When you see an imposing, immobile thing—say, a Beaux-Arts city building devoted to official happenings—is your first impulse to make that very solid object soft, squishy and accessible?

Rip on the throttle without downshifting, listen and feel the engine’s deep growl as it steadily builds more power until it screams. When exhaust pressure builds at high RPM, a secondary passageway in the exhaust opens, adding a boost of sound. Like hitting the powerband on a two-stroke, the power feels adequate until you reach around 7,000 rpm—and the it screams to life all the way to 10,500 RPM. It tickles your hearing senses. 

The best zoo in Missouri is basically a one-man show—or should we say a one-bear show. Visitors flock from all over the state to hang out with Kali (pronounced “Cully”), the 1,150-pound polar bear who was originally rescued from the Alaskan wilderness in 2013 as a cub. Now five years old, he’s become a St. Louis institution at McDonnell Polar Bear Point, where you and the kids can even spend a night in sleeping bags beneath the underwater viewing pool! Check out the 50 hidden gems in every state.

There is something at once mind-blowing and unassimilable about the phenomenon. The aurora borealis is, in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s phrase, “immensely foreign,” and it puts you into a kind of panic in which you want to simultaneously observe it, describe it, rejoice in it, interpret it, and record it. Nothing you’ve learned or read about the subject—scientific, folkloric, touristic—seems remotely adequate or even relevant to the experience. You develop the overwhelming impression that some cryptic but staggeringly powerful intelligence is staging a performance expressly for you, even as you remind yourself that this can’t be the case. Surprisingly intense emotions grip you. I remembered something that Kjetil Skogli told me about one of his expeditions: an English guy, overcome by the display, dropped to his knees and proposed to his girlfriend.

While I didn’t go to school for business affairs (no one does, honestly) and haven’t had a job that directly pulls from either of my majors at Southwestern, I do believe the liberal arts prepare us well for the meandering, unpredictable nature of today’s career paths. Professors encouraged me to link diverse fields of thought, to be open to new, surprising possibilities. Some people may argue that as liberal-arts students, we aren’t masters in any single field. I’d argue that today’s economy doesn’t want specialists. It wants generalists. Even in complex fields like law, medicine, or engineering, I’ve met many a lawyer or engineer who has jumped from one firm to another and dabbled in multiple specialties. Though I rolled my eyes at the buzzwords I constantly overheard in San Francisco’s tech scene, they do hold some truth about what’s expected in today’s workers: “wearing many hats,” “jumping in,” “scrappy,” “making it work.” And I think Southwestern encourages all of these things in its students.

TONY: That ball was very difficult to find. My nephew actually has it. I was talking about how my nephew was a really big fan, and Allen goes, “Oh, let me give you the ball. What’s his name?” I go, “James.” And he writes, “James, Stay in School.”

“You look at the world now and it’s totally alarming. It’s haunting with all these totally damning reports from the New York Times. We’ve got to do something,” Scott said. Scott believes the Denver art community is its own ecosystem. He frequently witnesses former customers coming back to donate and vice versa, which means ReCreative really is giving back to the neighborhood.

A version of this story originally appeared in the May 2019 issue with the title "GQ’s Best New Restaurants 2019."

Which came first? Your kids will have the best time playing with this reversible chick and egg fleece plush toy when you’re done stitching it together. 

Nofi first heard about it from her sister in Northern Connecticut, whose neighborhood has an active Buy Nothing community.

I first came across Loos’ essay as a young African design student living in Europe. The essay unnerved me for two reasons: I was studying to become a “modern” designer, reading the appropriate canon of literature, but I’d come from a culture deeply rooted in ornamentation, so the piece felt like a direct affront on a key aspect of my cultural identity.

commissioned by fondazione prada for its milan venue, ‘whether line’, the large-scale multimedia installation, conceived by lizzie fitch and ryan trecartin represents the first output of a creative process begun in late 2016, investigating the perpetual promise of ‘new’ terrain and the inherent instability of territorial appropriation. taking the idealized rurality endemic to back-to-the-land ideologies as a conceptual starting point, the project represents both a return and an escape. the opening of the installation coincides with the start of milan design week.