“Minimalism champions living with less, but Marie’s tidying method encourages living with items you truly cherish,” says the site for Marie Kondo, the self-help guru you are probably familiar with, if only as a reader. For a few days last year, some viewers of her Netflix show took to social…
“Botanica Absentia” by Margaret Keller (Credit: Courtesy of Margaret Keller) The room is a velvety, lightless black, except at the center, where light refracts through dichroic glass pendants and makes rainbows on the holographic floor. They are meant to cheer us up. This is Margaret Keller’s Botanica Absentia installation at…
(Credit: anokarina via Flickr) “Today, it’s spring,” I announce to myself, taking the cheery tone kindergarten teachers use with the recalcitrant. Deep inside, I am still stomping my foot, because this is all wrong. It is still winter. Last week, there were a few sunny, chilly days that felt like…
Last week I finished three of Pico Iyer’s recent books: Autumn Light: Season of Fire and Farewells (an anatomy of a single season, over the years, in Japan); A Beginner’s Guide to Japan: Observations and Provocations; and The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere. All are nonfiction, and…
JOAQUIN PHOENIX as Joker in Warner Bros. Pictures, Village Roadshow Pictures and BRON Creative’s “JOKER.” I was happily watching a British murder get solved by two smart female detectives when my husband pointed out that every conversation that was not about murder was about men. Neither of us realized that…
I titled my friend’s recipe “Susan’s Amazing Candied Pecans.” I called my favorite Bosnian restaurant “amazing,” recommended a film as “amazing,” gushed about Robert Macfarlane’s “amazing” nature writing and my friend’s “amazing” travel photographs. To even called a slow-cooker pot roast “amazing.” Writers should have more vocabulary. I imagine my…
(Credit: Rajan Manickavasagam via Flickr) The number of Indian immigrants eager to work at Indian restaurants has dropped sharply, and I am fretting about it. My husband looks at me like I have joined The John Birch Society. Why does it matter what someone’s ethnicity is? Well, normally, it does…
It is the season of wooing, in which film studios send their directors and stars to make the circuit of “tastemaker screenings” and build support for Oscar campaigns. Director Bong Joon-ho’s film Parasite, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and Best Foreign Language Film at the Golden Globes,…
For many of us who grew up in Illinois, the legalization of marijuana feels weird. Illinois banned cannabis in 1931, and in my little town, in the ‘70s and ‘80s, we called it dope, as if it was a serious thing indeed. My kids make fun of me now for…
Bertha Owens (Credit: Kevin A. Roberts) Hair dripping, soul at peace, I unlock the door, wet towels and swimsuit bunched under one cold arm, and hear the phone ringing. It is a landline (my husband is the human incarnation of retro) so I check caller ID on my way to…