brettworks

• An article about soccer player Rayan Cherki and the art of the additional touch.

“In the most decisive moments, Cherki gives the impression that he is able to pause time, calculate the best decision and elegantly execute it. Yet, he does this subconsciously and is empowered by his artistic touch of the ball.”

“He invariably takes the right number of touches, but it’s so often the extra one which allows him to fool everyone.”

“‘It’s about inventing, creating, doing things that nobody else sees or understands—that’s my philosophy.’”

• An essay on Philip Glass’s music.

“Any artist who invents a distinctive, instantly recognizable mood is sure to leave a mark on the history of their art form. And Glass did invent a mood, one that feels inseparable from American urban life in the late twentieth century. His unadorned cyclical patterns sometimes exude a chilly, untouchable melancholy; they are sad in the way that ruthlessly optimized, factory-produced luxury goods are sad. Practically none of the composers associated with what has come to be known as minimalism seem to feel especially affectionate toward the label—Glass prefers to call his work ‘music with repetitive structures’—but the term is a better fit for him than for many others, since he tends to build his music from simple, discrete building blocks: a triad, an ascending minor scale, a slurred two-note pattern. These gestures are endlessly replicable, like Warhol’s soup cans. And the sheen they give off, as they churn along, bespeaks an innocently optimistic vision of modern life as cheerful and outdated as Chicago’s skyline. The harmonies he wields had been available to musicians for many centuries, but the extreme cleanness of his textures—there is no dirt or sweat in his music, no humanizing messiness—could only have been dreamed up in his own time, in a world of cities organized into sleek and separate skyscrapers, cities made mainly of glass.”

• An essay by Jill Lepore on how to write a paper.

“Most everything is vital, so long as the way you write about it is sufficiently animated, informed, and judicious.”