My Ghibli childhood, according to my mother, began when I was three. One day, seeing me and my sister bored and listless, she put aside some sheet music that she had been practicing—she had quit her career as a pianist to raise us—and began to play the score to “My Neighbor Totoro.” There it was, the wind that blew across Hayao Miyazaki’s films, the spell that tinted ordinary life. When we moved to the States, my grandmother would send us VHS tapes of Miyazaki movies from Japan. Over the years, the stack of tapes grew taller, standing next to the TV like a plastic babysitter. Each time a film ended, I would press Stop and Rewind, and the tape would snap out, hot, like my sister’s cheek when she was asleep.
Miyazaki’s films have long been a kind of collective hearth, emanating their own theory of comfort. Comfort is woven into the very texture of their worlds: the plushness of the grass, the snap of the floors, the careful detail lavished on warm, nourishing foods like ramen and porridge and eggs on toast. If there is a secret room or garden, as there often is, the space is padded with hundreds of cushions (“Spirited Away”), amulets (“Howl’s Moving Castle”), or well-thumbed books (“Whisper of the Heart”). But comfort emerges not simply from Miyazaki’s womblike settings. It has to do with his characters themselves—characters who are introduced while soothing a raging insect, sucking blood from a wolf’s wound, or delivering a pacifier to a crying child. These people act with a tender determination, anchored by the belief that to be in the world is to learn to care for something other than...
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A new video released by the European Space Agency (ESA) reveals the riotous activity of the sun’s atmosphere in unprecedented detail. Taken by the Solar Orbiter in September, the footage captures a lush blanket of “corona moss” met by bright arches, or the magnetic field lines that shoot from the interior. Researchers say the brightest regions reach a whopping one million degrees Celsius—the cooler spots appear darker because they absorb radiation—and the “fluffy” hair-like structures are made of charged plasma. More.
Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article A New Video Captures Mossy Corona in the Sun’s Atmosphere in Extraordinary Detail appeared first on Colossal.
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Rental platform Airbnb has announced the addition of its Icons program, a category that provides a range of international experiences including a stay in the house from Pixar's Up and an overnight in the Musee D' Orsay in Paris. The first 11 Icons experiences include recreations of houses from popular culture, such as the floating.
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Movimento dos Artistas Huni Kuin at Venice Biennale 2024 The 60th International Art Exhibition, known as the Venice Biennale, is set to run from April 20 to November 24, 2024. This year’s theme, “Stranieri Ovunque” or “Foreigners Everywhere,” is curated by Adriano Pedrosa, marking a significant milestone as the first South American curator of the […]
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Dreamy Floating Spiral Architecture Inspired by the Golden Ratio
Inspired by the timeless allure of the golden ratio, architectural designer Manas Bhatia has used AI to produce a series of floating skyscrapers. With these buildings, which he calls Nautilus Bioarchitecture, Bhatia muses whether the timeless classicism of the golden ratio can shape the architecture of the future. Based on what we've seen, we think […]
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Contemporary artist Sacha Jafri prides himself on his unique way of working.
His "huge" Dubai studio includes three gallery spaces, a digital space, an office and a boardroom. He even has a room dedicated to nonfungible tokens, or NFTs.
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The new Hulu documentary charts the rise of one of the earliest reality-TV stars and the ethically queasy production choices that cemented his fame—but it’s elevated by its interest in what came afterward.
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More than 100 years after it was first exhibited, art historians still debate whether Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain,” submitted to the 1917 Armory Show in New York, was a wry joke or sly commentary on modern art—or both. That’s because the sculpture, a urinal the artist signed “R. Mutt,” was just a standard piece of plumbing. But Duchamp is also known to have coined the term “readymade,” in which he displayed objects like bicycle wheels or snow shovels as artworks unto themselves, posing the fundamental question that still thrills theorists: “But is it art?”
If Duchamp were around today to know what an emoji was, he’d probably love comic artist ND Stevenson’s take on “Fountain,” composed of a slew of what we might consider 21st-century digital readymades. More.
Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article In an Emoji History of Art, ND Stevenson Playfully Recreates Iconic Paintings appeared first on Colossal.
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The latest edition of our weekly Dezeen Agenda newsletter features the approval of Foster + Partners' 18 Blackfriars Road development in London. Subscribe to Dezeen Agenda now. UK architecture studio Foster + Partners has been granted planning approval for 18 Blackfriars Road, a development that will contain two residential blocks and a 45-storey office skyscraper. The.
The post Dezeen Agenda features Foster + Partners' plans for "London's lowest whole-life carbon high-rise" appeared first on Dezeen.
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Dezeen Showroom: named after a crystalline mineral, the Selenite Maximum surface collection by Italian brand Fiandre Architectural Surfaces brings an iridescent quality to interiors. The Selenite Maximum collection references selenite, a variety of gypsum known for its transparent crystals, which led the ancient Greeks to dub it 'moon stone'. In Fiandre's interpretation, crafted in high-performance.
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Stunning Bas-Relief Murals Transform Ordinary Walls Into Immersive Spectacles
View this post on Instagram A post shared by Relief Mural Art (@relief_muralart) Murals can bring new life to the most ordinary spaces. An artist known as Bihuashiyuge proves this time and time again by transforming large walls into wonderful artistic compositions. Using a variety of materials such as plaster and paint, the […]
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Sacha Jafri's 17,000-square-foot "Humanity Inspired" collection captured global attention when it achieved the record as the world's largest art canvas in 2020. The following year, he became one of the world's most expensive living artists.
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Classic American drama is haunted by monstrous mothers. Vain, vampiric mamas prowl through plays from Tennessee Williams’s “The Glass Menagerie” to Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” from Edward Albee’s “Three Tall Women” to Sam Shepard’s “Buried Child.” For those guys, mothers are either harpies or sirens—villains or traps. Yet, suddenly, this season we’re surrounded by richly human mothers, each with a compassionately observed interiority. (It’s maybe not a coincidence that 2024 has been a bumper year for women’s writing on Broadway.) In fact, Paula Vogel’s “Mother Play,” Shaina Taub’s musical “Suffs,” and Amy Herzog’s “Mary Jane” all happen to contain a long moment during which we are invited to simply sit and study a woman’s face. In a world where we don’t fear mothers as Medusas, perhaps we’ll choose to look at them forever.
In the autofictional “Mother Play,” at Second Stage’s Hayes Theatre, Celia Keenan-Bolger stars as Martha, a lightly disguised version of Vogel, and Jim Parsons portrays a version of the playwright’s brother Carl, who died of complications from AIDS in 1988. The play, which begins by flashing back to the early sixties, follows Martha and Carl for four decades as they deal with their hard-drinking, self-regarding single mom, Phyllis, played with a wonderful, lurching grace by Jessica Lange. Vogel’s work is subtitled “A Play in Five Evictions,” referring both to Phyllis’s struggle to keep her family housed in tenement apartments—the projection designer Shawn Duan puts images of scuttling cockroaches on fridges and trash cans—and to her vicious expulsion of sweet, bookish Carl after he tells her that he’s been sleeping with men.
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Fidencio Fifield-Perez’s Dacaments series began as a response to the bureaucracy of the U.S. immigration system. The Oaxaca-born artist immigrated with his family as a child, making him eligible for DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals). To qualify and retain his status, he needed to collect official documents, the envelopes from which became the substrate for his paintings.
When the Trump administration terminated the policy in 2017, people like Fifield-Perez were thrown into limbo before the Supreme Court reinstated it in 2020. More.
Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article Used Envelopes Hold Thriving Potted Plants in Fidencio Fifield-Perez’s ‘Dacaments’ appeared first on Colossal.
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British automotive manufacturer Aston Martin and Argentinian architecture studio Bodas Mian Anger have completed a skyscraper in Miami with a curved, flat form and a cantilevered pool deck near its top. Located in Downtown Miami, the 66-storey skyscraper was designed through a collaboration between the British car manufacturer and Bodus Mian Anger (BMA) and developed.
The post Cars and hurricanes inform "sail-shape" of Aston Martin's first residential skyscraper appeared first on Dezeen.
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16 Rare Videos of Iconic Artists at Work, From Monet to Matisse to Dalí
Thanks to technology and social media, art lovers can see how their favorite artists work. Many contemporary artists post video footage or time-lapse videos of their creative process, giving us precious insight into their creative minds. And while it may be rarer, did you know that we have similar types of videos from some of […]
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Granted, there are things worth getting upset about here, with good and bad art works talking over each other for entire rooms at a time. Peak braying is reached in a single tall gallery that Pedrosa has stuffed like a storage unit with abstract paintings by thirty-seven artists, most of them making their Biennale début. You can always try to make up for neglect by rushing lots of strong material through at once, but this doesn’t necessarily do the material any favors: plenty of abstraction needs time and space to bloom in the beholder’s eye, and none of the paintings in this room are permitted much of either, with the result being that nothing much blooms at all. Blame the curation, blame the inherent dilemma of the logjam—either way, it’s the one portion of the Central Exhibition which strikes me as an outright failure. A Rothko couldn’t thrive in a place like this.
The most obvious way to stand out in a big, loud multitude is to be louder, and loudness, with a side helping of eeriness, was more or less the métier of the mid-century Italian artist Domenico Gnoli. His sprawling painting of a woman’s shoe looks as rough as sandpaper, with two vampire fangs of red fabric poking down from its top edge—it has to be one of the most calmly odd things in the Central Exhibition this year, and also one of the most purely pleasurable, pulling you in with the friendly yank of a pop song. Gnoli’s approach isn’t so far from that of the Mexican Ana Segovia, whose “Pos’ se acabó este cantar” is one of this Biennale’s more memorable film pieces. Panting with hot color and haywire machismo, it features two Mexican cowboys, or charros, standing millimetres apart, their every move swollen to monumentality by the...
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When visiting his hometown of Runik, Kosovo, back in 2010, Petrit Halilaj realized that his elementary school was being demolished. He went to the site—which had miraculously survived the Yugoslav wars that spurred his family to flee to an Albanian refugee camp in 1998—and found a pile of desks, many with doodles and notes scratched into their surfaces.
These etchings have now found their way to New York, where they’re perched atop The Met’s rooftop garden for Abetare, which translates to primer, as in the early education books used for learning basic literacy. More.
Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article Petrit Halilaj’s Scratchy Doodles Grapple with Childhood Innocence on The Met Rooftop appeared first on Colossal.
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Belgian studio Mamout has extended a townhouse in Brussels, adding a small garden room built from a prefabricated shell of pastel green-coloured steel. Aiming to improve the connection between the home and its garden, Mamout drew on the form of an existing bow window on the rear facade to create a glazed seating area for the existing.
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Dezeen Showroom: flooring company Milliken has created dappled carpet tiles that take cues from both gardening and flower displays seen at the Chelsea Flower Show. The Painted Garden flooring range manifests as single plank-shaped tiles that can be installed in a range of patterns – including a herringbone format – to create dynamic carpeted floors.
The post Painted Garden flooring by Milliken appeared first on Dezeen.
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In the new Spring issue of The Paris Review, we published an Art of Poetry interview with Alice Notley, conducted by Hannah Zeavin. To mark the occasion, we commissioned a series of short essays that analyze Notley’s works. We hope readers will enjoy discovering, or rediscovering, these lectures, essays, and poems. This is another […]
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6-Year-Old Girl Breaks World Record for Lowest Limbo Roller Skating
Limbo skating is one sport that many people may not have heard of; but once you see it, i you’ll never forget it. The activity is a feat of athleticism and acrobatics, as it involves participants riding on roller skates underneath a low obstacle. In practice, this manifests itself in the form of the athlete […]
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Starring Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt, this action-comedy about a stuntman, by the stuntman turned director David Leitch, sticks its landings, but don’t expect characterization.
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Every month, Colossal shares a selection of opportunities for artists and designers, including open calls, grants, fellowships, and residencies. If you’d like to list an opportunity here, please get in touch at hello@colossal.art. You can also join our monthly Opportunities Newsletter.
$3,500 Artist Grants. The Hopper PrizeFeatured
The Hopper Prize is accepting entries for Spring 2024 artist grants. The program offers two awards of $3,500 and four of $1,000. More.
Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article May 2024 Opportunities: Open Calls, Residencies, and Grants for Artists appeared first on Colossal.
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Architecture studio Elding Oscarson has extended the National Swedish Museum of Technology with Wisdome Stockholm, a timber building topped by a curving roof that bulges over a visualisation dome inside. Made from 277 pieces of triangular cross-laminated timber (CLT), the spherical structure contains tiered seating surrounded by 3D screens. It sits inside an open-plan rectangular hall.
The post Elding Oscarson creates CLT dome theatre inside Swedish museum extension appeared first on Dezeen.
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Milan design week seemed to show that the industry has given up on reducing its planetary impact and creating products for regular people, writes Max Fraser. If last year's Milan design week felt like a return to a version of pre-pandemic editions, this year's felt like a hyped-up mega-festival. It's difficult to attain reliable figures.
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“When I first read these poems and was trying to describe them to a friend, I said they felt cosmic, even though they often take place in Shoptaw’s backyard or around his Berkeley neighborhood.”
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These Orangutan Videos Show off How Smart the Critically Endangered Primates Are
Orangutans are majestic primates who share 97% of their DNA with humans. These deliberate and capable animals are known for their ingenuity and ability to use simple logic. Unfortunately, both Bornean and Sumatran orangutans are critically endangered due to deforestation, fires, poaching, and the illegal pet trade. Luckily, there are organizations like Borneo Orangutan Survival […]
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Because the film has so little to say, viewers are free to simply focus on the vibes—which happen to be the area where Luca Guadagnino, its director, has most distinguished himself.
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Focused on the part of the sky where you can spot the constellation Orion (“The Hunter”) on clear nights, the James Webb Space Telescope’s latest dispatch blinks in astonishing images from an area known as the Orion B molecular cloud.
At 1,300 light-years away—more than 7.8 quadrillion miles from Earth—the cloud is the closest star-forming region to our solar system. And rising from the turbulent field of gas and dust is Barnard 33, commonly known as the Horsehead Nebula. More.
Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article The James Webb Space Telescope Reveals Details of the Horsehead Nebula in Unprecedented Resolution appeared first on Colossal.
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American studio Walker Warner Architects has completed Hale Kiawe, a family retreat with simple, gabled forms are set within an undulating landscape dotted with chunky lava rocks. Located along the Kona Coast on the island of Hawaii, the house was designed for a family who wanted a functional and beautiful retreat that was minimalist in.
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Swiss studio Kosmos Architects has designed Dice, a multifaceted piece of oak furniture that can be used as a stool, a coffee table, a lamp or a footrest. The five-pronged furniture piece weighs 10.5 kilograms and has a "warm" oak wood frame characterised by subtle chequerboard patterns. "Throw the dice, and this project will take.
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“This book, in our reading of it as in Canetti’s writing of it, is a type of life traveler’s talisman or amulet, a prose garlic bulb or rabbit-foot.”
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Watch This Indian Dance Group’s Mesmerizing Routines Taking Over Talent Shows Around the World
View this post on Instagram A post shared by b unique crew (@b_unique_crew) The creative possibilities of dance are seemingly endless given the range of things the human body can do. And it goes without saying, but the more control and flexibility a dancer has, the more moves they can integrate into their […]
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Nilay Patel, the editor-in-chief of the digital technology publication The Verge, has lately taken to describing theverge.com as “the last Web site on earth.” It’s kind of a joke—there are, of course, tons of Web sites still in existence, including the likes of Facebook.com—but also kind of not a joke. For much of the past decade, publications’ home pages were rarely the focus of attention; journalistic outlets relied on social media to distribute what they published. The Verge is an outlier in that it invested heavily in its home page when it was out of fashion to do so. In 2022, it launched a dramatic redesign that was meant to make its site a more dynamic destination; it included a “Storystream” of short posts and visual highlights, similar to tweets, that provide dozens of updates a day in real time. The new Verge looked less like a traditional publication and more like a social-network feed, which initially struck many industry observers as ludicrous. Why bother trying to do what the social platforms already do better? The home page was dead. TikTok was the future.
“The immediate reaction was ‘This is doomed to fail, no one will ever go to a home page again,’ ” Patel recalled. Then Twitter imploded under the leadership of Elon Musk, and all of the major social platforms pivoted away from news distribution. In the end, The Verge’s redesign worked. According to the company, the number of “loyal users” (defined as those who have five or more sessions on the site in a calendar month) increased by forty-seven per cent in the course of 2023. Though it is not a general-interest title, The Verge continues to be the most visited single site under the umbrella of Vox Media, its parent company. One could argue that its makeover, which has now become a subject of admiring chatter among media executives and the editors who work for them, heralds the revenge of the home page.
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“You know how when you smell a fragrance that brings you to a specific time—like if you wore a certain scent for a year in college or if your grandmother always smelled like Channel No. 5—each time you smell that fragrance it brings you right back,” says Suzanne Saroff. “The process of chewing the gum for this series did that in a jarring way.”
Saroff is referring to a new body of work highlighting tiny bubblegum sculptures on the brink of deflating or popping. More.
Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article Suzanne Saroff’s Playful Bubblegum Photos Capture Delicate Forms on the Brink of Bursting appeared first on Colossal.
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American architecture studio SOM has designed a skyscraper in downtown Miami defined by two expansive terraces and an "exposed structure". Located in Miami's Brickell neighborhood, 848 Brickell will rise 50 storeys and host office and retail space, as well as a restaurant and fitness centre across 750,000 square feet (69,680 square metres). Renderings show three.
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Dutch designer Christien Meindertsma aimed to rebrand linoleum and establish a new visual language for the misunderstood material with the Flaxwood tiles she has created for manufacturer Dzek. Much like traditional linoleum, the tiles unveiled as part of an installation at Milan design week are made of linseed oil, pine resin, wood dust and chalk.
The post Christien Meindertsma develops linoleum tiles that can be remolded "like playdough" appeared first on Dezeen.
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Adorable Video Shows Students Choosing How To Greet Their Teacher Every Morning
Maybe maybe maybe byu/KipferlAG inmaybemaybemaybe Teachers are in unique positions to impact their young students' lives and make positive change. This influence is especially important when students are young. That's why many people have fond memories of their elementary school teachers and the supportive relationship they forged with them. A recent viral video illustrates this […]
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There’s a line in one of my favorite songs that’s been tripping me up recently. “We Take Care of Our Own” kicks off Bruce Springsteen’s 2012 album, “Wrecking Ball,” a late-career masterpiece that sifts through the rubble of the Great Recession. After a few verses lamenting the American political system’s abandonment of the working class, “from Chicago to New Orleans,” Springsteen launches into the bridge. “Where’re the eyes, the eyes with the will to see?” he thunders. “Where’re the hearts that run over with mercy? / Where’s the love that has not forsaken me?” And then the stumbling block: “Where’s the work that’ll set my hands, my soul free?”
I’m not sure when this line first began to bother me—certainly not in 2012. Unemployment averaged just more than eight per cent that year, and the urgency of putting people back to work seemed evident to me, like it did to many. And we got our wish: unemployment plummeted in the course of the twenty-tens, bottoming out below four per cent on the eve of the pandemic. I suppose that’s when the trouble started. As the economic recovery from COVID progressed, the nation went back to work, and all the familiar complaints still held true: the pay was bad, the hours were long, the bosses were abusive. Neither hands nor soul were set free––and, come to think of it, wasn’t the idea of work setting people free a little, well, ominous?
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Whether deep in slumber or perched on ornamental pedestals, Willy Verginer’s bold, whimsical sculptures (previously) invite us into a surreal dream world. His latest series, The Lost Garden, draws on the paradisiacal notion of Eden and the alpine landscape and animals of the Dolomite Mountains near the artist’s home in northern Italy.
Verginer uses linden, or basswood, to chisel life-size sculptures of birds, bears, and human figures who merge with their natural surroundings. More.
Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article Children and Animals Merge with the Natural World in Willy Verginer’s Whimsical ‘Lost Garden’ appeared first on Colossal.
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The transition from print to online journalism has led to "chaos" within architecture criticism that has upsides as well as downsides, author Paul Goldberger tells Dezeen in this exclusive interview. Pulitzer Prize-winner Goldberger served as the in-house architecture critic for The New York Times in the 1970s and '80s during the zenith of postmodernism. He.
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Dezeen Showroom: four different-shaped tiles in twelve different colours make up Japandi, a range of ceramic tiles by Spanish brand Cobsa. Named after the style that combines Scandinavian and Japanese design, Japandi is designed as a versatile collection that offers designers "endless combinations and arrangements", said Cobsa. The four tile shapes available are named Circle,
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You Could Have $1 Bills That Are Worth up to $150,000
Less and less people are using cash these days, preferring quick contactless digital payment. If you still have a load of $1 dollar bills in your wallet, though, you might have done yourself a favor. In 2014 and 2016, the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing (BEP) made a mistake that means there are 6.3 […]
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Ask music critics what they think of Taylor Swift’s eleventh studio album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” and those who aren’t afraid of getting doxed might say something about the interminable length, the repetitive synth overlays, or the uninspired lyrics. Take “imgonnagetyouback,” a track that’s notably similar to Olivia Rodrigo’s “Get Him Back!” In the chorus, Swift sings that she hasn’t yet decided “whether I’m gonna be your wife or gonna smash up your bike.” Perhaps the lyric is meant to be somewhat infantile, but even the most novice editor should have pushed Swift toward the more obvious rhyme: “whether I’m gonna be your wife or gonna smash up your life.”
Ask a Swiftie what they think of the album, though, and they may very well say that it’s her best work yet. Yes, it would have made more sense for her to rhyme “wife” with “life” in “imgonnagetyouback.” But Swift obsessives know to connect “imgonnagetyouback” with “Fallingforyou,” a song by the 1975 that was written by Swift’s ex-boyfriend Matty Healy. In it, Healy sings, “I’m so excited for the night / All we need’s my bike and your enormous house.” Swift’s mention of a bike, in “imgonnagetyouback,” is therefore an intentional creative decision, like the lack of spaces in the song’s title. Some fans have gone even further, claiming that the lack of spaces not only invites a comparison to “Fallingforyou” but to Swift’s own “Blank Space,” a song on her “1989” album. (1975, 1989—there are a lot of years to keep track of here.) “In Blank Space music video,...
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