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Heavyweights

February 02, 2021

by Alexander Freeling.    Cold, like happy, is a relative term. Tell anyone from New York or Moscow that it was cold in Britain this year and you might get a pitying chuckle. But in a land without ...

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On Brand

January 05, 2021

by Alexander Freeling.   The promise of modern branding has always been complicated. On the one hand, brands have existed for centuries as a kind of maker’s guarantee. Medieval English merchants wo...

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Ordinary Creations

October 27, 2020

by Alexander Freeling.   There’s a longing at the moment—sometimes joking, sometimes deeply serious—for normality. But was there ever really normality, or do we only invent it by imagining away the...

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The Loneliest Hatmaker

September 01, 2020

by Alexander Freeling.   In the fifth smallest county in the United States, and the smallest in Nebraska, there’s a town called Arthur, population 118. Taking Fir Street, you can walk from one end ...

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The Sincerest Form of Flattery

June 23, 2020

by Alexander Freeling.   It takes a lot of work to make a map, and precious little to copy it. And since map makers, unlike novelists or painters, are all trying to tell the same story, it’s almost...

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WFH

May 08, 2020

by Alexander Freeling.   It wasn’t really the start, but it felt like one. As I write this, we’ve been officially confined to our homes in Britain for several weeks: confined not only by caution fo...

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Elegy

March 03, 2020

by Alexander Freeling.   When walking to work recently I passed three tourists taking photos. Hardly surprising in a town that’s full of visitors for three quarters of the year, but I felt a quiet ...

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On the Signature

December 31, 2019

by Alexander Freeling.   In Britain many things arrive late. New films, trends, technology. The trains, of course, but this is a valuable source of bland conversation for a notoriously non-confront...

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