The Nutritional Impossibility of Australia

As early as the first century A.D., Western cartographers and geographers began to speculate that there must be a large continent in the southern hemisphere, to act as a counterbalance to the large known landmasses of the north. Beginning with Magellan, explorers...

Landscapes of Quarantine: Call for Applications

President Richard Nixon addressing quarantined Apollo astronauts; photo courtesy of NASA. I’m very excited to announce my husband (Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG) and I will be hosting a design studio called Landscapes of Quarantine in New York City this autumn –...

Cupcake Gentrification

The unstoppable rise of the cupcake over the past five years has been analysed in terms of retro-food chic and nostalgia, the infantilisation of Western civilization, the triumph of appearance over substance, and even American political culture. After all, a cupcake...

Secret Meat

J. Crew’s La Boucherie boxer shorts illustrate French cuts of meat such as the poetically named faux-filet, tendron, and bavette d’aloyau, via Eat Me Daily. I first saw sot l’y laisse on a restaurant menu as a teenager, somewhere in south west...

Digest | London Yields, Harvested

London’s Building Center hosted a daylong seminar at the end of May called London Yields: Getting Urban Agriculture off the Ground. The speakers covered a lot of terrain—so, instead of a full recap of the event, the following list simply explores some of the...