This recent surge of human-curated guidance is both a reaction against and an extension of the tyranny of algorithmic recommendations, which in the course of the past decade have taken over our digital platforms. Today’s automated social-media feeds deliver increasingly indistinguishable content now sometimes generated by artificial intelligence; i

As all forms of media have moved into streaming, when everything seems to be a single click away, it’s easy to forget that we can also have physical, non-algorithmic relationships with the pieces of culture we consume in our personal time. We store books on bookshelves, mount art on our living room walls, and keep stacks of vinyl records. When we w