Category: Biography
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Poul Henningsen
Makers & Rooms — Essay I The Light He Couldn’t Stop Arguing About Poul Henningsen designed the most beloved lamp in the world. He also wrote cabaret songs, picked fights with the bourgeoisie, and fled to Sweden ahead of the Gestapo. The lamp was almost the least interesting thing about him. By Bergotte There is…
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The Cars
Essay · Music & Culture The Glamour of Disconnection The Cars made music about emotional unavailability and called it pop, which was either a very sophisticated joke or the most honest thing anyone did in the late 1970s, depending on how you felt about the decade. The answer is that it was both, and the…
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Sophie Calle
Encounters · No. 1 The Art of Following Someone Sophie Calle has spent forty years turning other people’s lives — and her own grief — into something that looks, uncomfortably, like art. By Bergotte In January 1980, Sophie Calle followed a stranger to Venice. She had met him briefly at a party in Paris, not…
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The Reel Argument: Ingmar Bergman
By Bergotte Ingmar Bergman made films about the things we cannot say to each other, and he made them with a directness that is almost unbearable. He is routinely described as a difficult filmmaker — demanding, austere, heavy — and this reputation has kept more people from him than it has drawn in, which is…
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Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World
Director: Sasha WatersTitle: Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the WorldYear: 2026Country: United StatesGenre: Documentary / BiographyRunning time: 91 minutesRating: ★★★★☆ What It Is Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World is Sasha Waters’s documentary portrait of the Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet Mary Oliver, whose deceptively simple poems about nature, solitude, mortality,…
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The Human Condition According to Tolstoy
By Bergotte Leo Tolstoy is the writer who makes other great writers feel provincial. Not because his books are the longest, though two of them are among the longest ever written, and not because his range is the widest, though it extends from the ballrooms of Moscow to the battlefields of Austerlitz to the peasant…
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Issey Miyake
Encounters · No. 6 A Piece of Cloth Issey Miyake survived the atomic bomb at seven years old and spent the rest of his life making clothes that felt like freedom. These two facts are not unrelated. By Bergotte On the morning of August 6, 1945, Issey Miyake was seven years old and standing close…
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Anne Sexton
Essay · Poetry & Lives The Woman Who Made Death Speak in Stanzas Anne Sexton wrote about madness, abortion, adultery, menstruation, incest, and suicide with a directness that the literary establishment of the late 1950s had agreed, without quite stating it aloud, was not available to women. She made it available. The cost was everything…
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Malcolm X
Essay · History & Lives The Man Who Kept Becoming Someone Else Malcolm X is one of the most difficult subjects in American history to write about honestly, because the honest account requires holding simultaneously several versions of the same person — the street hustler, the Nation of Islam minister, the Black nationalist icon, the…
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Sarah Vaughan
Essay · Music & Lives The Divine One and the Instrument She Was Given Sarah Vaughan possessed what may have been the single greatest natural voice in the history of American popular music — a contralto of three-octave range, extraordinary richness, and an improvisational intelligence so developed that it functioned less like singing and more…
