RECENT FAVOURITE ARTICLES

We first wrote about Christo and Jeanne-Claude in January, when Sotheby’s announced the sale of some of the artists’ work. Bulgarian Christo Vladimirov Javacheff and Morrocan Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon met in Paris in 1958. In 1961, three years after they met in Paris, Christo and Jeanne-Claude began imagining and creating temporary works of art in public spaces. They would marry in 1962 and become one of the world’s most famous artistic collaborations …

WHILE IT HAS been sunny lately and all the leaves are still wonderfully green with only a few touches of yellow here and there, and only a few that have fallen along pathways and around the foot of signs at coffee and ice cream shops, it was blustery today. The kind of blustery wind that has a coolness attached to it, the kind that is meant to shake leaves from trees and carry them away …

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, signed off last month on a new initiative code-named Project Amplify. The effort, which was hatched at an internal meeting in January, had a specific purpose: to use Facebook’s News Feed, the site’s most important digital real estate, to show people positive stories about the social network. The idea was that pushing pro-Facebook news items — some of them written by the company — would improve its image in the eyes of its users, three people with knowledge of the effort said. But the move was sensitive because Facebook had not previously positioned the News Feed as a place where it burnished its own reputation. Several executives at the meeting were shocked by the proposal, one attendee said.

It’s simple, we are often told: All you have to do to maintain a healthy weight is ensure that the number of calories you ingest stays the same as the number of calories you expend. If you take in more calories, or energy, than you use, you gain weight; if the output is greater than the input, you lose it. But while we’re often conscious of burning calories when we’re working out, 55 to 70 percent of what we eat and drink actually goes toward fueling all the invisible chemical reactions that take place in our body to keep us alive. “We think about metabolism as just being about exercise, but it’s so much more than that,” says Herman Pontzer, an associate professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke University. “It’s literally the running total of how busy your cells are throughout the day.” Figuring out your total energy expenditure tells you how many calories you need to stay alive. But it also tells you “how the body is functioning,” Pontzer says. “There is no more direct measure of that than energy expenditure.”

THIS WEEKEND WE were glued to the news, trying to find more information about the missing van-life blogger Gabby Petito and the generally strange circumstances surrounding the entire case. Coincidentally, we had been talking about the whole #vanlife phenomenon which has swept social media the past few years, because P had been watching videos of tiny homes and the algorithm began throwing converted vans across his path …

YOU MAY HAVE noticed a certain modular sofa set all over social media the past year and a half in the homes of celebrities and influencers alike, and you may even have known that it was the Camaleonda sofa, originally designed by Mario Bellini over fifty years ago, but did you know that it has become so popular in contemporary times that it was reissued in 2020? The Camaleonda currently has such a following, that four of the homes we featured recently here at TIG all included it: here, here, here, and here. In this instalment of Design History, we will be taking a closer look at the über-trendy Camaleonda, beginning with its designer, Mario Bellini.