Recent Intelligence: culture, ideas, and obsessions to elevate your week /037
Reflections that soften, gestures that linger, and the slow currents beneath a world moving too fast.
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February is often described as a bridge between winter and spring. Today is cold, cloudy, and drizzly, but it’s brighter than it’s been in months, and the days are unmistakably growing longer. I don’t believe in numbers or star signs, but I find myself caught by the idea of this rare, auspicious Year of the Fire Horse, by what it suggests about change and momentum. Things have felt stuck since the pandemic, as though time itself stalled, and maybe 2025 marked the end of that pause. Maybe this new year will finally bring the movement we’ve been waiting for.
This weekend, we’re thinking of taking the train into Manchester for dim sum, screening a film (last week we watched Manhattan Murder Mystery and didn’t much care for it), and a brief decompression from the accumulating weight of projects and plans that have already begun to define the year.
This edition of Recent Intelligence includes reflections on the quiet cultural shifts beginning to surface this winter – from the way we move our bodies and care for our skin, to the technologies reshaping work, attention, and intimacy, often without our consent. There are design histories that reward close looking, beauty notes that favour softness over drama, and media worth reading slowly, with a cup of something hot nearby. There’s thought, warmth, and the soft current of meaning beneath it all, the kind that lingers long after you’ve finished reading.
LAST TIME /at hyperreality
These Analogue Winter Days
Pressed glass, film grain, and the intimacy of staying in
This is a Life Update of sorts, but not in the usual way. It is, instead, a compilation of the analogue ways I've been spending these winter days – from salvaged souvenirs and pressed glass to film photographs that smell faintly of the past. There are handwritten letters, skincare experiments, a controversial pan, and a return to 2016 that might feel more familiar than you'd expect. Small habits, carefully kept things, and the particular pleasure of moving through winter at a slower speed.
DESIGN /briques de verre
Glass brick, often referred to generically as glass block, is an architectural element made from glass that admits light while maintaining visual obscurity. Although the two terms are frequently used interchangeably, they describe distinct products with different constructions, properties and architectural applications. A glass brick is a solid unit, formed by pouring molten glass into a single mould, whereas a glass block is hollow, created by fusing two moulded halves together to form an internal air pocket. This fundamental difference affects everything from weight and insulation to structural performance and cost, and continues to shape how each is specified in contemporary design.
The origins of glass blocks lie in early twentieth-century experiments with prism lighting, developed to introduce daylight into factories and industrial buildings. An important precursor was patented in France on 11 November 1886 by the Swiss architect Gustave Falconnier, who developed the first hollow glass block system. Mass production followed in 1932 with the construction of the Owens-Illinois Glass Block Building in the United States, marking the material’s transition from innovation to mainstream architectural component.
From the outset, hollow glass blocks appealed to architects for their ability to diffuse natural light while preserving privacy. Their internal air cavity makes them lighter than solid glass bricks and gives them superior thermal and acoustic insulation, though they are not load-bearing. These qualities made them particularly well suited to non-structural applications such as partitions, windows and decorative walls.
Glass bricks, by contrast, are heavier, denser and significantly stronger. Their solid construction offers greater impact resistance and clarity, with less optical distortion than hollow blocks. While they provide less insulation, they can be used structurally and are often specified for columns, façades, light wells and high-end architectural features. In specialist systems, some glass bricks can meet stringent security or resilience standards, including ballistic or storm resistance, contributing to their higher cost.
Both materials found their architectural moment during the 1930s and 1940s, becoming emblematic of Art Deco and Streamline Moderne design. In cities such as Chicago and New York, glass blocks were widely used in storefronts, factories and residential buildings, often forming dramatic curved walls that celebrated modernity and technological progress. Their ability to create luminous, sculptural surfaces without sacrificing privacy aligned perfectly with the ideals of the period.
After a decline in the post-war years, glass blocks experienced a resurgence during the 1980s and 1990s, in step with Postmodern design. They became a familiar feature of domestic and commercial interiors, particularly in bathrooms, office partitions and room dividers, valued for their soft, diffused light and visual screening. By the turn of the millennium, however, their widespread use led to a sense of stylistic fatigue, and they briefly fell out of favour.
In recent years, both glass bricks and glass blocks have been reassessed and reintroduced with greater intentionality. Contemporary architects and designers are drawn to their nostalgic appeal and atmospheric qualities, using them to create moody, light-filled spaces. Today they appear in walls, skylights and pavement lights, as well as in interior applications such as showers, partitions, furniture and even entire kitchens, and increasingly in refined exterior façades – each material chosen for the specific qualities its construction affords.
(All images via Pinterest)
SHOPPING LIST /cosy, wintry things
Below, for paid subscribers: A slower descent into the textures beneath the main letter. We begin with antique mirrors, with reflection that clouds, softens, and bears the marks of time as a way of thinking about perception, ageing, and the appeal of imperfection. From there, the focus widens: beauty that refuses hardness, strength built slowly rather than forced, and the growing rejection of optimisation as a way of living. We move through technology’s current theatre – humanoid robots, automation, the widening gap between promise and consequence – alongside questions of attention, labour, and what it costs to stay psychologically intact as systems accelerate around us. Woven through it all are winter rituals, aesthetic decisions, and small, deliberate attentions that give life its texture, its sense of being lived in rather than passed through.