"All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered."
Veiled in Wit: Queer Subtext and Gender Play in The Heptameron Often dubbed “the French Decameron,” The Heptameron is a collection of 72 stories told by a group of noble travellers, written by Marguerite Queen of Navarre, sister to King Francis I, and one of the...
Not by Nature, but by Habit: Christine de Pizan and the Complexity of Gender Roles “If it were customary to send little girls to school and teach them the same subjects as boys are taught, they would learn just as well… Not because they are female,...
The Sword and the Stage: La Maupin, the Scandalous Virtuosa of Baroque France Julie d’Aubigny, better known as La Maupin, was a French opera singer, expert swordswoman, and outlaw who lived as boldly as the heroines she portrayed. Born into a noble family and trained at...
From April 12 to September 15, 2025, Venice’s Peggy Guggenheim Collection hosts the richly evocative solo exhibition Maria Helena Vieira da Silva: Anatomy of Space (Anatomia di uno spazio in Italian), curated by Flavia Frigeri, an art historian from London’s National Portrait Gallery. Featuring around...
As Blossoms Fall: The Poetry of Ephemeral Love in Nanshoku Ōkagami “Their sleeves were soaked with tears, not from shame, but from knowing they had only this one night. In the garden, plum blossoms were falling—each petal a sigh, each gust a farewell.”-- Ihara Saikaku, The...
In the Courtyard at Dusk: Female Intimacy in Mughal Miniature Painting In the world of the Mughal court, the zenana was a secluded space that offered elite women both constraint and community. Mughal miniature paintings often depicted moments of leisure among women: dressing, reading poetry, making...
A werewolf story by Alexandre Dumas père. Chapter XVII: The Baron de Mont-Gobert Thibault found himself in the Countess's room. If the magnificence of Bailiff Magloire's furniture rescued from the lumber-room of his Highness the Duke of Orleans, had astonished Thibault, the daintiness, the harmony, the taste of the...
The Queer Alchemy of Benvenuto Cellini: Desire, Scandal, and Self-Fashioning in Renaissance Florence Benvenuto Cellini — sculptor, goldsmith, author, swordsman, and scandal — lived at the heart of Renaissance Florence with the fire of a man determined to be seen, remembered, and unruly. Best known for...
I’m currently in Venice for the Architecture Biennale, and I stopped at the local Fondazione Prada for the current exhibition by AMO/OMA, more out of due diligence than anything. I confess I wasn’t expecting much. I was wrong, and I recommend this show to anybody...
I already spoke about the value of failing fast on projects; it's not anything I invented, and yet our mindset always shifts towards trying to avoid failure. We try to build bulletproof workflows. We have a failsafe in place for everything. We craft The One...
