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Is your reading just an "escape" Your favorite beach read might be a gated community for your conscience. Today, we interrogate the "catharsis commodity" of reading & ask if our reading habits are part of the Hideous Bargain.
Communicate with your local boat owners.The Crime in the Woods
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Kicking from Beyond the 40
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Where love rules, there is no will to power
And where power predominates, love is lacking.
The one is the shadow of the other.
Carl Jung
Park Slope2026 Summer MENS LOOK BOOK
Ill be at Half Price Books at the Dallas flagship location Sun 5/17 from 1-3 PM for a live in-store author appearance! Swing by and say hi where Ill be signing copies of my YA sci-fi novel Unsecret Identity: Eric Icarus - Book One. I hope to see you there!
The second half of a is shorter than the first half, its science
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Emotional Ignorance - Misadventures in the Science of Emotion
Dean Burnett's fifth and most personal book delves into the real science of emotion, and exposes just how baffling, but vitally important, it is, for every aspect of modern life.
HONYAL NEWS 2026/04 /04
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Live Beautiful (Abrams Books, 2020) by Athena Calderone is a 256-page interior design book featuring more than a dozen homesincluding two of Calderone's ownphotographed by Nicole Franzen.
"May is Heritage Month. To celebrate, here's a reading list of by Jewish .
From to and even a picture , these highlight Jewish Canadian voices."
": Woman of Valor Heroines of Our History is a commentary on the 22 verses of 31, based on , the , classic texts, and . It is published by , the central publishing house of the - movement.
The does not merely explain Eishet Chayil it positions it as a sweeping and historical statement about and Jewish survival. The tone is set early on, with sentences like, At every critical juncture of our long and challenging history, you will find the fearless and wise eishet chayil shepherding us toward our destiny.
One of the books central claims is clear and consistent: Jewish does not merely include it is propelled by them."
Live Beautiful: The Book by Athena Calderone Changes How You Think About Home Design
Some books tell you what a beautiful home looks like. Live Beautiful tells you why it worksand that distinction matters more than you might expect. Athena Calderone, founder of the EyeSwoon creative platform and one of the most respected tastemakers in contemporary interior design, published this book in 2020 through Abrams Books. It arrived at a cultural moment when people were reconsidering the spaces they inhabit. Today, it remains as relevant as ever.
This is not a passive book. You dont sit with it and simply admire the images, though the photography by is genuinely extraordinary. Instead, Live Beautiful invites you into a conversation about how considered design shapes daily experience. Calderones central argument is clear: beautiful design isnt decorativeits functional at the deepest level.
Live Beautiful: A Book by Athena Calderone.That idea deserves more attention than it usually gets.
What Makes Live Beautiful Different From Other Interior Design Books
Most coffee table books on home design operate on a single register: aspiration. They show you something gorgeous and leave you there, slightly envious. Calderone refuses that dynamic. She opens the doors to more than a dozen homesincluding two of her own residencesand then she explains what youre looking at. Not just aesthetically, but structurally and psychologically.
Each home profile in Live Beautiful follows what Id call the Origin-Anatomy-Application. Calderone first traces the initial spark of inspiration behind each space. Then she breaks down the physical and compositional detailslayered textures, collected objects, customized vignettes. Finally, she distills actionable tips so readers can translate those principles into their own environments. This three-part structure gives the book real editorial intelligence.
Furthermore, the book includes what Calderone calls why the design works callouts. These short, precise annotations sit alongside the photography and function as design criticism in miniature. They train your eye. After reading just a few, you start seeing your own home differently.
The Calderone Design Philosophy: Collected, Not Curated
One of the most useful concepts running through Live Beautiful is the distinction between collected and curated spaces. Calderone champions what might be called Intentional Accumulationthe deliberate layering of objects with personal history, sensory weight, and visual tension. This stands in contrast to the sanitized, algorithmically perfect interiors that dominate social media feeds.
Her homes and the homes she features feel inhabited. They feel like someone actually lives there and has made choices over time. That specificity is rare in design publishing, and it reads as deeply honest.
Additionally, Calderone draws on her international network of interior decorators, fashion designers, and cultural tastemakers. The result is a book with genuine range. You move from a New York loft to a European country house and back, and the thread connecting these spaces isnt a single aesthetic but a shared commitment to considered living.
Nicole Franzens Photography as a Design Argument
It would be a mistake to treat the photography as merely illustrative. Franzens images are compositionally deliberate in ways that reinforce Calderones written arguments. She shoots interiors the way a portrait photographer approaches a facewith attention to shadow, proximity, and the emotional charge of negative space.
The light in these photographs is almost always natural and directional. Surfaces feel tactile. You can sense the weight of a linen curtain or the coldness of a stone countertop. This matters because Live Beautiful is fundamentally about sensory experience, and Franzens photography makes that argument without a single word.
Together, Calderone and Franzen have produced what Id describe as a Dual-Channel Design Texta book where the visual and verbal tracks carry equal argumentative weight and work in genuine dialogue rather than hierarchy.
Layered Textures and the Sensory Logic of Interior Design
Calderone returns repeatedly to texture as a primary design tool. This is a more sophisticated position than it might first appear. Texture isnt just visualit implies touch, temperature, and sound absorption. A room with only smooth surfaces feels cold and clinical. A room with layered textures feels warm, complex, and alive.
The book offers concrete guidance here. Calderone identifies specific combinationsrough linen against polished marble, matte ceramic beside reflective glassand explains the perceptual logic behind them. Moreover, she connects texture choices to emotional registers. A heavily textured space invites you to slow down. A spare, smooth space energizes you and prompts movement.
This framework, which Id call Textural Emotionality, is one of the most practically useful ideas in the book. Once you understand it, you can apply it to any room at any budget level.
How Live Beautiful Approaches the Concept of the Vignette
The design vignettea small, composed grouping of objects within a larger roomgets serious attention in Live Beautiful. Calderone treats vignettes not as decoration but as Narrative Anchors: discrete moments within a space that tell you something specific about the people who live there.
She shows you how a vignette works in practice. A stack of books, a single ceramic vessel, a framed print, and a dried flower arrangementeach element selected for its material quality and its relationship to the others. The grouping creates a focal point, but it also creates a kind of personal statement. It says that this person is paying attention.
Importantly, Calderone also shows you what doesnt work. She discusses proportion, scale, and the problem of overfilling a surface. Her advice is specific enough to be genuinely useful and honest enough to acknowledge that restraint is often the harder discipline.
The Role of Customization in Elevated Home Design
Another thread running through Live Beautiful is customizationnot in the expensive sense of bespoke furniture, but in the sense of personalizing what you have. Calderones homeowners paint existing pieces, reupholster inherited chairs, commission local artisans for specific items, and mix vintage finds with contemporary work.
This approach reflects what Calderone calls the Signature Layer Principle: the idea that every home needs at least one element that couldnt have come from a showroom or a catalog. That element anchors the space in a specific identity and prevents it from feeling interchangeable with every other well-designed home.
Practically speaking, this principle is liberating. It means you dont need a large budget to create a distinctive home. You need intention, patience, and a willingness to look beyond the obvious sources.
Live Beautiful as a Framework for Emotionally Resonant Spaces
Beyond the practical guidance, Live Beautiful makes a broader argument about the relationship between environment and emotion. Calderone suggests that the homes we create are, in a real sense, portraits of who we are and who we aspire to become. This is a position with deep roots in architectural philosophy, but Calderone makes it accessible without dumbing it down.
She describes a concept Id frame as Environmental Self-Expression: the idea that the choices we make in designing our homesthe colors, the materials, the objects, the arrangementsare not neutral. They reflect values, memories, and desires. Furthermore, they shape behavior. A well-designed home doesnt just reflect who you are it influences how you live.
This is why the books title works so well. Seriously, Live Beautiful isnt just an imperative about aesthetics. Its a statement about a way of engaging with the worldattentively, specifically, with care for the sensory texture of daily life.
Who Should Read Live Beautiful
The obvious audience is anyone interested in interior design. But the book rewards a wider readership. Architects will find the annotated photography analytically useful. Photographers will find Franzens compositions worth studying closely. Writers and editors will recognize the books structural intelligenceCalderone is an excellent writer who understands how to sequence information for maximum impact.
Moreover, anyone building or refining a creative practice will find Calderones emphasis on inspiration and process genuinely useful. The book models a way of paying attentionto materials, to history, to the specific qualities of light in a particular roomthat translates well beyond home design.
The Lasting Value of Live Beautiful in the Interior Design Canon
Five years after its publication, Live Beautiful has not aged into irrelevance. If anything, its core argument has become more urgent. As digital environments grow more consuming and generic, the quality of our physical spaces matters more. We spend more time at home than previous generations did. We need those spaces to do real work for usemotionally, intellectually, socially.
Calderone anticipated this. Her book makes a case for the physical home as the primary site of personal expression and daily renewal. That case is well-argued, beautifully supported, and practically actionable. For a book in this category, that combination is rare.
Live Beautiful belongs on the shelf of anyone who takes design seriouslynot as a status marker, but as a discipline for living more deliberately. It deserves its reputation, and then some.
Frequently Asked Questions About Live Beautiful by Athena Calderone
What is Live Beautiful about
Live Beautiful is an interior design book by Athena Calderone, published by Abrams Books in 2020. It profiles more than a dozen carefully designed homes, including two of Calderones own residences, and explains the principles behind each space. The book combines stunning photography by Nicole Franzen with practical design guidance, why the design works annotations, and resource lists for each home.
Who is Athena Calderone
Athena Calderone is a New York-based creative director, chef, and design personality best known as the founder of EyeSwoon, a platform covering food, design, and lifestyle. She has collaborated with major brands across the design and hospitality sectors and is widely regarded as one of the most influential tastemakers in contemporary American design culture.
Is Live Beautiful suitable for people with a small budget
Yes. While the homes featured in the book represent a high level of investment, Calderones principleslayering textures, creating vignettes, adding a signature personal elementapply at any budget level. The book consistently emphasizes intention over expenditure.
Who photographed Live Beautiful
All photography in Live Beautiful was shot by Nicole Franzen, a New York-based photographer known for her work in food, interiors, and portraiture. Her images are a central part of the books argument, not simply its illustration.
How many pages does Live Beautiful have
Live Beautiful has 256 pages. It measures approximately 9.33 x 11.26 x 1.18 inches and weighs 3.6 pounds, making it a substantial physical objectone designed, appropriately, to be displayed as well as read.
Where can I buy Live Beautiful
The book is available through major online and brick-and-mortar retailers, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and independent bookshops. The ISBN is 978-1419742804. It is published by Abrams Books.
Is Live Beautiful worth buying as a gift
Absolutely. Its large format, exceptional photography, and genuinely useful content make it an ideal gift for anyone interested in design, architecture, photography, or creative living. It functions as both a coffee table object and a practical reference book.
Check out more of our book reviews here at WE AND THE COLOR.
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The Occult in Nineteenth-Century AmericaThe Greek Magical Book PGM XIII The Eighth Book of Moses
PGM XIII is a comprehensive ritual manual consisting of 28 pages of which 25 were inscribed in Greek.
This comprises the famous Eighth Book of Moses, the most extensive ancient ritual preserved in the magical papyri, taking up 41 days for preparations alone.
4th century,
Photos Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, Leiden
More details on my blog:
Ischia is Burning: The Novel I Have Been Writing for Thirty-Six Years
Most books are written. A few are excavated. is a book I excavated from a steel filing cabinet in a Manhattan apartment, where it had been sitting for more than three decades inside a folder marked Ischia, in the form of a screenplay I wrote at twenty-five years old in the second year of an MFA program at Columbia. The novel that has just been published is what happened when I sat down with that folder in May, found the staples rusted and half the dialogue wincing, and wrote what the twenty-five-year-old version could not yet write. The novel is now available as a , and a complete free web reading edition lives at .
I need to tell you where this started, because the thirty-six years between the conception and , not biographical trivia.
The Steel Filing Cabinet
In the spring of 1990 I was a graduate student in the Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Graduate Theatre Studies at Columbia Universitys School of the Arts, in the dramatic writing concentration, working on a thesis screenplay for a class taught by Grafton Nunes. Grafton had produced Kathryn Bigelows first feature, The Loveless, with Willem Dafoe in his first leading role. He had spent his early career at Paramount. He knew what a film script was supposed to do and he knew when one was doing it.
I wrote a screenplay called Ischia is Burning. The country I had visited once. The island I had never seen. What I had read about it concerned the Greek colonial site at Pithekoussai, the oldest western Greek settlement in the central Mediterranean, founded in the eighth century before Christ on a volcanic island twelve miles off the Bay of Naples. The island had a basin. The basin had a name. I gave the basin sixteen children and four adults, and I gave the four adults eighteen years to build an Iron Age village around the children, and I gave the village a contamination event in the groundwater that would not have happened in the Iron Age.
Grafton read the screenplay. He told me it was the best student screenplay he had ever read. With a teachers specificity, he named the adjustments he wanted me to make. Blockbuster was the word he reached for, as if he were predicting a weather event.
I did not make the adjustments.
I gave the screenplay to Sam Crothers at . Sam read it. He told me he loved it. The cohesion problems were the second thing he raised. After that came the matter of money, which Grafton had not raised at all. The last thing Sam asked me was what I was willing to wait for. Sam got sick within the year. He retired to Florida. We did not speak again. Marty Richards, who ran the Producer Circle, died in November 2012. Sam followed him in April 2013. Neither lived to see the novel.
I put the screenplay in a steel filing cabinet in an apartment on East 13th Street. It stayed there for thirty-six years. From time to time I took it out, read the first ten pages, and put it back. The notebook in which I had written down Graftons adjustments was lost in a move sometime in the late 1990s, and after that I told myself for a long set of years that I could not begin the novel because I could not remember what Grafton had said, and to begin without remembering would be to disrespect what he had given me.
I see now that the unremembered adjustments were the alibi. The actual reason was simpler. At twenty-five I was not old enough to write what finding out costs a child. Nor was I old enough to write what finding out costs the adults who have spent eighteen years not telling.
The Basin on Pithekoussai
The novel opens in the autumn of 1986 in a basin on the western flank of the Italian island of Ischia, in a place called Mezzavia. Mezzavia does not exist on any map I have been able to locate, although the road of that name does run between the towns of Forio and Casamicciola Terme on the actual island. In the novel, the basin holds four adults and sixteen children. The children range in age from six to seventeen. The adults are, by training, an anthropologist, a physician, a pilot, and a linguist. They have spent eighteen years building a closed Iron Age village around the children, complete with hand-woven clothing, a small iron mill the children themselves operate, a constructed Germanic dialect rooted in Old Norse and Old High German, an invented cosmology with four gods and eight constellations, and a sky with no airplanes in it.
The children believe they are living in the Iron Age. They believe this because the four adults have withheld twenty-four years of European history from them. No radios enter the basin. No printed page betrays the year. The antibiotic that would tell a child the world contains chemistry beyond the herbal poultice does not exist there.
In September of 1986, a cesium-137 contamination event begins to appear in the basins groundwater. The four adults face the question they have spent eighteen years not asking, which is what to do when the constructed world you have built around children begins to poison them, and the only treatment you can offer comes from a century the children are not allowed to know exists.
The title of the book is also a transmitted phrase. A pilot speaks it into a dispatch microphone at zero four sixteen on a Thursday in September 1986, from the cockpit of a plane climbing out of the American air base at Aviano in northeastern Italy. The book takes its thirty-three chapters to answer three questions about that phrase: what is burning, who is speaking it, and where the radio signal is going.
The novel is the answer the four adults arrive at.
The Temptation
The book moves at the velocity of a thriller and the moral architecture of an inquiry, which is what keeps it from settling cleanly into either form. What it pursues is a question older than the basin and older than the Iron Age the basin pretends to be. The question is what happens when a small group of educated people, looking at a larger group of human beings, decides in private that the larger group cannot be trusted with the truth and must be administered the world on a schedule the educated group will determine.
That question runs through the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the Willowbrook hepatitis study, Decree 770 of the Socialist Republic of Romania, the Stanford prison experiment of 1971, the closed religious compounds of the American Southwest, and a hundred other documented projects in which one group of people decided what another group would be permitted to know. The Notes on Sources at the back of the novel walks through the historical anchors. Inside the novel itself, those anchors are kept off the page. What sits on the page is fiction. The four adults and the sixteen children of Mezzavia are inventions. What is not invented is the temptation that built them.
I am . The four adults are educated, careful, well-spoken people who can defend every individual decision they made, which is precisely why naming them as monsters would let the reader off the hook. The novel is interested in how educated, careful, well-spoken people arrive at a project that, taken in aggregate, looks like the thing they would never have built if they had been able to see the whole shape of it from the outside. What the novel refuses to do is let them off the hook for what they built. It refuses, at the same time, the easy out of calling them monsters, because calling them monsters would close the question of how their colleagues, students, and followers found them defensible while the work was being done.
An Addendum the Way I Wrote It at Twenty-Five
The original 1990 screenplay is reproduced unaltered in the back of the book as Addendum I. The dialogue I made wince in May has been preserved exactly as I committed it in 1990, with its small infelicities and its young confidence both intact. I considered editing the screenplay. I decided against it. The point of including the screenplay at the back of the book is to show the reader the gap, in technique and in moral attention, between what I could write at twenty-five and what I could write at sixty-one, rather than to display the early version as a finished object. The story is identical across both versions, along with the four scientists, the sixteen children, the basin, and the fire. Two different writers, separated by thirty-six years, were working on the same material.
If a reader of the novel goes to the addendum and finds that the screenplay version reaches conclusions the novel does not reach, and lands its moral judgments where the novel will not land its moral judgments, that is the point. The young writer was bolder. The old writer is more careful, and more wounded, and less willing to tell the reader who the villain is.
For the Children Who Were Never Told
The dedication of the book is one sentence long. It reads, For the children who were never told.
I want to be clear about who that dedication is for. First, the sixteen fictional children of the basin on Pithekoussai, who are inventions, although the patterns of behavior they live inside are documented in places that were not inventions. Beyond them, the dedication names every reader who has ever sat across from a parent, or a doctor, or a government, and realized that the version of the world they had been given was a redacted version, edited by someone who had decided, on their behalf, what they could carry. The book is also for the adults who decided. Those four scientists in the basin can defend every individual decision they made. What the novel is interested in is why their defenses sound the way they do, and why those defenses have sounded the same way in every century in which someone has been entrusted with a knowledge that someone else has decided will not be shared.
How to Read the Book
The novel runs around 130,000 words across thirty-three chapters and a closing addendum. Paperback and Kindle edition are available now at Amazon, and a complete free web reading edition lives at , where the full bibliography of David Boles Books is also indexed. The Foreword tells the thirty-six-year story I have only summarized here. A Notes on Sources section walks through the historical record the novel draws on. Readers who want to put the book down and argue with somebody about it will find a Reading Group Discussion Guide in the back, which is the use I would most like the book to be put to.
I will be writing about Ischia is Burning at length over the coming weeks, including a Human Meme podcast episode on the moral physics of withheld knowledge, a investigative piece on the documented American history of closed communities, and a conversation series on BolesBlogs.com about the books relationship to the Institutional Autopsy trilogy and to the question of what fiction can do that documentary work cannot. The conversation continues. The book is the entrance into it.
Sam Crothers asked me, in 1990, what I was willing to wait for. The answer arrived thirty-six years later. The book exists.
David Boles is the founder of David Boles Books and the editor of Prairie Voice. His was completed in March 2026 with the publication of . He lives in New York City with the Deaf ASL educator Janna Sweenie and two British Shorthair cats.
065 with
Today, he shares his thoughts on , , , , and goat .
He also replied to 's question.
Like every week, we got recommendations.
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CHRONOLOGICAL SERIES REVISED EDITION
Low-tech Magazines original book series is available again. This revised edition of the original (2007-2021), uncompressed series is based on the edits made for the compressed edition (released in 2025). However, we increased the font and image sizes and returned to a one-column layout for improved reading comfort.
Volume I (2007-2012), Volume II (2012-2018) and Volume III (2018-2021) are now available in paperback and hardcover via our Lulu bookstore. Volume IV (2021-2025) is on the way.
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The book design is a collaborative effort by Laia Comellas, , and Johanna Gratzer. Marie Verdeil made the covers, Vaiva Vinskaite did the typesetting.
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The is extremely mesmerizing, full of suspense, and the protagonist gives us the perspective that is an adventure of its own. And all that on top of a classical from . Thank you, , for and the rest of the trilogy!
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