Journal

Who curates those TED talks? Juliet Blake is fascinated by people, a passion that informs both her work and her portrait collection.

When I ask TED’s Juliet Blake how she came to have a wall full of portraits in her Brooklyn home, she responds wonderfully, with asides embedded in digressions: “I grew up in the north of England, and my sister was 17 years older (she’s an Academy Award-winning costume designer)—and I was convinced for the longest time she was my mother, which really screwed me up, but it turned out I just had very old parents and was a late mistake. But anyway, my sister was a really good painter, and I now have a lot of her work in my house, and so I sort of grew up in a quite artistic environment, and my earliest memories are of her painting, or of her work on the walls.” Following an early family trip to the National Portrait Gallery in London, a special love of portraiture was born.

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Cricket Bitters are meant to be the gateway drug to insect cuisine.

Edible insects are widely touted as a way for the world to get more protein without the environmental problems that come with raising cows or pigs. The problem, of course, is that most people in the West aren’t quite ready to embrace the idea of eating bugs.

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Lawsuits, drained finances, and death threats: Inside the real terrors of Russ McKamey’s notorious McKamey Manor.

Russ McKamey just got back from McLeansboro, Illinois and things did not go well.

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Designed by Bureau V and engineered by Arup, National Sawdust keeps the focus squarely on sound.

Aside from a kaleidoscopic mural and a slim ribbon of windows, National Sawdust, a new performance venue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, looks almost like any other industrial conversion on the outside. But step inside the narrow entrance and that’s where it comes alive. You’ll find yourself in a tall lobby bracketed by two angular, tile-clad walls. The polished concrete floor and brick shell nod to the structure’s past life as a factory, but the faceted surfaces and sculptural chandeliers signal its current incarnation as a creative space. Go another layer deeper and you’re in the performance hall, a soaring white room criss-crossed with black bands.

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Transforming Fashion explores eight years of groundbreaking collections that merge science, technology, and high fashion.

When people talk about Iris van Herpen, they often talk about unlikely intersections: of fashion and technology; technology and craftsmanship; otherwordly creations and those inspired by nature. Sarah Schleuning, the curator of Iris van Herpen: Transforming Fashion, opening next week at the High Museum in Atlanta, throws another one into the ring: a blend of singular focus and big, expansive ideas.

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For Dubai Design Week, Loci Architecture + Design constructed six pavilions that showcase the beauty of sand.

Sand is an inherently playful material—just ask any kids building castles at the beach. To create pavilions for a Dubai Design Week exhibition themed “Games: The Element of Play in Culture,” local firm Loci Architecture + Design naturally turned their attention to the material. The challenge became about how to create a modern form that wouldn’t interfere with the works exhibited within.

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Middle Eastern governments can’t stop pumping the oil that is going to destroy their own countries.

When the heat index went over 160 degrees in parts of Iraq this July, the government was forced to call a mandatory four-day vacation for everyone. It was too hot to go outside.

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Whitechapel was designed to look like an abandoned London Underground station turned secret clubhouse.

A little over a year ago, Martin Cate—the restauranteur and cocktail expert best known for his San Francisco rum bar Smuggler’s Cove—decided to expand into new territory. His business partner, Alex Smith, wanted to take on gin, but they didn’t want to open up just another gin bar. As Cate puts it, they wanted to “smuggle-ize” it: design an immersive experience that makes their customers feel like they’ve stepped out of San Francisco and into a Victorian Steampunk fantasyland.

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All Black Cats Are Not Alike chronicles the strange habits, peculiarities and tastes of 50 fabulous felines.

If there’s one thing cat owners can agree on, it’s that their cat is absolutely, utterly unlike any other cat on the planet. You could chalk that up to pet-owner fanaticism, but most cats actually are little weirdos—each has their own strange habits, distinct peculiarities and rarified tastes. For proof, look no further than the 50 felines profiled in Amy Goldwasser and Peter Arkle‘s delightful new illustration book All Black Cats Are Not Alike.

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In Slate, Caroline Sinders writes that SXSW representatives failed to address her concerns about GamerGate-related threats.

Earlier this week, SXSW Interactive, the popular annual tech festival held each March in Austin, announced it was canceling two schedule panels about gaming culture and online harassment. The move prompted backlash from feminist advocates and media outlets, including BuzzFeed and Vox Media, both of whom threatened not to attend the festival if SXSW didn’t reverse its decision.

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