https://kinfolk.com/la-pitchoune/
Julia Child had a knack for wonderful homes: be it her charmed upbringing in Pasadena or in the Edenic beauty of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), where she served as an intelligence officer in World War II; in Sichuan Province; Bonn; Oslo or Cambridge. And, of course, there’s her beloved apartment in the 7th Arrondissement of Paris that she stuffed to the gills with pots and pans, and where she first began work on the book that made her an American…
https://kinfolk.com/moses-sumney/
“I often go up into the mountains, to write and disconnect from the world,” says Moses Sumney, his cadence soft and measured, as he rides the train from Montreal to Toronto.
Solitude is a precious commodity for Sumney, and its delicate fruits are everywhere to be found on Lamentations—an all-too-brief but unified group of songs culled from his latest album. The EP’s title is carefully chosen, like most of the words Sumney uses, and its contents find him reckoning with loneliness, the limits of intimacy and entrapment within the self…
https://kinfolk.com/language-of-flowers/
We rely on flowers, like music, to express emotions that seem too raw, sacred or risqué for words. There is no lingua franca in the floral world; a lily would mean something quite different to a lady of the Tang court and a high-toned matron of Boston. Flowers accumulate meanings and then let them fall away. Take the rose. For Dante, it symbolized the multifoliate arrangement of divine love in heaven, yet for Gertrude Stein (“a rose is a rose is a rose”) it was proof of plain being. George Orwell, railing at the decay of his beloved English language, decried the growing preference for scientific flower names (chrysanthemum, say) over the older, more descriptive forget-me-nots and snapdragons…
https://kinfolk.com/day-in-the-life-camille-becerra/
While all restaurateurs want to keep their patrons coming back, New York chef Camille Becerra has an additional objective—to immerse each of her diners in the creative power of flavor and by extension, to teach them new ways of cooking and thinking about food. Camille has built her reputation by cutting through the ruthless noise of the New York restaurant scene with ingenious, vibrant dishes that dazzle both the palate and the eye…
https://kinfolk.com/irving-penns-corner/
It was perhaps to poke fun at the enigma of fame, and certainly to disrupt it, that photographer Irving Penn would place his most famous subjects in a narrow corner to have their portraits taken. The prop was simple in its contrivance, just two studio flats arranged at a sharply acute angle, but it sufficed to recast his famous subjects in a less complacent light. There they would stay, these celebrated men and women, until they showed us something new…
https://kinfolk.com/isabel-reuben-toledo/
Books, photographs, prints and mementos spill out of shelves and across tables. Vines and potted plants grow in the corners of a byzantine series of rooms that are at once a home and an atelier. The history of New York, in its most self-flattering mode, lives in countless objects: book collections gifted by Bill Cunningham, Klaus Nomi and other friends; a drafting table from the illustrator Antonio Lopez. Collectively, the objects would signify style and status were they not at the heart of the fairy tale embodied in Isabel and Ruben themselves. With an intensity that borders on obsession, their love for each other is the dominant presence in whichever room they inhabit and is the subtext of whatever idea they address. It’s a love that shifts and reshapes itself constantly, making a harmony of their work, art and relationship. It has a constant presence, like the giant, ancient cactus that towers over one of the loft’s larger rooms…
https://kinfolk.com/hideyuki-oka-how-to-wrap-five-eggs/
Japanese culture has a preference for concealment over grandeur. Take the landscape paintings of the Muromachi period, in which a few shaded lines were often used to signify mountains. How quickly the mind fills in the vast surrounding emptiness, how complete the sense becomes of unseen valleys, of frozen pools with sleeping fish! These were painters who knew how to modulate the power of the hidden, to manipulate its unique command over the imagination. But the concept was also integral…
https://kinfolk.com/one-plus-two-is-blue/
When a young Mary Shelley sat down to describe the first conscious moments of Frankenstein’s monster, her imagination flew to synesthesia. “I saw, felt, heard and smelt, at the same time,” she wrote, “and it was, indeed, a long time before I learned to distinguish between the operation of my various senses.” Jolted awake for the first time, in Shelley’s vision, the mind emerges from a primordial unity in which sight and sound are one.
Artists have always been sensitive to hidden links between the senses. Nabokov, for example, claimed grapheme-color synesthesia, a condition he shared with Rimbaud, whose poem Voyelles paired the primary colors to the sound of vowels. Both thought that the letter A was black. To some degree, we all rely on cross-sensual metaphors to describe the things that move us. The colors in one painting seem loud, while those in another seem muted. Some people crave black metal; others prefer the blues…
https://kinfolk.com/inside-voices/
Let’s do an experiment. Try to remember what was going through your mind right before you began reading. Concentrate on whether your thoughts had the quality of spoken words. If so, what were they saying? Were they dithering over a work email? Shouting out a preference for dinner? I’ve made it difficult for you, of course, because now you’ve had to summon a new voice in order to read. But before you began reading, there might have been another voice…
With his camera, Lartigue doted on the somatic beauty of French summers—the sporting life, fast cars and the splash of swimmers at play. Strange, then, that the world has so long neglected his work in color. Perhaps it’s a remnant of midcentury photography’s black-and-white orthodoxy, which Lartigue merrily defied. Contemplating an orange in a letter to Anaïs Nin, for example, he once wrote, “It’s about showing that it shines in the sun […] that it’s not a dead object”…
https://kinfolk.com/on-the-fly/
In the frigid New York winter of 1910, experimental biologist Thomas Hunt Morgan etherized a family of fruit flies and began sorting through their sleeping forms. After a while he saw something unusual—a fly with white eyes.
In all his time studying Drosophila melanogaster, Morgan had seen only red eyes, or more specifically, red compounds with 760 individual lenses. What confronted him now was a rare genetic mutant. He bred the fly, eventually yielding a cohort with those same ghostly features. His experiment established the material basis of heredity in the chromosome, providing an essential “How?” that had been missing from Darwin’s theory of evolution…
https://kinfolk.com/the-good-fight/
Conflict is a part of most romantic relationships—and in a certain sense, if there are no arguments there may not be enough at stake. Yet certain types of chronic arguing can be a sign of abuse or dysfunction. Some psychologists point to a qualitative difference between conflict driven by disagreement and that driven by contempt. Psychologist John Gottman popularized this distinction with his suggestion that contempt is the greatest single predictor of a failed marriage…
Few objects are as reliable as a fresh bar of soap. When we stand in our showers and lather our bodies we are doing something that our ancestors have done for more than 4, 000 years—though unlike them, we tend to do it alone. The history of public bathing is important to Karen Kim, founder of soapmaker Binu Binu. Kim makes natural soap in the tradition of the jjimjilbang—Korean bathhouses that promote intergenerational bonding and simple good health…
https://kinfolk.com/tips-for-the-weekend/
James Joyce, with his usual penchant for modesty, once said that a genius is incapable of making mistakes, that “errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.”
However true this may be for art, Joyce’s words have a lot to teach us when it comes to navigating the physical world. The ubiquity of Google Maps and other navigation systems has significantly reduced our experience with being lost. There are obvious advantages to this change, but scientists and laypeople alike are now taking notice of the downsides. One seems certain: that we learn less about our physical world when we are guided through it passively, and we have fewer opportunities for the lucky discoveries that come from finding our own way. We are less likely than ever to happen upon the wooded byroad that gives us a more pleasant commute, or the cheerful pub that lies nestled a few miles beyond a well-known route…
