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…
Marina Abramovic Thinks the Pain of Love Is Hell on Earth
“I’m all for heroism,” Marina Abramovic says. “I love heroism.” And at 76, after a long and groundbreaking career, she is largely viewed by the art world in heroic terms.
https://nytimes.com/interactive/202…
Agricultural Regeneration
Through centering Black culture, Kamal Bell is reconceiving food systems, inspiring Black youth to farm, and shepherding the future of food justice.
https://eamesinstitute.org/kazam-ma…
Jeanette Winterson has no idea what happens next
The author and former enfant terrible on life after death, breaking the rules, and forging a self through fiction.
https://newyorker.com/culture/the-n…
Why Cities Must Embrace Getting Smaller
The phrase “Demography is destiny” is repeated more than once in Smaller Cities in a Shrinking World (Island Press). This new book by noted urban researcher Alan Mallach tackles, in meticulous and fascinating detail, the “wicked problem” of shrinking cities in the U.S. and across the globe.
https://commonedge.org/why-cities-m…
California Scheming: Nine Unsolicited Design Ideas for the Secret City of Solano County
Investors have been vocal about their visions for the future—but silent about the actual city they’re funding. We asked a creative agency, an architecture firm and our own graphic designer to imagine it for them.
https://theinformation.com/articles…
Ed Ruscha’s Calmly Collapsing America
In “Now Then,” a sprawling retrospective at MOMA, the artist traces the rise and fall of a national language.
https://newyorker.com/magazine/2023…
Peter Zumthor on Paring Back a ‘Beautiful Idea’ for LACMA
The Swiss architect of one of the most polarizing museums in the country says his Los Angeles design has been significantly streamlined. So why have costs kept rising?
https://nytimes.com/2023/10/04/arts…
Ray Johnson’s Elusive Dream: ‘I Want to Dance’
The discovery of a group of early collages tells a new story about Johnson’s ties to dance and the dance world.
https://nytimes.com/2023/09/26/arts…
