California Coziness Reigns at Palihouse West Hollywood, and Other News

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California Coziness Reigns at Palihouse West Hollywood

Avi Brosh goes back to where it all began with the revival of his Palihouse brand. Palihouse West Hollywood features 95 rooms and suites blending California minimalism with a Euro kind of coziness—custom beds (dressed in Bellino Fine Linens) and lounges in jewel-tone takes on wide-wale corduroy, for example, along with checkerboard-tiled bathrooms stocked with Diptyque amenities. 

The sunny Palihouse Lobby Café & Bar has bright ideas for breakfast, including a Wood Oven Pancake and—why not?—an espresso martini with orgeat syrup. Just above the cafe floats the aptly named Mezzanine Sushi, offering late-night bites like bacon-wrapped shimeji mushroom. Located a few steps from city must-sees like LACMA and Largo at the Coronet, the boutique hotel is the perfect (re)introduction to the Palisociety, the family business of hotels and residences stretching throughout California and into Portland and Seattle and, before too long, Austin and Nashville. —Jesse Dorris

A massive new JR installation in Hong Kong is worrying the city’s feng shui experts. 

JR has unveiled a 40-foot-tall outdoor installation in Hong Kong called Giants: Rising Up to celebrate the city’s art month. The sculpture depicts a high jumper floating mid-air with a backdrop of Victoria Harbor and incorporates bamboo scaffolding, a construction technique considered safer than steel and listed as the city’s intangible cultural heritage. However, the artwork has drawn criticism from feng shui consultants and traditional Chinese metaphysics and divination practitioners who see it as a bad omen, resembling someone who fell off from a building and landed on a bamboo scaffolding, projecting negative energy to viewers.

Ai Weiwei’s latest project invites you to flip off both landmarks and political buildings. 

Ai Weiwei has launched a digital project called Middle Finger in partnership with Avant Arte. Users can create and upload their own “raised finger” by superimposing Ai’s outstretched arm over searchable locations or overlaying his arm on their own images. The project coincides with Ai’s upcoming exhibition at the Design Museum in London, and a time-limited silkscreen print edition of Middle Finger in Red is available for sale on Avant Arte’s website.

The American Academy of Arts and Letters’ annual ceremony will honor Faith Ringgold. 

Faith Ringgold, the renowned artist who has used intricate narrative quilts to express social justice themes, will be honored with a Gold Medal for Painting at the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ annual awards ceremony. In recognition of her work in founding Anonymous Was a Woman, an organization that provides grants to women artists, Susan Unterberg will receive an award for Distinguished Service to the Arts. Additionally, poetry critic Helen Hennessy Vendler will be given a Gold Medal for Belles Lettres and Criticism for championing the works of notable poets like Seamus Heaney and Jorie Graham.

Shreesh Design Studio envisions an Indian preschool with vibrantly colored buildings.

Shreesh Design Studio has designed a preschool in Gujarat state, India, consisting of brightly colored steel buildings arranged in a circle around a central amphitheater. The steel structures provided a cost-effective solution and allowed for easy future dismantling and relocation. The circular pathway separating the classrooms from the amphitheater doubles as a cycle track, while sandpits, grassy landscaping, water fountains, and a swimming pool provide sensory spaces for students to play. The project’s open and cohesive layout invites exploration, making it an ideal environment for young children to learn and grow.

Titus Kaphar co-authors a clever book about the human cost of mass incarceration. 

Redaction is a collaborative project between poet Reginald Dwayne Betts and painter Titus Kaphar that explores the human cost of mass incarceration through a series of etched portraits overlaid by legal documents that Betts redacted to create poetic verse. The book, an outgrowth of the 2019 exhibition of the same name at MoMA PS1, features striking images printed on black paper using outside-the-box production techniques. The team sought to create a mass-produced artist’s book that could circulate beyond gallery walls, with a soft cover to make it accessible to those incarcerated and single-sided pages that can be torn out and made into personal artifacts.

Rolls-Royce secures funding to develop a small nuclear-powered reactor on the moon.

Rolls-Royce’s ambitious project to create a nuclear-powered reactor as a long-term energy source for lunar bases has received further funding from the UK Space Agency. The new funding will allow the company to develop a modular micro-reactor, with a demonstration model scheduled to be sent to the moon by 2029. The project will focus on generating, transferring, and converting heat into usable energy, with the aim of paving the way for continuous human presence on the moon. Rolls-Royce has partnered with several universities to help outfit the micro-reactor to operate in the lunar environment.

Today’s attractive distractions:

A stunning new study suggests that Venus may be volcanically active.

One critic argues that L.A.’s latest high-rise is grotesquely egotistical.

Scottish castles may be appealing, but the upkeep virtually never ends.

Pop culture–inspired ice cream flavors should be kept in the churner.