“I'm sort of appalled by my mother.” “I'm kind of obsessed with these cookies.” “I'm a little freaked out by drone strikes.” 

What, exactly, is the deal here? We're all suddenly unable to say clearly what we're feeling? Everything has to be qualified ever so slightly? We're appalled--but we're just sort of appalled. We're not willing to commit to it. It's like an epidemic of cultural coyness.

My sense is that this is at least partly a Puritan relic: a simultaneous fascination with and fear of heightened emotion. We attach these qualifiers only to the most extreme conditions—appalled, obsessed, addicted. (We wouldn't say “That restaurant was kind of decent” or “I'm sort of pleased with my car.") We want to feel the romance of being appalled, obsessed, etc.—but we al... Read More

Or in a handsome boutique in Williamsburg. Or here. 

This is a cookbook that no home cook will ever use. It has more text than most novels. The design is achingly spare. The recipes call for things like crisp lichen and “a handful of last year's autumn leaves”; preparations involve things like burned-out trees and often last roughly a year. It's a cookbook for fairies and gods. It's also a profound work of cultural anthropology. As an object, as a document of a life lived with unthinking authenticity, as a portrait of the snowy, wordless moment between our primal past and our possible future, it is rare and beautiful. It has the integrity of undiscovered earth.     

 

 

A friend of mine from high school is now the CEO (or some clever, start-uppy title like Comrade Evangelist) of a small high-tech start-up in Cambridge. I recently read an interview with him in a start-uppy online magazine in which he described the daily routine in his office this way: “It's basically heads-down until lunch--and then we come out and start having meetings.”

“Heads-down”: This term fills me with existential dread. 

The crew's been out on the road shooting a new series of videos for Wellesley College (and taking in the New England fall foliage, like the nature-starved New Yorkers they are).

Now through October 20th, Generation Gallery will host Iconopedia, the very first US exhibition of the work of Milan based illustrator and artist Lorenzo Petrantoni.

Lorenzo's very personal, iconic style of illustration gives life back to printed words, characters and symbols that would otherwise be forgotten, left hidden away in old books. The fascinating results of his keen eye, and near compulsive, symmetric filing of white space creates images that are thoroughly charming.

Lorenzo's illustrations have appeared in many major US publications including the NY Times Book Revue, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, Wired and GQ. He has created advertising for brands such as CocaCola, Burton Snowboard, Nike and Nespresso, and has designed a collection of watches for Swatch.