NYC’s New Culture Commissioner
Diya Vij appointed DCLA commissioner, dispatches from Frieze LA, finding god at the Brooklyn Museum, and the jazz photos the FBI censored.
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Radioposter Launches Paper-fi: Analog Books with Synchronized Soundtracks
Paper-fi syncs physical books with audio soundtracks that follow readers in real time as they turn each page. Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article
Popular (and good)
Popular is easy to measure. Good, not so much. Setting out to make something popular requires only a focus on the crowd and on the moment. Most pop music is popular simply because that’s what it was built to do. Good work can be good without being popular. And so the two goals
Behold the First Realistic Depiction of the Human Face (Circa 25,000 BCE)
?si=HOvgnTtB4xSNqpNE In 1894, archaeologist Édouard Piette discovered the “Venus of Brassempouy,” otherwise known as the “Lady with the Hood.” Unearthed in southwestern France and dating to around 25,000 BCE, this carving represents the earliest realistic depiction of a human
When Do We Become Adults, Really?
"Scientists define the stages of life in biological, societal, and chronological terms—but none of them quite capture what it’s like to grow up."
The Greatest Double Agent Ever: How a Spanish Chicken Farmer Became the Most Important Double Agent in WWII
Juan Pujol García was one of the rare individuals whose participation in World War II made him a Member of the Order of the British Empire and earned him the Iron Cross. He gained that unlikely distinction in perhaps the riskiest of all roles in espionage, that of a double
How Should You Live Your Life: Marie Howe’s Spare, Stunning Poem “The Maples”
“Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy,” Albert Camus wrote in one of the most sobering opening pages in literature. So here you are, having answered affirmatively, consciously or not, now facing the second
A nearly perfect score
After playing 498 days in a row, my score today in Bongo was the second-highest in the world: There’s a difference between casual online games that have a right answer, and those that are open-ended. In crossword puzzles and most of the games from the Times (like Wordle and
A Lighthouse for Dark Times
This is the elemental speaking: It is during phase transition — when the temperature and pressure of a system go beyond what the system can withstand and matter changes from one state to another — that the system is most pliant, most possible. This chaos of particles that
Against Self-Criticism: Adam Phillips on How Our Internal Critics Enslave Us, the Stockholm Syndrome of the Superego, and the Power of Multiple Interpretations
"In broaching the possibility of being, in some way, against self-criticism, we have to imagine a world in which celebration is less suspect than criticism."