WEEKEND READS: Brighter days ahead
The best writing of the week for December 20, 2025
Happy Saturday, Ink readers!
If you’re in the Northern Hemisphere, this weekend brings with it the winter solstice, the beginning of winter, the shortest and darkest day of the year, and an opportunity to consider that we are headed for brighter days, no matter how gloomy it may seem right now. And with that in mind, we invite you, our supporting subscribers, to spend some time reading along with us, so — as we do each weekend — we’ve collected some of the most interesting writing and thinking we’ve come across during the week.
Welcome to today’s edition of Weekend Reads.
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Look upon my works
For those who understand architecture as a symbolic project, a practice that aims to express and concretize an ideological vision—especially of the future—Trump’s Winter Palace tack-on is more interesting and begins to make more sense. Unlike the left and especially unlike liberals, the right has assembled for itself an aesthetic program, an answer to what the future should look like, slopified as it may be. Indeed, like all fascists, its broader program is to aestheticize politics itself. (One must here remember the difference, articulated best by Godard, between the liberal idea of making political art and the socialist idea of making art politically so as to not fall into the same trap.) In short, conservatives understand that the project of politics is nothing short of remaking (or unmaking) the world itself. [The New York Review of Architecture]
