Shunryu Suzuki explains how to practice zazen
Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind is the seminal work by San Francisco Zen Center founder Shunryu Suzuki Roshi. In this chapter alone he explains: how to practice zazen, the difference between small and big mind, and the true nature of thoughts.
https://lionsroar.com/mind-waves-se…
Robert Glück’s Gloriously Unreliable Memorial to a Lost Love
“About Ed” is a literary monument that harnesses memoir’s emotional honesty while indulging fiction’s stylistic latitude.
https://newyorker.com/books/page-tu…
The price of Netanyahu’s ambition
Amid war with Hamas, a hostage crisis, the devastation of Gaza, and Israel’s splintering identity, the Prime Minister seems unable to distinguish between his own interests and his country’s.
https://newyorker.com/magazine/2024…
The Art of Solitude
The challenges and rewards of being alone.
https://tricycle.org/magazine/solit…
Christian Friedel tells Josh O’Connor about making The Zone of Interest
At the Telluride Film Festival late last summer, Josh O’Connor finally met the actor who delivered what he considers the performance of the year.
https://interviewmagazine.com/film/…
How Camille Pissarro went from mediocrity to magnificence
He began as more of a tutor than a talent. But in his final decade he lent a keen eye-in-the-sky view to the Paris streets, rendering miracles of kinetic characterization.
https://newyorker.com/magazine/2024…
A Parliament of Owls and a Murder of Crows
How groups of birds got their names, with wondrous vintage illustrations by Brian Wildsmith.
https://themarginalian.org/2024/01/…
Housing Agency
Opposed to top-down solutions, John F. C. Turner believed that architects and planners of housing should empower the people who will live in it. His ideas remain startlingly radical today.
https://placesjournal.org/article/h…
Literary Circles
Designing the National Library of Kosovo in Pristina in the early 1970s, Andrija Mutnjaković deployed the dome as one of his fundamental forms in order to mark the Ottoman empire’s impact on the region.
https://worldofinteriors.com/story/…
Coiled Baskets, Spiraled Histories
It is June of 2023. I stand in a storage facility of the British Museum in London, my outstretched palm resting inside the coiled top of a wide-brimmed Chumash hat.
https://brooklynrail.org/2023/12/ar…
Fran Lebowitz, A Humorist at Work
Fran Lebowitz’s trademark is the sneer; she disapproves of virtually everything except sleep, cigarette smoking, and good furniture.
https://theparisreview.org/intervie…
How the Poet Christian Wiman Keeps His Faith
Nearly two decades ago, Wiman was diagnosed with a rare cancer and told he probably had about five years to live. In a new book, he makes the case against despair.
https://newyorker.com/magazine/2023…
Conservation Conversation
The heirs of the Eameses and Achille Castiglioni discuss the nuances, delights, and challenges of discovering and sharing their respective legacies.
https://eamesinstitute.org/kazam-ma…
How Jensen Huang’s Nvidia Is Powering the A.I. Revolution
The company’s C.E.O. bet it all on a new kind of chip. Now that Nvidia is one of the biggest companies in the world, what will he do next?
https://newyorker.com/magazine/2023…
Iris Murdoch on the Myth of Closure and the Beautiful, Maddening Blind Spots of Our Self-Knowledge
In literature, when a storyline involves victim and a persecutor, we call it a drama.
https://themarginalian.org/2022/06/…
Piecing Together My Father’s Murder
I was too young to remember what happened to my dad, and no one explained it to me. So I tried to assemble the story myself.
https://newyorker.com/magazine/2023…
Not in Their Name
Jewish Voice for Peace doesn’t just oppose the war; it challenges the link between Jewish identity and support for Israel.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/202…
Aesthetic Environmentalism
A new exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art struggles to establish the relationship of architecture to the postwar environmental movement and its relevance to our present-day crisis.
https://placesjournal.org/article/a…
David Sedaris: Punching Down
A Thanksgiving treat from the most delightful man on planet Earth.
https://thefp.com/p/david-sedaris-p…
Necessary Losses: The Life-Shaping Art of Letting Go
“The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” Elizabeth Bishop wrote in one of the great masterpieces of poetry.
https://themarginalian.org/2023/11/…
Toys & Play
In a 1961 magazine article focused on the exhibition, Mathematica: The World of Numbers…and Beyond, Charles Eames responds to the author’s probing by stating, “Toys are really not as innocent as they look. Toys and games are the preludes to serious ideas.”
https://eamesinstitute.org/collecti…
Are For-Profit Developments Consistent With the Values of a Public University?
I am by no means an expert on public-private partnerships. But for about 10 years, as the University of California Berkeley’s campus planner and then campus architect, I watched these developments play out in higher education—sometimes from a front-row seat, sometimes as a participant.
https://commonedge.org/are-for-prof…
Abstract Thinking
In his latest treatise, Pier Vittorio Aureli frames architectural production as a stand-in for the much larger and more complex system of economic production as a whole. The problems start there.
https://nyra.nyc/articles/abstract-…
Simone de Beauvoir on How Chance and Choice Converge to Make Us Who We Are
To be alive is to marvel — at least occasionally, at least with glimmers of some deep intuitive wonderment — at the Rube Goldberg machine of chance and choice that makes us who we are as we half-stride, half-stumble down the improbable paths that lead us back to ourselves.
https://themarginalian.org/2017/01/…
bell hooks on Love
“Had I been given a clear definition of love earlier in my life it would not have taken me so long to become a more loving person. Had I shared with others a common understanding of what it means to love it would have been easier to create love.”
https://themarginalian.org/2023/11/…
Eclipsed in his era, Bayard Rustin gets to shine in ours
The civil-rights mastermind was sidelined by his own movement. Now he's back in the spotlight.
https://newyorker.com/magazine/2023…
