A year into the pandemic, many of us are longing to do what once might have seemed mundane: leaf through the design section at the library, walk maskless through the galleries of a museum, or just spend a quiet afternoon at a local bookstore. For Valery Marier, a Toronto-based graphic design student in her final semester at the York/Sheridan Program...

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In 2018, the musician and writer Claire L. Evans began cataloguing examples of an increasingly ubiquitous style of editorial illustration she calls “Corporate Memphis,” a winking reference to the vibrant, patterned abstraction popularized by the Memphis Group in the 1980s. By now you know the style: A woman whooshes past on tiny white roller skates, a periwinkle leg twice the...

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Reminisce with me, for a moment, about all the fun of the book fair. A meadow of tabletops unfolds across a large hall, and the scent of new books is infused with the sweat of the trendiest nerds. You’ve approached a table having judged a book by its cover and find yourself face-to-face with the book’s publisher, or perhaps its...

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A deceptively simple question: How are you feeling right now? It’s simple because you’re probably sentient and awake; deceptive because the web of human emotion is always undulating, twitching and warping in response to events—real, perceived, micro, and otherwise—in real time.    In 1980, to help people answer that question, the psychologist Robert Plutchik published a paper about the eight core...

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The past year has felt like the highest-budget sci-fi movie ever made: rioting mobs swarmed the US Capitol, a deadly virus is still sweeping through the planet, and the Earth is nearing a critical climate threshold after 2020 rivaled the hottest year on record. It’s been stranger than fiction and yet all too real. So I escaped from our dystopia...

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