I suppose there are two types of souvenirs that we can pick up while traveling: mass-manufactured tchotchkes like fridge magnets or snow globes, or local artisan-made trinkets and wares. The latter has come to represent cultures outside of their locales, an opportunity for tourists to take a little bit of their experiences with them home.

Louisa Eunice writing in Design Observer:

The souvenir industry, though vital for many local economies, has long been accused of flattening cultural complexity into digestible clichés, transforming sacred objects into décor, and replacing sustainable materials with cheaper alternatives to meet demand. Yet for countless artisans, participation in that market remains a practical act of endurance: a way to keep culture visible in a world that might otherwise forget it.

So on the flip side, though these souvenirs reduce the cultures of those places to a carved giraffe, sculpted clay bird, or ceremonial mask, I would argue that at least the artifacts can spark conversation.

The fact that a mask can be both a ritual object for the local artisan who made it and a decorative item for the tourist who bought it says more about resilience than dilution. It reveals how objects can inhabit multiple meanings without losing their essence. What we often call “appropriation” may, in these moments, also be adaptation, a negotiation that allows heritage to stay visible, if altered, in the modern world. 

To understand souvenirs this way is to see them not as hollow tokens but as collaborations: between maker and buyer, local and global, art and economy. When tourists view these pieces as design legacies — works that carry labor, history, and symbolism — the exchange becomes more than commercial. It becomes cultural continuity in motion.

I must admit I’ve tried to read this essay by Frank Chimero—a script from a talk he recently gave—for about a week. I tried to skim it. I tried to fit it into a spare five minutes here and there. But this piece demands active reading. Not because it’s dense. But because it is great.

Chimero reflects on AI and his—and our—relationship to it. How is it being marketed? How do we think about it? How should we use it?

First off, Chimero starts with his conclusion. He believes we should reframe AI to be less like a tool or technology, and more like a musical instrument.

Thinking of AI as an instrument recenters the focus on practice. Instruments require a performance that relies on technique—the horn makes the sound, but how and what you blow into it matters; the drum machine keeps time and plays the samples, but what you sample and how you swing on top of it becomes your signature.

In other words, instruments can surprise you with what they offer, but they are not automatic. In the end, they require a touch. You use a tool, but you play an instrument. It’s a more expansive way of doing, and the doing of it all is important, because that’s where you develop the instincts for excellence. There is no purpose to better machines if they do not also produce better humans.

Then, he wanders off to give examples of four artists and their relationships with technology, stoking his audience—me, us, you—to consider “some more flexibility in how to collaborate with the machine in your own work, creative or otherwise.”

Read the whole piece. Curl up this mid-autumn Sunday afternoon with some hot tea and take the 20–25 minutes to read it and take it in.

’Tis the season for online archives. From GQ comes this archive of the work of Virgil Abloh, the multi-hyphenate creative powerhouse who started as an intern at Fendi and rose to found his own streetwear label Off-White, before becoming artistic director of Louis Vuitton’s menswear collection. He had collabs with Nike, IKEA, and artist Jenny Holzer.

I do think my favorite from this archive is his collection of LV bags. I’m used to seeing them in monochromatic colors, not these bright ones.

If you’ve ever wondered why every version of Hokusai’s “The Great Wave off Kanagawa” feels just a little bit different, this video from the British Museum is a gem. It dives into the subtle variations across 111 known prints and shows how art, time, and technique all leave their mark.

Capucine Korenberg from the British Museum spent over 50 hours just staring at different versions of the print, joking “This is about the same amount of time you would spend brushing your teeth over two years. So, next time you brush your teeth just think of me looking at The Great Wave.”

Here’s a fun visual essay about a artist Yufeng Zhao’s piece “Alt Text in NYC.” It’s a essentially a visual search engine that searches all the text (words) on the streets of New York City. The dataset comprises of over eight million photos from Google Street View! Matt Daniels, writing for The Pudding:

The result is a search engine of much of what’s written in NYC’s streets. It’s limited to what a Google Street View car can capture, so it excludes text in areas such as alleyways and parks, or any writing too small to be read by a moving vehicle.

The scale of the data is immense: over 8 million Google Street View images (from the past 18 years) and 138 million identified snippets of text.

Just over halfway down the article, there is a list of the top 1,000 words in the data. Most are expected words from traffic signs like “stop.” But number twenty-five is “Fedders,” the logo of an air-conditioner brand popular in the 1950s to the 1990s. They’re all over the exteriors of the city’s buildings.

Best viewed on your computer, IMHO.

You might not know his name—I sure didn’t—but you’ll surely recognize his illustration style that came to embody the style du jour of the 1960s and ’70s. Robert E. McGinnis has died at the age of 99. The New York Times has an obituary:

Robert E. McGinnis, an illustrator whose lusty, photorealistic artwork of curvaceous women adorned more than 1,200 pulp paperbacks, as well as classic movie posters for “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” featuring Audrey Hepburn with a cigarette holder, and James Bond adventures including “Thunderball,” died on March 10 at his home in Greenwich, Conn. He was 99.

…

Mr. McGinnis’s female figures from the 1960s and ’70s flaunted a bold sexuality, often in a state of semi undress, whether on the covers of detective novels by John D. MacDonald or on posters for movies like “Barbarella” (1968), with a bikini-clad Jane Fonda, or Bond films starring Sean Connery and Roger Moore.