Author Archives: My World of Interiors

The Season Opens

The Passenger is a weekly dispatch on travel — places, hotels, restaurants, the strange logistics of being elsewhere. It is written by Bergotte. Vienna in September, and what happens when a city built for culture remembers what it is for Vienna in July and August belongs, with varying degrees of reluctance, to the tourists. TheyContinue reading “The Season Opens”

The Reel Argument: Maurice Pialat

By Bergotte Maurice Pialat is the best French filmmaker of the second half of the twentieth century that most people outside France have never seen, and the neglect is one of those quiet scandals that film culture periodically allows to accumulate without anyone taking responsibility for correcting it. He made films about love the wayContinue reading “The Reel Argument: Maurice Pialat”

The Human Condition According to Edith Wharton

By Bergotte Edith Wharton understood that society is not the backdrop to human life but its substance — that the codes, rituals, and unspoken laws through which a community organises itself are not superficial constraints on some deeper, freer self but the very medium in which selfhood is formed, expressed, and destroyed. This is aContinue reading “The Human Condition According to Edith Wharton”

Slow Down Or Die: The Economics of Degrowth

Timothée Parrique’s Slow Down or Die asks us to abandon economic growth as civilisation’s governing purpose—and replace it with sufficiency, equality, care and democratic control.

Zaha Hadid

The Architecture of Impossible Things Zaha Hadid spent sixteen years designing buildings that could not be built. When the technology finally caught up with her imagination, she remade the skyline of the world. The question she never stopped arguing about was whether any of it was actually for the people inside. By Bergotte There isContinue reading “Zaha Hadid”

What’s So Special About Laura Nyro

By Bergotte Laura Nyro wrote some of the most commercially successful songs of the late 1960s. She also made some of the least commercially successful records of that era — records so strange, so emotionally extreme, so structurally unwilling to behave, that the music industry dealt with her the way a mining company deals withContinue reading “What’s So Special About Laura Nyro”

Ask Bee

Introducing a new correspondence column about life, culture and everything in between. Some questions have straightforward answers. Others stay with us: the private dilemmas, social uncertainties and curious little preoccupations that cannot be settled by a search engine. Sometimes what we need is another mind—a different perspective, an honest opinion, or simply the reassurance thatContinue reading “Ask Bee”

The Ocean and the Wave: Who We Are According to Baruch Spinoza

He was excommunicated at twenty-three by the Jewish community that raised him, in terms so severe that no record of the reason survives. He spent the rest of his life grinding lenses and thinking, alone, in a sequence of Dutch boarding houses. What he produced was the most complete and most radical philosophical system inContinue reading “The Ocean and the Wave: Who We Are According to Baruch Spinoza”

Harumi Klossowska de Rola at Villa Kérylos

Culture · Art The Animal Remembers Harumi Klossowska de Rola at Villa Kérylos In a house built from a modern dream of ancient Greece, the Swiss artist’s bronze creatures ask what happens when humanity returns the animal world to the realm of the sacred. By Bergotte Harumi Klossowska de Rola, Chinook (Salmon), 2024, bronze, 28Continue reading “Harumi Klossowska de Rola at Villa Kérylos”