“Before you start to think about Mondrian’s paintings,” says the Dutch artist’s biographer Hans Janssen, of the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, “you have to realise that he was born, in 1872, by candlelight in Amersfoort, a backward, economically undeveloped town in Utrecht. And he died, aged 71, beneath fluorescent lights, on the 3th6 floor of […]
I am going through a personal crisis. I used to love reading. I am writing this blog in my office, surrounded by 27 tall bookcases laden with 5,000 books. Over the years I have read them, marked them up, and recorded the annotations in a computer database for potential references in my writing. To a […]
Walking into the new Jaguar Land Rover Classic Works facility in Coventry, England — basically a massive 150,000-square-foot repair and restoration shop — the contrast is startling. Ancient, beaten-down Defenders, with their doors barely hanging on and their engines hopeless, rusted hulks, sit on spotless floors under lighting fit for a surgical theater rather than […]
FREEDOM, Me. — Right in the middle of dinner service at her restaurant, the Lost Kitchen, the chef Erin French likes to step out and talk to the crowd, as if she’s giving a toast at a party. “It’s July in Maine,” she said on a recent night, raising a sweaty glass of rosé. “How […]
My entire girlhood I spent obsessed with magazines, a journey I can map exactly: It started with furtively reading 16 and Bop and Teen Beat at the grocery store, ogling pictures of JTT and Devon Sawa. I had a subscription to American Girl, a magazine for elementary schoolers with advice about dealing with friend drama […]