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9 domains, expanding dailycontribute ↓Don't let everyone find this · Priv. Edition · MMXXVI
A private monograph
welcome to taste, un—borrowed.
A field guide through the corners of the world worth actually visiting, not repeating — so that your next opinion is yours.
scrollNo. 01 of 01
The reason we're here
i hate that all my sources of research are coming from people making reels on the internet. i need opinions and thoughts of my own.
Why we started this page
§ The Method
Two moves, stacked.
Taste is not a library of references. It is the muscle of responding to something and being able to say exactly why. The project is to build that muscle — not a shelf of things to quote.
Move 01 · Begin here
The Opinion Gym
Before adding a single new input, interrogate what you already love. The songs you replay. The outfit that feels like armour. The book you lied about finishing. Not why do you like it — that question is lazy. But: what does this do that the thing next to it does not? Borrowed opinions collapse under specific questioning. Real ones get sharper. You start here, always.
Move 02 · Then, forever
The Obsessions Method
Then go narrow, not wide. Not art but Italian radical design of 1966; not music but Ethio-jazz of the 1969–74 golden age. Two to three weeks per corner. Primary sources only — the painting, the album, the book itself, not the thread about it. Write a paragraph. Defend it. Revise it. A real taste is a constellation of deep small obsessions, never a thin coat.
I.Art
Painters, heretics, and the quiet ones.
The canon is a rumour. The interesting story was almost always happening on the edge, a decade too early, by people the textbooks missed. Five of them, here.
A Swedish mystic who, between November 1906 and March 1907, painted a series called Primordial Chaos — the first non-representational abstract paintings in Western art, made four years before Kandinsky. She believed the work was dictated by spirits and asked that it stay hidden for twenty years after her death. The art world was not ready. It arguably still isn't.
In 1966, a handful of twentysomethings in Florence — Superstudio, Archizoom, and friends — began drawing architecture that was never meant to be built. Their work was utopia and dystopia in the same ink. Superstudio's Continuous Monument is a single grid-wrapped slab laid across the Grand Canyon, the Manhattan skyline, the Sahara — at once a joke, a warning, and a love letter.
Between 1968 and 1969, a Japanese photography magazine called Provoke published exactly three issues, and set the visual grammar of the postwar world: grainy, blurred, out-of-focus — are, bure, boke. The refusal of the clean image was a political refusal. Daidō Moriyama was the one who made it holy.
Japan's first radical postwar avant-garde, founded by Jirō Yoshihara in 1954. Their manifesto commanded: do what no one has done before. So Kazuo Shiraga painted with his feet, suspended from a rope. Saburō Murakami ran at full speed through paper screens. They invented performance art a decade before the West claimed it — and the West still half-ignores them.
A Swiss healer and autodidact who made enormous geometric drawings on graph paper, guided by a pendulum she asked questions to. She did not consider herself an artist. The drawings happen to be among the most severe and luminous geometric abstractions of the twentieth century. Af Klint's cousin in spirit.
Not the beach reads; not the canon you already feel guilty about. Five writers whose sentences do something the English major next to you on the plane has no language for.
A Ukrainian-born Brazilian writer whose sentences hallucinate. She wrote about a girl eating a cockroach, a chicken's brief freedom, a woman's ten-minute metaphysical crisis in a kitchen. Her final novel, The Hour of the Star, appeared in 1977 — the year she died. There is no writer like her, which is something people say about many writers but is accurate about very few.
A classicist who writes poetry, a poet who writes essays, and an essayist who refuses the genre. Autobiography of Red (1998) is a novel in verse about a red-winged boy-monster who falls in love with Herakles. This is not a joke. It is one of the great books of the last fifty years.
A Portuguese poet who did not consider his own self sufficient for literature, so he invented over seventy others. Each heteronym had a biography, a birth date, an astrological chart, a prose style. His private diary — The Book of Disquiet, assembled posthumously from a trunk of fragments — was published in 1982, forty-seven years after his death. It is the great text on modern loneliness.
Start here
The Book of Disquiet, trans. Richard Zenith. Open to any page — that's also how you read it.
A German expatriate who walked the coast of Suffolk alone and wrote The Rings of Saturn (German 1995, English 1998) — a book shaped like a country walk but actually about the Holocaust, silk, herring, Sir Thomas Browne, the Opium Wars, and himself. He embedded uncaptioned photographs into the prose. He invented a kind of melancholic wandering that nobody else has quite matched.
Start here
The Rings of Saturn, trans. Michael Hulse. Read the first twenty pages slowly.
An Italian novelist whose sentences are spare, flat, almost domestic — and inside them, fascism happens, a husband is murdered by the regime, a family history of Europe is quietly told. Family Lexicon (1963) won the Strega Prize. She is what people mean when they say moral clarity — the sentence-level kind, not the posturing kind.
For five years before the Derg regime shut it down, Addis Ababa had a nightlife scene that produced something that shouldn't have been able to exist: Ethiopian pentatonic scales run through American jazz instrumentation, played in hotel lounges by musicians nobody outside the country had heard of. Mulatu Astatke was the quiet centre. Francis Falceto began rescuing the tapes on his Éthiopiques series for Buda Musique in 1997.
After her husband John died, Alice Coltrane moved further out into territory he had been pointing toward — harp, tanpura, devotional drone. Journey in Satchidananda (February 1971) is spiritual jazz at its most unrepentant. She later became a Hindu swamini and ran an ashram in the hills above Malibu until her death.
A British duo from Birmingham fronted by Trish Keenan, who made dream-pop that sounded like a cursed library cassette — sixties library music refracted through English folk and half-remembered children's television. Keenan died of H1N1 complications on January 14, 2011. The band stopped. The music did not.
A gay Buddhist cellist from Iowa who lived in a tiny Lower East Side apartment and made underground disco records, chamber compositions, and solo cello-voice songs that feel like dispatches from the bottom of a pool. He died of AIDS on April 4, 1992. Most of his masterpieces were released after his death.
Start here
World of Echo (1986). Or — if you want something softer — the compilation Love Is Overtaking Me.
A brief, incandescent movement in late-1960s Brazil — Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, Os Mutantes — that collided bossa nova with Beatles psychedelia, Oswald de Andrade's anthropophagic manifesto, and political protest under a military regime. Two of them were imprisoned and exiled. The records are joyful anyway, which is the point.
Not the logo-maximalists. Not the celebrity collabs. Five designers who treated clothes as arguments, and whose arguments are the water every serious-looking person today is swimming in.
She founded Comme des Garçons in 1969 without a design degree and spent the next half-century refusing fashion's entire vocabulary. Her SS97 "Body Meets Dress" collection — widely called "lumps and bumps" — built padding inside dresses where no body should curve. It is considered the most important fashion event of its decade. She still does not explain her work.
In October 1988, a Belgian designer showed his first collection (SS89) in a Paris playground called Café de la Gare — models walked on a stage covered in white paint that smudged the audience's clothes. His labels were blank. He gave no interviews. His garments had four white stitches at the back of the neck where a logo should be. For two decades, this was the most influential designer in the world, and almost nobody knew what he looked like.
"I think perfection is ugly. I want to see scars, failure, disorder, distortion." He arrived in Paris in 1981 alongside Rei Kawakubo, made all-black drapery in shapes no French atelier had permission to make, and was called "Hiroshima chic" by the press as an insult. He kept going. He is still going.
Phoebe Philo's decade at Céline invented what is now called quiet luxury: coats wider than the bodies they contained, flat shoes, no logo, clothes for women who wanted to be taken seriously wearing something expensive they had chosen themselves. The collections are now secondhand-market legend. Everyone trying to dress well in 2026 is trying to dress like the Philo archives.
An Austrian designer who made the nineties make sense: stark tailoring, rubberised textures, industrial hardware on cashmere. He was the first to broadcast a major runway show over the internet, in 1998. Then in 2005 he quit fashion entirely and became a sculptor. He has mostly stayed quit. His 90s archive remains the most copied wardrobe of the last three decades.
Five designers who made the world you already live inside. Once you can see them, you can't un-see them — which is the whole point of developing an eye.
As head of design at Braun from the 1960s onward, Rams formulated ten principles — less, but better — that every product you own today quietly descends from. His Braun T3 pocket radio of 1958 is the direct ancestor of the first iPod. Jony Ive has said as much. The principles are worth memorising the way a chef memorises mother sauces.
On August 4, 1972, the MTA unveiled a new subway map designed by Massimo Vignelli. It used five angles — 0°, 45°, 90° — treated every station as a dot of equal size, and abandoned geography entirely. New Yorkers hated it. The MTA replaced it. It is now in MoMA's permanent collection. It is also, arguably, the most beautiful map ever drawn of anything.
On December 11, 1980, a group of designers met at Ettore Sottsass's flat in Milan, put Bob Dylan's Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again on repeat, and decided to make furniture that was loud, unserious, pattern-drunk, and totally against the minimalism sweeping Milan. Their first exhibition on September 18, 1981 scandalised the design world. Half of 2020s "80s maximalist" interiors are them, diluted.
Art director of Muji since 2002, and the person most responsible for the theory of emptiness in contemporary Japanese design. His book Designing Design (2007) argues that the best design is not a sign but a vessel — a form empty enough to hold whatever the user brings. His follow-up, White (2008), is a short book about one colour that turns out to contain everything.
In 1928, a twenty-four-year-old woman named Charlotte Perriand co-designed, with Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, a chaise longue called the LC4 — a machine for reclining, a piece of design you can recognise at fifty metres. For decades Le Corbusier was credited alone. History has slowly corrected itself. Perriand also designed mountain refuges, furniture for postwar Japan, and lived to one hundred.
Not airport self-help. Five thinkers whose work rearranges how you experience your own attention after reading them — which is the only test that matters.
In 1979, a Harvard psychologist took eight elderly men to a monastery in New Hampshire retrofitted to look and sound exactly like 1959, and asked them to live there for five days as if it were 1959. At the end of the week, their posture, dexterity, vision, and memory had measurably improved. She called the study Counterclockwise. Nobody in mainstream medicine likes to talk about why.
A psychiatrist, literary scholar, and philosopher who spent twenty years writing a book arguing that the two hemispheres of the brain attend to the world in different ways — the right holds the whole in context, the left abstracts and manipulates — and that Western culture has let the left colonise the right, to catastrophic effect. The Master and His Emissary was published by Yale on October 30, 2009. It rearranges how you think.
Freud's student who broke away and went further out: the collective unconscious, the shadow, anima and animus, archetypes that keep surfacing in every myth and every dream. Most of Jung is slow-going. His late autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962) is not.
An Austrian psychiatrist who survived four concentration camps. In 1946, within weeks of liberation, he wrote Man's Search for Meaning — part memoir of the camps, part his theory of logotherapy: the proposition that the primary human motivation is neither pleasure nor power but meaning. The book has sold over ten million copies. It still reads like it was written yesterday.
A neuroscientist and primatologist who studies baboons in Kenya and stress in humans, and reaches deeply uncomfortable conclusions about free will (he doesn't believe in it) and behaviour (he thinks it's determined by biology you don't control). Behave (2017) is a 700-page tour of every factor shaping a single moment of human action — from one second ago to one million years ago.
Strip the LinkedIn noise. Four minds who understood persuasion as craft — and whose work is still the real curriculum under everything that calls itself marketing today.
In 1959, Bill Bernbach's agency DDB ran a magazine ad for Volkswagen with a tiny Beetle on a mostly empty page and the caption Think small. Until then, American advertising assumed bigger was better and never admitted a product had flaws. DDB reversed the rules by being honest. It is the ur-text of modern advertising; every honest-seeming campaign descends from it.
Vice-chairman of Ogilvy UK, behavioural economist, and professional defender of apparently-irrational ideas. His book Alchemy (2019) argues that logical solutions are over-represented in business because they are defensible, but that psychologically potent solutions — the "useless" cherry on the sundae — are where the actual magic lives. He is also very funny.
A Columbia law professor who wrote the history of attention-capture capitalism. The Attention Merchants (2016) traces the modern economy's business model — from the first penny paper in 1833 to the infinite scroll — as a two-century project to sell human attention to advertisers. It explains why your phone is the way it is.
The British-born grandfather of the modern ad agency, who famously said "The consumer is not a moron; she is your wife." His Confessions of an Advertising Man (1963) is the first real textbook of the industry, written in the era when advertising took itself seriously as a craft. Even if you never write an ad, it is a book about how to think about persuasion.
Not the dates you memorised. Five stretches of the past that, once you've understood them, rearrange how the present looks — which is the only reason to study history at all.
For twenty years before the First World War, one European city was the operating system for the twentieth century. Freud was inventing psychoanalysis, Klimt and Schiele were painting, Wittgenstein was a teenager, Mahler was conducting the State Opera, Schoenberg was about to abolish tonality. They were all drinking coffee in the same cafés. After 1914, it was gone.
Walter Gropius founded an art and design school in Weimar on April 1, 1919, and for fourteen years it was the most influential institution in modern design — Klee, Kandinsky, Albers, Mies van der Rohe, Moholy-Nagy all taught there. In 1933 the Nazis closed it. Its faculty dispersed to America and remade everything from Harvard's architecture department to the look of IBM.
The only successful slave revolt in modern history. Between 1791 and 1804, enslaved Africans on the French sugar colony of Saint-Domingue defeated — in sequence — the French planters, the Spanish, the British, and Napoleon's army, founding the first Black-led republic. C.L.R. James's The Black Jacobins (1938) is the book that rescued this from the footnote it had been reduced to.
For fifteen years between a lost war and a fascism that would burn everything, Berlin was the most free and most decadent city in Europe — cabaret, expressionist cinema, the world's first sexology institute, Brecht, Dietrich, Kurt Weill. Hyperinflation. A queer liberation half a century early. Christopher Isherwood was the one who wrote it down; Cabaret is the show-tune sanitization.
Never a road. Always a network. For roughly two millennia, goods, ideas, pathogens, and gods moved back and forth across Eurasia along a shifting web of routes connecting Chang'an to Samarkand to Damascus. Buddhism travelled east on this network. Paper travelled west. The Black Death travelled with them. The modern world is downstream.
Not the workshop handouts. Five thinkers and makers who understood that a story is a technology — and who each built one that reshaped how audiences thought.
The American mythologist who, in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), argued that the basic arc of every major myth — departure, initiation, return — is the same story told again and again. George Lucas admitted it was the structural spine of Star Wars. Hollywood has been quietly operating on it ever since. Knowing the pattern is how you stop being manipulated by it.
In January 1972 the BBC broadcast a four-part television series called Ways of Seeing — a direct, quiet reply to Kenneth Clark's patrician Civilisation. Berger argued that images are never innocent: they carry arguments about class, gender, and ownership in every frame. The companion book came out the same year. It remains the single most useful hour you can spend learning to actually look at anything.
In 1986, Le Guin published a short essay — The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction — arguing that Western story-theory is obsessed with the hero's spear and ignores the thing that actually sustained humans: the carrier bag, the basket, the container. A story, she proposed, is better thought of as a net that holds things together than an arrow aimed at a kill. It is possibly the most quietly radical theory of narrative of the twentieth century.
A Belarusian journalist who spent forty years interviewing ordinary Soviet citizens — Chernobyl cleanup workers, the wives of Afghan war soldiers, the last generation to believe — and arranged their voices into books that read like nothing else. She won the Nobel Prize in 2015 for what the committee called "polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time." It is the opposite of the lone-hero story, and it destroys you.
Miyazaki co-founded Studio Ghibli on June 15, 1985, and spent the next forty years making animated films that refuse almost every convention of Hollywood storytelling — no clear villain, no three-act chase, entire sequences with no dialogue or plot advance. He calls it ma: the pause, the negative space, the gap that makes the thing mean something. Watch one of his films with this in mind and you will never watch cinema the same way.
Long-form essays from the small, considered quarters of the internet — Cabinet, Public Domain Review, n+1, The Drift, Real Life, Pin-Up, e-flux, Ribbonfarm, Meaningness, Low-Tech Magazine — where writers treat specific objects, histories, and arguments with unreasonable seriousness. Click a title, tick it when done.
The phrase "object lesson" is now a cautionary idiom. Originally it was a 19th-century Swiss pedagogy, codified by Elizabeth Mayo from Pestalozzi's schools, for breaking the world into its sensory parts — a revolutionary method for teaching taste itself.
On the Mason Pearson hairbrush (design peaked in 1885) as an argument against the tech industry's religion of continuous improvement. Femininity reframed as ceremony, not optimisation.
Asherah poles. Heifer carcasses. Tent pegs. Kay lists every inanimate movable object in the Bible, stripping narrative from the text to reveal the theological universe as a pure register of things.
An 18th-century Amsterdam collector who re-positioned insects to resemble embroidery, believing that ordering a cabinet was a religious act — an attempt to restore nature's prelapsarian harmony.
Against the modern critical reflex to "unmask" Arbus as a proto-body-positivity photographer. An argument that her photographs are powerful precisely because they refuse to resolve.
Rothfeld picks up Dwight Macdonald's 1960 Masscult and Midcult to argue that vagina hats and RBG candles aren't just aesthetic cringe — they neutralise radicalism into "creamy pap."
Instead of the default academic mode of suspicion — unmasking what a text hides — the author argues for sitting in front of a work and asking what it makes possible. Permission to have actual feelings about art.
Feidelson reads Cunningham's choreography notes as "cave paintings" — stick figures scribbled fast, the tremor of the hand more useful than clarity. How to read notation as body.
On the R.M. Schindler house in Los Angeles: concrete slabs with wrinkles from the Kraft paper that lined the forms, soft-soap on the walls, no rooms assigned to specific functions. Architecture that tolerates a life.
Architecture's whole decorative vocabulary was a response to cold and darkness. Gas and electricity stripped it of function. Design, Rahm argues, now has to be rewritten in the grammar of thermal conductivity.
On the shift from sleek-metal-and-glass tech to knitted fabrics and warm textiles: coziness is a strategy for smuggling surveillance devices into the home.
How 16th-century cheap broadsheet woodcuts codified the broom-riding crone from scattered court records. The grammar of mass hysteria, it turns out, is a visual one.
Groys: in a secular world, God no longer watches the soul — so the individual has inherited the divine task of designing their own public face. Why you can't stop curating yourself.
Easterling rejects the cult of the hero-object. Real design is the matrix of relations between things. She calls the required mindset the "canine mind" — seeing positions and potentials, not names.
How the demand for "signature elements" on social media reshapes the literal design of restaurants, bedrooms, cafés. Taste as a two-way dialogue with an algorithm. "Authenticity" is just as commodifiable as perfection.
On the 17th-century origins of the painted-on mole, and how hydrogenated cottonseed oil in the 1920s accidentally gave modern makeup its "slickness." Beauty is chemistry.
Rao reads The Office as a Nietzschean taxonomy of corporate life: sociopaths, clueless, losers. An accidental theory of organisations dressed as a sitcom recap. Funnier and more accurate than any MBA textbook.
Beyond fox and hedgehog. Rao argues for the "cognitive nomad" — weak views, strongly held — and points out that hedgehogs with one big idea are actually easier to convert than foxes with many.
A decade-long book-blog on avoiding the binary of nihilism and fixed meaning. Meaning, Chapman argues, is interactive — neither in your head nor in the object, but a dynamic performance, like a rainbow.
On the machinery of office work: why digital invisibility paralyses thought, and how mechanical tools like the typewriter force a linear-enough logic that actually lets the mind work.
§ References & further reading
Where to look next.
Every corner was fact-checked against primary sources. Short bibliography below, grouped by chapter. Every link opens a Britannica entry, a Google image search, a YouTube search, or the essay itself.
It keeps expanding — new corners, new voices, new things to mistakenly love. These pages are curated by hand, one obsession at a time.
If you have an edge
Send me a corner.
Have a specific obsession, a half-forgotten essay, an artifact you think belongs here? Write to me — I read everything, and credit the good stuff when it makes it in.
Curating takes hours that add up — reading, cross-checking, writing, fact-verifying. If the library has given you something, consider funding the next volume.
Don't read this like a list. Pick one corner and disappear into it.
Two to three weeks. Primary sources only. Come back when you can tell me, in specific sentences, what the thing does — and what it does that the thing next to it doesn't. That's the whole practice. Repeat for the rest of your life. (Tick things off as you go.)