Summer leisure. The only thing more pressing than which hat you’ll pack (choose the Panama) is what book to pick up. From ageless to hot-off-the press, cerebral to escapist, we’ve got you covered on reads to bring along on your next vacation. Now, to decide which
Adventure is a tricky word. It is subjective, vague. It can be a perilous voyage on raging seas, or calmly speaking our mind over coffee with a friend. But we know this: adventure takes an individual out of their comfort zone and calls them to
Poetry transplants us. It jars us awake with its pace and rhythm, so different from everyday life. It grabs us by the shoulders and says, as Rilke did so brilliantly in “Archaic Torso of Apollo”: You must change your life. A good poem distills truth and beauty
By the time Mary Delany died at age 88 in 1788, she had outlived two husbands, mingled with Handel, befriended King George III and Queen Charlotte, lived in Windsor and had created almost 1,000 mixed media collages. Born in 1700, Mary grew up in London, where
Sometimes you just want to submerge yourself in a story -- to stay up too late because the book is just that enveloping, or seriously reconsider breakfast if not eating means covering more pages. Each of these sagas (saga: from Proto-Germanic sago meaning long, heroic narrative)
“I never gave up painting, I just changed my palette. ” Ray Kaiser Eames (December 15, 1912 – August 21, 1988) made up half of the creative duo that spread modern American industrialism to the world. She and Charles Eames reconstructed the relationship between design and
Every March 8th, we celebrate women. It started like this: in 1911, German theorist and activist Clara Zetkin organized International Women’s Day to rally for social, economic and political reform. Over one million men and women gathered in Austria, Switzerland, Germany and Denmark. The day has
United Kingdom, 1870. Charles Dickens dies in Rochester. The postal headquarters puts Victoria’s face on the new Three Halfpence Red stamp. In Edinburgh, Sophia Jex-Blake and the first female medical degree candidates push through a mob to take exams. Calling them candidates is putting it
The world is your intellectual wilderness. You are an explorer traversing foreign terrain, taking with you new information and interests as you would exotic flora or a strange insect. Formal education has nothing to do with it – education and knowledge aren’t necessarily synonymous. Refining
In the feudal era, samurai ruled Japan. Under the Shogun, these warrior dynasties formed the country’s aristocracy. But this military nobility did more than enjoy the cush of privelege. Samurai were highly trained soldiers prepared to die defending their clan and their family – and
I was filled with such a dangerous delicious intoxication that I could have walked straight off the steps into the air, climbing on the strength of my own drunkenness into the stars. And the intoxication, as I knew even then, was the recklessness of infinite
Like a first kiss, you never forget your first opera. Innocent and perhaps slightly awkward, you go through the motions of what you’ve only heard about: the velvet curtains, the chandeliers, the fancy dress and the moment during the aria when your fingers grip your
I want a singleness of eye, a purity of intention, a central core to my life that will enable me to carry out these obligations and activities as well as I can. I want, in fact – to borrow from the language of the saints
The story goes like this. On his deathbed in a Paris hotel, writer and unremitting wit Oscar Wilde said, “That wallpaper is killing me. Either it goes, or I do.” While the image is funny, strangely touching and possibly not even entirely true, Wilde had