Pico Iyer

3 weeks ago | airmail.news | Pico Iyer

Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane If a shrewder Muggle had been casting HBO’s coming series on Harry Potter, the person chosen to act as a wizard might well have been Robert Macfarlane. He is, officially, a professor of literature at Cambridge, but, happily, no writer sounds less professorial. Macfarlane climbs mountains, plunges into the underworld, collaborates with artists on books about lost words, lost spells. He makes films, writes songs and operas, has published a book-length prose poem.

3 weeks ago | flipboard.com | Pico Iyer

17 hours agoIndia: Pet rottweiler attacks 4-month-old in housing society, baby succumbs to injuriesAhmedabad, India - May 12, 2025 A four-month-old baby girl succumbed to injuries after being mauled by a pet Rottweiler in a residential society. The incident occurred in Radhe Residency near Hathijan Circle, Ahmedabad, Gujarat, western India, on May 12. Visuals from the spot show the dog mauling both the baby and her aunt, who was left seriously injured, spreading chaos in society.

1 month ago | airmail.news | Pico Iyer

It’s close to midnight, and I’m wandering around a world-class museum I have almost entirely to myself when I stop to admire a David Hockney painting on the walls. The Jennifer Bartlett not far away echoes, perfectly, a real boat on a real beach through the windows. Round another corner, 100 neon signs in rainbow colors—“Try and Live,” “Live and Live”—flash injunctions from Bruce Nauman. The Rauschenberg and Basquiat and George Segal are so close, they feel like neighbors, or private possessions.

1 month ago | flipboard.com | Pico Iyer

NowA look at Japan’s love of packaging, from impeccably crafted cardboard to lacquered works of art. In the story of Urashima Taro, a Japanese folk tale dating to the eighth century, a young angler is invited to an underwater kingdom as a reward for rescuing a sea turtle from cruel children. At the end …

1 month ago | nytimes.com | Pico Iyer |Ilya Milstein

Throughout its history, the country has taken imports and changed them into something else entirely. Credit Credit... Illustration by Ilya Milstein. Animation by Jonathan Eden A Japanese sentence is often as mongrel as a Japanese street. While walking through a shopping arcade in Osaka - here a tatami tearoom, there a French cafe, in between a McDonald's - you'll notice Chinese characters, known as kanji, on many storefront signs.