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Yui Suzukey, "Lattice Picnic," 2026.
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Early 20th century three-light chandelier made of lacquered sheet metal featuring thistles and tulips.
Charlotte Perriand with an unknown man on a summer’s day, date and photographer unknown, from the collection of the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, via aetherian_upstate.
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He was born in 1948 and grew up in a small Suffolk backwater. This was a world closer to the 19th century than it was to our own dully fractious era. No global hullabaloo of youth culture: impossible to imagine Altamont or Live Aid, Michael Jackson on the Thames, Bono cold calling George Bush mid-gig, Katy Perry in orbit. No personal touchscreen beckoning itchy fingers. Just gazing dreamily into the distance or cycling about aimlessly on long summer afternoons. Boredom and its cloud-drift antidotes. Boredom as something almost erotic.
Ian Penman, "Infinite Wibble." London Review of Books, 9/25/2025.
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Monotony is the most beautiful or the most atrocious thing. The most beautiful if it is a reflection of eternity—the most atrocious if it is the sign of an unvarying perpetuity. It is time surpassed or time sterilized. The circle is the symbol of monotony which is beautiful, the swinging of a pendulum of monotony which is atrocious. ... A squirrel turning in its cage and the rotation of the celestial sphere—extreme misery and extreme grandeur. It is when man sees himself as a squirrel turning round and round in a circular cage that, if he does not lie to himself, he is close to salvation.
Simone Weil, "The Mysticism of Work" from Gravity and Grace.
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In order for work to be meaningful and sustaining, Weil argued, it had to demand thought and attention. This was an insight she arrived at through firsthand experience. During her work on the assembly lines of newly automated factories, she marveled at “this mental void inside me, this absence of thought indispensable to the slaves of a modern machine.” She worried that the “social machine,” the managerial class of bureaucrats and technocrats, was slowly gravitating toward unconsciousness as countless decisions were being outsourced to specialized technical criteria nobody really understood. Modern life was no longer serving human needs; it was serving the ends of the machine, and it was becoming more and more difficult to steer it in a direction of our choosing. In the talks I gave that year, I often quoted a passage from Oppression and Liberty in which she imagines a future civilization where “all human activity…was subjected right down to matters of detail to an altogether mathematical strictness, and that without a single human being understanding anything at all about what he was doing.” It never failed to elicit a sympathetic murmur from the audience.
Meghan O'Gieblyn, "Wishing It So." New York Review, 9/24/2026.
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... [H]e asked if I’d be open to reading some Shakespeare aloud together: specifically, Act I, Scene 7 and Act II, Scene 2 from “Macbeth.” ... “I’m kind of obsessed,” he said. “I go see the same plays over and over and over.” We sat opposite each other at a glass dining table in a midtown hotel suite. ... [H]is performance was serious, decisive, earnest. Afterward, I told him that it was nice to be reminded of the particular, idiosyncratic music of Shakespeare’s lines. He agreed. “It affects you even if you don’t understand the words sometimes,” he said.
Amanda Petrusich, "Rivers Cuomo Is Piecing It All Together," The New Yorker, 8/30/2026.
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I myself went fell hard for the Eclogues as a University of Michigan undergrad from 1982 to 1984; really, the line A Jove principium; Jovis omnia plena (“The beginning is from Jupiter; all things are full of Jupiter”—but the English just doesn’t cut it) altered me neurologically and impaired my enthusiasm for anything subsequent. Indeed, I became an obscure poet, a translator, a sarcastic cultural historian, and a serial axe-wielding reviewer.
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We chew our burritos. Maybe our cells yearn to be free of us, I think, most unscientifically. Maybe they’re exhausted by the constant negotiations in time and space it takes to maintain the form of an eye, a limb, a mind. Lord knows I’m tired too.
Claire L. Evans, "Report from Goleta." Wild Information, 7/12/2026.
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Those constant bearers of meaning
bore me. I want to open wide now
to the absence of concept, understanding,
representation, to the inward flare
of exhilaration. To the gratuitous
revelation of mineral forces.
Forrest Gander, from Mojave Ghost.
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