Hung floor to ceiling: the salon wall returns
A wall crammed frame-to-frame, top to cornice, on deep red damask. The salon hang is making a comeback, and with it an older, busier way of looking.
Art · 5 min
The Gallery
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Inside the white cube, where nothing is allowed to distract
The modern gallery is engineered to disappear: white walls, grey floor, light from nowhere. It's the most ideological neutral room ever built.
Art · 4 min
The weight of bronze, and the bodies inside it
A bronze figure folds in on itself, dark and burnished. Sculpture is the one art form you can't take in from a single spot — you have to walk around it.
Art · 4 min
The Reading List
View all →Fyodor DostoevskyCrime and Punishment
Crime and Punishment, and the long walk back
Raskolnikov commits his crime in the first fifty pages. The rest is the slow, sweltering business of a mind that cannot live with what the body has done.
Books · 6 min
Leo TolstoyAnna Karenina
Anna Karenina, or every unhappy family
Everyone remembers the first line. Fewer remember that the novel's real love story is Levin's — mowing a field, falling in love, learning, slowly, how to live.
Books · 7 min
Mikhail BulgakovThe Master and Margarita
The Master and Margarita, and the devil in Moscow
A talking black cat, a decapitation by tram, and a manuscript that refuses to burn. Bulgakov's banned masterpiece is the funniest book about tyranny ever written.
Books · 6 min
Screening Room
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Past Lives, and the ache of the road not taken
Celine Song's debut is a film about timing — about the versions of ourselves we leave in other countries and other decades, and the quiet grief of choosing one life.
Film · 7 min
Aftersun, a memory developing in the dark
Charlotte Wells's debut hides a devastation in plain sight: a holiday remembered by a grown woman trying to read her young father's sadness in footage she's watched a hundred times.
Film · 6 min
