The Live Issue
Newly Set in Type
Psychology
Boredom, and the work it quietly performs
Plate
Iconismus Mentis Humanae
The mind as a chambered observatory; fourteen rooms, one telescope, no exit.
Interview
On drawing the same tree for a decade
Archive
Sixty-one unsent letters, cataloged
Visual Arts
The Amateur Botanists Who Painted What They Could Not Name
On nineteenth-century flower plates, the pleasure of description, and looking as a form of patience.
By Iris Neroli · 14 min
Psychology
A Brief History of the Compartmentalized Mind
Phrenology was wrong about everything except the appetite for maps of ourselves.
By Daniel Okonjo · 18 min
Literature
Notes Toward a Theory of the Interrupted Dream
Woodcut sleepers, marginal annotations, and the sentences that only arrive at 4 a.m.
By Vera Lindqvist · 9 min
Essay
Chromatic Arguments: Color Wheels as Moral Diagrams
Every system for ordering color smuggles in a system for ordering people.
By Martin Ashe · 22 min
Collections
Rooms Built for Reading
The architecture of concentration, from monastic carrels to the reading room ladder.
By Sofia Reyes · 11 min
Plate
The Natural System of Colors
Twelve hand-tinted segments, shewing their mutual relations and affinities.
Plate
The Attentioscope
An instrument contrived for the measurement of attention. Scale: steady to very inconstant.
Marginalia
The typographers who refused the semicolon
Object
A pocket sundial, carried for forty years
Applied Archaism
I Kept My Grocery List in a Memory Palace
The classical art of memory, followed to the letter, for one week of ordinary shopping.
By the Editor · 11 min
Plate · Format II
A Phrenology of the Home Desk
Plate III. — The working surface mapped into its nine faculties, after the manner of the cranial atlases.
By the Editor · 6 min
Field Notes from the Interior
Why the Last Stair Is Different
You have climbed these stairs ten thousand times. Your foot still gets the last one wrong.
By the Staff Psychologist · 8 min