Young prodigies, whatever their trade, require a wide variety of handlers. Chaos, early adulthood, and extremely high stakes have a tendency to trigger a quick and fiery unraveling, one that often burns brightly and briefly before the public turns a blind eye. Mikaela Shiffrin will not be one of those prodigies.

The eighteen-year-old American ski racer, cautiously aware of the dangers of a quick ascent, still became, last year, the third-youngest woman to hold a World Championship title in the history of her sport. That victory, in turn, threw the weighty expectations of gold at next year’s XXII Olympic Winter Games in Sochi upon her. Even then, she’ll still be a teenager, albeit one for whom pressure has long been a byproduct of calculated success.

London-born Anna Karlin might argue that her transition from digital to industrial design was no transition at all, save for one particular caveat: “When you become your own client, you can push the lim- its,” she says. “If I didn’t design something from inception, rather than responding solely to client briefs, I knew I was going to feel dissatisfied.”

As the web has flooded itself with flash sales and coupons, one-off deals and questionably low prices, the online market has come to resemble something of a digital Canal Street, where everything is a cheap alternative to its original self. L’ArcoBaleno, which launched earlier this year, is the extreme nonconformist, and refreshingly so—the Biennale des Antiquaires of the Internet, where fine design and rich content formally meet.

It’s difficult to look at Harper Reed’s work without looking at the dialogue surrounding it, which is an unfortunate side effect of its impact. The former CTO of Obama for America 2012, Reed is an overtly-contemporary figure in a disarmingly slowly-moving field, and his youthful understanding of the interconnectedness of digital life is often cited when explaining the underpinnings of Obama’s electoral success. The gauges, mohawk, and handlebar mustache simply add to the myth, that of the hacker-cum-reformist who turned the campaign world upside down with a few lines of code.

Alejandro Zambra’s Ways of Going Home is the work of an author for whom brevity is a push back against the whitewashing of history. Relative to his novels which preceded it—The Private Lives of Trees and Bonsai—Ways of Going Home is an epic, yet it completes its telling in just under 140 pages. Why? “Sometimes, when we write, we wash away everything clean, as if by doing so we could advance toward something,” our narrator tells us. “We ought to simply describe those sounds, those stains on memory.”

Richard Gilligan’s DIY, published last year by 1980 Éditions in Paris, may well come to be seen as skateboarding’s Poetics of Space, the Gaston Bachelard classic on architecture as a reflection of historical experience. Appropriately, Gilligan is less interested in the actual action of the sport than he is in the environments that enable it—curves […]

Enough has been said about the transformative power of digital life. Yes, communication has taken a bastardized form, a series of short bursts of text tossed to some proverbial wind. And yes, we’re all somewhat guilty of abusing the distance social networks provide, rarely bridging the gap between what we share and what we mean. Over time, though—fairly recently, really—the dullness of these changes has begun to compound. Sometimes, we simply want to reach out and, quite literally, feel something new.

Where art and industrial design diverge is in the latter’s focus on functionality—the fabrication of an object for a specified use. New York-based designer Lindsey Adelman takes this process a step further. When she first experimented with lighting, her métier, she says, “I just thought about multiple points of light, then worked backwards: What’s the minimal structure necessary?” Considering the quality of her work, with its spiraling plays on our relationship with nature, it may come as a shock that beauty is an almost-unintentional outcome.

Authors’ lives can veer exhaustingly between extreme exposure and near anonymity. This is a byproduct of their creative process and an outcome of its finished form. Even a story narrated through a wide lens—stretching wildly, in turn, across time and space—has the impact of exposing its author’s own history. And yet, in most cases, they pass almost invisibly down a city street, a disconnect between writer and reader that, when bridged, can strengthen their bond.

In selecting architect David Adjaye for their first retail space, Proenza Schouler’s Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez were attempting to chisel their own progressive framework into Manhattan’s stiff Upper East Side. The outpost, they say, was meant to be “the antithesis of a slick, high-gloss Madison Avenue store,” and Adjaye, whose rise to fame is rooted firmly in the dissolution of cultural boundaries, was seen as the ideal mediator.