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Diane and Gerry Weintraub: Ocean Moss. A miniature book of photos in the collection of The Met.
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Berndt Friberg holding some of his handmade miniature vessels for Gustavsberg (Sweden). Found at Forage Modern Workshop.
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Lawson Fenning Ivanhoe desk styled by Tali Roth Designs.
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The important question lying behind many possibly intractable issues is whether people are serious – whether their stated beliefs, are authentic, or merely devised to achieve a certain self-presentation or outcome. Campaign polls, social media, ‘progressive’ politicians, ‘populist’ politicians, journalists invoking ‘free speech’ and ‘democracy’, quack doctors invoking science, your Facebook friends invoking quack doctors, skincare, astrology: clearly, not everything is what it seems, but it’s hard to tell what it actually is.
Some modern critics exploit this uncertainty, grounding their analyses in the stability of conventional moral wisdom even as they bemoan its absence. They emphasise the primacy of emotions and the importance of ‘empathy’ in order to avoid the discomfort of thought and the stakes involved in taking a position.
Lauren Oyler, "Ha Ha! Ha Ha!" The London Review of Books, 1/23/2020.
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The loss is tremendous and heartbreaking on so many levels, both the human suffering and the wiping out of other species, the loss of places, seasons. And it strikes me that it seems so much easier to imagine these losses than to imagine that we could change ourselves and create a different form of living on the planet.
It is really crucial that we learn to imagine what we could gain. If we can't imagine it, it’s more difficult to create. It'll make us dependent on accidents, serendipities.
Climate adaptation specialist Dr. Susan Moser in conversation with Laurie Mazur for Earth Island Journal, 1/22/2019, talking "about communicating bad climate news, the benefits of 'functional denial,' the varied flavors of hope, and the better world we can build in the wreckage of life as we know it."
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Related: Emma Marris/NYT — "How to Stop Freaking Out and Tackle Climate Change."
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The late Charles Sprawson on swimming: “It seemed to me that it appealed to the introverted and eccentric, individualists involved in a mental world of their own.”
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Peter Schjeldahl, "The Art of Dying." The New Yorker, December 16, 2019. (This issue may have my vote as best cover-to-cover issue of the NYer in 2019. Every article is a banger.)
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"One drunken night, a superb painter let me take a brush to a canvas that she said she was abandoning. I tried to continue a simple black stroke that she had started. The contrast between the controlled pressure of her touch and my flaccid smear shocked me, physically. It was like shaking hands with a small person who flips you across a room."
Peter Schjeldahl, "The Art of Dying." The New Yorker, December 16, 2019. (This issue may have my vote as best cover-to-cover issue of the NYer in 2019. Every article is a banger.)
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Filed under something beautiful to look at: 25 influential rooms—"[O]ne history of design in the West on one day from one group of highly opinionated people."
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Filed under something beautiful to look at: 25 influential rooms—"[O]ne history of design in the West on one day from one group of highly opinionated people."
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He did it partly because he wanted to look like a member of Blink-182 every day of the year, partly because he was convinced his newly sprouting leg hair would keep him warm, and partly because his mother begged him to put on something more sensible. That last one, he added, might have been a key factor: “I think it probably had to do with the age,” he said. “Having a little more personal agency, and a little of that ‘You can’t make me’” attitude.
Ashley Fetters, "The Boys Who Wear Shorts All Winter," The Atlantic, 1/9/2020.
