*
Bode beaded tab jacket at Neighbour.
*
Bug, bird, and flower tiles in stylist Maude Smith's London bathroom — she painted each one herself. (The kitchen encrusted in wine corks and seashells is also beyond.)
*
Pretty Kamawanu Wafu furoshiki to brighten dull days from Moth.
*
Charles Burchfeld: Tree Ghosts, 1919.
*
At Granta: the best books of any year.
*
Do you have a working definition of love?
It’s a verb. That’s the first thing. It’s an active engagement with all kinds of feelings—positive ones and primitive ones and loathsome ones. But it’s a very active verb. And it’s often surprising how it can kind of ebb and flow. It’s like the moon. We think it’s disappeared, and suddenly it shows up again. It’s not a permanent state of enthusiasm.
Esther Perel, in conversation with Alexandra Schwartz, The New Yorker, 12/9/2018.
*
The afterlife of broken art.
*
The ugly history of beautiful things: perfume, angora. (I loved Katie Kelleher's color stories so I was thrilled to find her new-ish essays on Longreads.)
*
So: what is glitter?
A manipulation of humans’ inherent desire for fresh water. An intangible light effect made physical. Mostly plastic, and often from New Jersey. Disposable by design but, it turns out, not literally disposable. A way to make long winter nights slightly brighter, despite the offshore presence of Germans. An object in which the inside of a potato chip bag meets the aurora borealis.
Caity Weaver, 'What is Glitter?' NYT, 12/21/2018.
*
The idea of the mind as a palace or church, whose individual rooms can be explored with training, is familiar from the memory treatises of antiquity and the Middle Ages. The “memory palace” as a mnemonic device was widely used before the advent of printing to organize and remember vast amounts of information. By memorizing the spatial layout of a building and assigning images or ideas to its various rooms, one could “walk” through the imaginary building and retrieve the ideas relegated to the separate parts.
Aysegul Savas, 'The Celestial Memory Palace.' The Paris Review, 12/7/2018.
*
A business with no end. (NYT)
*
The very worst fantasy of Zero Waste is that we can neatly atone for humanity’s destruction with these individual rituals of purification. That by purging our homes of single-use grocery bags, plastic toothbrushes, and disposable razors, we can breathe a sigh of relief. But truly imagining a Zero Waste world, one in which we don’t merely displace our trash but rather work toward a circular economy where trash is no longer produced, might guide us toward a more holistic vision of environmental justice.
Madeleine Wattenbarger, 'Waste Not, Want Not.' The Baffler, 12/19/2018.
*
How to fall asleep in two minutes.
*
Sweet potato toast.
