The Art of Cigar Rolling by Hand
In the Partagas factory on Calle Industria in Havana, a torcedor assembles a Lusitania double corona from five different tobacco leaves.
2024-12-13
JA
James Alderton
128 articles
Showing 81–100 of 128 articles
Inside a German Optical Lens Workshop
At the Leica factory in Wetzlar, optical glass blanks from Schott AG are transformed into precision lenses through grinding, polishing, centring, and coating operations taking up to three months per element.
2024-12-13
Why Some Fabrics Last Decades While Others Fall Apart in Months
A Harris Tweed jacket purchased in 1970 remains wearable today.
2024-12-07
The Architecture of New York's Art Deco Towers
The Chrysler Building, completed in 1930, remains the most exuberant expression of Art Deco ambition.
2024-11-28
The Architecture of Rome's Baroque Churches
When you step inside Sant'Andrea al Quirinale, designed by Bernini and completed in 1670, the oval interior unfolds as continuous theatrical experience.
2024-11-27
The Architecture of London's Brutalist Icons
The Barbican Estate, completed in 1976, rises from bombed-out ruins of the City of London in massive concrete terraces and towers housing over four thousand residents above a concert hall, theatre, cinema, library, and art gallery.
2024-11-26
The Architecture of Tokyo's Hidden Temples
Tucked between a convenience store and a parking garage in Minato ward, Zojoji Temple's main gate rises fifteen metres above the pavement.
2024-11-25
The 10-Year Watch: What Makes It Worth It
A mechanical watch from Tudor or Omega contains between one hundred and three hundred components machined to micron tolerances.
2024-11-21
Inside the Workshop: A Scottish Cashmere Mill
At Johnstons of Elgin mill in Moray, Scotland, hair fibre from Mongolia is so fine it takes the fleece of four goats to produce a single sweater.
2024-11-18
The Illustrators Whose Work Defined an Era of Book Covers
In 1945, Edward McKnight Kauffer designed a jacket for T.
2024-11-13
The Musicians Who Build Their Own Instruments
Harry Partch spent decades building an orchestra of instruments that could play the forty-three-tone scale he believed necessary to capture human speech.
2024-11-11
The Second Lives of Decommissioned Churches as Concert Halls
When a nineteenth-century church in Hamburg was deconsecrated, its Gothic nave possessed an acoustic reverberation time of nearly three seconds.
2024-11-06
On the Beauty of an Unfinished Painting
Cezanne's The Large Bathers, housed in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, shows patches of bare canvas between its monumental figures.
2024-11-04
The Forgotten Female Composers of the Romantic Era
In 1846, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel composed a piano cycle called Das Jahr, assigning each month a character piece of remarkable harmonic invention.
2024-11-02
How Dieter Rams Designed Calm Into Everyday Objects
In 1961, Dieter Rams designed the T 1000 world receiver radio for Braun.
2024-10-31
The Quiet Revolution in Scandinavian Contemporary Art
Scandinavian contemporary art has achieved international prominence while refusing the spectacle that characterises much of the global art market.
2024-10-25
The Renaissance of the Independent Literary Magazine
The Paris Review, founded by George Plimpton in 1953 from a café in the Marais, has survived seven decades by maintaining a singular editorial principle: publish the work, not the name.
2024-10-21
How Public Radio Shaped a Generation of Curious Men
Ira Glass's This American Life, which premiered on Chicago's WBEZ in 1995, did not invent narrative radio but it codified its modern form: a theme, three or four acts, first-person narration that was simultaneously confessional and analytical, and a production aesthetic that valued awkward pauses and verbal stumbles as markers of authenticity.
2024-10-17
What Hemingway's Notebooks Reveal About Writing Under Pressure
Ernest Hemingway's working notebooks, held at the John F.
2024-10-14
The Museum Guard Who Memorised Every Painting
Patrick Bringley worked as a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for over a decade, standing in the same galleries for eight hours a day, five days a week.
2024-10-12