Best of 2025: Picasso and Research

Pablo Picasso’s Stunning Repetitions

Jillian Hess | Noted | 7th April 2025

Picasso was a master realist until the advent of photography. His response was “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon”, a painting that “set the art world on fire”. He carried out 809 preliminary studies and filled 16 different sketchbooks, moving from realistic representations to geometric forms, collapsing perspectives, using shapes that didn’t belong together — birthing what would become known as cubism (1,600 words)

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The Lost Art Of Research As Leisure

Mariam Mahmoud | Kasurian | 9th March 2025

The 21C world of audio-visual distractions was predicted by major 20C figures like E.B. White, Virginia Woolf and Susan Sontag. Leisure, not as pure idleness but as an inheritor of the Greek concept of scholē or "school", is under threat. As the German philosopher Josef Pieper argued, this takes the form of "a style of unconstrained research". Don't just read — read playfully, purposefully and curiously (3,500 words)