Beverly Nguyen’s Highly Tactile Taste in Media | The Slowdown - Culture, Nature, Future
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Beverly Nguyen. (Photo: Sean Davidson)
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 tends to gravitate toward tactility in all aspects of her life. Having established her career in the fashion world with positions at Vogue, 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 small business, her namesake homewares store Beverly’s NYC. Lining the shelves of the specialty market are wooden spoons, brooms, baskets, and pepper grinders—many of these items sourced from local Chinatown vendors—as well as her own custom extra virgin olive oil.

Following its manifold iterations over the past two years—first, in April 2021, as a pop-up shop on Ludlow Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side; then as a pop-up at Rockefeller Center; then as a section in Nordstrom’s home goods department at its Midtown flagship; and then, in 2022, as three different pop-ups within the span of four months—the shop is soon to settle into its permanent home at 27 Orchard Street. Serendipitously, the shop’s final destination, expected to open next month, is just one street over from its very first pop-up location. To Nguyen, this full-circle trajectory feels inevitable in hindsight: “After having a shop in Midtown at Rockefeller and at Nordstrom, and then having an understanding of what it was like to be in a Lower East Side location [with my first pop-up]—especially working with a lot of Chinatown vendors and friends who are all downtown or in Brooklyn—I was just like, You know what? I need to be where my friends, community, vendors, artists, where I live, where I eat, where I hang out. For me, that’s downtown.”

With two jobs that revolve around up-and-coming brands, designs, and talent, it’s impossible for Nguyen to fully escape social media and the internet vortex. But when she can, she does. “I tend to look at tangible things in my day, because in the last decade of my life, I spent so much time on Instagram looking for young designers and new brands and talent and interesting things that were happening on the internet,” she says. Starting her days with a 20-minute meditation, Nguyen has a strict no-phone-in-bed policy and has omitted a television in her living room layout. She prefers to have her nose in magazines and catalogs rather than pointed toward a screen, and finds herself attending matinees at local theaters instead of tuning in to Netflix or HBO shows.

Here, we speak with Nguyen about the tactile, often sensory media she consumes, which includes the annual fashion journal Vestoj, mastheads and indexes of old magazines, and the physical newspaper.

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The exterior of the Beverly’s NYC pop-up at Rockefeller Center. (Photo: Sean Davidson)
The exterior of the Beverly’s NYC pop-up at Rockefeller Center. (Photo: Sean Davidson)
Nguyen at the first Beverly’s NYC pop-up on Ludlow Street. (Photo: Ryan Lowry)
Nguyen at the first Beverly’s NYC pop-up on Ludlow Street. (Photo: Ryan Lowry)
The interior of the first Beverly’s NYC pop-up on Ludlow Street. (Photo: Ryan Lowry)
The interior of the first Beverly’s NYC pop-up on Ludlow Street. (Photo: Ryan Lowry)
The exterior of the Beverly’s NYC pop-up at Rockefeller Center. (Photo: Sean Davidson)
The exterior of the Beverly’s NYC pop-up at Rockefeller Center. (Photo: Sean Davidson)
Nguyen at the first Beverly’s NYC pop-up on Ludlow Street. (Photo: Ryan Lowry)
Nguyen at the first Beverly’s NYC pop-up on Ludlow Street. (Photo: Ryan Lowry)
The interior of the first Beverly’s NYC pop-up on Ludlow Street. (Photo: Ryan Lowry)
The interior of the first Beverly’s NYC pop-up on Ludlow Street. (Photo: Ryan Lowry)
The exterior of the Beverly’s NYC pop-up at Rockefeller Center. (Photo: Sean Davidson)
The exterior of the Beverly’s NYC pop-up at Rockefeller Center. (Photo: Sean Davidson)
Nguyen at the first Beverly’s NYC pop-up on Ludlow Street. (Photo: Ryan Lowry)
Nguyen at the first Beverly’s NYC pop-up on Ludlow Street. (Photo: Ryan Lowry)
The interior of the first Beverly’s NYC pop-up on Ludlow Street. (Photo: Ryan Lowry)
The interior of the first Beverly’s NYC pop-up on Ludlow Street. (Photo: Ryan Lowry)

How do you start your mornings?

I have a different morning program depending on the time of year. Right now, since I’m staying in New York in August, I have to carve out my own breaks, and I usually like to take one in the morning. I get up around 5:30 or 5:45, and I go straight to a meditation before anything. I meditate for twenty minutes. Then I drink a ton of water, and I stretch. I don’t typically look at my phone until after that meditation, unless somebody I’m dressing or styling is in a different time zone—in that case, I would have been up an hour or two hours before that. But since everybody is on strike [laughter]—since I’m not dressing any celebrities at the moment—I start there, and then I’ll check my phone and I’ll have my coffee.

Where do you get your news?

I always listen to NPR in the morning. I’ll either turn on Aretha Franklin or blast NPR through the bathroom while I’m washing my face. [Laughs] Then, once I look at my phone, I get all the New York Times alerts. I just scroll through the news and see what’s happened in the world, and in New York. I also get the newspaper every day, so I usually check that. I’m a big print person.

I think you might be the first person I’ve talked to on this series who gets the physical newspaper.

Really? Well, one of the weird reasons I opened the store—there are so many reasons I opened the store—but at the time when I was really getting into it was because I was in a fight with The New York Times. Because I had moved addresses, and it takes them six months to really begin resending you the paper. I thought that if I opened the store, I could just carry the paper and actually have the Times every day sent to the store. But I found out it is extremely difficult, and it’s a big waste of money to do that, because for every issue that doesn’t sell, you have to spend your own money sending it back to the printer. That’s why it’s very rare to find the New York Times or any kind of daily newspaper at most of your bodegas.

Interesting. Back to the digital world, do you have any favorite newsletters?

I actually love The Slowdown’s newsletter. I look forward to that. I also love the New York Times Cooking newsletter, like “Five things to make in a week.” I love to cook, so I read any food newsletters that come through.

Is there a recipe that you’ve made recently from one of those newsletters?

I just came back from Eataly, because I’m going to make a vongole tonight, but as I was coming downtown back to my apartment, there was one [newsletter] that I flipped through and it has this delicious Yucatán Mexican grilled pork chop. It’s called poc chuc, and it looks so delicious. There’s orange and grapefruit and lime juice—super citrusy. I feel like those recipes that they offer are for the modern working person. You can pick up these ingredients at any grocery store, and the images are so pretty, but actually realistic and attainable.

I also always read a little recap from Women’s Wear Daily. Another thing that I enjoy that I don’t think most people get, unless you’re in the world of fashion, or you’re an editor or stylist, is a lot of press releases. Every day, I get, like, twenty-five of them. I really enjoy reading press releases from luxury fashion houses. Balenciaga releases, probably once every two weeks, a press release of some sort, and it’s so beautifully written. That press release is truly a form of art—the way they capture and sell what they’re releasing without images. It’s just very old school. I almost read it like a memo.

Any favorite magazines?

I have so many. I love Pin-Up. I’m very attached to Felix [Burrichter], the founder. Do you know him?

I actually interviewed him for this very series, maybe a year and a half ago.

Oh! I had no idea. I look forward to reading the actual articles in Pin-Up. They highlight incredible and versatile designers and professors and people who are up and coming, and they have a good point of view. It’s worth spending money on print for that. I also read a lot of System Magazine. Those interviews are long, and they’re beautiful.

I love newreader.net. That’s something I really, really love that comes close to the Uline catalog, in that it’s a digital library archive. It profiles certain friends and people in their community and network who have done incredible things with their work, and how they archive their work, and how they research their work, [whether it be] a musician or a writer or an architect. It’s visually simple and so visually beautiful that it makes it easy to digest.

HommeGirls is another favorite. I work with them a lot. I love the foundation of the magazine. It’s much more visual, photo heavy. So much of my work, whether it’s the store or fashion, is seeing who’s up and coming, and seeing how people are portraying old luxury brands with a new way of styling for fashion, and how it’s working with younger actresses or actors or designers. So it’s fun to see their point of view and their vision. The magazine’s fashion director, Stella Greenspan, has really polished the magazine, I feel.

Another print that I always look forward to getting is Vestoj. It’s a journal that comes out annually. It’s not pretentious at all. The back of it has a manifesto, and it’s like, “Advertising is forbidden, everything will be questioned,” you know, “fashion must always be taken seriously.” But it’s actually pretty witty and cheeky. Part of it is dissecting the zeitgeist, what’s happening in the world. One thing could be on authenticity, or they’ll have Demna interviewed, or they’re having Miuccia Prada interviewed, or they’ll have Mike Eckhaus and Zoe Latta of Eckhaus Latta interviewed, and they give their personal advice on how they built their career on trying to be authentic. It’s not just cheesy or pretentious. It’s actually very digestible. It gives fashion a little space for philosophy.

Also, now that I spend relatively less time on social media platforms and websites versus paper—and also because I’m opening the store—I spend a lot of time looking at catalogs. Me and the Uline catalog are pretty close. I’m really into looking at inventory lists, and images, and quantities, and graphics.

Any favorite podcasts?

I listen to Time Sensitive and At a Distance over and over again. If I fly, and I’ve downloaded an episode, I listen to it multiple times. I just love the amount of research that goes into them. It’s really psychotic to get to the point of interviewing somebody where you get really deep and don’t ask surface-level questions. It challenges the interviewer to think, What’s next? They’re coming up with more emotions than you’d think. I love that kind of dialogue. The one with Deborah Needleman was incredible.

I’m also a really big, newfound lover of Dua Lipa’s At Your Service. I don’t know if somebody is ghostwriting her questions, but she really has a true journalistic, articulate way of speaking to somebody that reaches them on a personal, real level. There are niceties and there are manners, and I think you have to maintain that in some regard. But there’s also some push. She actually centers a lot around upbringing and culture and identity and any traumas, but it doesn’t feel invasive. It doesn’t feel like the way Oprah comes in to rip you down and get you to expose everything. She’s just like, “Let’s talk about it.” She’s very relatable.

Then, of course, I’m a fashion girl. So I do like the Vogue Run-Through. [The hosts] Chioma [Nnadi] and Chloe Malle are pretty hilarious. They’re so different, and they’re so light.

Any favorite TV shows?

I haven’t been watching too many heavy HBO or Netflix shows. But I watch a lot of YouTube. I learn to build furniture, and I have an interest in it. Since I’m opening the store, I learn how to polish floors, how to change a gas pipe if I need to. I’m just studying how to do all of this, even though I have no training background in design or architecture or an interior design license. I was just like, Okay, let me watch YouTube.

People call it “YouTube University.”

On more than one occasion, I’ve had to change the entire toilet. So I’ve taken a lot of YouTube courses on how to change a toilet. The most unexpected one with like zero views is usually the best one for me.

There’s also this girl named Dianxi. She’s a 20-year-old cook in China who lives on a farm, and she doesn’t speak, and they’re sixteen minutes an episode. She cooks for her family and her dog, and she forages everything. It is stunning. She forages peppercorns, she hunts her own meat, she pickles cabbage. She prepares all these four-course meals for her family, and she does it all over an open fire. She’s half my size, and she’s climbing sugarcane, you know? She’s become a bit of a star now, which is hilarious, because it’s just her by herself and her little brother and the dog and the parents, and no one’s speaking. She wasn’t always big. I’ve been watching her for probably five years or something. I feel like I relate to her. That’s how I want to be cooking, but I’m really using, like, an Our Place plan. Each one ends with her calling her parents over to eat. Sometimes it’s nighttime, and they’re outside, and it’s just so mundane. But it makes me miss my family. We’re unpacking my TV behavior. [Laughs]

Any favorite recent films?

One of my favorite things to do is to see a matinee. I have my own schedule, and sometimes I’ll be like, “I have a two-hour meeting,” but it’s actually a movie. I guess it’s kind of research. So recently in theaters I saw Past Lives, which I thought was so beautiful. I thought Greta Lee was incredible. I watch a lot of films at IFC and Film Forum, because there will be some weeks where they do, like, Wong Kar-wai only, and you can watch a triple feature.

What book or books are you currently reading?

There’s an author, Adam Phillips. He’s a therapist and a philosopher. He has a book called Missing Out. I pretty much read it every season—at least once in the winter, once in the spring, once in the summer, once in the fall. I usually travel with it. I highly recommend it. It’s like an early version of teaching us how to not have FOMO, and searching for the life unlived. A lot of times we wish we were living someone else’s life. It’s sort of teaching you how to control and think about not wanting those things. He speaks on romanticizing your own life and your own relationships versus longing for something that you’ve never experienced.

I was also just reading The Mindful Athlete, which is a book [by George Mumford] about Phil Jackson and how he got the [Bulls and the] Lakers to win all of their championships through meditation.

Any favorite social media accounts?

I’m really scandalous with Instagram. Sometimes I’m like, if people saw what I liked, it would be really weird. I’m all over the map, because you’re just being offered so much information. But the Instagrams I love are funny ones. I love this account @goodshirts. It’s just a T-shirt site, and it shows you all of these crazy sayings on their T-shirts that are just kind of raunchy and inappropriate. It’s a nice break. The graphics are really funny, and it’s a lot of plays on words. And it’s people all over the world—it’s not just in one location, it’s not just New York. It takes place in every country and city, and it’s hilarious.

For inspiration, I like @de_architects_. Just visually stimulating. I love the way they caption everything. There’s a lot of information, and it references the time and the source and the period of the piece that they’re posting about. There’s a lot of interesting banter back and forth between the comment section. I look to that a lot for references.

There’s this one, @sinkreviews, and it’s this guy that comes in and rates bathrooms in the city. The designs of some of them are pretty fabulous. He goes to Grand Central Station, and he goes to Home Depot, and he’s so funny.

What’s one book or other piece of media that you think everyone should consume?

Vestoj. One thing that I look for in reading material and media is allowing everybody to be a part of it. There’s a lot of exclusivity in a lot of media—it’s intimidating and it’s unapproachable sometimes. Especially in fashion, if you’re in it, and you’re aware of it, then you’re jaded by it, and you’re critiquing it, and there are all these different approaches that people take. But Vestoj is such a great introduction for anyone—or just a refresher—if you want to know about fashion. The writing style is so digestible, and it gives respect to fashion while making it very approachable.

Any guilty pleasures?

It’s so dorky. When I was a kid, I lived in Orange County, and I wasn’t around fashion unless it was a magazine. My parents work in fashion, but they did not glamorize it at all. I would read captions—and I still do this now, actually, it’s the one thing that I do that’s a-single-girl-living-alone behavior—and I read the masthead for old magazines all the time. I read captions that were written in the corners of magazines, where they have the price and the description and where you can buy them. That is one of my favorite indulgent things to do. And then I go really weird, and I read the back index. I love that kind of publishy-techy-media thing. That’s how I learned when I was 12 or 13 years old who Grace Coddington was, Anna Wintour. I learned who the beauty assistant was at the time at Vogue. I learned all those roles.

This is a departure from magazines—but one of my favorites is rereading the John Pawson book [Living and Eating], and the back has all the things you need for your kitchen, down to which pan to use for cooking fennel, and which stockpot to use when you’re poaching chicken, what you should make Monday through Friday, and it’s like the last twenty pages of the book. God, that sounds crazy. But that’s my guilty pleasure.

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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