2025-12-15

M.F. Husain Museum in Qatar

India’s best-known artist gets his own museum—in Qatar

Although he died 14 years ago, aged 95, M.F. Husain is India’s best-known modern artist. He recently became its most expensive, too: earlier this year one of his works sold at auction for $13.8m, a new record for an Indian painter. The opening of Lawh wa Qalam (The Canvas and the Pen) in Qatar adds one more item to Husain’s list of achievements, for it is the first museum outside India dedicated to a single Indian artist.

Why is the museum in Doha and not, say, Pandharpur, the town of Husain’s birth? The artist, who was Muslim, fell foul of Hindu nationalists, who claimed to be offended by his frequent depiction of Hindu goddesses in the nude. By the mid-2000s the harassment had become intolerable: death threats, vandalism of his artwork, an attack on his home by Hindu militants and an estimated 900 legal cases registered against him. He left India in 2006 and never returned, living between Dubai, Doha and London. “It is a sad day for India,” the editor of the Hindu, a newspaper, wrote at the time.

Mubi Podcast with creator of Jiro Dreams of Sushi

JIRO DREAMS OF SUSHI... and David Gelb changes how people eat it

David Gelb changed how the world looked at food documentaries. I watched Jiro Dreams of Sushi not too long after it first came out. Over the years, I have also followed the numerous food documentaries (including Gelb's Chef's Table and it's various spinoffs and knockoffs) define an entire genre of documentary film-making.

This podcast was a nostalgic trip down memory lane and had some interesting insights on how the whole phenomenon began.

2025-12-18

The performative male

When did everything (and everyone) become so ‘performative’? | Dazed

This article is about "performativity" in general, but imo the best parts of it are a slick breakdown of the performative male.

The word “performative” has been thrown around in 2025, mostly to describe the “performative male”. The archetype of a performative male is a tote-bag-carrying, matcha-drinking, All About Love-reading man who curates his behaviours to attract women, using more “feminine” interests to lure them into a false sense of security. Appearing to look “not like other guys” while simultaneously acting exactly like other guys is an unfortunately common occurrence in heterosexual dating. Online, the idea of performative men took on a life of its own – there are performative male final boss starter packs, videos of men “performatively” reading and even performative male lookalike contests.

…

To understand how everything and everyone became “performative”, let us first track the emergence of the performative man. Dr Rauchberg says the performative male trend was a splintering of last year’s celebrity look-alike contests. Most of these look-alike contests centred around male celebrities, like Timothee Chalamet. As these contests grew in popularity and were replicated, they sparked a larger conversation around how masculinity is enacted. She calls performative men the “Gen Z hipsters”, sipping matcha lattes and reading dog-eared feminist paperbacks instead of falling into the violent confines of the manosphere. “When the only media representations you see either fault you (men are bad!) or push you into warped misogyny, the performative male is an ironic, playful response that pushes back at weaponised misogyny in media,” she says.

Thin and Thick Desires

Thin Desires Are Eating Your Life

The business model of most consumer technology is to identify some thick desire, find the part of it that produces a neurological reward, and then deliver that reward without the rest of the package.

Social media gives you the feeling of social connection without the obligations of actual friendship.

Pornography gives you sexual satisfaction without the vulnerability of partnership.

Productivity apps give you the feeling of accomplishment without anything being accomplished.

In each case, the thin version is easier to deliver at scale, easier to monetize, and easier to make addictive.

The result is a diet of pure sensation.

And none of it seems to be making anyone happier.

The thick life doesn't scale.

That's the whole point.

So: bake bread.

The yeast doesn't care about your schedule.

The dough will rise when it rises, indifferent to your optimization.

You'll spend an afternoon doing something that cannot be made faster, producing something that you could have bought for four dollars, and in the process you'll recover some capacity for patience that the attention economy has been methodically stripping away.

Write a letter, by hand, on paper.

Send it through the mail.

The letter will take days to arrive and you won't be able to unsend it or edit it or track whether it was opened.

You're creating a communication that exists outside the logic of engagement metrics, a small artifact that refuses to be optimized.

Code a tool for exactly one person.

Solve your friend's specific problem with their specific workflow.

Build something that will never scale, never be monetized, never attract users.

The entire economy of software assumes that code should serve millions to justify its existence.

Making something for an audience of one is a beautiful heresy.

None of this will reverse the great thinning.

But I've started to suspect that the thick life might be worth pursuing anyway, on its own terms, without needing to become a movement.