Noteworthy reads from the last week:
“A History of Wallpaper's Deception,” Jude Stewart
“Wallpaper has been guilty of little white lies, like visually altering the proportions of a room or projecting your idle fancies onto the four walls—and also of more outright deception, of social pretension, even the erasure of history.”
“The Declining Taste of the Global Super-Rich,” Amber A'Lee Frost
“This is the state of fine arts under contemporary capitalism. Classics and antiquity have lost cultural cache in the age of disruption, and there is no longer an aristocratic imperative to support noble projects of lofty ambition.”
“A Century of Wild and Utopian Experiments with Self-Sustaining Worlds,” Claire Voon
“Can a house sustain itself by eating its own tail?”
“Inside a Chinese Self-Help Group,” Yuebai Liu
“The desire for self-actualization in a hyper-competitive society like China is strong. It’s also increasingly difficult as inequality continues to rise.”
“Tracing the Steps of Lost Explorers in Miserable, Beautiful Siberia,” Hampton Sides
“Today it’s hard for us to understand how intensely curious people were in the 19th century to learn what was Up There. The polar problem loomed as a public fixation and a planetary enigma. The gallant, fur-cloaked men who ventured into the Arctic had become national idols. People couldn’t get enough of them.”