Designers & Books Blog

 

856 blog entries
November 20, 2013

New models for professionals who want to live a life based on courage as opposed to fear.

By Deborah Berke October 23, 2013

This book includes some of Susan Sontag’s best-known essays. My favorite, “Against Interpretation,” has this to say: “Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all.”

April 12, 2023

I have enjoyed her stories and her essays, but connect best to Grace Paley’s poetry. Read anything by her.

By Deborah Berke December 26, 2013

A great exhortation to all of us to be questioning observers.

By Deborah Sussman December 10, 2019

A brilliant example of “less is more” and how affecting such discipline can be.

By Deborah Sussman November 1, 2013

Read as much of Proust as you can, starting with Swann’s Way, for a profound description of individuals and a socio-political climate. Like a pebble thrown into a lake, the famous story of eating a “madeleine” begins an epic masterpiece. In Proust’s invention the lake becomes an ocean. This work is worth the effort, and will exercise your brain.

By Deborah Sussman December 31, 2013

Proves that hands are still viable tools for making art.

By Diana Balmori March 3, 2014

Gardens are fundamental, Robert Pogue Harrison says, in giving order to our relation to nature, rather than bringing an order to nature.

By Diana Balmori February 19, 2015

A priceless observation is: “To be without method is deplorable, but to depend entirely on method is worse. The end of all method is to seem to have no method.”

By Dominique Browning May 27, 2014

I happen to love all of Hicks’s books. . . But the fabric book, written in 1971, pushes the envelope—as he did with his bold, idiosyncratic decorating style—and remains a useful eye-opener today.