Category Archive: Big Ideas
Kitchen Chemists
Though the food world of the past boasted elaborate, strange Medieval sotelties—strange food dioramas and jokey dishes like four-and-twenty-blackbirds baked in a pie, which I write about in Encyclopedia of the Exquisite—it seems to me now that no era has…
Fluturas and Birrabirros
I was remembering today how a friend at school learned how to say ‘butterfly’ in some twenty different languages. It’s such a pretty project. So I started making a list of my favorite butterfly translations, and it seems to be…
Relatively Delightful
With the fashion collections just around the corner, it seems an appropriate moment to pay homage to Charles Baudelaire, fashion’s first poet, who recognized that fashion is integral to portraying modern times in art, and who swans his way through…
Three degrees of happiness
Usually, I’m slightly skeptical of such reports, but the scope of Harvard Medical School’s recent study on the spread of happiness is really impressive. Over 20 years, scholars studied a group of around 50,000 people to determine how happiness spreads…
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