The Case for Keeping a Small Number of Good Glasses, Plates, and Knives
The case for the small kitchen of considered objects is not the minimalist case. It is the older case — that a…
Theodore Brennan writes about culture and the conduct of ordinary life — what we eat, where we sleep, how we treat one another at table, and what the rooms we choose to inhabit say about us. He has been at this work, in one form or another, for nearly two decades, with bylines in magazines that still pay for long sentences and that still keep copy editors on staff. He divides his year between a small apartment in Brooklyn Heights and a rented top floor in the Príncipe Real neighborhood of Lisbon, and he is unembarrassed by the obvious editorial cliché of the arrangement. The writing here is the writing he wanted to publish but could not always place in the magazines that have been steadily commissioning less of it. The tone is considered. The subjects are unfashionable in the way that the best subjects often are. The aim is to take culture seriously without taking the discussion of culture too seriously.
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The case for the small kitchen of considered objects is not the minimalist case. It is the older case — that a…
The small daily practice of writing three sentences in a notebook is one of the older practices of adult self-management, and it…
The right size of apartment, for an adult or a couple living without children, is smaller than most contemporary apartment design assumes.…
The small bookshop, of fifteen hundred square feet, run by people who read what they sell, is one of the more durable…
A small note on what has been on the reading table this spring, with brief and unenthusiastic notes on each. The aim…
The morning coffee made slowly at home, with attention, is one of the few daily practices that has held up against the…
The handwritten thank-you note has, against all reasonable prediction, become more meaningful in 2026 than it was at any previous point in…
Something has happened, in the past several years, to the small-hotel landscape of the European cities — and the most interesting development…
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The slow-furniture movement has been around long enough now that it is no longer a movement so much as a small, settled…
The dinner party went away for a while and has now started to come back. It is worth saying plainly that the…