Joachim Pissarro interviews Jeff Koons at The Brooklyn Rail:
Rail: I’d like to spin the thread of porcelain and ceramic as a material culture that runs throughout your works.
Koons: My grandparents had porcelain figurines. When I was a kid, I would play with them and I would be so excited. It was titillation, really. And the excitement that comes from this, that excitement is equal to any experience anybody else could have, even looking at a Michelangelo. You can’t really define how one is of more value, because as a young child you don’t know those hierarchies, but you do feel excitement, stimulation. I like that porcelain is a material that was democratized and became ceramic. So even my family could have porcelain when you know this came originally from the emperor’s kitchen. So the concept of porcelain—or ceramic—to me they are very close. I don’t make a distinction.
more here.
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Erik Satie was the truest bad boy of musical modernism in the hypercompetitive market of Paris before World War I, crammed with aspiring bad boys. He took up pieties and profaned them. He took up blasphemy and somehow blasphemed against that. His music is ingeniously confounding. It received no shortage of vicious criticism, and Satie responded in kind. A postcard to the critic and composer Jean Poueigh began, “Monsieur Fuckface…Famous Gourd and Composer for Nitwits.” He lost the ensuing libel suit, adding to his eternal financial woes. Among his many achievements, he’s near the top of the (long) list of self-destructive classical composers.
The race to
I have arrived to present to you the Ultimate List, otherwise known as the List of Lists—in which I read all (or at least many) of the Best Of lists on the internet and count which books are recommended most.
At dawn Hanoi is already awake. Motorbikes swarm beneath balconies before the light has quite broken, a mechanical chorus that carries the city into motion. From the window of my apartment overlooking Tây Hồ, the lake lies bruised with mist until the first glare of sun turns it to metal. On the street below, vendors set down baskets of fruit, incense burns outside a pagoda, and the smell of French bread mingles with diesel.
With the arrival of 
In Mexico City on 27 September 1842, a man was delivering an unusual eulogy. Fixing his eyes on what he called ‘the mutilated remains of an illustrious leader of independence’, the speaker was so moved that he felt he must ‘shed ardent tears over the remains of the hero’ before him. The occasion, however, was not quite as sad as he made out. For the hero, Antonio López de Santa Anna, a general and many times president of Mexico, was listening to the speech. What was being buried, for the second time, was a leg the general had lost in battle years earlier. Santa Anna was attached to his leg, even if it was no longer attached to him. Now president, he had organised for it to be disinterred, brought to Mexico City in a glass case like a holy relic and then reburied with pomp and ceremony beneath a lavish monument. Two years later, after a revolt toppled Santa Anna from power, the leg was exhumed again and dragged through the streets while people shouted, ‘Kill the lame bastard!’ and ‘Death to the cripple!’ Less than two years after that, in 1846, Santa Anna was president once more, charged with defending Mexico against US invasion. He was not up to the task, and soon the Stars and Stripes was unfurled over the magnificent central square in the capital city. The occupying US troops left only after Mexico was forced to sign away half its national territory, including present-day California.
Weeks ago, the sweet family across the street put up their festive holiday lights. The house on the corner followed, then three more houses, all before I had even managed to order a Thanksgiving turkey.
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With just a single injection, a new treatment transforms immune cells in cancer patients into efficient tumor-killing machines. Now equipped with homing beacons, the cells rapidly track down and destroy their cancerous foes.
When Allen Levi, a musician who had written scores of songs over his career, began writing his first novel, his plan was to finish it and stick it in a drawer. “I just wanted to see if I had the muscle to write a piece of long fiction,” he said. The resulting book, “Theo of Golden,” is about an older man who moves to a city in Georgia and begins buying 92 pencil portraits off a coffee shop wall to return them to their subjects and “rightful owners.” After a group of Levi’s friends read the novel and encouraged him not to let the manuscript molder, he self-published it through Amazon in the fall of 2023.
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Waymo’s co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana made a striking prediction this week:
This has been a year in which terrible ideas buried and forgotten rose from the dead and ate many brains.