackle and Pop
How the author of “The Right Stuff,” “Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers” and other classics turned sociology into art.
https://nytimes.com/2024/08/15/book…
Winter of the Mind
On the front lines of the attention liberation movement.
https://nyra.nyc/articles/winter-of…
Consuming Provence: The Gentler Footprint of French Sprawl
I’ve discovered that much of the American lifestyle also exists here: expanding suburban housing developments, SUVs … and big box stores.
https://commonedge.org/consuming-pr…
The Betrayal of American Border Policy
A young Jesuit priest arrived in Texas hoping to cultivate hospitality toward migrants. During the past four years, he’s watched that possibility slip away.
https://newyorker.com/news/dispatch…
Open and shut case
Much of Geoffrey Bawa’s design is about the interplay between interior space and exterior setting. But ethnic tensions in Sri Lanka and, later, the eruption of violence meant that the architect’s house in the capital increasingly took on the air of a small fortress, as if keeping the warring world at bay
https://worldofinteriors.com/story/…
Evan Gershkovich Is Finally Coming Home
In a multinational prisoner exchange, the Wall Street Journal reporter was freed, after being detained for more than a year in Russian jail.
https://newyorker.com/news/news-des…
Maker : Jenny Phillips
A few months before I moved while in the midst of packing and planning, I had a crazy idea to visit as many of my artist’s friends' studios that I could squeeze in and photograph them for inspiration.
https://amakersday.substack.com/p/m…
James Baldwin taught us that identities can help us to locate ourselves. But they trap us too
The writer, who would have turned 100 this week, spoke to, and from, America’s moral conscience.
https://theguardian.com/commentisfr…
An Artist Flowering in Her Nineties
Isabella Ducrot, a painter in Rome, didn’t really pick up a brush until her fifties. Four decades later, galleries and museums throughout Europe are celebrating her work.
https://newyorker.com/magazine/2024…
Isaac Julien with Zoë Hopkins
In the past four decades, British filmmaker Sir Isaac Julien has become widely celebrated for his pioneering body of work, which combines avant-garde film techniques with an incisive gaze at the politico-historical tumult of our world and a careful grip on the intellectual and philosophical currents that have shaped modernity.
https://brooklynrail.org/2024/07/ar…
Failing the Driving Test with Kevin Barry
Kevin Barry is widely recognized as one of the most gifted fiction writers to emerge from the English-speaking world in the new century.
https://theparisreview.org/blog/201…
Welcome to the world of radical authenticity — how the internet is bringing sexual and gender diversity to the fore
The ability to ask questions, learn and find community online is transforming the way people identify, particularly Gen Z.
https://universityofcalifornia.edu/…
Peculiar Décor
Notes on the Gaza solidarity encampments.
https://nyra.nyc/articles/peculiar-…
8 Revelations From Louis Kahn’s Last Sketchbook
The architect who designed some of the 20th century’s great buildings kept a notebook with intimate glimpses into his creative vision. Now it’s his daughter’s final goodbye.
https://nytimes.com/2024/07/11/arts…
Norman Maclean Didn’t Publish Much. What He Did Contains Everything
You could read his literary output in a single day, yet it includes almost all there is to know about what the English language can do.
https://newyorker.com/magazine/2024…
The Queer Imagination, Then and Now
This essay series, generously supported by Scott Lynn, is named in honor of the art historian and critic Irving Sandler, whose broad spirit was epitomized in the question he would ask, with searching eyes, whenever he met someone or saw someone again: what are you thinking about?
https://brooklynrail.org/2024/07/ar…
Minoru Yamasaki: The Fragility of Architecture
His work—more than 250 buildings in the span of 30 years—was lauded by critics and colleagues, cited for international design awards, and landed the architect on the cover of Time.
https://commonedge.org/minoru-yamas…
Here comes the sun: Zadie Smith on hope, trepidation and rebirth after 14 years of the Tories
I used to shock US audiences with my stories of Britain’s excellent, accessible universities and healthcare. Then the Conservatives ruined the country. Now real change is on the horizon.
https://theguardian.com/politics/ar…
Notes on a Last-Minute Safari
We saw every animal that was in “The Lion King” and then some. They were just there, like ants at a picnic, except that they were elephants and giraffes and zebras.
https://newyorker.com/magazine/2024…
The true losers of this presidential debate were the American people
We didn’t need this show. Each candidate has had time to show us who they are, and one is a felon trying to destroy democracy.
https://theguardian.com/commentisfr…
Even If a Project Fails, the Ideas Behind It Don’t Disappear
For architects and designers, unbuilt/unrealized projects are confounding, bittersweet, frustrating, elusive, even ghostly—the ultimate what-ifs.
https://commonedge.org/even-if-a-pr…
Kanye West Bought an Architectural Treasure—Then Gave It a Violent Remix
How the hip-hop star’s beautiful, dark, twisted fantasy turned a beach house in Malibu, designed by the Japanese master Tadao Ando, into a ruin.
https://newyorker.com/magazine/2024…
Going Once, Going Twice
No doubt it’s a finer fate than the place becoming an Apple Store.
https://nyra.nyc/articles/going-onc…
The Co-op Where Everyone’s an Architecture Critic
When Paul Goldberger moved into U.N. Plaza last year, he joined a cadre of design-obsessed owners.
https://curbed.com/article/paul-gol…
