Anne Helen Petersen on Keeping Media All Around—But at Arm’s Length | The Slowdown - Culture, Nature, Future
Skip to main content
The Slowdown
Search
Courtesy Anne Helen Petersen
Courtesy Anne Helen Petersen

Anne Helen Petersen resides on Lummi Island, a small land mass in the Puget Sound seven minutes off the coast of Washington by ferry. Just over nine square miles large and home to a mere 900 residents, Lummi is known to be the quietest of the islands in the Sound. Up above, seagulls soar and squawk; down below, ocean waves slosh onto stony shores. Residents spend their time hiking, boating, or strolling along the serene coastline, or catching up on the local goings-on via The Tome, the island’s newsletter, which arrives in their (physical) mailboxes once a month.

Given her chosen environment, one might imagine Petersen to be a sort of recluse who spends her days on lengthy hikes or consumed by long-ago literature, and her nights bundled up by a campfire on the beach, looking out onto rolling waves.

In reality, she’s a highly active, plugged-in media figure who runs the popular Substack newsletter Culture Study and previously worked as a Buzzfeed senior culture writer. With a Ph.D. in media studies, Petersen uses her newsletter to dig deep into small pockets of our common culture—with topics ranging from sex ed to parenting to dealing with grief—in a distinctly spirited-yet-skeptical tone. She also hosts the Crooked Media podcast Work Appropriate, which covers all things workplace, and the HGTV podcast Townsizing, for which she interviews former city dwellers who, like her, have relocated to smaller, quainter towns. (Petersen moved from New York City to Missoula, Montana, in 2017, before relocating to Lummi Island in 2021.) Additionally, she’s the author of books on womanhood, work culture, millennial burnout, and Hollywood scandals.

Despite this vast output, Petersen’s media habits aren’t entirely at odds with the slow pace of where she lives. The way she consumes media actually sort of mimics her environs in a strange yet ultimately coherent way. Though mere minutes from the U.S. mainland, she maintains an important, intentional distance from it on her contained island outpost; plugged in and attentive as she may be to the media around her, she keeps it at arm’s length, and often indulges in content that serves as an escape from the tangled webs of the internet. “I spend a lot of time thinking about how to consume less media,” she says. “I’m trying to be intentional, instead of letting media wash over me.”

We recently spoke with Petersen to see how these intentions manifest in her media intake, which spans the writer Chris La Tray’s newsletter, the HGTV show Maine Cabin Masters, and Lummi Island’s Nextdoor.

How do you start your mornings?

I try to listen to all of the advice about how you shouldn’t look at your phone first thing in the morning, but I absolutely do. Besides the obligatory check of my email and Instagram, I go on the Discord channel for my newsletter, Culture Study, to see what the East Coasters and the Europeans have been talking about overnight.

For news, I used to always look at Twitter, but that impulse has totally atrophied. About a month ago, when everything first started to disintegrate, I was like, I just don’t feel like I want to use this site anymore. It’s just not rewarding me in the same way that it used to. The hits of serotonin are not the same. Now I get a fair amount of news just from scrolling Instagram: The New York Times, The Atlantic, Vox, The Washington Post, and also Hitha Palepu’s #5SmartReads story series, where she posts five important news stories per day. But the way that I generally get it is I pocket things, and come back to them later. So my morning scroll is less reading and more, Oh, that’s interesting. I’m gonna come back to that later.

Do you have any favorite newsletters?

I subscribe to so many. Newsletters are the way that I learn about a lot of the stuff that’s happening in the world instead of Twitter these days. One that I always read, as soon as I get it, is Chris La Tray’s newsletter, An Irritable Métis. That’s probably my favorite of all time. Chris is someone who I know from when I lived in Montana. He is a Métis, Little Shell writer who writes about everything—about indigenous identity, about being a cranky person in the world, and especially about being outdoors, and figuring out your relationship to the outdoors. His newsletter takes me away from the internet, which I think is a really amazing thing. It makes me think of things that have nothing to do with the internet.

Another newsletter that I always open is Virginia Sole-Smith’s Burnt Toast, which is ostensibly about the intersection of parenting and anti-diet culture. I’m not a parent, but I read it voraciously. It’s always really interesting and really useful to me in dismantling a bunch of the shitty nineties diet culture that I internalized over the years.

I also always read Brandon Taylor’s Sweater Weather, which is a newsletter about his reading habits generally. Again, it’s just one of those newsletters that takes me away from the internet. One newsletter that brings me to the internet is Ryan Broderick’s Garbage Day, which is all about the weirdness of internet culture. I really appreciate it for connecting dots between things that are happening all around the internet all the time.

Any favorite podcasts?

I listen to Ezra Klein’s podcast [The Ezra Klein Show] pretty faithfully. He finds the most interesting people, and is really good at getting out of the way to let them speak. I used to be an academic and I have a Ph.D., and I love the rigor that comes with talking to academics. He has so many academics on the podcast, and it’s one of my favorite ways to consume academic thought.

I also love—and this is a recent find—Switched On Pop, which is from Vulture. It’s a musicologist and a musician who break down current pop songs. It’s so fascinating, and it’s exactly the sort of analysis that I love, which is that it takes a popular object and then goes really deep into it.

Any favorite magazines?

Well, my partner, Charlie Warzel, is a writer at The Atlantic, so we have a subscription there. I’ve been trying to do more reading of actual magazines, instead of reading it piecemeal through a subscription online. I wonder if, with the disintegration of Twitter, I’m going to start embracing the return to the physical magazine.

What are your go-to TV shows?

Right now I’m watching Andor, which is fantastic. I was a Star Wars nerd when I was a kid, but I have not been super engaged in the extended universe. But I heard that this was the best TV show since Mad Men, so I was like, Okay, I can get on board with that. I also just love Tony Gilroy, who’s the show’s screenwriter. Michael Clayton is one of my favorite movies, which he also wrote.

My stress-relief watch is Law & Order: SVU. I’ve made it almost entirely through all of the twenty-something seasons. I started in the beginning, but because I don’t like the older seasons as much, I tend to watch the ones in the middle the most.

Another one I watch for stress relief is this HGTV show called Maine Cabin Masters. It’s about these people who go and find old cabins in Maine, and then make them livable for like ten thousand, fifteen thousand, twenty thousand dollars. I really like that. Another show I’ve watched recently that I loved is called The Patient with Steve Carell. I wanted to binge it all in one night, but I spread it out over the course of a week.

What books are you currently reading?

I recently wrote a piece about how I’ve resolved to be serious about reading again, because it was a muscle that, like it did for a lot of people, atrophied over the course of the pandemic. I would find myself scrolling instead of reading, which is my favorite thing in the whole world—specifically reading fiction. At the moment, I’m reading Miriam Toews’s Fight Night, which I love.

There are two other books that I’ve read recently that I love. One is Hua Hsu’s Stay True, which is just wonderful for those of us who were born between 1975 and 1985, in terms of the sort of culture that we came up in. The other one is called Zorrie by Laird Hunt. It’s just a beautiful little sliver of a novel that is very Marilynne Robinson-meets-Elizabeth Strout. It made me cry.

Any guilty pleasures?

I already told you about Law & Order: SVU and Maine Cabin Masters. [Laughs] Well, first of all, I don’t believe in guilty pleasures. I think all pleasures are deserved.

Maybe you could consider these guilty pleasures: I live on Lummi Island, off the coast of Washington. It’s a small island of about nine hundred people, and there are two ways that people get [local] news here. One is through the local Nextdoor, which has managed not to be toxic, because you’re not allowed to talk about Covid and you’re not allowed to talk about politics on it. And so people just post pictures of sunsets and talk about birds. I check it once a day, and I just love being immersed in it. The other way people get news is a newsletter we have that looks like a church bulletin—it’s long, and it’s printed usually in colors like blue or orange, and it comes in the mail. It’s called The Tome, and it’s just all the news about the island. It has little stories about, say, what the civic club did, or about improvements they’re making to one of the local trails, that sort of thing. Until last month, it was edited by this guy, Paul [Davis], who’s 96 years old. He’s still alive, but he’s passing it over to someone new. So there’s definitely been a 96-year-old’s humor fused into the tone, which I liked, too. I don’t know if it’s guilty, but it’s a small little pleasure of mine to read that when it comes in the mailbox.

Keep reading


Mimi Kuo-Deemer. (Photo: Aaron Deemer)

A prominent figure in the world of qigong; meditation; and neijia, or internal martial arts (she is a sixth generation lineage holder in the Baguazhang practice), Mimi Kuo-Deemer has a Qigong and the Tai Chi Axis: Nourishing Practices for Body, Mind, and Spirit (2019) and Xiu Yang: The Ancient Chinese Art of Self-Cultivation for a Healthier, Happier, More Balanced Life (2020) have served as guides for countless individuals seeking the transformative power of these disciplines. Originally from

This past June, The Slowdown launched our Book of the Month newsletter, for which, at the start of every month, we revieNot Too Late to Tracy K. Smith’s urgent yet timeless memoir To Free the Captives, here are the books we thought fit the bill.

Cover of “To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul” by Tracy K. Smith. (Courtesy Knopf)

Family. Memory. Legacy. These words, these themes, build upon each other. Within our families there are shared moments, To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul (Knopf), the former U.S. poet laureate Tracy K. Smith examines the deepest of American wounds through her own family. Th

Cover of “Open Questions: Thirty Years of Writing About Art” by Helen Molesworth. (Courtesy Phaidon)

I find essay collections captivating because they offer the opportunity to dive in at any point. Of course, reading themOpen Questions: Thirty Years of Writing About Art (Phaidon) by Helen Molesworth, the first-ever collection of her art writing, I did in fact start from the beginning.

Stefan Sagmeister. (Photo: Victor G. Jeffreys II)

The Austrian-born, New York–based graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister has a rare knack for tackling broad, universal subjNow Is Better, just out from Phaidon, he’s taken on the subject of long-term thinking, arguing that never before in human history havbetter. First started in the 2020 lockdown, the project vividly brings statistics to life through a range of media, including

William B. Irvine. (Photo: Lyndon French)

Philosopher William B. Irvine’s journey from a youth spent in mining towns in Montana and Nevada to becoming a renowned A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy (2007), Aha!: The Moments of Insight that Shape Our World (2014), and most recently, The Stoic Challenge: A Philosopher's Guide to Becoming Tougher, Calmer, and More Resilient (2019). Though he no longer gives classroom lectures, he continues to spread his wisdom through his writing, which aims

Spike Lee. (Courtesy Jamel Shabazz)

Until February 4, 2024, the Brooklyn Museum will have an (unofficial) new name: the Crooklyn Museum. As of last weekend, the fifth floor is hosting “Spike Lee: Creative Sources,” an immersive exhibition featuring more than 450 objects—ranging from artwork, sports jerseys, and film posters to pho

Roxane Gay. (Photo: Reginald Cunningham)

When it comes to astute and unvarnished observations about pressing issues of our time, Roxane Gay never fails to deliveNew York Times contributing opinion writer has gained international recognition for her sharp, subversive output across genres, includDifficult Women (2017); her novel An Untamed State (2014); her memoir, Hunger (2017); and her New York Times best-selling essay collection, Bad Feminist (2014). As is evident across her writing, Gay has a rare knack for both exposing raw truths of the society we live in aThe Sacrifice of Darkness (2020) and the comic book series and Marvel spin-off World of Wakanda (2016-2017)—providing imaginative havens to escape to.

Cover of “Roman Stories” by Jhumpa Lahiri. (Courtesy Knopf)

Just over a decade ago, in 2012, Jhumpa Lahiri moved with her husband and two children to Rome. In the 12 years prior, sInterpreter of Maladies; her best-selling 2003 novel, The Namesake, was turned into a Hollywood film directed by Mira Nair. Her arrival in Rome, it turned out, would alter her already exThe Lowland, which was a finalist for both the Man Booker Prize and a National Book Award, remains her last published work of ficti

Installation view of Edmund de Waal’s solo exhibition “this must be the place” (2023) at Gagosian in New York. (© Edmund de Waal. Photo: Rob McKeever. Courtesy Gagosian)

Every year, the fall brings a global gauntlet of gallery openings, museum galas, and art fairs (Frieze London and Paris+ in October, Salon Art + Design in New York and Paris Photo in November, and the perennial year-end juggernaut Art Basel Miami Beach in December, to name a few). In an effort to cut through the noise—just as we did this past summer—we selected five must-see shows this season, from New York City, to Washington, D.C., to Denver. In New York, we recommEp. 97 of Time Sensitive—so of course we’re a bit biased).

Dr. Gary Cooper, founder of the re-commerce company Rheaply, speaking at the fair. (Courtesy Emerson Collective)

This past Wednesday, I made a visit to Chelsea’s High Line, where a certain kind of science fair—coinciding with New YorClimate Science Fair, hosted by Emerson Collective in collaboration with the climate-tech nonprofit Elemental Excelerator. With the aim of cultivating climate optimism and impactful conversations about our collective future, the community-drEp. 2 of our Time Sensitive podcast) to the marine biologist Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson. “The heart of so much of our work is really thinking of the power

David W. Orr. (Photo: John Seyfried)

David W. Orr could be considered at once an educator’s educator, a political scientist’s political scientist, and an ecoDemocracy in a Hotter Time: Climate Change and Democratic Transformation, from M.I.T. Press, which he edited), articles (more than 250 to date), and lectures (hundreds around the world) with a

Aerial view of Tom Lee Park. (Photo: Connor Ryan. Courtesy Memphis River Parks Partnership)

In the whirring, flashing, globe-spanning machine that is American popular culture, Memphis, Tennessee—population 620,00Memphis Blues” was a key evolutionary link between ragtime and jazz; just over 50 years later, Bob Dylan namechecked it with his semiStuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again”; 15 years after that, a group of radical Italian designers in Milan, listening to the Dylan track while thinking up a

Christopher John Rogers. (Photo: Robin Kitchin. Courtesy Farrow & Ball)

If there’s anything that Christopher John Rogers cares even more deeply about than clothes, it has to be color. Since establishing his namesake fashion label in 2016, tGossip Girl, red carpets (Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, and Rihanna have all donned his dresses), and into the illustrious halls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (two of his dresses were featured in the Co

Cover of “The Ugly History of Beautiful Things: Essays on Desire and Consumption” by Katy Kelleher. (Courtesy Simon and Schuster)

As I was reading Katy Kelleher’s beautifully written new book, The Ugly History of Beautiful Things: Essays on Desire and Consumption (Simon & Schuster), I found myself returning to a conversation I once had with the graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister, who in 2018 himself published an astute book on beauty. “If you’re in an environment that is lacking beauty,” Sagmeister told me, “you are becoming an asshole.” Cheeky as his

vanessa german. (Photo: AJ Mitchell Photography. Courtesy Kasmin, New York)

When the artist, performer, and poet vanessa german was selected to design a temporary memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., as part of the “Beyond Granite: Pulling Together” exhibition (on view from Aug. 18 through Sept. 18), she quickly found herself turning to a catalytic moment in AmericaMarian Anderson’s 1939 Easter Sunday concert at the Lincoln Memorial. Attended by 75,000 people in the then segregated U.S. capitol, with millions more listening on

Beverly Nguyen. (Photo: Sean Davidson)

Defying the pull of our digital, largely two-dimensional age, the New York–based stylist and shop owner Beverly Nguyen tVogue, Opening Ceremony, and La Garçonne; as an assistant and later studio director of the stylist Kate Young (the guest on Ep. 3 of Time Sensitive); and now as a professional stylist herself, Nguyen has in recent years plunged headlong into a new sBeverly’s NYC. Lining the shelves of the specialty market are wooden spoons, brooms, baskets, and pepper grinders—many of these itemsextra virgin olive oil.

Cover of “Look: How to Pay Attention in a Distracted World” by Christian Madsbjerg. (Courtesy Riverhead Books)

“All too often, we humans push papers, ideas, or money around at a monotonous pace with no time for rest and even less tLook: How to Pay Attention in a Distracted World (Riverhead Books). The result of decades of research and time spent thinking and writing about the subject of observatiLook spans a vast range of theories—from philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notion of embodied perception, to psychologist M

Installation view of the Herzog & de Meuron exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, London (14 July – 15 October 2023). Photo © Royal Academy of Arts, London / David Parry. © Herzog & de Meuron

Designing a truly great building is no easy feat. Among many things, it must be cognizant of history, responsive to the Tate Modern—a former power station transformed into an art gallery in 2000, then extended in 2016 by the Basel, Switzerland–based a

Pedro Gadanho. (Courtesy Actar Publishers)

For the past 15 years, the architect, curator, and writer Pedro Gadanho has been raising alarm bells about the urgency tEco-Visionaries,” a 2018 exhibition he co-curated at the Museum of Art, Architecture, and Technology in Lisbon, Gadanho is at the forefClimax Change: How Architecture Must Transform in the Age of Ecological Emergency (Actar Publishers, 2022), brings together his most recent research and thinking to profound and potent effect.

Installation view of “Thaddeus Mosley: Forest” at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas. (Photo: Kevin Todora. Courtesy Nasher Sculpture Center)

As we head into the summer, we scouted the globe—from London to Dallas to Miami to New York—to select what we feel are tArt Basel Miami Beach in December): “Joan Didion: What She Means” at the Pérez Art Museum Miami.

Lina Ghotmeh. (Photo: Harry Richards. Courtesy Serpentine Galleries)

As far as architecture career paths go, Lina Ghotmeh’s is a bit of an anomaly. In 2005, at age 25, while working in Londreceived the Grand Prix Afex, a prestigious French architecture prize. Around that time—project complete—Dorell, Tane, and Ghotmeh shuttered DGT and

Cover of “Worlds Without End” (2023) by Chris Impey. (Courtesy MIT Press)

The astronomer Chris Impey’s latest book, Worlds Without End: Exoplanets, Habitability, and the Future of Humanity, explores the implications of the fact that there are, by his rough count, a mind-boggling four billion Earth-like planthe latest episode of our At a Distance podcast, adding that, “We’re not gonna go there; the energy cost is insane. We have to look after this planet.”

Norman Teague. (Photo: Ross Floyd. Courtesy Norman Teague Studios)

Norman Teague has a global outlook, but the artist, designer, furniture-maker, and educator keeps his work close to homeAfricana” furniture and homeware collection from 2021 incorporates hand-carved details that reference African tribal carvings, a

View of Thomas J Price’s “Beyond Measure” exhibition at Hauser & Wirth’s Downtown Los Angeles gallery. (Photo: Keith Lubow. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth)

In the ebb and flow of history, civilizations have long endured through sculpture, the distillation of a society’s valueBeyond Measure,” an exhibition of new and early works by the British artist Thomas J Price (on view through Aug. 20), presents monuments of a subject almost wholly excluded from the sculptural canon: the casual

The cover of “Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility” (2023). (Courtesy Haymarket Books)

If there’s one book I’m going to be shoving into peoples’ hands for years to come, it’s the recently released collectionNot Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility (Haymarket Books)—which is why it’s our pick for The Slowdown’s debut Book of the Month column.

The “Kwaeε” timber pavilion by Adjaye Associates. (Photo: Michelle Äärlaht. Courtesy Adjaye Associates)

The Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena, the curator of the 15th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2016, was on hand last week for the debut of the Biennale’s 17Davos Baukultur Alliance, a new global initiative from the organization that aims to advance eight core principles it deems essential to a prosphis celebrated half-built house developments, Aravena’s words were as stirring as ever—only now, their impact felt strangely, eerily different.

Object No. 118, a set of white ceramic bowls, in the New York City home of Kate Berry, chief creative officer of Domino magazine.

Three weeks have passed since our Milan Design Week exhibition “Take It or Leave It,” in collaboration with the Italian architect and designer Paola Navone, during which she gave away hundreds of items she had collected or designed over the years, from Indian metal spoons an

Tom Delevan with his new Archival rug collection for Beni Rugs. (Courtesy Beni Rugs)

As the design and interiors director of T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Tom Delavan adheres to a schedule of nonstop, high-intensity days that consist of writing, overseeing photoshoots, porDomino, Delavan also operates his own interior design practice, drawing on three decades of immersion in the worlds of fine anBeni Rugs called Archival, which launches next week.

John Pawson. (Photo: Gilbert McCarragher. Courtesy Phaidon)

Across his 40-year career, the British architect John Pawson has realized a vast portfolio of impeccably refined projectMaking Life Simpler (Phaidon), one by his longtime friend the design writer and critic Deyan Sudjic, a book not only about his work and visi

GUBI’s presentation at Bagni Misteriosi for Milan Design Week. (Courtesy GUBI)

Everywhere I went during this year’s Milan Design Week, there seemed to be a palpable feeling that the Salone del Mobile design and furniture fair, now in its 61st year, is sputtering, or, at the very least, puttering. While it unquestionabAlcova, which this year took place at a former slaughterhouse, and spaces in and around the city’s Brera neighborhood, long a GUBI presented its latest collections this year, or the Bonacossa Tennis Club, where the Milan-based designer Cristina Celestino created a pop-up restaurant with the food collective We Are Ona. Many architects, designers, and journalists I spoke wi

View of the “Take It or Leave It” exhibition. (Photo: Antonio Campanella)

One thousand numbered objects, 623 lottery drawings, 591 “Take Its,” 32 “Leave Its,” and a smattering of trades therein,Take It or Leave It,” in collaboration with the Italian architect and designer Paola Navone, and it was no placid affair. But of course it to give away hundreds of items she had collected or designed over the years, from Indian metal spoons to indigo textiles to ceramic

Paola Navone. (Photo: Antonio Campanella)

Radical by nature and a rule-breaker at heart, Paola Navone has been on an endless self-described “treasure hunt” for thArchitettura Radicale, and then went on to join the Italian radical design groups Alchimia and Memphis. From the early 1980s to 2000, she liv

Lesley Lokko. (Photo: Murdo Macleod. Courtesy the African Futures Institute)

For Lesley Lokko, plurality comes naturally. Born in Scotland to a Ghanaian father and a Scottish mother, and moving freThe Laboratory of the Future,” she’s bringing exactly this outlook to the main exhibition. On view from May 20 through Nov. 26, the six-part presentAfrican Futures Institute in Accra, a new architecture school and research institute that, as with her Biennale show, positions Africa as a labor

Jonah Takagi. (Photo: Erik Benjamins. Courtesy Marta)

Jonah Takagi comes across as laid-back and casual, but the truth is, he keeps pretty busy. The bulk of his time is splithis namesake design studio, and Providence, Rhode Island, where he teaches a Herman Miller–inspired furniture design course at the Rhode Island Sc

Overlapping copies of “No Finish Line.” (Photo: Weston Colton. Courtesy Nike)

From its classic swoosh logo, to its signature Air Jordan silhouette, to its legendary “Just Do It” tagline, to its recent 50th anniversary video short by Spike Lee, Nike knows how to expertly engineer and craft its brand down to the tiniest detail, and how to subtly zoom out and in

Cover of “Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory” by Janet Malcolm. (Courtesy Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

When Janet Malcolm first wrote for The New Yorker in 1963, her debut wasn’t in the form of the piercing prose she became known for, but instead a slim poem titled “Thoughts on Living in a Shaker House.” On the surface, it may seem an odd starting point for Malcolm, who would become one of the foremost writers about—andNew Yorker staff writer until her death, on June 16, 2021, at age 86. But the poem’s lines are indeed pure Malcolm: plainspoken, cu

Aerial view of the new Son Bunyola hotel in Mallorca, Spain. (Courtesy Son Bunyola)

The old’s been rung out, the new’s been rung in. We’re now all looking out on the year ahead, thinking about what it migthe tide turning on travel restrictions and peace of mind slowly being restored to the masses. 2023 is forecast to be the year when, for better or worse, travel will make a full return to its pre-pandemic patterns.

Washington Square Park in New York City’s Greenwich Village. (Photo: Spencer Bailey)

It’s a late afternoon in early November, nearing dusk, and I’m sitting with Michael Kimmelman, the New York Times architecture critic, inside the West Village outpost of Daily Provisions, a café from the New York City restaurateur Dawrote about another Meyer establishment, Union Square Cafe, unpacking the implications of the then-new location and layout of the l

“Ilan's Garden” (2022) by Doron Langberg. (Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro)

That the first work of art I saw during this year’s Miami Art Week was a newscast seems somehow appropriate in our precaage of misinformation and sped-up media ecosystem?” the artists behind it, from the civic-engagement coalition For Freedoms, appeared to be asking. “And really, what’s t

Installation view of “Young Lords and Their Traces” at the New Museum. (Photo: Dario Lasagni. Courtesy the New Museum)

What’s the purpose of a museum—and who decides which objects are worthy of value, attention, and care? These two questioYoung Lords and Their Traces” at the New Museum, the Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates’s first-ever museum survey exhibition to be staged in New Y

The Sculpture Gallery at The Glass House. (Photo: Michael Biondo)

It’s a serene, bluebird-sky day, a slight chill in the air, and I’m walking with the Paris-based, Austrian-born designerSculpture Gallery, a transfixing space of light and shadow built in 1970 that’s home to works by artists including Michael Heizer, Robert

The “shite” (primary performer) in “Makura Jido” (“Chrysanthemum Boy”). (Photo: Yutaka Ishida. Courtesy Japan Society)

Two winters ago, I picked up a copy of Penguin Classics’ Japanese Nō Dramas, a volume of two dozen translations by Royall Tyler I’d been meaning to read since tearing through Yukio Mishima’s Five Modern Noh Plays a decade previous. I had moved into a New York City gem (an apartment with a fireplace), and with Covid cases skyrocketi

The “Urban Sun” installation at the Solar Biennale, designed by Studio Roosegaarde. (Courtesy the Solar Biennale)

As changes in weather patterns, economic realities, and public perception have triggered a wave of climate consciousness over the past few years, renewable energy sources have enjoyed a newfound level of attention, no longer relegated to thlong-sputtering industry of solar power. Factoids like how an hour and half worth of sunlight hitting the earth could provide the world’s total energy consumption in a year have been employed to tease out the industry’s transformative power for decades. Now, with technological advances makincheaper and more efficient than ever, it seems better poised than ever to take on a greater role in weaning humanity off of its fossil fuel and coal depende

Elizabeth Dee. (Courtesy Independent Art Fair)

Since 1997, when she founded her eponymous (now shuttered) gallery, Elizabeth Dee has been a fixture of the New York artIndependent Art Fair. An elegant, tightly curated event that remains an outlier in its efforts to elevate overlooked, underrepresented, and

Courtesy Mack Books

What does it mean to revisit a photograph? When a camera shutters, it locks a moment in time, forever trapping the imageGathered Leaves, the latest book by the Minneapolis-based photographer Alec Soth, whose work has long documented lonely souls and fractured dreams in spaces across the United States. In Gathered Leaves, Soth revisits five of his previous books, including in its pages new notes, annotations, text excerpts, and even photo

Kate Berry. (Photo: Jessica Antola)

Kate Berry’s glowing personality transmits what she seems to desire most: a breath of fresh air, and time to care for her myriad plants; raise her 9-year-old daughter, Quinn; or host intimate dinner parties for friends on the garden-covered terrace of her Domino and of the food, wine, and travel magazine Saveur, Berry has interactions with media that, due to her demanding schedule, tend to be brief and light—and meaningful. She lives her work, which leaves plenty of time for creating media, but not so much for taking it in. As she puts it, “You don’t

Courtesy Thames & Hudson

Consider the flower. What image blossoms to mind? What emotion does it elicit? For centuries, flowers have persisted as Flora Photographica: The Flower in Contemporary Photography (Thames & Hudson), out August 30, editors William Ewing and Danaé Panchaud compose a selection of vibrant modern floral

The Wind and Water Bar mid-construction. (Photo: Phan Quang. Courtesy Thames & Hudson.)

Lush fruit trees bursting over a roof. A canopy of plants covering a facade. Intricate bamboo constructions spiraling frVõ Trọng Nghĩa: Building Nature (Thames & Hudson), readers get an inside look into how the celebrated architect has embraced two core themes throughout

David Wallace-Wells. (Photo: Andrew Zuckerman / The Slowdown)

The climate writer and essayist David Wallace-Wells has a knack for translating the unimaginable into the painfully realarticle for New York magazine and subsequent book of the same name, The Uninhabitable Earth, played a critical role in jolting the conversation, detailing the varied plagues and, finally, apocalyptic conditions The New York Times, who added him to their Opinion section, where he has begun a weekly newsletter to reflect on the latest in our Anthropocene Age.

The Future Library Forest. (Photo: Rio Gandara. Courtesy Helsingin Sanomat)

“A forest in Norway is growing.” So begins the cryptic text printed on a certificate for the Future Library, or Framtidsbiblioteket, an artwork by Scottish artist Katie Paterson that, over the span of a century, cumulatively builds a collection of wri

Sound installation by Devon Turnbull. (Courtesy Lisson Gallery)

At New York’s Lisson Gallery, an unfettered approach to sculpture is the driving force behind a new group exhibition. OnThe Odds Are Good, The Goods Are Odd” presents the work of 11 groundbreaking New York City–based contemporary artists. In the exhibition, sculptures are a m

“Windy” spins on New York’s High Line. (Courtesy Meriem Bennani, High Line Art, and Audemars Piguet)

Rising from a patch of spiny ornamental grass on New York’s High Line park, a 9-foot-tall tornado spins in place, whirliWindy”, a new (and first-ever) sculpture by the Moroccan-born, New York–based artist Meriem Bennani, installed near West 23rd2 Lizards” (2020), made with filmmaker Orian Barki and launched on Instagram at the start of the pandemic, depicted the bewilderi

Baratunde Thurston at the Badwater Basin in California’s Death Valley National Park. (Courtesy Twin Cities PBS/Part2 Pictures)

“We think we invent things and create things and define ourselves by ourselves, but that’s not the whole story,” BaratunAmerica Outdoors, a six-part travel series that premiered last week on PBS. Thurston—a writer, comedian, and podcaster who has advised tThe Daily Show, and authored the best-selling memoir How To Be Black—has a knack for navigating nuanced conversations around race, culture, politics, and technology, framing these discussi

Cover of “Rocky Mountain Modern” by John Gendall

The jagged spine of the Rocky Mountains is too beautiful to mar. Yet over the years, developers and builders have manageBuckminster Fuller, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Eliot Noyes, and Eero Saarinen completed commissions in the Western United States, transforming it into a hub for architectural modRocky Mountain Modern: Contemporary Alpine Homes (Monacelli Press).

Alexandra Lange. (Photo: Mark Wickens)

A recurring theme in design critic Alexandra Lange’s work is unpacking how—and for whom—objects and spaces are designed.The Dot-Com City, and surveyed how kids’ toys and physical environments impact their development in her 2018 book, The Design of Childhood. The ways in which outdoor public spaces, with their basketball courts, playgrounds, and skate parks, fail teen girls wa story she wrote for Bloomberg CityLab—one of many publications she has contributed to over the past two-plus decades.

A still from Kandis Williams’s multiscreen work “Triadic Ballet” (2021). (Courtesy the artist and the Rosenkranz Collection.)

Time standards are one of the many seemingly invisible societal constructs we interact with every day but seldom ponder.Mountain / Time,” the show is a nod to both the local time zone in Aspen, Mountain Standard Time (MST)—which the writer and critic Kylehas hailed for its “apartness” and “sense of detachment from the economic and cultural centers of the nation”—and the conceptual d

Installation view of the “Hermès in the Making” exhibition in Troy, Michigan. (Photo: William Jess Laird)

Detroit is a city of craft. Of carmakers and Carhartt. Of Motown Records and Eminem. Of iconic midcentury design (Isamu Noguchi’s Hart Plaza and Dodge Fountain, buildings by Mies van der Rohe and Minoru Heidelberg Project. So it’s fitting that, following previous iterations in Copenhagen, last fall, and in Turin, Italy, last month, the Freits latest “Hermès in the Making” exhibition (through June 15). A playful, Willy Wonka factory–like presentation of the company’s know-how, the display offers “an o not to smile while walking through it. Divided into four sections—”A Culture of Traditional Craftsmanship,” “High-Quality Msecret!” Beyond, stations feature artisans in saddle-stitching, porcelain painting, gemstone setting, glove-making, leather wor

Photo: Carlo Banfi. (Courtesy Flos)

Emerging from the pandemic, the design industry, like most of us, has changed. The past two and a half years, which havean increasingly pressing climate crisis, have formed a solemn backdrop. In March 2020, almost at once, in the locked-down lives of many, the notion of “home” a

Maria Cristina Didero. (Photo: Stefan Giftthaler)

The concept of the Golden Age was first introduced by the ancient Greek philosopher Hesiod, around 700 B.C., in a refereDesign Miami Basel (June 14–19), taking place at the Swiss city’s Messeplatz. Organized around the theme “The Golden Age: Rooted in the Pa

Cover of “The Trayvon Generation” by Elizabeth Alexander

How do the generation of Black Americans who grew up in the past 25 years reckon with the tragedies that play out in theThe Trayvon Generation (Grand Central Publishing), poet, educator, and scholar Elizabeth Alexander—who currently serves as the president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the largest humanities philanthropy in the UnEp. 52 of our Time Sensitive podcast)—explores these questions, and others, by meditating on race, class, trauma, justice, and memory, and their influences

Installation view of “Plastic: Remaking Our World.” (Photo: Bettina Matthiessen)

In the early 1860s, an advertisement in The New York Times offered $10,000 to anyone who could invent a new material for billiard balls. At the time, elephant ivory was the matercamphor, a waxy substance found in the wood of the camphor laurel tree. Though celluloid would later prove to be less than idea

Rendering of Drift’s indoor drone performance, “Social Sacrifice” (2022). (Courtesy Drift and Aorist)

Non-fungible tokens, or NFTs (one-of-a-kind digital assets created using blockchain technology), have divided the art woEp. 59 of our Time Sensitive podcast), see them as pathways to a promising future, while others express concern around the sky-high price points and carbon emissions they generate.

“Between the Mountain and the Sky” by Maggie Doyne

At 35, Maggie Doyne is the mother of more than 50 children. One is her biological child, who lives with Doyne, her husbaBetween the Mountain and the Sky: A Mother’s Story of Hope and Love (Harper Horizon), out last month. Through telling her extraordinary story, she demonstrates the life-altering power of

A ramen bowl by Taku Satoh. (Photo: Hiroshi Tsujitani. Courtesy Nacasa & Partners Inc.)

Eating ramen is a multisensory experience: the fragrant steam coming off of the broth, the slurping sound of enjoying thThe Art of the Ramen Bowl” (March 18–July 5) that’s on view at the Los Angeles location of Japan House, an initiative with additional hubs in Londonburi, the porcelain receptacles in which ramen is traditionally served, and renge, the compact, teardrop-shaped spoons that often accompany them, made by 30 leading artists, architects, and designers.

Anicka Yi’s “Biologizing the Machine (spillover zoonotica)” (2022), on view at Milan’s Pirelli HangarBicocca. (Photo: Agostino Osio. Courtesy the artist and Pirelli HangarBicocca.)

Anicka Yi’s intoxicatingly sensory installations don’t just surround the viewer—many of them literally permeate the body, their sEp. 14 of our At a Distance podcast), in which three industrial steel tanks saturate the air with an aroma concocted by fusing secretions from carpenter an

Integrative nutritionist Daphne Javitch

Integrative nutritionist Daphne Javitch helps people develop their versions of a healthy life—a potentially daunting tasDoing Well, Javitch, a former womenswear consultant at Theory and Uniqlo, offers private health and career coaching as well as groEp. 46 of our At a Distance podcast.)

Installation view of “David Byrne: How I Learned About Non-Rational Logic.” (Courtesy Pace Gallery)

Thick, wobbly lines branch out across a wall of Pace Gallery’s global headquarters in New York. Follow each stroke to itwomen, grandpas, and singers craning toward the ceiling, and donuts, hairs, and holes reaching into the ground. Part absurdist diagram, part heart-melting poem, and part consciousness-shifting artwork, thiDavid Byrne: How I Learned About Non-Rational Logic” (on view Feb. 2–March 19), a restorative survey of drawings the musician has made over the past two decades.

Skyscraper Page website

With their audacious, gravity-defying forms, skyscrapers have captured the public’s imagination for more than a century.Skyscraper Page, a zany website with a skyscraper discussion forum that has spread to some 100,000 threads. But what’s the point of obs