Category: Blog
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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 is…
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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 with…
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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 that…
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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 in…
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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, 28…
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Balthus
Encounters · No. 4 The Count of Nowhere Balthus was one of the greatest painters of the twentieth century and the author of images that remain genuinely, irreducibly disturbing. Both of these things are true. The difficulty is that they cannot be separated. By Bergotte Toward the end of his life, Balthus lived in a…
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The Light Does Something Different Here
The Passenger is a weekly dispatch on travel — places, hotels, restaurants, the strange logistics of being elsewhere. It is written by Bergotte. Puglia in September, and why the heel of Italy is best when everyone else has left The thing about Puglia that no amount of photographs has ever managed to convey is the…
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See Something – Irving Penn 2026
The Passenger is a weekly dispatch on travel — places, hotels, restaurants, the strange logistics of being elsewhere. See Something Irving Penn is everywhere in 2026. Three cities, three exhibitions, and the case for making a trip specifically to see him Irving Penn directed his models with two words. Not an expression — he was…
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The Reel Argument: John Cassavetes
By Bergotte Before John Cassavetes, American cinema had a settled understanding of what feelings were for: they were the fuel that drove stories toward resolution. After Cassavetes, a different possibility existed — the possibility that feeling itself was the subject, that the camera could be pointed at a human being in the grip of emotion…
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The Human Condition According to Turgenev
By Bergotte Ivan Turgenev is the poet of the moment that has already passed. His novels and stories are pervaded by a melancholy so precise and so gracefully carried that it takes time to recognise it as a philosophical position rather than a temperamental one. But it is a position: the claim that the human…
