Taste

The Second Reading Is the First Real One

Taste · Pages · No. 10 The Second Reading Is the First Real One The first pass is reconnaissance. You were busy finding out what happens. Nearly everything the book... Read more...

Chairil Anwar Wrote Like a Shout

Taste · Pages · No. 09 Chairil Anwar Wrote Like a Shout Twenty six years, roughly seventy poems, and a national language permanently rewired. Indonesian modernism arrived in a single... Read more...

Pramoedya Wrote It in His Head First

Taste · Pages · No. 08 Pramoedya Wrote It in His Head First On Buru Island they took his pens. So he composed the Quartet aloud, from memory, and told... Read more...

Monocle, on Paper

The magazine that reads like an airport lounge for the curious, and the conviction it sells: that quality of attention is a way of living. The paper stock alone is... Read more...

The Book of Five Rings, at the Bench

Musashi wrote his strategy manual in a cave, two weeks before dying. Four centuries later it reads like workshop notes. What a sword text teaches a perfume bench. Read more...

Traditional Japanese samurai armor in a museum display

Musashi, Read Slowly

Yoshikawa's thousand-page epic about getting better at one thing forever. The underdog's book, and the case for reading it at the pace it was serialized. Read more...

Borges Predicted Infinite Scroll

The Library of Babel, an infinite archive where everything exists and nothing can be found, is a literal description of the modern internet. Written by a blind librarian in 1941. Read more...

A hand holding a brush drawing kanji script

Sei Shōnagon Invented the Listicle

A Heian court lady's lists of things that quicken the heart read exactly like the internet's favorite format, a thousand years early. What her version had that ours lost. Read more...