lightness

According to Todd Pezzuti, Caleb Warren and Jinjie Chen in their study Cool People , the earliest roots of cool lie in the African diaspora, in West African ideas like itutu (Yoruba for “coolness”), which refers to a state of spiritual composure and grace under pressure. Confronting the brutal realities of slavery and Jim Crow, African Americans... See more

depressive eroticism

My father's rich, my momma's good looking. Right? And I can play the Blues. I've never suffered and don't intend to suffer.

Standing for nothing has the obvious appeal of making you impossible to pin down. There’s something very chic about smoking a cigarette outside a bar and being all like whatever. You’re playing a game of hide-and-seek with life, and you’re hiding.

Too often, clichéd experiences are maligned for being “basic” when they’re actually just normal (and often quite good). A secure person can unironically enjoy a pumpkin spice latte. If you’re on page 37 of the SSENSE sale, you may never know the happiness of going to Target to get some fall candles. But I hope you do. (I hope we all do.) Red roses... See more

On June 7, 1926, after Gaudí’s workday ended, he set out toward a church in the Gothic Quarter where he liked to say evening prayers. “ He was always thinking about the Sagrada Família when he was walking,” Faulí told me. As Gaudí crossed a street, he saw a tram coming—and, as Faulí tells the story, he threw himself backward only to have “another... See more

Yes, it 's true! The head which was creating, living with the highest life of art, which had realised and grown used to the highest needs of the spirit, that head has already been cut off from my shoulders. There remain the memory and the images created but not yet incarnated by me. They will lacerate me, it is true! But there remains in me my... See more