taste

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

house dysmorphia vs nostalgia:

social media might be causing a sort of “house dysmorphia”

and it’s finally more noticeable as we become more drawn to nostalgia

your home should be a sincere reflection of yourself, not a copy of someone else’s highly curated design

it has so much more value in your life when the space you spend most of your time is... See more

“Authenticity”, I think, looks like the power to opt in or out, perform or not, when you want to—in other words: freedom. So when it comes to the Internet, if switching off entirely isn’t possible any more, then surely the words of MGMT can be useful: “control yourself, take only what you need from it.”

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

To be clear, some people are great at making things and simply bad at dressing. But what inspires me about the examples above is the running theme of work and talent making you look better . Too often, when we desperately search for “the perfect jeans” “the perfect tee” or “the perfect haircut,” I think that what we are really looking for doesn’t... See more

n this sense, Labubus do seem to be a defining moment of 2020s culture. For those interested in moving culture away from fads such as these, resistance requires much more than a refusal to consume. If fads are narratives as much as products, they need to be starved of engagement, as well. We haven't figured out how to do this yet.

Educated people feel a duty to know these trends as part of cultural literacy. They don't buy Labubus, yet they join the "we" and descend into introspective angst about what Labubus mean for the state of "our" collective psychology.

As a general strategy for cultural consumption, omnivorism was very smart: Erecting artificial barriers against “low”... See more

In the digital age, cultural artifacts are eroded by abundance. Timelines layer and compress artwork, images, and artifacts into corners of the internet. In my corner, I stumbled across a speech entitled “Perfume, Defense and David Bowie’s Wedding” delivered by Brian Eno in 1992 at the Sadler Wells Theatre in London. In it, Eno predicted the... See more

KRF : How do you define taste?

BD : Taste is the natural tendency to filter, mix and recombine the like and the unlike to approximate sublimity.