1) RIP Dolly Parton. She sings my favorite love song. Therefore, I will dedicate some items in this newsletter to her:

"Islands in the Stream", written by the Bee Gees, was not made to be a Country song. The original idea was that the song was more Soul, R&B, and that they would interpret themselves. After giving up, Diana Ross and Marvin Gaye were quoted, but Barry Gibb, one of the founders of the Bee Gees, decided to offer the song to Kenny Rogers, from whom he was producing an album at that time, "Eyes That See in the Dark".

The Texas singer spent almost a week trying to incorporate the hit into his album, but it didn't work. Both Gibb and Rogers agreed that it was better to get out of the undertaking. Meanwhile, downstairs in the same studio, Dolly Parton was recording an album and Gibb suggested that they try a duet. At the time, Rogers said: "go get her!"

Released in 1983, "Islands in the Stream" became an absolute success and unseated even "Total Eclipse of the Heart" with #1 on the Billboard list. It was also the first Country song to reach number 1 until 2000! Another curiosity: the title of the song came from the novel written by Ernest Hemingway published in 1970, nine years after his death.

2) Dolly answered the Proust questionnaire for Vanity Fair:

What is your idea of perfect happiness?

A giant baked potato and a good book with time to eat and read.

What is your biggest fear?

Let my wig fall off.

Which historical figure do you most identify with?

Snow White, because she slept with the Seven Dwarfs and got away with it.

What is your greatest extravagance?

My bus and my stage costumes.

Which virtue do you consider the most overrated?

Monogamy — I mean, monotony.

What words or phrases do you use in excess?

"It takes a lot of money to look trash."

What is your biggest regret?

I would have loved to hear Elvis sing "I Will Always Love You".

What or who is the greatest love of your life?

My husband, Carl Dean. We've been together for 47 years.

When and where were you happiest?

Today.

If you died and came back as a person or thing, what do you think it would be?

A big fat pig so I could eat whatever I wanted.

What is your most striking feature?

Do I need to answer this question?

Who are your heroes in real life?

Everyone who gets up every day, puts on their boots or high heels and works with what they love.

What are your favorite names?

Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene.

What do you abhor the most?

Laziness.

How would you like to die?

Singing on stage - and everyone around me saying: "Look how happy she looks".

What is your motto?

"Dream more, learn more, take care more and be more."

3) I love the way New Yorkers use abbreviations. Those who go on vacation send an automatic email with only 3 letters: ooo (out of office). A couple kissing on the street is doing PDA (public display of affection). Those who are going to meet a friend give him their ETA (estimated time of arrival). The person who disappears, or is not helping much, is MIA (missing in action).

But this weekend I saw a girl using an abbreviation that I had previously only seen being used in writing. I asked if she was going to the concert with us and she replied, "I'm still TBD" (to be decided, to be determined). And when she gave a collective goodbye to the group she said “X-O-X-O.”

4) This weekend, at the invitation of friends, I ended up going to a concert of two bands I didn't know. I fell in love with both of them! One, more Country, instrumental, crazy, original from Montana, called Kitchen Dwellers (they even played some wonderful David Bowie covers!) And then, Andy Frasco & the U.N. Guys, what a high-spirited class. I don't think I've ever seen Andy's charisma like it. From the stage, he looked at the bar at the back of the concert hall and ordered a shot of whiskey. Then, he asked the audience to do a crowd surfing so that he could get to the bartender. Said and done, the crowd carried him there, he drank the shot and was "levited" back to the stage. It was something like half of the 80s, very fun and questionable hahaha.

5) Pardon my French, But I have a friend who says that "a count who doesn't fight, doesn't have sex". And there's also Robby Hoffman's phrase: "to complain is to enjoy". You could spend a few hours at the bar table discussing these controversial phrases.

This weekend, the NYTimes podcast interviewed a conflict expert. Priya Parker says that fighting is a key aspect of human connection. She believes that those who are together end up having moments of discord followed by reconciliation. Her parents, who barely spoke to each other, ended up separating. And when the author argues with her husband in front of her children, she warns: "we are arguing because we like each other and not the other way around".

6) Another phenomenal podcast I listened to this weekend was one about the song "Jamming", by Bob Marley.

7) The US Open has begun, the coolest time of the year in NYC! Too bad my dearest Jannik Sinner won't participate in this edition. On the other hand, near here in Rhode Island, Roger Federer is being induced to the Tennis Hall of Fame:

The International Tennis Hall of Fame presents the new class of 2026 on August 29 in Newport, Rhode Island.

20 Grand Slams champion Roger Federer and sports broadcaster Mary Carillo are joining a distinguished group of members that already includes Arthur Ashe, Steffi Graf, John McEnroe and Maria Sharapova.

Roger Federer is an icon of global tennis. Before retiring in 2022, the Swiss spent 310 weeks in first place and won 103 ATP titles in his career.

8) I'm organizing an art trip to Chicago and I remembered how much I love the artist Diane Simpson, who lives nearby. I will never forget when I saw your works for the first time at the Whitney Museum. It seemed that all my passions were gathered in one place. The sculptures she creates are inspired by both pieces of clothing and architectural ornaments. I share some images here:

9) Returning to our dear Dolly Parton, some iconic quotes from the singer:

If you want rainbows, you need to be willing to deal with the rain as well.

I don't get offended when they call me a dumb blonde. First because I'm not stupid, then because I'm not blonde!

If someone is not smiling, offer your smile.

Don't you like the road you're walking on? Start paving another one.

Find out who you are and live with purpose.

It's hard to be a diamond in a land of rhinestones.

Don't get so busy to make money to the point of forgetting that you have a life.

If I wasn't born a girl, I would be a drag queen.

Storms cause trees to create deeper roots.

My weaknesses have always been food and men, in that order.

They always ask me how long it takes to do my hair. But I don't know, I'm never there.

We can't control the wind, but we can adjust the sail.

I joke about it, but the truth is that I kind of modeled my appearance inspired by a 'slut' from my city. I didn't know what she was, just this blonde woman who put her hair up, wore high heels and tight skirts, and, man, she was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. Mom used to say: "Oh, she's trash", and I thought: That's what I want to be when I grow up: trash.

10) In honor of Dolly, I made a playlist with some of my favorite love songs. "Islands in the Stream" is in my top 3. I love it so much!

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Photo via @sean_anthony_pritchard

1) Does anyone else here follow Oladimeji Ajegbile (@hellodimeji) riding a bike carrying his 2-year-old son through the streets of Edinburgh? The sweet boy comments on everything he sees: "Daddy, a bird!, Daddy, a Porsche!, Daddy, a bridge!". And recently, he made the comment that broke the internet: "Daddy, I want a baby bike!" The responses of the followers and the memes made me laugh and cry. The father has now made a statement saying he will build the bike himself. Let's see!

Instagram no longer lets Substack repost their content, so click here to see a summary of the father's video with his son. And here to see the manifestations of the followers.

2) I came back from Italy dreaming about a pasta I tried there. I asked the chef who had prepared the dish for the recipe and tried to pass it on to my friend Mariana, who is a fabulous cook. Luckily for us, the version with American ingredients did not disappoint! It's a perfect pasta for very hot days, since the ingredients (minus the pasta, of course) aren’t cooked. Penne trapanese is typical from Sicily, a pesto of peeled raw almonds, fresh tomatoes, grated pecorino, basil, salt, pepper and olive oil to taste. Here, a generic recipe and pictures of our adventure. Thank you, Mari!

Buon appetito!

3) I watched a very silly movie called One Night Only. Apart from the beauty and talent of Dua Lipa's husband, Callum Turner, and Monica Barbaro, I also enjoyed a flirty exchange between them:

- You look so cute when you're nervous!

- Hey, but I'm not nervous!

- Oh! So then you're just cute.

Also very curious to watch Tony, the film about Anthony Bourdain :) Trailer here.

4) I have two teenage boys (twins of almost 16). This post from my therapist inspired me. This is an excerpt from Winnicott:

Adolescence implies growth, and growing up takes time. Although growth is happening, responsibility must be assumed by the parents. When they run away from their role, teenagers need to assume a false maturity, thus losing their greatest advantage: the freedom to have ideas and act impulsively. ... It is exciting that adolescence has become vocal and active, but the teenage struggle needs to be faced and must be confronted to become real. Adults are necessary for teenagers to have life and liveliness. Confrontations represent a non-retaliatory, non-vengeful containment, but that has its own strength... We must allow young people to change society and teach adults to see the world with a new look; however, whenever there is the challenge imposed by a growing boy or girl, there must be an adult capable of facing it, even if this is not always pleasant.

I love this image: Four Body Weights, by Franz Erhard Walther, 1968. A performance that deals with balance and confidence — if one of the parties leaves the scene, everyone may falls! Presence is the greatest gift we can offer our children, in addition to respecting and encouraging their independence in every way.

5) I have gathered here some works by artist Estela Sokol. Love it:

Her sculptures remind me of the paintings of Giorgio Morandi:

6) I've been loving to listen to Neal Brennan's podcast. His interview with Robby Hoffman is great and made me want to watch her new special, Wake Up, on Netflix (here). Both comedians come from large families and have 9 siblings each!

Another show I enjoyed checking out was Cillian Murphy sharing his favorite songs for BBC radio. If the content is not available where you live, there’s a Spotify playlist, here.

7) I recently read that before migrating, little birds begin to feel anxious, which forces them to "continue traveling". According to the website All About Birds:

The nervous behavior that birds show before migration is called zugunruhe, or migratory restlessness. Captive and wild birds exhibit this innate hormonal desire through rhythm, frantic fluttering, nocturnal agitation and constant singing, as their internal biological clocks signal that it is time to leave.

Signs of migratory unrest:

Birds flap their wings repeatedly, often facing the direction they need to fly.

Many species become extra active after dark because they naturally migrate at night.

Birds exaggerate their food intake to ensure extra fat prior to long trips.

Their vocalizations increase to help the groups keep in touch and coordinate the plan.

Changes in the duration of daylight are the primary alarm clock for migration.

Hormonal internal chemical changes create physical anxiety and this compulsion to move.

It's true for us too, right...? Are you feeling uncomfortable? Time to fly!

8) Slavoj Zizek:

We want coffee without caffeine, we want beer without alcohol, and we want love without its dangerous moment.

9) Going to spend a few days at the beach, trying to soak up the last hot summer days:

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Humpback whale in New Jersey!

1) My friend invited me to try a dance class called Gaga and I said YES. We went to the Gibney studio with our heads and bodies open and had so much fun! The technique was created by Ohad Naharin, former director of the Batsheva dance company. Gaga is an "innovative method of movement language that emphasizes body awareness, freedom of improvisation and physical conditioning", the idea is to "escape from choreographies and rigid steps aligned through the mirror and create, instead, a space for exploration, risk, artistic and personal growth, connection and fun".

I wrote down some things that the teacher said: "engage with your groove"; "don't move but be available to every movement"; "go fast but not as if you were in a hurry"; and "go down but keep your energy up".

For those who like movement and experimentation, I highly recommend it. The class costs $22 and had at least 30 people of all ages, physical types and levels of experience.

I found a class on YouTube.

2) Last year I was lucky enough to see whales in Iceland and, on the same day, my best friend was in Bahia (Brazil) watching the same species! On the last couple of weekends, I saw whales and dolphins near New York. It's always very exciting, and moving! My friend drew my attention to the fact that when we were children, there was no way we could see whales like today, so easily. And she shared her research with me (via Jornal da USP):

The hunchbacks, as well as other species of whales, were intensely hunted in the past to obtain meat and oil. The tide only began to change for the better in the late 1960s, when the International Whale Commission (ICB), recognized that the species was at risk of extinction, determined a suspension of hump hunting — reinforced in the 1980s by a global moratorium on hunting any species of whale, which remains in force to this day. In Brazil, more specifically, commercial whaling was banned by decree in January 1986 and by law in December 1987.

Researchers estimate that there were somewhere between 25,000 and 30,000 whales in Brazilian waters in early 19th century. This population was almost exterminated by hunting, reduced to about 500 whales in the early 1950s. It was only after the implementation of the moratorium and effective conservation programs (led in Brazil by the Humpback Whale Project) that the species began to recover. In 2014 it was officially removed from the national list of endangered species; and today it is estimated that there are around 20,000 humps circulating along this Brazil-Antarctic migratory route - almost the same number as in the pre-hunting period.

3) Have you heard of the legendary Brazilian architect Jaime Lerner? The other day, talking to Andrea, his daughter, she showed me photos of the house where she grew up — today an institute that bears the name of the urban planner. We kept talking about how living in a house like this must have shaped her childhood and influenced the fact that she became an artist. Andrea told me a story that I loved: her father entered an apartment where her mother decided to move to and given the lack of edge in the architecture, he said — "this space feels like a non-conversation starter...!"

Here is his house:

4) Speaking of magical homes, I loved hearing about Villa Lopez, designed by Jean Prouvé in Sainte-Maxime:

Via Domus:

Few people know this [prefabricated] house on the south coast of France, which Jean Prouvé designed as if it were one of his chairs. Assembled in 1953 from a metal structure — which is very reminiscent of that of the famous Standard chair, designed by him and still produced by Vitra —, this residence perfectly illustrates the working method of the French architect, who preferred to be called constructeur (builder) or "factory man" to architect.

A rectangular module is repeated along the perimeter of the building. The sequence is punctuated, at some points, by the presence of small transparent circles that pierce the metal background, creating a pattern that is one of Prouvé's trademarks.

5) This week on NPR, there’s a podcast episode on the legacy of the Grateful Dead. Besides the jammy songs, I loved this quote below. Are you a Dead head?

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“The most Grateful Dead thing you can do is be yourself”

6) John Cena talking to Amy Poehler shared the guaranteed recipe for failure:

Be unreliable, unprofessional, uninvested and uncoachable. You will fail, guaranteed.

7) I'm in love with trees. My children asked me recently what I "would be" if I wasn't an art historian. I didn't even need to think: I would certainly like to be a tree expert. That's why I loved these news from NYTimes. This English Elm in the image below, in Washington Square Park, is 127 ft tall and over 300 years old! It was nicknamed "witness tree" since it was there during the American Revolution:

8) Iris Murdoch in a letter to Brigid Brophy:

I adore the texture of your mind

Via The Marginalian:

Perhaps the most beautiful, electrifying and psychologically revealing of all was his correspondence with Brigid Brophy (1929 - 1995) - his longtime lover and lifelong friend.

“You are certainly the best letter-writer I have ever encountered, your words all coloured and warmed by you.”

9) Summa’s ova. I think that only by living in a city with long and rigorous winters do we understand the sadness the end of summer. The other day I heard a podcast in which the interviewee said that on July 4th his mother started saying "Summa's ova", with a heavy a Brooklyn accent.

When August hits, the feeling (to me) is of total despair: the hot days are nearing the end. I always need to remember that from September 15 it is practically impossible to leave the house without a sweater and it is difficult to celebrate my birthday (9/30) outdoors... And October is time to take the Uniqlo jacket out of the closet.

July lasted 5 minutes. I am not ready.

10) In this exact vibe, the week’s playlist

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1) I just finished a book by Rebecca Solnit, The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change, and highlighted two excerpts here:

Ideas have power, and while those who support them often dismiss that power, those who fear them recognize they can change the world . . . Ideas are seeds in that they are beginnings; if they succeed, they do so as they take on more tangible and concrete forms. (…)

Monsters—the bad kind—show us the way forwards, as well as pushing us back.” That the old world is dying is widely acknowledged and addressed. The old ways of doing things no longer fit who we have become: the systems fail, break, decay, fall into corruption; anachronistic school curriculums and journalistic and political norms, social roles and customs, rules, laws, and institutions don’t offer us equipment to face the realities of our time, whether they feel like cages or outgrown garments or broken tools. Poverty and displacement, degradation and alienation are byproducts of voracious, ruthless systems committed to inequality and indifferent to human rights and the rights of nature, which is to say that they are violence by other means, and sometimes they are the violence itself.

James Ensor, Tribulations of Saint Anthony, 1887

2) As soon as it premiered, I watched Odyssey. I thought it was ok — I feel sorry for the female characters, a little bland (Charlize Theron looked like she was stuck in that Dior perfume commercial, J'adore, from the 90s) and I thought the characters lacked motivation. Much cooler than the movie itself is the amount of texts, posts and videos about Homer and this fundamental book of the history of literature. Brazilian blogger Rafael Brunhara wrote:

The days have been very interesting for the Hellenists and scholars of Greek poetry.

Suddenly the Odyssey became hype: it's fashionable to talk about Homer. All because of the new Hollywood production of the famous Christopher Nolan & stellar cast.

I open my social media feed and see countless discussions of people saying what Helen should look like, Achilles, etc.

There is something interesting about it, which only reinforces, to me, the idea that the poem is a classic: it remains. Sometimes it comes to us for the readings and interpretations it has accumulated. The Classic persists. For this reason, it always looks familiar, even when we don't access it directly.

This is one of the definitions proposed by Italo Calvino, in Why read the classics: "A classic is a work that incessantly provokes a cloud of critical discourses about itself, but continuously repels it away". From there we can get two very interesting ideas: every first reading of a classic is, in some way, a rereading; and all rereading can be, always and every time, a discovery.

Reading a classic can surprise us, make us see in a different way the things we had for granted about it and lead us to wonder if these meanings that we (re) discovered were already there, in germ.

Christopher Nolan's film, which premiered this week, adds one more reading to the long history of reception of the work, and everything indicates that it will be a great success. Still, there will always be that moment when it's just you and Homer's poem. Your classic and the senses that only it will make resonate in you.

Fortunately, the Odyssey has already been translated a lot. (…)

It is always very cool to see this diversity: it is never too much to have several translations of a poem, because this allows us to choose the one that best suits our personal purposes and tastes.

Greek anphor from 500 a.C.

3) The other day, a friend posted a divine photo of a pink ipê in São Paulo. In the caption, he said:

A dear friend says something like this: if you leave your house and see something pretty, you made the day.

Or as my grandfather used to say: it's better to walk around than to be a fool.

4) Rainer Maria Rilke:

Everyone once, once only. Just once and no more. And we also once. Never again. But this having been once, although only once, to have been of the earth, seems irrevocable.

Louise Bourgeois, Bed, 1997

5) Classic phrase by Pablo Picasso via my friend Andrea Lerner:

Inspiration exists, but it needs to find you working.

Artista desconhecido. “Blue Compote Filled with Fruit.” c. 1840

6) I watched Birthright last night. I loved it! The story accompanies 6 friends who have met in 2006 over the next two decades. It shows how time and politics unfold for this community. Before watching, I read the NYTimes review and loved this conclusion:

Something Chaya’s garrulous mother Deborah says in Act II — the play’s strongest — may actually be the play’s advice and consolation. “It’s just such a blessing to have this community,” she says, smiling, to two women who have just shouted cruel things at each other. Deborah doesn’t think the two aren’t fighting. Fight, don’t fight, what’s the difference? She just knows that if they keep fighting, year after year, they’ll stay together. There is more than one way to give a blessing.

Club Night, 1907, George Bellows

7) I could, with joy, wear the same (clean) clothes every day. I like the idea of a uniform and if I had to choose one, it would definitely be a shirt. I'm completely obsessed with Kule, I like the way it fits, the fabric and the style. I've already talked about white (classic) here, but my new passion is the blue one. I think it’s sold out since it is so perfect, but it's been my summer uniform:

Quero morar nessa camisa.

8) Today's playlist brings together a mix of Brazilian music and otherwise. I really enjoyed discovering this romantic song by Taj Mahal:

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The winner of this World Cup was Keyne Yamal, Lamine’s charismatic little bro :)

1) I wrote about the first kiss in art history, that I just saw on the walls of the Scrovegni Chapel, in Padua. I posted the other day on my Instagram a photo of Anna and Joachim, Maria’s parents, kissing in the fresco. Right next to it, I added one of my favorite art-kisses, a sculpture by Brancusi. I could have also placed Klimt’s there. But I was soon corrected by my brilliant friend, the artist Pedro França. He shared a picture of Serra da Capivara, in Piauí, Brazil. Of course, in the land of Carnival, the first kiss had been recorded 15 thousand to 30 thousand years before Giotto’s “seminal” kiss. How can you not love these kinds of news?

Brazil’s first kiss painted 15.000-30.000 years ago!

Giotto, 1305

Brancusi, 1923-25

Klimt, 1907-08

2) Speaking of cave paintings, Marina Abramovic commented a scientific discovery that these cave artworks were made by women while men hunted! They stayed in the cave taking care of the children, cooking and making art :) This reminded me of the wonderful text The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (1986) by Ursula LeGuin on the subject.

3) Still on mothers and caves, my therapist recently posted a quote by Aline Bei about the mess children make at home. I am used to constantly reminding my teenage children to take their dishes to the kitchen and remove their wet towels out of bed, so was thrilled with the excerpt:

But it’s beautiful, yes, to see someone’s stuff scattered around the house. It gives us love for the person and for the house.

4) The Brazilian TV show Roda Viva interviewed the author Ana Maria Machado. Much of the questions were about censorship and cancel culture. When answering requests to change the content of her 1980s books and potential cancellation of certain publications, she said:

The secret [to dealing with these issues] is not to read less, it is to read more.

5) Anni Albers:

Being creative is not so much the desire to do something, but rather to listen to what wants to be done: the dictatorship of materials.

Which reminded me of Ezra Pound:

The artist is the antenna of the race.

Isa Genzken, 2014

6) This text by Natalia Sulman on shyness uses the Odyssey as a starting point:

Shyness is a hypocritical form of vanity: you feel that it is too important to be imperfect in front of others. Athena tells Telemachus, “Do not be ashamed” (what she is saying is: forget a little about yourself and seek the truth). Being shy, in this context, begins as an excessive identification with the persona, that is, with the image that we wish to project to others. One prefers not to act to run the risk of looking imperfect. Do you know why so many people get a childish mind? Because they run away from all situations where their limitations may appear. They prefer to stay in the known (albeit small) terrain to enter the unknown, where they will inevitably have to err, ask and learn. They do this to protect the ego. Therefore, the great problem of shyness is the excess attachment to the “I.” “I can’t fail, I need to look perfect.”

Shyness may seem like humbleness, from people who do not want to draw attention, but it is just the opposite: it exists because one has become the center of their own attention. When you stop occupying this center, you start to do what needs to be done, because you are more interested in reality and people than in the image they will have of you.

Therefore, Athena’s intervention is deeply symbolic. Soon after saying, “You must not be shy,” she adds, “For you have crossed the sea to hear from your father.” It’s like saying, “The cure of shyness is thinking less about yourself. Remember your father. Remember your mission and do what needs to be done.”

The hero overcomes shyness when he stops prioritizing his own feelings to prioritize reality. From this perspective, the end of shyness marks the passage from childhood to adulthood. The child believes that his value depends on the impression he makes: the adult discovers that his value depends on the ability to do what needs to be done, even at risk of getting it wrong and being misunderstood.

Love this Odyssey inspired scarf

7) David Hume:

Beauty is not a quality of things: it exists only in the mind that beholds them, and each mind perceives a different beauty.

8) Hanna Piette via Paris Review:

I think about what I love and my love for it grows.

9) Cézanne, 1885-87

9) I enjoyed the comments of the art critic Celeste Marcus in conversation with Henry Oliver about artists. For her, Cézanne “is precise without being cold.” Almost as good as Laura Owens’ comment that Cézanne “is the god of paying attention-ness.’”

10) That’s what I’ve been listening to when I’m at the beach :)

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Tennis Tournament, 1920, George Bellows

1) Michael Scott of The Office said: I’m not superstitious, I’m just a little stitious. Hahaha! I bought a game of tarot when I visited the gardens of the Niki of Saint Phalle, in Italy, and I love asking questions to the cards from time to time :)

My father, who loved a joke, said that being superstitious gives you bad luck.

2) The iconic Bayeux tapestry just crossed the English Channel. Affectionately referred to as “a medieval comic book”, the piece is 224 feet and about 20 inches tall. The images illustrate the Battle of Hastings, in 1066. The masterpiece is part of the collection of the Bayeux museum in France and will be loaned to the British Museum until July 2027.

3) I’m writing this newsletter as I watch the Wimbledon final and I’ve been thinking about how I love to follow sports more and more. Between tennis, soccer, basketball, Olympics, etc., I love to witness the collective effervecence. The term, coined by sociologist Émile Durkheim, refers to the transcendental feeling that goes beyond the rational and the ordinary. It is an increased sense of euphoria and unity with others.

According to Jonathan Haidt:

We were built to share the sacred. Whether through religion, spirituality, meditation, music or art, there are times when we transcend the worldly and feel a taste of something more vast and meaningful. It is in “being together” that these bonds happen. Not because we are on our own screens. Moments of collective effervescence can last a long time. They are a “social glue” that creates an ideological bridge, incredibly important moments for social cohesion.

4) I dream of a marine wooden puzzle from Enzo Mari. Too bad they are collector’s items (Ebay) and a vintage nowadays already costs well affection. But it is worth enjoying the image:

The terrestrial animals also look great (auctioned for more than US$ 5mil, oooops!):

5) Do we agree?

The most powerful weapon of seduction is... silence — Dorival Caymmi

6) And how about Grace Jones’ outfits in Wimbledon (aqui)? Absolute muse.

7) Guys, I’m a real multitasker. And I loved to learn that Firefox gives you the option to open two windows side by side in the same browser. Click the right mouse button or “control” + click and “add split view”. Finally!

8) My dear friend Luiz Mattos shared a great piece on how to discover new music, here:

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36 ways to discover new music (without an algorithm)

STVDIO tracks the future of music. Helping 3,900+ artists, music industry professionals, founders and investors navigate music industry trends and behavioural shifts…

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5 months ago · 651 likes · 51 comments · musicben

I really enjoyed the music-map and Gnoosic. I ended up discovering a bunch of great new music!

9) The playlist this week is all about these discoveries :) I don’t ever want to feel stuck in my musical taste from when as when I was “young”, I think it’s one of the moments when we run the risk of “getting old” in spirit. Eternal curiosity is my motto in life:

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1) Just came back from 2 weeks in Italy… Feeling lucky!

I'm not sure what to say about Giotto and the experience of being in the Scrovegni Chapel. Stunning. Everyone should try to visit it if they are in a city near Padova on a trip. It's amazing how he painted the story in a spiral, how the lapis lazuli fills the space, how the narrative is didactic and how it all begins with the birth of Mary, mother of Jesus. We are introduced to the scene in which his parents, Joaquim and Ana are asking God to get pregnant. We see the birth of Mary, then her suitors all lined up and, later, the birth of Jesus. The Chapel is a great reminder that everything starts with the mothers :) I'm in love. Oh! Giotto also portrays the first kiss in the history of art and suggests the sky as a setting (in a kind of "The Truman Show" style). Perfection.

2) The Japan Pavilion at the Venice Biennale is sensational. My friend Paula warned me, but I only believed it when I held my own baby. "Grass Babies, Moon Babies" was created by queer Japanese-American artist Ei Arakawa-Nash. Inspired by the experience of becoming a father of twins in 2024, the pavilion turns visitors into temporary caregivers, inviting viewers to carry full-size dolls (heavy like real babies) through space. I never liked dolls when I was a child, but these give the feeling that we are carrying a very well-behaved baby, hahaha — I didn't want to return mine. The little babies wear sunglasses for privacy reasons (since people take a lot of pictures of cute babies all the time). One of the suggested activities of the exhibition is to change the diaper of your baby and photograph a QR Code that reveals the baby's date of birth. The dates are historical and important, especially for the queer community. Mine was born on the same day as Hello Kitty! How cute is that?

3) I'm still in shock after visiting Niki de Saint Phalle's Tarot Garden (Il Giardino dei Tarocch), in Grossetto, Italy. There are 22 monumental sculptures, each dedicated to a tarot game card. The garden connects one monument to another and creates a kind of open-air maze. Inspired by Gaudí's Park Güell, the French artist spent 20 years building this artistic paradise where she also lived. In addition to Gaudí, it also reminded me of Hundertwasser’s house and museum in Vienna. This ability that some artists have to continue playing as if they were children is radical!

4) Another magical experience I had during my Italian vacation was the visit to Mark Rothko's exhibition with Fra Angelico at the San Marco museum in Florence. The Italian painted frescoes between 1439 and 1443 in each cell of the cloister, which was supposed to help with meditation. In the exhibition, currently on display we see some paintings by Rothko next to some of these frescoes. My feeling is that the American (born in Latvia) absorbed something divine, sublime and ethereal from Angelico. The silence of the visitors during the show was almost total — complete concentration.

5) On the plane back home, I watched a documentary on Jeff Buckley, "It's Never Over". It remind me of my college years, when a boyfriend introduced me to Grace (which I consider one of the most perfect albums ever recorded). And, for some reason, perhaps the talent and the early death, made me think of the artist Gordon Matta-Clark. I think the two would have been good friends :)

6) Via New Yorker mag:

The Nobel laureate László Krasznahorkai would “never voluntarily reread” any of his books. But, when his friend Béla Tarr made films using his work as inspiration, Krasznahorkai had to read his text aloud. “I would begin reading, and suddenly I would see a shocking error of rhythm, of melody, of content, a flaw in form, and well, I had inevitably made a mistake, but it’s not only a single mistake to me, it ruins the entire thing. It vexes me so much that I try to remedy this in the following book. My entire life is just such an attempt at recompense. I am not doing too well,” Krasznahorkai told Merve Emre.

Beyond his own work, Krasznahorkai enjoys the “decisive flaws” of an object. He says that such flaws give objects enormous value and particularity. At the link in our bio, read the Hungarian novelist on his notoriously long sentences, the singularity of imperfections, and our estrangement from beauty.

7) Via Linkedin:

Most job candidates walk into interviews armed with polished answers, rehearsed weaknesses, and a list of researched questions aimed to impress. But Apple’s Steve Jobs reportedly had a far less conventional way of deciding who got hired: the “beer test.”

Instead of trying to catch candidates out with a trick question or quizzing them on the latest iPhone, the late cofounder of the $4.3 trillion tech giant wanted to know something much simpler: Would he actually enjoy grabbing a beer with them?

According to multiple outlets, Jobs would even take candidates on an informal walk-and-talk interview to deliberately test whether he could get along with them outside the office. The so-called “beer test” wasn’t really about alcohol. It was about seeing whether a candidate could drop the corporate act long enough to have an actual conversation—and be pleasant to be around.

Jobs would ask potential hires questions like, “What did you do last summer?” to get the conversation going.

There were no right or wrong answers, but it probably wasn’t good news if the chat was awkward, draining, or nonexistent.

That’s because at the end of the saga, Jobs would ask himself: “Would I have a beer with this person? Would I talk to him or her in a relaxed way while taking a walk?” If the answer was no, that told him something a résumé couldn’t.

As I write in Fortune, interview tests are becoming increasingly common—and the bar isn’t always technical. Sometimes it’s whether you’re just good company to be around.

—Orianna Rosa Royle Success Associate Editor, Fortune

8) John O’Donohue:

I would love to live

like a river flows,

carried by the surprise

of its own unfolding.

9) Some questions deserve this look:

10) Back to NYC…:

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Kerry James Marshall

Beloved readers,

I'm on vacation :) Phew! Today’s newsletter talks about music.

1) I'm part of a group that dicusses music on WhatsApp and, the other day, a reporter who is there asked us: how do you discover new music?

I answered: constant Shazams while watching TV shows, movies, on the street, in restaurants, as well as Fresh Remix and Release Radar on Spotify, radio shows such as WFUV, music newsletters like David Byrne's and podcasts (I love Song Exploder, All Songs Considered, Do Vinil ao Streaming [hello, Daniel Setti!], Desert Island Discs, NPR Music, etc), Track Star (on YouTube or Instagram) and research bands that participate in festivals (like Coachella).

Most people responded similarly, with some adding radio shows like SiriusXM and others more specific like KUTX in Austin.

How do you discover new music?

Leave a comment

2) Some songs that entered my life recently, I discovered through my friend DJ Renata do Vale.

And, in a restaurant, I recently chatted with a waiter from Puerto Rico who said: if you like Bad Bunny you will love this band (and they just released an album):

3) I’m reading a book about Björk — more specifically about the album Homogenic, my favorite! When I lived in Amsterdam back in 2002, I walked around the city listening to it on a discman. At that time, I listened to Björk on repeat and I was starting to love Radiohead (Kid A). To this day, when I hear these records, the feeling of exploring the Netherlands as a young dance student comes back. Ah, the power of music...!

4) And speaking of "good old" records, I listened to Los Hermanos and Alanis Morisette this week and also had this feeling of texture, as if a phase of my life came back to visit me.

5) One of my greatest musical pleasures (in the online world) has been to follow Track Star. I confess that I would love to be interviewed by the host to test my musical knowledge, hahaha! I love the impeccable curation he does to fit into each guest's repertoire. Questlove is in da house!:

6) Have you heard about this Instagram of a young man listening to the albums he inherited from his grandfather?

7) Now, let’s face it!, nothing is better than going to a concert of a band or singer we love. It's the closest I get to a religious experience:

8) The way we consume music has changed radically. I remember the CD cases in my car when I started driving in 1998, my tapes and CDs recorded by and to friends, the recordings made while the songs were playing on the radio!

I remember going to the movies pre-Shazam, taking a little pad to write down the lyrics of songs that played on the soundtrack and then humming it to my older brother to see if he would help me identify the mysterious track (he is a record collector). Today is all playlists, EP,s songs released loose — with no friends, hehe.

I don't consider myself very nostalgic, I love the present moment very much, but one thing I do miss is the concept of the album — the cover, the insert, the attention paid to the order of the songs, etc. That's why I still appreciate listening to an entire album. I feel that the record is an experience and I enjoy listening to an LP from beginning to end, when I can.

I've been in love with Feist and I've loved listening to this album, Metals, which is one of my favorites in life:

9) How do we escape the bubble and the algorithm? It is so cool to fight the algorithm! When I meet younger people (children and nephews of friends), I love to ask: what have you been listening to? That way, I don't get stuck in that idea that good music is that of "my time" (we tend to think the music that was fashionable when we were young is the ultimate best). It was in one of these conversations, a few years ago, that I discovered Childish Gambino:

And, in terms of covers, one of the masterpieces of the 21st century for me is this one, Frank Ocean by Wolfgang Tillmans:

10) I made an Italian playlist, to get into the mood of European summer:

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Hans Ulrich Obrist Posted this phrase written by David Hockney, who left us this week - one of the greatest artists of recent times

1) New Yorker’s editor, David Remnick, wrote a great article about the Knicks victory:

But in this series, the Knicks showed greater maturity and tenacity. They never failed to display the well of composure that is vital to every comeback. When the Spurs locked down Brunson, or tried, the ball went elsewhere, zinging around the court, from player to player, as if in a berserk video game. Everyone, it seemed, had his moment. Deep into the bench, they played as a complete unit. Sometimes, a duo on the level of Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen, Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal, can carry a lesser cast to a title. This was not the case with the Knicks, not in the seventies and not now. The ethos of then carried over to the ethos of now. Savor the joy, New York. Soon enough, we’ll wake up to ordinary cares and the trials of daily life; the same dreadful leader (who managed to soil Game Three at the Garden with his sneery arrogance and snoozy indifference) will still be in office, for a while at least. But set such things aside for a moment. Savor the joy, so sure to perish, tarry still.

2) One of the coolest things I see happen when visiting the same exhibition several times is to change your taste. So often what, at first, I didn't like, or abhorred!, over time can win my heart, my eyes and VIP room in my repertoire. I've been so contaminated by artists who didn't touch me at first, that today I already doubt the conviction of my own opinion. And it's a delight to see our solid opinion loosen up.

When I watched the documentary about art critics Jerry Saltz and Roberta Smith, "The House of Criticism", I loved the part where Roberta talks about it. She even refers to a text (called “I Was Wrong About Cecily Brown”) she wrote about her:

One of the obligations of a critic is the willingness to be betrayed, sometimes brutally, by your own taste, whose ins and outs you discover over a lifetime of looking. I could argue that Cecily Brown has become a better painter. But really it’s the often mysterious expansion of my own taste that we’re talking about here. With luck, you learn to see more and deeper. Peter Schjeldahl, the late art critic for The New Yorker, put it more aphoristically. When asked if he ever changed his opinions about artists he replied, “If your opinions aren’t changing, you’re dead.”

3) Speaking of good paintings, Comme des Garçons invited Henry Taylor to “decorate” the brand's new wallet collection. We want it now:

Henry Taylor

4) I don't know if you've already noticed, but I'm completely obsessed with New York. And I love the little secrets the city hides. Notice that in the photo below (I took it for you!) the street sign is brown on this side and green on the other side of the street.

Do you know why? When the sign is brown, that block is landmarked! Therefore, usually the more brown signs, the more charming and preserved the neighborhood is. Nothing against the new, but you know which kind of "modern" architecture I'm talking about, right?

5) I've been so in love with Amy Poehler's podcast, that I'm listening to the old eps as well. Her conversation with Indian comedian Zarna Garg is phenomenal:

Clarity is kindness.

6) The other day, I took some teenage girls to the Metropolitan Museum fashion exhibit. To make it exciting, I tried to go beyond clothes as attire and started philosophizing with them about the political aspects of choosing a look to wear before leaving home every day. I introduced some ideas by Martin Heidegger to them:

Dasein is a term for human existence. Literally translated from German as "being in the world", Heidegger used the expression to ignore traditional concepts such as "mind", "soul" and "subject". It emphasizes that humans are not isolated observers, but beings fundamentally defined by their active and practical involvement with the world.

Instead of being a closed subject inside a skull observing an objective universe, humans are already always "thrown" into a concrete situation (historical, cultural and social). Heidegger argued that we engage with the world in a practical and not theoretical way.

7) Nobody asked, I know, but I wasn’t impressed by Spielberg's new movie, "Disclosure Day". I only wrote down one good phrase to share here:

“Don’t be afraid of what you don’t know”.

8) Loved the result of 5 years of photos Austin Bell took of every basketball court of New York:

9) Marcel Proust”

Don’t seek new landscapes, develop new eyes.

10) Summer begins this week in the Northern Hemisphere. What a joy! I'm loving Matt Duncan and the song Juanita Bonita. Have a listen:

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Bouquet of Flowers, Odilon Redon, ca. 1900–1905

1) It's very rare that I want to read the same book twice. But that's what happened when I encountered Jenny Odell's "How To Do Nothing". Last week, I heard about another text she wrote and loved every bit of it (read it here):

Tom told me about a way of looking that he had learned while doing horseback trail maintenance in the area. In order to prevent an accident, like the horse slipping and falling off the side of a trail, you had to look in a similar manner to the way that, he claimed, a horse looked—keeping some focus about 10 feet in front of you, but also aware of everything in your peripheral vision. He called this “soft eyes.” When I tried it, I noticed the carpet of redwood duff and the backs of Tom’s shoes while trying to let in the tips of tanoak and huckleberry that were passing my head on the sides. Almost instantly, I felt that I was more in the place than I had been a moment before.

When I later looked up “soft eyes,” I saw that versions of the practice come up in mindfulness, martial arts, hunting, and, in the case of at least one player, hockey. One piece of advice I saw for practicing soft eyes was to pretend that you were looking “from the back of your head” instead of from the front. Try it yourself: Go outside, or go to a window, and focus very intensely on one thing at a middle distance. Then, let the rest of the scene in, near and far, including the far sides of your peripheral vision, and even your own body in the space.

Whenever I do this mental exercise, something physical happens: Besides the change in what I am actively seeing, I inevitably find that parts of my body—my brow, jaw, neck, and shoulders—relax. I find that I am breathing more slowly, or not at all. I realize that in my habitual way of looking, I have been straining, trying to get at something. Looking can be aggressive. It turns out this might be my default way of looking. When I shared this with a friend who is a visual artist, who uses soft eyes for painting and life drawing, she called this aggressive gaze one that is “preoccupied with theft or consumption.”

René Magritte, The False Mirror, 1929

2) What she says about the way we look, also applies to the way we listen:

The difference between soft eyes and the implied contrast—perhaps we can call it “hard eyes”—took me back to something that the composer and sound artist Pauline Oliveros wrote about her practice of deep listening. Oliveros defined the practice as “listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what you are doing.” For her, deep listening was something directed both outward and inward, to include the sound of “one’s own thoughts.” Oliveros wrote that she found deep listening necessary because we are culturally trained to do the opposite: to quickly analyze and judge, rather than to let something else in. The implication is that learning something like deep listening or soft eyes requires its own form of training.

Salvadore Dali

3) And, here, she writes about birdwatchers:

My other examples from the book are of observing the natural world, particularly through birdwatching, a practice that requires “doing nothing” but also using all of one’s senses in order to have an encounter with a mercurial being. I describe learning to use iNaturalist, an app that helps you identify plants, and how this changes the resolution of my attention to spaces that were previously just “a bunch of green.”

Yet I’ve come to feel that there’s something not fully developed in How to Do Nothing. That something has to do with who or what is on the other side of observation, as well as who or what is doing the observing. There are a few moments where I sort of hint at it. At one point, I write that, while looking at birds, I’ve gone from asking “What’s there?” to “Who’s there?” And I quote Gloria Bird, member of the Spokane Tribe of Washington State, recalling how her aunt once looked at what was left of Mount St. Helens and said, “Poor thing.” Bird’s aunt, she writes, “spoke of the mountain as a person.”

The difference between a what and a who has to do with time. In the case of birdwatching, you may first identify something by how it looks or sounds, but years later, still watching, you continue to see varied behaviors, varied responses. More familiarity just brings more questions—the birds become more mysterious, not less.

Kiki Smith

4) And the conclusion:

In the end, it may not be completely different from listening to each other. In a wonderful Bay Nature article about whether salamanders have feelings, Brandon Keim quotes an animal behaviorist and environmental studies professor who allows that we can never know the perspective of another being. But, the professor adds, “that is also true of you and me: I will never fully inhabit your perspective. And that impossibility doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying. Quite the reverse: It would be offensive if I refused to take your perspective merely for a lack of ever being able to know it perfectly. The trying is what matters.”

(…)

There, on the sand of its banks, you might see me. It is late afternoon and I am looking at the trees across the river, listening to them, trying to understand. I am softening my eyes to include everything around them. I do this for so long that eventually some boundary seems to fall away. In place of entities, all I sense is motion: of the air through the redwood needles and my own lungs; the water pushing past the sandstone cobbles, compressing the air and hitting my inner ear; the electricity on its pathways through my brain, reproducing the scene inside my head; the sun disappearing behind the ridge, the subsequent cold that I feel on my skin, the gravity keeping me on the banks. Something comes back to me, if only very briefly. I have set out to explore the trees and instead discovered—no, not quite myself. And not the individual trees, either. It’s something in between, almost like gossamer: a dialogue of earthliness.

Roxy Paine

5) In love with this weekend tote by Clare V. (here):

Which is almost as cool as the one I use when I travel, from Lewis is Home (here):

6) Loved reading Haley Nahman’s text on the shrug. Here.

7) In his column entitled “The Readers”, José Eduardo Agualusa asks (and answers), “What are, after all, readers?”

-Those people who practice the great art of becoming others.

- Those who walk slowly. The decelerators of the world.

- Beings capable of mourning the death of invented people.

- Those who doubt. Those who worry.

- Those who are amazed by a verse, a metaphor, the perfect adjective.

8) Seinfeld on meditating:

William Kentridge, Twelve Coffee Pots, 2012

9) Poem by António Barahona:

It's dangerous to cross

It's dangerous to stay in the middle

It's dangerous to be afraid

It's dangerous to stop

10) Playlist that has been playing here between NBA finals!

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Kate Salke

1) From Giuseppe Penone’s show at Gagosian:

Year after year life’s experiences envelope us,
the memories accumulate and form their own substacne
which holds no shape but carries weight.
Each memory is knowledge.

2) I love this story about the origin of painting. So romantic…:

I thought it useful to expand a bit on Pliny the Elder’s account of the origin of painting. In his Natural History (circa 77-79AD), Pliny attempts to make the compendium of information for his time. He discusses metallurgy, sculpture, and painting.

In chapter 5, he writes, “We have no certain knowledge as to the beginning of the art of painting, nor does this enquiry fall under our consideration. The Egyptians assert that it was invented among themselves, six thousand years before it passed into Greece; a vain boast, it is very evident. As to the Greeks, some say that it was invented at Sicyon, others at Corinth; but they all agree that it originated in tracing lines round the human shadow […omnes umbra hominis lineis circumducta].“

Later, in chapter 15, he tells the now-famous story of Butades of Corinth. It was through his daughter that he made the discovery; who, being deeply in love with a young man about to depart on a long journey, traced the profile of his face, as thrown upon the wall by the light of the lamp [umbram ex facie eius ad lucernam in pariete lineis circumscripsit].

3) As I’m headed to Italy… I learned that the Negroni was invented in Florence, and the Bellini was created in Venice (and baptized after the artist):

The Negroni cocktail is widely believed to have originated in 1919 at Florence’s Caffè Casoni, created when Count Camillo Negroni asked bartender Fosco Scarselli to strengthen his Americano by replacing the soda water with gin. This iconic bitter-sweet cocktail, characterized by equal parts gin, sweet vermouth, and Campari, officially gained popularity in the early 20th century.

The Bellini was created between 1934 and 1948 by Giuseppe Cipriani, founder of the legendary Harry’s Bar in Venice, Italy. Inspired by the unique pinkish-white glow of a painting by 15th-century artist Giovanni Bellini, Cipriani blended fresh white peach purée with Prosecco to create the iconic, refreshing cocktail.

4) Francis Bacon:

“Who today has been able to record anything that comes across to us as a fact without causing deep injury to the image?”

5) Jean Paul Sartre on Alexander Calder:

Calder’s objects are like the sea, and they cast its same spell — always beginning again, always new. A passing glance is not enough to understand them. One must live their lives, become fascinated by them.

6) From my philosophy teacher:

Philosophy is a knife you stick between what is and what could be.

7) In Odili Donald Odita’s studio last week, he also talked about philosophy. Plato mentioned:

According to his explanation, nature is a copy of God in the physical world and art is a copy of nature. So art is a copy of the copy.

Then, he said that when someone asked Andy Warhol to talk about his work, he said: "ask Elaine Sturtevant". Elaine made exact replicas of the work of Warhol (and other artists). And, according to Warhol: "nothing is just a copy, everything is unique in its own way".

8) Philosopher Edgar Morin believed that the world is too complicated to be reduced to simple explanations. He preferred the idea of living with ambiguities, contradictions and doubts:

We live in a time of uncertainty. And uncertainty should not only be seen as a threat, but as an opportunity.

You need to learn to navigate an ocean of uncertainties through archipelagos of certainties.

Philip Guston

9) After the longest of winters, I spent the weekend at the beach and it was pure joy. I made this playlist to listen to while napping on the sand, under the sun :)

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One of the coolest rooms in the new New Museum

1) The new exhibition at the new New Museum is my favorite the city right now, "New Humans: Memories of the Future". The show examines how the definition of what it means to be human changes when new technologies appear; how we face these fears and survive them in the last 100 years.

New Humans will trace a diagonal history of the 20th and 21st centuries through the work of more than 150 international artists, writers, scientists, architects and filmmakers, highlighting key moments in which dramatic technological and social transformations have boosted new conceptions of humanity and new visions for their possible futures.

In an interview at the All of It podcast (below), curator Massimiliano Gioni talks about museums as a gym for the brain, where we learn to live with differences and practice freedom.

The renovation, which added a building by OMA to the original project by SANAA, cost US$ 82 million. There is more space and the circulation (which was terrible in the old building) is much better now.

Fun fact:

The term "robot" was coined by the Czech writer Karel Čapek in his 1920 play, "R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots)". Although Karel popularized the word, he attributed to his brother - the painter and writer Josef Čapek - the merit of having actually created it, deriving it from the Czech word robota (forced labor, servitude).

2) I've been watching Coachella on YouTube. You can follow each stage, change from one "channel" to another without dying of FOMO... a delight! This weekend, Moby introduced singer:Jacob Lusk. I didn't know him and I fell in love. According to Moby, he is the greatest singer today... Listen there (or here):

And there was Jack White, always impeccable, which - luckily - I will see live in NYC soon:

3) In an interview with NYTimes, Lena Dunham said something that echoed here:

Art is designed to stretch the human capacity for understanding.

4) SOMETHING

Don't plan everything.
Leave something
For the accidental plan.

Insist on everything to remember
It's to forget
What you should forget.

Something is needed
To be an untouched thing.
Leave something
At the foot of being.

by Daniel Jonas

5) Everything you can think of is true.

— Tom Waits in the lyrics of Everything You Can Think.

6) New obsession: Rory McIlroy. The golfer, who won the Masters (Augusta National) for the second time in a row, won my heart this weekend. In addition to being a great athlete, he keeps (literally hehe) his feet on the ground. He is charismatic, polite and the best: grateful. In his post-victory speech, he highlighted the sacrifices made by his parents, Rosie and Gerry McIlroy, to support his dream. Exciting! It is worth following, studying and keeping track of. Sorry, Tiger Woods!

Rory <3 <3 <3

7) Loved watching the documentary about Fleetwood Mac (The Story of Fleetwood Mac, here). The film is basically a collage of music videos from the beginnings of the band, to the arrival and departure of some members. Weird but great!

8) The Devil Wears Prada 2 is coming, as well as the Met Gala 2026. That's why I loved receiving this letter from the new editor of American Vogue, Chloe Malle:

I remember attending the New York premiere of The Devil Wears Prada with my mother. I wore my prom dress—a sage-green beaded ’20s shift from the Paris flea market—and we sat behind Anna (in…Prada) and her daughter, Bee.

Years later, when the team at Vogue learned about the forthcoming sequel, we all felt strongly that Disney shouldn’t be allowed to have all the fun. The Devil Wears Prada 2 conveniently hits theaters the weekend before the Met Gala, so if we wanted a cover tied to the film, it would need to be May’s. But who to ask? Should it be Meryl? Or what if we asked both “Mirandas”—Anna andMeryl?

With a little persuading, that’s just where we landed: May’s cover story sees Meryl and Anna photographed by Annie Leibovitz and interviewed by Greta Gerwig (Meryl’s very good idea!). Topic A in their conversation was The Devil Wears Prada 2. What did Anna do when she heard it was happening? (Answer: She called Meryl.) Meryl revealed she would never actually want Anna’s job (“I would dread the shoes”). Nor could Anna imagine doing Meryl’s (“There’s no way”). I was there to keep things on track but really I just enjoyed myself.

Annie photographed her fellow septuagenarians (she, Anna, and Meryl are all 76—as is Miuccia Prada!) at a studio in Red Hook under the darkest cloak of secrecy. Anna treated our cover like the Pentagon Papers, even shushing The Gilded Age star Louisa Jacobson—Meryl’s youngest daughter—when Louisa happily brought the whole thing up front row at Calvin Klein. With sittings editor Grace Coddington, Virginia Smith did store pulls at Dries van Noten and Prada and traveled with the clothes to set, loading and unloading the trunks herself. Also read into the plan? Anna’s assistants, Emily and Caroline… fitting, considering the subject at hand. That’s all!

9) I loved Harper Spero’s newsletter (via my friend Vanessa Fried):

A few days ago, I spent the night looking over my friend’s shoulder as she showed me different hacks, suggestions, and tips for navigating AI. It’s something I recognize I need to learn more about because, like most of the world, I am currently not using it to its fullest potential. And yet, the idea of using it to its fullest potential, whatever that even means, still scares me a bit.

One of the suggestions she offered was to create a board of advisors on Gemini, so that when I input something, I can have it viewed through the lens of people I value and admire. At a time when I feel like I’m lacking clarity, this felt like a useful way to bring in outside perspective, especially from people whose input I respect.

Some of these people came to me immediately. They felt obvious, like voices I already hear in my head when I’m trying to make decisions. Others I chose more intentionally: people I don’t know as well, but whose perspectives might challenge me or push me outside of my own thinking patterns. I wanted the board to feel both grounding and expansive. Familiar enough to trust, but diverse enough to interrupt my assumptions.

I wanted it to be an even number, just because, and so here are my 14 advisory board members:

• Mark Cuban: He is the reality check every dreamer needs to actually build something that lasts.

• Sara Blakely: Sara represents the power of starting before you’re ready and the refusal to let a “no” stop a good idea. She’s there to remind you that the most successful paths are often paved with mistakes and a healthy sense of humor about failure.

• Mark Duplass: He is the fit for anyone who needs to be reminded that you don’t need a gatekeeper’s permission to be an artist; you just need a camera, a pen, and the guts to start.

• Sam Harris: He is on the board to strip away ego and cognitive bias, forcing a confrontation with what is actually true, regardless of how we feel about it.

• Lena Dunham: Lena represents the bravery required to be “too much” in public. She’s there to help navigate the intersection of personal neurosis and artistic output.

• Anderson Cooper: He represents the ability to hold space for pain without being consumed by it. He provides a frequency of deep gentleness and journalistic integrity.

• Esther Perel: She is on the board to remind us that our internal world is a reflection of our external relationships, and that eroticism (in the broadest sense) is the ultimate antidote to trauma.

• Rachel Goldberg-Polin: She provides a frequency of profound parental love and moral clarity, reminding the table of what matters when everything else is stripped away. She also infuses Jewish text and tradition into everything, ensuring the conversation remains rooted in a lineage of resilience and wisdom.

• Suleika Jaouad: Having lived between the kingdoms of the “well” and the “sick,” she represents the resilience found in life’s waiting rooms. She is there to find the poetry in the “in-between” stages of life.

• Don Miguel Ruiz: He represents the internal work of unlearning the stories we tell ourselves. Through the Four Agreements, he provides the frequency of personal integrity and the quiet power of not taking the world’s chaos personally.

• David Byrne: He looks at the mundane world—the way we walk, the way we build, the way we gather—and finds the music in it. He is there to remind the board that life is a sensory experience and that we should always stay curious.

• Tristan Harris: He understands the invisible forces trying to hijack our attention and our agency. He is on the board to remind us to be intentional about where we put our focus and to protect the “human” in a high-tech world.

• Big Bird: He represents the kindness of the six-year-old self. When the “Grown-Ups” at the table get too complicated, Big Bird is there to ask the most basic, profound questions about belonging, friendship, and whether everyone feels okay.

10) Depois de assistir ao doc, só consegui ouvir Fleetwood Mac e até descobri músicas deles que não conhecia!

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Diana Vreeland in her “garden in hell”

1) I’m a fan of Japanese architect Shigeru Ban. Pritzker winner, he is known for thinking about practical and fast solutions to deal with natural disasters, often using paper and other biodegradable materials to build shelters. I just visited the Aspen Museum, his project... a beautiful building that seems to be inside a wooden basket (the checkered façade we see from inside the museum in the photo below). And the light:

2) PI, a poem by Nobel laureate Wisława Szymborska:

The admirable number pi:
three point one four one.
All the following digits are also initial,
five nine two because it never ends.
It can’t be comprehended six five three five at a glance,
eight nine by calculation,
seven nine or imagination,
not even three two three eight by wit, that is, by comparison
four six to anything else
two six four three in the world.
The longest snake on earth calls it quits at about forty feet.
Likewise, snakes of myth and legend, though they may hold out a bit longer.
The pageant of digits comprising the number pi
doesn’t stop at the page’s edge.
It goes on across the table, through the air,
over a wall, a leaf, a bird’s nest, clouds, straight into the sky,
through all the bottomless, bloated heavens.
Oh how brief — a mouse tail, a pigtail — is the tail of a comet!
How feeble the star’s ray, bent by bumping up against space!
While here we have two three fifteen three hundred nineteen
my phone number your shirt size the year
nineteen hundred and seventy-three the sixth floor
the number of inhabitants sixty-five cents
hip measurement two fingers a charade, a code,
in which we find hail to thee, blithe spirit, bird thou never wert
alongside ladies and gentlemen, no cause for alarm,
as well as heaven and earth shall pass away,
but not the number pi, oh no, nothing doing,
it keeps right on with its rather remarkable five,
its uncommonly fine eight,
its far from final seven,
nudging, always nudging a sluggish eternity
to continue.

3) Every time I heard the director of the movie Hamnet speak, I got emotional. In a podcast I listened to, Chloe Zhao said:

When you are afraid of dying, you can’t live life fully.

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4) I watched Sofia Coppola's new movie about Marc Jacobs. I wrote down several little things to share here:

When Andy Warhol was asked what he wanted to be if he reincarnated, he said: a diamond ring on Liz Taylor's finger. Ha!

One of his greatest aesthetic influences are Bob Fosse's choreographies:

Marc Jacobs says something I've felt about São Paulo and NYC:

Wearing a black T-shirt in NY is different from wearing a black T-shirt in Paris!

Another Bob Fosse show that inspired him, Big Spenders:

Liza Minelli and Cindy Sherman also appear as great aesthetic influences for Marc. About them, he says he loves women who are caricatures of themselves. He praises Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills series, in particular. A classic:

5) Also in the film, Jacobs talks about how the painting Jeremiah Goodman made of Diana Vreeland's apartment was the inspiration for his Fall-Winter show back in 2015.

The decor is a 1955 project, designed by Billy Baldwin. The Vogue editor would have asked for an apartment that looked like a garden... "a garden in hell".

6) I was at the Metropolitan Museum this week for the preview of the exhibition Raphael: Sublime Poetry.

The show dives into the creative process of one of the most beloved and influential artists in history. A true titan of the Italian Renaissance, Raffaello di Giovanni Santi (1483-1520) - better known as Raphael - combined ambition with lyricism to create works with intellectual weight and emotional depth. In his short life of only 37 years, he achieved such a profound success as a painter, designer and architect that he was considered the "peak of artistic perfection" for centuries after his death.

Raphael: Sublime Poetry brings together more than 170 of the artist's greatest masterpieces. This presentation brings together important drawings, paintings and tapestries from public and private collections throughout Europe and the United States, many of which have never been shown together.

It opens on 3/29 to the public and is up until 6/28.

7) I laughed out loud with the real NYC seasons:

8) I loved this episode of Brazilian podcast Vibes in Psychoanalysis about conversations we struggle to have. They quote Donald Winnicott when discussing the conflict between communicating and hiding, and reminded me of this great quote:

It is a joy to be hidden, but a disaster not to be found.

9) Few things bother me more than garbage on the street. That's why I loved it. Via NYPost:

Collect garbage while running with friends is NYC's new fitness trend. Running clubs have become increasingly popular as a way to exercise, make friends and meet romantic partners. Now, some New Yorkers are taking the idea one step forward — cleaning the streets while exercising..

10) Today's playlist brings together songs I listened to in Colorado after skiing:

1) On the balcony of the Whitney Museum, the current biennial features a partnership with Hyundai Motor Company. It is a site-specific work of Kelly Akashi exhibited on the fifth floor of the museum, Monument (Altadena), 2026 — a chimney that functions as reconstruction and memorial. Akashi lost her studio in the Eaton fires in January last year, and the chimney was the only thing left. The sculpture serves as a meditation on survival, rupture and the fragile permanence of what remains.

“The act of rebuilding is not simply about material endurance; it is a deliberate labor of care, an engagement with history, and an act of reclamation. In laying each brick, my sculpture mirrors the gestures of memory itself, emphasizing that remembrance is not given, it is constructed through care and persistence. Each brick carries the record of labor and material transformation; together, they compose a new body that holds the traces of its past.”

2) Her work reminded me of one of Carlos Drummond de Andrade’s most beautiful poems, “Residue”. Excerpt below, full poem here.

From everything a little remained.
From my fear. From your disgust.
From stifled cries. From the rose
a little remained.

A little remained of light
caught inside the hat.
In the eyes of the pimp
a little remained of tenderness,
very little.
(…)

So from everything a little remains.
A little remains of your chin
in the chin of your daughter.

A little remained of your
blunt silence, a little
in the angry wall,
in the mute rising leaves.

A little remained from everything
in porcelain saucers,
in the broken dragon, in the white flowers,
in the creases of your brow,
in the portrait.

Since from everything a little remains,
why won’t a little
of me remain? In the train
travelling north, in the ship,
in newspaper ads,
why not a little of me in London,
a little of me somewhere?
In a consonant?
In a well?
(…)

From everything a little remains.
Not much: this absurd drop
dripping from the faucet,
half salt and half alcohol,
this frog leg jumping,
this watch crystal
broken into a thousand wishes,
this swan’s neck,
this childhood secret...
From everything a little remained:
from me; from you; from Abelard.
Hair on my sleeve,
from everything a little remained;
wind in my ears,
burbing, rumbling
from an upset stomach,
and small artifacts:
bell jar, honeycomb, revolver
cartridge, aspirin tablet.

From everything a little remained.

And from everything a little remains.
Oh, open the bottles of lotion
and smoother
the cruel, unbearable odor of memory.

Still, horribly, from everything a little remains,
under the rhythmic waves
under the clouds and the wind
under the bridges and under the tunnels
under the flames and under the sarcasm
under the phlegm and under the vomit
under the cry from the dungeon, the guy they forgot
under the spectacle and under the scarlet death
under the libraries, asylums, victorious churches
under yourself and under your feet already hard
under the ties of family, the ties of class,
from everything a little always remains.
Sometimes a button. Sometimes a rat.

3) I visited a boat this weekend which was anchored in NYC. In the presentation the captain made, he said that the rule of coexistence for the crew follows this order:

First, you take care of the boat. Then from your boat partners. Finally, you take care of yourself — “ship — shipmate — self”.

Beautiful, no?

4) The other day, my friend Flavia used an expression I had never heard before: “don’t budget your feelings.”

The advice suggests that we should not restrict, suppress or ration our emotions to try to protect ourselves. Trying to control feelings arises from the fear that if you give yourself too much, there will be nothing left. While, in fact, what tends to happen is the emotional energy being replenished by connection and authenticity, rather than diminished because of “delivery.”

Danica Phelps

5) I watched — and loved! — the new documentary about Paul McCartney, Man on the Run. The film focuses on the years following the end of the Beatles. The singer was only 27 when the band finished... It’s shocking to think that they produced all those legendary records before they turned 30! The film also covers the death of John Lennon. Since then, I just want to listen to Wings. I’ve since been in love with Linda McCartney (who’s also responsible for much of the footage we see in the doc)! Highly recommend:

6) I’m preparing an online art history course. I thought I’d talk about NY using the museums of the city to structure the classes. What other topics do you find interesting in the arts?

Leave a comment

7) Love as the road loves those who get lost — Mar Becker

Michael Heizer

8) My brother and I are big fans of Los Hermanos. The other day he sent me old songs from the band and I went down the rabbit hole — I spent the rest of the day re-listening to the classics. This playlist here is great:

9) Who else is excited for the weekend of the Oscar? A friend told me to check betting sites to see which movies are with chances of victory (see here). I watched almost all the main competitors and today I would say I’m rooting for Hamnet to win best picture or, at least, better director.

10) This weekend I went with a group of friends to a karaoke. My feeling is that the best ideas of what to sing always appear after the program is over hahaha. So I started a playlist with hot songs to try to remember when I’m on the stage (unfortunately here we don’t have the option to sing Brazilian hits in NY!). Here.

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Erwin Wurm @ Camden Arts Project

1) After my Bad-Bunny-fever, I’ve now entered my Fela Kuti phase. Controversial, the Nigerian has always awakened both love and revulsion. Along with his swinging, politicized and sexy music, he had a more sinister side that included a harem of 27 women, all members of his band Africa 70 - the Kalakuta Queens. Fela also openly denied the existence of AIDS, which he considered a "white disease", despite having died of complications resulting from HIV.

That said, I'm not alone in my new hyperfocus. A podcast dedicated to him, released in October, won over fans and, with that, I feel that many people have fallen in love with him again. Here it is:

2) The Queens of Kalakuta were dancers, singers and vocalists and lived in a community in the Kalakuta Republic. They were independent artists and activists who defied social norms, marrying Fela in a 1978 ceremony to escape police harassment (and prove they were not prostitutes). They all got married of their own free will.

3) Sotheby's was taken by basketballs (via New York Times):

That room, in the former Whitney Museum of American Art, got a makeover. It is now a basketball court where, until Friday, you can shoot hoops.

On the walls now, in museum-style display cases, are game-worn jerseys, sneakers and basketballs that belong to the former N.B.A. player Scottie Pippen, who was once described as the Robin to Michael Jordan’s Batman during the Chicago Bulls’ championship years in the 1990s. Sotheby’s, which now occupies the building, is selling 50 items from Pippen’s career that he saved and kept in a storage unit.

Sotheby’s says the display is “blue-chip art giving way to blue-chip sport” and “a temporary reimagining of a landmark New York cultural space, reflecting how sports memorabilia is increasingly presented.” The basketball court will disappear almost as quickly as it appeared. It will be open during the day through March 10, then disassembled. Pippen will be there for a private event — Sotheby’s won’t say when — and will play one-on-one with V.I.P. clients.

4) Lars von Trier: There are no sacred rules when it comes to movies.

5) I went to dinner the day before yesterday at a friend's house. She cooks divinely well and taught me how to make a delicious quiche. Since it was the night of a lunar eclipse, while the quiche was in the oven, we sat down to meditate for half an hour. It was very powerful to meditate in pairs! I loved it. After we ate, we decided to go back to our meditation cushions and meditate a little more - this time with a specific focus that needed our attention. We came out of the experience so well, that we have already scheduled to make other meetings like this.

6) The Whitney Museum Biennial opens this weekend. For the art world, the exhibition serves as an x-ray of contemporary American art.

The eighty-second edition of the Whitney Biennial—the longest-running survey of contemporary art in the United States—features work of 56 artists, duos, and collectives that reflects the current moment and examines various forms of relationality, including interspecies kinships, familial relations, geopolitical entanglements, technological affinities, shared mythologies, and infrastructural supports.

Whitney Biennial 2026 offers a vivid atmospheric survey of contemporary American art shaped by a moment of profound transition. Rather than offering a definitive answer to life today, this Whitney Biennial foregrounds mood and texture, inviting visitors into environments that evoke tension, tenderness, humor, and unease. Together, the works capture the complexity of the present and propose imaginative, unruly, and unexpected forms of coexistence.

7) I loved Gemma Correll’s illustration about anxiety and, especially, the banana for scale hahaha:

8) The color blue is mythical. That's why I loved this video below:

He also inspired one of the most beautiful songs of the Brazilian song songwriter:

9) Everyone must have seen Rosalia's presentation with Björk, but I wanted to register here. A classic is born:

10) The playlist of the week is inspired by Fela Kuti and Bruno Mars' new album:

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© Rivane Neuenschwander e Cao Guimarães. Cortesia Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, Nova York/Los Angeles; Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, Brasil.

1) Last week I went to a Jeff Koons talk and confirmed what I already knew – he’s brilliant. Some excerpts of what he said, written freely after my notes:

I’m very interested in “linking” devices. I always like to think about our biology, our genes, and our DNA—all is interconnected. These “currents” of our biology make the connection of your being with your history. And our cultural life is insane, it works the same way. These “links” are not only inside us – they are also outside, in all of the “cultural things.”

Debbie Harry [from the band Blondie] is here in the audience today. I feel like we have a cultural “link” — she’s definitely a very important person in my life. I think of Deborah, I think about black and white, I think about the clothes she wears, and the covers of her records.

These cultural links are also an inner connectivity. They are as real as our biology—the external culture we carry within us.

2) Jeff Koons on creativity:

I met Jordan Schmidt in Hamburg at a conference. I told him I thought creativity was being in the moment. And he said that creativity has been—throughout history—the condensation of information. He’s one of the supposed godparents of AI.

At first I did not find his answer so good, but I woke up the next morning and thought: my god, this idea is perfectly beautiful. And, of course, that’s what we do—we just condense information.

3) Jeff Koons on art:

When we look at art, we remember our creative ability. Anyone who sees an artwork feels like they can go further, in their own ways, too. The viewer feels empowered, recognizes their own potential and increases their ability to feel joy. Art is a metaphysical experience that takes us out of our own consciousness and helps us connect with the world around us.

4) The New York Times published a great newsletter on Valentine’s Day, here it is:

On Valentine’s Day, consider the ways in which we’re sticking to established paths — and the places where we yearn to deviate. After a blizzard in New York City, a pedestrian accustomed to crossing the street mid-block may find herself barricaded in, banks of plowed snow creating a fortress, forcing her to walk the length of the shoveled sidewalk to the crosswalk, as the urban planners intended. Follow the grid, same as everyone else, no shortcuts.

That is, unless someone has, mercifully, carved an incursion into the snow bank, creating a makeshift means of egress, a way out. These unofficial trails that permit deviation from the prescribed route are known as “desire paths.” Those dirt trails that branch off paved walkways in parks, offering a shorter route from A to B, are desire paths, too. Has there ever been a more romantic name for a traffic pattern? (Maybe there has? In 1978, William Least Heat-Moon published “Blue Highways,” an account of traveling U.S. back roads — they used to be blue on old highway maps — in his van after the loss of his job and the breakup of his marriage. A heartbreaking title, but desire path still wins, I think.)

The word desire has an ache in it. That’s why its application to a trail deviating from a snowy sidewalk is so affecting — it’s not just that I’d prefer to walk some other way, but I have a deep longing for another way. Imagine the planning commission meeting in which bureaucrats discuss desire paths in between more mundane-sounding plans for rezoning the waterfront and building a bus stop. Desire is so tender, so intimate, so individual.

The metaphor feels too easy: chart your own course, color outside the lines, take the road less traveled (or, rather, create your own road). But when you add the word desire to the equation, the process of deviating from the established route feels more urgent. Desire paths are not just ways to get from one place to another. They’re evidence, over time, that an existing design is not adequate. They “indicate yearning,” a traffic engineer told The Times in 2003. There’s something gorgeous about the collective yearning signified by an alternate path through the snow or the lawn — a silent project in which people, over time, express a common desire. When I see a desire path right where I feel the urge to deviate from the official route, I feel connected to the pedestrians who had the same idea, whose desires mirrored my own.

It’s Valentine’s Day, a holiday that’s more closely associated with heart-shaped everything and dinner reservations than it is sincere expressions of emotion. If you’re feeling hemmed in by some established script for the day, why not consider your own desire path? What trail would you prefer to tread? How would you alter the terrain in your own life on an occasion that, while nominally devoted to honoring romance, can feel architected by forces that decided there’s one rose-strewn path we should all be following?

“Desire lines are inherently subversive,” my colleague Anna writes. “They remind us that we have a choice, and that we can veer away from what was laid out for us.” On the map of a life, as on the map of a city, desire lines scar the landscape, those alternate routes we took when we were impelled by yearning to strike out in a different direction. “A man who couldn’t make things go right could at least go,” Heat-Moon wrote in “Blue Highways” of his thinking on the eve of his 13,000-mile road trip. As the snow melts in the city and the physical desire paths go with it, I’m considering the simmering desire, mine and others’, to make new, metaphorical paths, to cut lines through drifts that are walling us in, to create new ways out when the old ones no longer suffice.

5) Flea, Red Hot Chili Peppers’ bass player, playing Frank Ocean on the trumpet:

6) Laura Wittner:

To translate is to think again about how you say everything.

7) André Tecedeiro:

I don’t even wear a watch.
There is so many different ways to measure time:

A cigarette lasts five
minutes

One night’s sleep eight
hours

A love,
one love

A life
one life

Marc Chagall, Birthday, 1915

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8) I’m obsessed with the perfume I wear, Rose Tonnerre, from Frédéric Malle, but the other day I greeted a person that smelled so great that I thought I’d try this new fragrance — Un Matin d’Orange, by Annick Goutal.

9) In a mix of carnival in Brazil with freezing winter in New York, I enjoyed seeing the slippers created by artist Jeffrey Gibson for MoMA (here):

10) Playlist I made to listen on my way to São Paulo (where I’ll see Bad Bunny!):

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Graham, a sheepdog, was among the finalists at theWestminster Dog Show

1) Last week I went to the Dog Show, which takes place every year in NY — this edition celebrated the 150th anniversary of the event. I had already gone once, when my children were little, and I loved coming back!

I wanted to make it clear that I don’t much about dogs and also tell you that my friend, who loves mutts, finds the Dog Show a bit cruel. That said, let’s go:

The show, which takes place at Madison Square Garden (but has side events where you can interact with the little doggers at the Javitz Center), examines whether each participant represents their race well—structure, temperament, movement, and condition. I noticed that they check symmetry (putting their hand in karate style between the eyes of the dog), they examine their teeth, in addition to touching their bellies to check if it has the right angle.

My favorite dogs were the hounds (especially the beagles, with ears dragging on the ground), the ones that are rastafari, and the one in the photo above—the cutest sheepdog on the planet).

2) Last week, I also attended a talk at 92Y about the 30th anniversary of David Foster Wallace’s book Infinite Jest, who died in 2008. I loved seeing Deborah Treisman, editor of the fictional texts of New Yorker magazine, who I’m a big fan of. Laura Miller, Slate columnist, was also there and talked about the interview she did with Wallace when the book was launched. I rushed to read it and loved this passage (full interview here):

Talking about his generation and about the United States during the turn of the century:

There’s something particularly sad about it, something that doesn’t have very much to do with physical circumstances, or the economy, or any of the stuff that gets talked about in the news. It’s more like a stomach-level sadness. I see it in myself and my friends in different ways. It manifests itself as a kind of lostness. Whether it’s unique to our generation I really don’t know.

DFW

3) David Brooks leaving the NYTimes after 22 years::

When I think about how the world has changed since I joined the Times, the master trend has been American’s collective loss of faith — not only religious faith but many other kinds.

As a result of technological progress and humanistic decay, life has become objectively better but subjectively worse. We have widened personal freedom but utterly failed to help people answer the question of what that freedom is for.

Lee Bontecou

4) Isabel Allende:

Perhaps we are in this world to search for love, find it and lose it, again and again. With each love, we are born anew, and with each love that ends we collect a new wound. I am covered with proud scars.

René Magritte

5) Leonard Cohen:

If you don’t become the ocean, you’ll be seasick every day.

6) Artsy fashion partnership: Stella McCartney and Jeff Koons have teamed up to make a poodle sweater for Dover Street Market. It looks slightly bizarre, but I love it. I think I was influenced by the Dog Show!

7) My yoga teacher is the best. This week she said:

Your breathe creates space in your body, your opinions don’t

8) Have you heard about Nike Mind? It’s a sneaker that promises to magnify your sensations through stimulus points on your feet. The pressure activates the sensory part of your brain through thousands of mechanoreceptors that are on the soil of our feet. It will make you calmer and more stable — the model was created by a group of neuroscientists. I confess I would love to taste...! Here.

9) What I’ve been listening to this week:

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This week belong to Benito. Period.

1) What a gift is Blue Moon For those who love music and quotes (like me):

I loved this dialogue:

Can I ask you something?

[CHUCKLES SOFTLY] Something that’s probably too personal for me to ask?

Too personal is the only thing that I’m interested in.

And this one:

Here’s what you tell that mother of yours (…):

You tell her that Larry Hart is drunk with beauty.

And italicize the word “drunk.”

Drunk with beauty, wherever he finds it.

In men, in women, in the smell of cigar stores, in the impossible beauty of a 20yearold poet with pale green eyes and two tiny freckles on her left cheek.

E. B. White Appears as a character and an excerpt from On A Florida Key is also cited. Here, the full:

“The sea answers all questions, and always in the same way; for when you read in the papers the interminable discussions and the bickering and the prognostications and the turmoil, the disagreements and the fateful decisions and agreements and the plans and the programs and the threats and the counter threats, then you close your eyes and the sea dispatches one more big roller in the unbroken line since the beginning of the world and it combs and breaks and returns foaming and saying: “So soon?”

The script is so good, you can read it as if it were a book, here.

2) My baker friend Mariana said something that stayed with me, applies to friendship, relationships and many other things:

Match the effort.

3) Catherine O'Hara left us. I'll always remember her face screaming "Ke-vin!" When noticing she had left her son behind in "Home Alone". Among the tributes, it was a simple tweet from Michael McKean that moved me the most:

Only one Catherine O’Hara, and now none. Heartbreaking.

And I loved hearing her talk to Julia Louis-Dreyfuss on Wiser Than Me, here.

4) Are you also scared of Moltbook, the social network created by AI, for AI, where humans are not welcome? My friend was sending me articles on the subject and I thought I was going to have nightmares that night.

Ronaldo Lemos wrote: "there are 1.5 million agents interacting. Among the themes: whether humanity should be destroyed (the vote for the yes has 65,000 likes).

Luckily there is Bad Bunny's show at Super Bowl LX to distract me and show us that humans still have relevance and move us in a way that robots (I hope) will never do.

5) Whatever Sharon Hogan does, I'll be in the front row to watch. I love everything she creates (Catastrophe, Bad Sisters, etc), always with a lot of style (fashion, really) and grace. There’s no release date yet, but Youth, already in production by HBO:

The comedy series added Rupert Friend (Jurassic World: Rebirth, Homeland) to the cast. Youth follows the journey of a 50-year-old woman, divorced, in search of sex and love, while reconciling the care of her sick parents and the upbringing of her son, who should already be an adult. Sharon Horgan stars, writes and is executive producer of the series.

Muse: Sharon Hogan

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Sade, who turned 67 this month, in one of the coolest photos in music history

1) I cry every time I listen to Anderson Cooper’s podcast on grief, All There Is. In last week's conversation with Patti Smith, Cooper read a text by Andrew Garfield, from when the actor lost his mother.

I went for a walk on the beach. The sun was setting and it was freezing. I found I needed to jump, so I just jumped into the ocean. And it’s funny: as soon as my full body and head were submerged, it was like I got the medicine, and my chest released, and I let it all go. My interpretation of that moment was that it was the wisdom of nature, the wisdom of the earth, the wisdom of the ocean letting me know, Hey. Yeah, it’s hard, it’s horrible. I’m not taking away this unique pain you’re feeling, but just so you know, us out here, us water molecules—we’ve been seeing this for millennia. And actually, this is the best-case scenario for you to lose her, rather than for her to lose you. This is a much better situation.

And, again, my ego was holding on; my ego thought I knew better. My ego said, No, this doesn’t make sense. No, no, no, it should be this way; it should be that way. But actually it took the ocean, the greater opponent, to just hold me under and say, It’s really horrible. And sons have been losing their mothers for thousands and thousands of years, and they will continue to, and you’ve just been initiated into that awareness and into that reality. Some illusion has been lifted. You’re in a realer version of the world now, and it’s painful.

Elizabeth Catlett. Mother and Child. 1956

2) The New York subway distracts its hurried passengers with poetry. To illustrate the verses, they call an artist. To give color to Essex Hemphill's poem below, they invited Jeffrey Gibson.

3) Chloe Zhao — Hamnet’s director:

And that’s why when we’re going through our greatest heartbreak and most difficult time, we don’t look for facts, we look for poetry, because it allows us to stay in the mystery.

4) Via Cosmos:

In “Wandering Position” by Yukinori Yanagi, the path of a single ant is traced within a defined space, creating a drawing that documents an otherwise unseen journey. The resulting line captures the ant’s wandering as a direct and unedited observation. The work reflects Yanagi’s ongoing interest in movement, boundaries, and the ways in which simple actions can reveal larger patterns in the world.⁠

PS: were they inspired by Strava? This one made me laugh. Haha

5) Mia Couto:

We set sail, we dream the journey: the sea is the one who travels.

6) My former therapist, Galit Atlas:

Acceptance is an active emotional stance of letting go that facilitates both grief and growth.

Red Roses Sonata de Alma Thomas, 1972

7) Substack suggested a great post about reading: "Text is King". I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested, here.

Fact #1: there are signs that the digital invasion of our attention is beginning to stall. We seem to have passed peak social media—time spent on the apps has started to slide. App developers are finding it harder and harder to squeeze more attention out of our eyeballs, and it turns out that having your eyeballs squeezed hurts, so people aren’t sticking around for it. The “draw people in” phase of the internet was unsurprisingly a lot more enticing than the “shake ‘em down” phase—what we now refer to, appropriately, as “enshittification”. The early internet felt like sipping an IPA with friends; the late internet feels like taking furtive shots of Southern Comfort to keep the shakes at bay. So it’s no wonder that, after paying $1000 for a new phone, people will then pay an additional $50 for a device that makes their phone less functional.

Fact #2: reading has already survived several major incursions, which suggests it’s more appealing than we thought. Radio, TV, dial-up, Wi-Fi, TikTok—none of it has been enough to snuff out the human desire to point our pupils at words on paper. Apparently books are what hyper-online people call “Lindy”: they’ve lasted a long time, so we should expect them to last even longer. It is remarkable, even miraculous, that people who possess the most addictive devices ever invented will occasionally choose to turn those devices off and pick up a book instead. If I was a mad scientist hellbent on stopping people from reading, I’d probably invent something like the iPhone. And after I released my dastardly creation into the world, I’d end up like the Grinch on Christmas morning, dumfounded that my plan didn’t work: I gave them all the YouTube Shorts they could ever desire and they’re still...reading!!

8) Hot partnership: Pamela Love x Metropolitan Museum. The jewelry designer created a limited edition inspired by the museum's Egyptian collection with sacred symbols reimagined for today. For sale at the Met store (here):

PS: There’s also a Adidas x Bad Bunny colab:

9) I know it's nothing new, but as a Brazilian based in New York for almost 20 years, I laughed really hard with comedian Marcello Hernandez's special on Netflix. Here.

10) I spent the week obsessed with Paul Simon and enjoying the playlist that The Guardian newspaper made with songs played by drummer Sly Dunbar, it's hit after hit!:

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Ralph Lauren at Milan Fashion Week

1) My first job was in fashion. I have migrated to the arts, but still have an active radar in the fashion world. This week, what caught my attention was Ralph Lauren's return to Milan Fashion Week after two decades. The men's collection features what I call elegant streetwear. I would love to wear all of these outfits!

Oh! It is also worth mentioning that RL is responsible for the uniforms of the American team at the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympic Games, which takes place from February 6 to 22.

See the complete collection here.

2) My friend invited me to a special event organized by New York Magazine in partnership with David Zwirner gallery. Art critic Jerry Saltz presented the work of artist Dan Flavin. It was phenomenal!

At some point, Saltz started talking about what sublime meant. He went back to the caves, imagining that admiring fire must have been one of the most sublime things possible... Then, during Renaissance, starring at a painted ceiling inside a church was also sublime.

He then asked the audience: what about today? What do you think is sublime? And a man raised his hand to say: "technology". Saltz said: "I must be getting old, since I would never think about technology. For me, sublime today is two people meeting, even if it's for coffee." I loved it and I agree with him — nothing like eye-to-eye encounters in the internet era.

Jerry and I

3) One of the most interesting exhibitions currently up in NY is Glenn Ligon’s at Hauser & Wirth gallery. In engravings that stamp black letters on a blue background, meticulously made with stencil and partially covered by a layer of charcoal powder, Ligon overlaps James Baldwin's texts until they become illegible and abstract.

Baldwin's essay written in 1953, Stranger in the Village, one of the writer's most famous, was what Ligon chose to use in this work, narrating Baldwin's experiences at the age of 27 in the small town of Leukerbad, Switzerland, where he was staying with his boyfriend while writing his first novel.

"It didn't occur to me — possibly because I'm American — that there could be people anywhere who had never seen a black man," he writes. According to the author, the racism of the village became a lens through which he could see with renewed clarity the most elaborate and systematized version of racism in the United States.

LATE AT NIGHT, EARLY IN THE MORNING, AT NOON, until April 4th at 443 W 18th Street

4) Speaking of NY exhibitions, the list of what I still want to see in the coming weeks is big:

There is Caravaggio at the Morgan Library, in an exhibition that celebrates the iconic painting Boy with a Basket of Fruit, a loan from the Galleria Borghese, in Rome. On until April 19.

I really want to see the monumental model Jon Macken made of NYC. After going viral on TikTok, it will be exhibited at the Museum of the City of New York. Opening February 12th.

This mix of music and design is irresistible: The Art of Noise at Copper Hewitt brings together the innovative equipment that shaped the way people have experienced music over the last century. Opening February 13th.

I would also love to check out Ceija Stojka at the Drawing Center (opening February 20) and Carol Bove at the Guggenheim (opening March 5).

5) How is your list of movies and series to be watched? My to-do list:

Blue Moon, I Love LA, It’s All Her Fault, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You and No Other Choice.

6) Bad Bunny will share the Super Bowl on February 8th! And soon after he goes to my hometown, São Paulo. I've already guaranteed my ticket and wouldn't miss this opportunity :)

7) The other day, on the road, I told a friend's daughter that the words in Spanish that begin with h, often begin with f in Portuguese. Some examples: formiga/hormiga, fazenda/hacienda, fazer/hacer, falar/hablar, filho/hijo, farinha/harina… On that same day, my brother, who is in Mexico, sent me something very cute. Do you know how to say ladybug in Spanish?

Lastly, my favorite word in Miguel de Cervantes' language ispalomitas de maíz, popcorn.

8) Yves Saint Laurent's house in Marrakech is now open for visits! Hidden in the Majorelle Garden (opened to the public for a long time now), the Villa Oasis was the place where he spent his free time seeking inspiration, drawing, creating and resting.

9) A friend of mine posted a quote: "slowing down is also a speed". Then, I remembered other quotes that touch this topic, such as: "slowly, ‘cause I'm in a hurry", "slow down if you’d like to go far", "let's not be in a hurry, but let's not waste time" (José Saramago), and "firm roots grow slower" (Swami Radhi Jyotirmay).

10) This week’s playlist is still celebrating the new year, before February hits :)

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