Anni Albers Transformed Weaving, Then Left It Behind
Her textiles are quiet revelations, but even her later prints show how restraint can generate ravishing beauty.
https://newyorker.com/magazine/2024…
Conserving Culture: A Conversation with David Wessel on Rebuilding Ukraine
As of January 2024, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has destroyed nearly a quarter of a million buildings, most of them private homes, according to the Kyiv School of Economics.
https://savingplaces.org/stories/fi…
Voices of Mourning
What do we owe the dead?
https://thebaffler.com/latest/voice…
A Dutch Architect’s Vision of Cities That Float on Water
What if building on the water could be safer and sturdier than building on flood-prone land?
https://newyorker.com/magazine/2024…
How AI Can Help Us End Design Education Anachronisms
The rise of generative AI has given every design educator sufficient reason to reconsider both what to teach and how to teach it.
https://commonedge.org/how-ai-can-h…
When Richard Serra’s Steel Curves Became a Memorial
The sculptor had a breakthrough in the late 1990s with his torqued metal rings. Then the attack on the World Trade Center, which Serra witnessed, gave them a sudden new significance.
https://nytimes.com/2024/03/28/arts…
Tending Building
To tend a building is to design in consonance with inevitable change — and to understand this change as a desirable expression of material properties, site dynamics, inter-species coexistence, and the behavior of buildings and their contexts over time.
https://placesjournal.org/article/t…
Not Having to Worry about Proportion, Harmony, and Beauty Is a Cop-Out
Even within the world of design media, it was easy to miss the news: In late January, Notre Dame’s School of Architecture announced that Peter Pennoyer, a New York–based architect and author, had won the 2024 Richard H. Driehaus Prize.
https://commonedge.org/not-having-t…
One of America’s Funniest, Gayest Writers Is Finally Becoming Famous
This is wonderful!
https://newyorker.com/culture/perso…
Spencer Finch with Ann C. Collins
For more than thirty years, Finch has chased the evanescence of experience, deconstructing the physics of perception and rebuilding it into work that rebalances the way we see while underscoring the sheer delight of being.
https://brooklynrail.org/2024/03/ar…
The Essential James Baldwin
He wrote with the kind of clarity that was as comforting as it was chastising. Here’s where to start.
https://nytimes.com/article/james-b…
Earlier Selves, Strangers: A Conversation with Robert Glück
Just finished Robert Gluck's recent novel, "About Ed." I found this interview from six years ago and wanted to share it. I remember well the San Francisco Gluck talks about.
https://openspace.sfmoma.org/2018/0…
The art world before and after Thelma Golden
When Golden was a young curator in the nineties, her shows, centering Black artists, were unprecedented. Today, those artists are the stars of the art market.
https://newyorker.com/magazine/2024…
Jewish Identity with and Without Zionism
New books provide sober histories of the conflicts among Jews over Israel and offer alternate ways forward.
https://newyorker.com/books/under-r…
The Artist Holding Valuable Art Hostage to Protect Julian Assange
Using a thirty-two-ton Swiss bank safe, Andrei Molodkin says he will destroy works by Picasso, Rembrandt, and Warhol if the WikiLeaks founder dies in prison.
https://newyorker.com/culture/perso…
Awesome and Affordable: Making the Case for Great Housing
When Brenda Mendoza told an NPR reporter about her commute to work, she became the face of the housing crisis in Los Angeles today.
https://commonedge.org/awesome-and-…
The Road to 1948
How the decisions that led to the founding of Israel left the region in a state of eternal conflict.
https://nytimes.com/interactive/202…
How Might We Talk About the Shoreline of San Francisco?
Just at the moment when urban waterfronts across North America and Europe are being revitalized as public amenities, they’re coming under the threat of sea level rise.
https://commonedge.org/how-might-we…
No More Corn in Egypt
The imminent destruction of a postmodern gem should inspire reflection on those dwindling resources: time and care.
https://nyra.nyc/articles/no-more-c…
Artist Agnes Martin on inspiration, interruptions, cultivating a creative atmosphere, and the only type of person you should allow into your studio
I have sometimes, in my mind, put myself ahead of my work and have suffered in consequence.
https://themarginalian.org/2016/02/…
History of the Present: Dhaka
Dhaka is a paradigmatic South Asian megalopolis. It is also a model for what a city can be, a place where urban logics are tested, where optimism and pessimism, adaptation and dysfunction, affluence and poverty flourish without clear bounds.
https://placesjournal.org/article/h…
The Queerness of It All: An Interview with Jeffrey Kripal
DEBATES ABOUT RELIGION can get pretty tiresome. Wherever you stand, it often seems like there’s nothing new to say about religion. But then you’ve probably never encountered Jeffrey Kripal.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article…
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…
