“I think I then immediately boxed my heart away and tightened the great padlock over my chest so that I couldn’t feel anything that would undermine or dissolve me…”
My Pop Life: The Night – Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons
Francis Bacon: The Essays
“I doe now publish my Essayes; which, of all my other works, have been most Currant: For that, as it seems, they come home, to Mens Businesse, and Bosomes.”
Things Were Never Normal
This exhibition highlights “third spaces”: components of an area’s social infrastructure, communal spaces outside of home and work such as taverns, church picnics, diners, restaurants, and movie theaters—sites where we might gather, if we could agree.
Chicken Castle
These observations and the pictures taken from them don’t speak in specifics, but when you are in a place where people, over time, have been able to imprint parts of themselves on the built environment, you can feel the city speaking to you in some way, though the language is only partly translatable or transferable.
Syllabub Cookies
Suffice to say that Syllabub, sometimes a drink, sometimes a desssert, is a very very old recipe. It’s the sort of thing Old Fezziwig would serve at his holiday party in A Christmas Carol. It’s the sort of thing David Copperfield would serve at his bachelors’ dinner party, the party which resulted in the best description of being drunk in all of literature.
Il Sorpasso
The heart of the film is the unlikely friendship between Bruno and Roberto.
December
A collection of all the articles we’ve published over the past month, for those who like to savor their Magpies’ tidings as an issue. We’re really honored this month to share photography from Paris, art from Ottawa, a brilliant article written in Tokyo about a Ugandan record label, along with beautiful poetry, memoir, and more.
Thinking Makes it So: Platon Karataev and Epictetus
The harder his position became and the more terrible the future, the more independent of that position in which he found himself were the joyful and comforting thoughts, memories, and imaginings that came to him
Frédéric Carrayol: Lost Images From the Sink
This craftsman, as he likes to define himself, photographer and shooter, freezes a free and wild nature with the sandstone of his wanderings across the continents. Then he returned it on paper with coffee toning, complex emulsions and rare treatments.
Double-crusted Savory Pie (Vegetarian)
A perfect vegetarian holiday meal. It’s hearty and flavorful, and it has real center-of-the-plate, star-of-the-meal attention-grabbing qualities.

