Mia Westerlund Roosen’s Ongoing Material Inquiry

Mia Westerlund Roosen’s Ongoing Material Inquiry

Mia Westerlund Roosen’s Heat (background) and Conical (foreground), both from 1981, on view at Nunu Fine Art. Photo: Martin Seck, courtesy the artist and Nunu Fine Art Multidisciplinary artist Mia Westerlund Roosen’s early career unfolded against the backdrop of Minimalism’s heyday, but her work diverged sharply from the austere, industrial ethos of contemporaries like Donald…

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From Soil to Still: The Master of Botanicals Rethinking Sustainability in Premium Spirits

From Soil to Still: The Master of Botanicals Rethinking Sustainability in Premium Spirits

From Murcia’s lemon groves to Vietnam’s cassia forests, Garneri details how sustainability begins long before distillation. Jon Enoch This Q&A is part of Observer’s Expert Insights series, where industry leaders, innovators and strategists distill years of experience into direct, practical takeaways and deliver clarity on the issues shaping their industries. In the world of premium spirits, few…

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The A.I. Boom Is Stress-Testing America’s Power Grid

The A.I. Boom Is Stress-Testing America’s Power Grid

Explosive A.I. growth is compressing decades of grid planning into years, forcing utilities and investors to rethink infrastructure. Unsplash+ Artificial intelligence has quickly become the focal point of nearly every major technology debate today—the safety of each system’s model, algorithmic bias and its impact on the future of work. The challenge isn’t theoretical. Beneath those…

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Osaka’s Long-Overdue Luxury Hotel Moment Has Arrived

Osaka’s Long-Overdue Luxury Hotel Moment Has Arrived

Osaka is not Tokyo. It has never tried to be. Whereas the country’s capital exudes a buttoned-up beauty and a cosmopolitan charisma found in only a handful of global megacities, “tenka no daidokoro,” which translates to “Japan’s kitchen”—a nickname dating to the Edo period when the city was a major rice-trading hub—has a far more…

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What to Say When Someone Tells You to Smile More

What to Say When Someone Tells You to Smile More

Four words have echoed across every boardroom, dating app, and city street in the world: You should smile more. Anastasia Ryan has heard it her whole life, but perhaps never more than in a role where the people she was speaking to couldn’t see her at all. “The majority of what I did was over…

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Why You Should Handwrite Someone You Love a Card

Why You Should Handwrite Someone You Love a Card

Dashing off an email or text takes seconds. Handwriting a card takes a little courage—and five minutes with a pen. Putting in the extra time and effort matters more than you might think. “We all have a need to matter—to be considered and to be seen,” says Alison McKleroy, an art therapist in San Francisco.…

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One Fine Show: “Michael Rakowitz, Proxies for Poets and Palaces” at the Stavanger Art Museum

One Fine Show: “Michael Rakowitz, Proxies for Poets and Palaces” at the Stavanger Art Museum

Michael Rakowitz, The Ballad Special Ops Cody, 2017. Photo: Erik Sæter Jørgensen, Courtesy the Stavanger Art Museum Welcome to One Fine Show, where Observer highlights a recently opened exhibition at a museum not in New York City, a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention. Few contemporary artists create work about war…

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FDA Refuses to Review Moderna’s New Flu Shot

FDA Refuses to Review Moderna’s New Flu Shot

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently informed Moderna that it would not review the company’s application for approval of its new flu vaccine, which is its first using mRNA technology for influenza. The FDA has been going back and forth with Moderna for nearly two years since the company submitted Phase 3 data…

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