How Nothingness Became Everything We Wanted
“The culture of negation inspires a taste for nothingness and glorifies numbness.”
Can Monoculture Survive the Algorithm?
“Art’s deepest impact comes when it is least expected. In contrast, algorithmic recommendations lead us down a path of pleasant monotony: a looming monoculture of the similar. To resist it, we should embrace obscurity, difficulty, diversity, and strangeness as just as important as recognizability or universality.”
My Own Private Iceland
When an island nation of 300,000 residents receives more than two million tourists a year, radical change is inevitable — but is it all negative?
No Place Like Home
A slew of new shows timed perfectly for new year’s resolution purges help us pare down our possessions, keeping us focused on stuff instead of, say, systemic housing inequality.
Group Therapy for the End of the World
A chronicle of a week spent in the Swedish countryside, at a workshop designed to help participants come to terms with impending environmental doom.
Style is an Algorithm
No one is original anymore, not even you.
When You’re a ‘Digital Nomad,’ the World Is Your Office
On life at a Miami digital-nomad compound, which one resident describes as “a hybrid between a summer camp for adults and a reality-TV show without the cameras.”
Nowhere Mag
For ten years, Monocle has successfully catered to the world’s status-conscious, globe-trotting elite by offering them exclusivity, materiality and identity. So does the rise of nationalism threaten a lifestyle magazine that treats the world as one big upscale mall?
Welcome to Airspace
How the same design language — “the neutered Scandinavianism of HGTV” — took over coffee shops and Airbnbs from Brooklyn to Osaka.
The Grays of Our Lives
The anxiety of choice—what I should do, what I should read, who I should be—has had a curious effect on the world of fashion. Color is out, gray is in. Gray, the midpoint between black and white, has far more than fifty shades; each one communicates a subtle difference in meaning, but all provide an effortless canvas of cool.
