taste

“I don’t need them,” he admitted, sifting through his boxes containing thousands of old records. “No one needs them.” But he suggested they fulfill some spiritual purpose that might benefit us more than ever today. “It’s nice to have a curated collection of the things you like around. Especially with everyone trying to ‘Marie Kondo’ their lives and... See more

Taste isn't some mysterious gift bestowed at birth—it's simply what happens when you pay close attention to what moves you.

I do not blame anyone but myself for this. This is not something the corporations did to me. This is something I did to myself. But I am looking now for software that insists I make choices rather than whispers that none are needed. I don’t want my digital life to be one shame closet after another. A new metaphor has taken hold for me: I want it to... See more

As anything scales too effectively - from fashion to restaurants to music - the market opens for more non-scalable alternatives. Once Starbucks opens on every block, many of us crave the artisanal coffee shop. Once our favorite Italian restaurant becomes a chain of three, we grow tired of it. Why? First, so much of what we buy and do is tied up in... See more

While it’s probably one of the corniest things I’ll ever write in this column, I’ve come to believe that developing taste is not so unlike going to therapy; it’s an inefficient, time-consuming process that mostly entails looking inward and identifying whatever already moves you. It’s the product of devouring ideas, images and pieces of culture not... See more

Collecting is an exercise in creating a framework, the logic of what is in or out. But then there are decisions that seem associative or intuitive.

To put it more plainly: As you grow older, you face the interconnected questions of which parts of yourself to preserve, which parts of yourself to evolve, and which parts of yourself to abandon .

I think these are fun questions to work over, because they’re questions without easy answers and, anyway, there’s no opting out of them. You can ignore... See more

But that eternal present is a lie, an illusion, a fabrication of the digital interfaces. And this not only destroys our sense of the past but also undermines our ability to think about the future.

In an environment without past or future, all we have is stasis.

So it’s no coincidence that culture has stagnated in this eternal digital now . The same... See more