Dear readers,
This is just a short note from me to wish you all a festive and peaceful end to the year, along with some final thoughts for 2022. I won’t be troubling you with another essay until the first week of January.
It’s been hugely rewarding to launch The Pathos of Things this year, allowing me to develop my ideas and cover subjects I wouldn’t get commissioned to write about elsewhere. I hope you’ve found it valuable too.
To those of you who are paying for your subscription: you have my eternal gratitude. To those who enjoy my work, please consider chipping in! Researching and writing these essays, though satisfying, is also time consuming. Your support would be deeply appreciated.
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Newer subscribers might be interested in revisiting some of my earlier posts, where I tried to lay some groundwork for this newsletter: in particular, Introduction to The Pathos of Things and Designing Modernity.
My most popular piece, by a big margin, was the one I wrote about Soho House and the fate of the arts and media industries, called The Rise and Fall of the Creative Class. I also got a good response for this essay about Chinese fast-fashion giant Shein, and for my look at the mind-bending world of the semiconductor industry. (I’ll probably be returning to this last subject, since there have been lots of new developments there).
While we’re thumbing through the archive, I’ll pull out two more pieces as wild-cards: my potted history of the modern kitchen, and my review of David Abulafia’s superb book about human life on the ocean, Boundless Sea.
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Finally, something to look forward to: I’m planning to give The Pathos of Things a visual makeover at some point in the coming months, so we can all stop scratching our heads about why this glorified design blog shows so little interest in designing an attractive blog.
That’s all; except, of course, for hoping you all have a wonderful Christmas and a happy New Year.
Wessie