A writer begins with an empty page. A tailor begins with a length of cloth.
Both face the same question: what can be removed without losing the idea?
A good editor cuts paragraphs the way a good tailor cuts fabric, carefully, respecting the original intention. Neither creates talent. Neither invents character. They simply reveal the form hidden inside.
This is perhaps why the friendship between an author and an editor feels like the one between a client and a tailor. Trust built stitch by stitch, draft by draft.
In the end, the best editing and the best tailoring share the same ambition. To make the work feel effortless, as if nothing had ever been changed.

He has been making sushi for more than seventy years.
The restaurant seats ten. Reservations take months. 
He still arrives first and leaves last. Not ambition. Habit. 

The film is not about sushi.
It is about what happens when a person decides that one thing is worth an entire life.

A cutter, not a tailor. The distinction matters to him. So does every seam, every choice of cloth, every conversation in the shop. A film about craft as discipline and survival. The cutting table is never just a cutting table.

Tanizaki wrote this essay in 1933. It has not aged because it was never about its time.

He argues that beauty does not announce itself. It settles into corners, into the patina of old wood, into the space between things. Western aesthetics, he suggests, flooded everything with light. Something was lost in the process.

A useful book for anyone who works with materials, surfaces and the question of what is enough.

Some books become part of us long before we understand why.

Martin Eden and The Sea-Wolf by Jack London are two of them. I first read them in Russian, when I was much younger. Reading them again later in life, I found different questions in the same pages — about ambition, will, freedom, and the person we choose to become.

They are here not because they are famous books, but because they are part of my story.

I first heard this story several years ago.
Recently, I wanted to listen to it again. It felt a little like watching a favorite film for the second time, although the form is completely different.

The story unfolds through a correspondence between two people who happen to meet online. It seems that nothing much is happening, and yet everything happens in the words between them.
I have always valued dialogue as a form. Here, the dialogue is the story itself.
I never read this correspondence. I listened to it.
The narrator was excellent. That, too, was part of it.
Perhaps that is why, after several years, I wanted to hear it again.

This book does not offer a gripping plot. Nothing in it makes you say, “Well, I did not see that coming.”
That is exactly why it stays with you after the last page.

William Stoner lived an ordinary life. He taught literature. He loved. He raised a daughter. He did not always say what he thought. He did not always hold his ground. But he went the distance.

Today, box office records are broken by superheroes. But a real superhero is someone who simply sees their own life through. No special powers required.
Stoner is exactly that.

Reading his story, you start asking yourself questions you never seem to find time for.
Was the work you devoted years to something you truly loved?
Was the love real?
Were there moments when you walked past something and later wished you hadn’t?
This book did not reveal these truths.
It simply brought them into the light.

At first, this book reminded me strongly of Downton Abbey. The period, the house, the rituals, the hierarchy, the impeccable butler — I even found myself picturing its characters the same way.
Somewhere in the middle, I began to have my doubts. I wasn’t yet sure this story would stay with me.
But the final pages made me look back at the whole book differently.
That is what some books do. The ending changes everything before it.
After finishing the book, I became curious about its author. Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki and moved to Britain with his family when he was five. He became a British writer and writes in English. Yet he created such a convincing English world that it is easy to forget that he was not born inside it.
Perhaps that small distance allowed him to see this world with particular clarity.
I am not sure many writers of the old English school could have written this England more convincingly.
Ishiguro was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017. His prose is remarkably restrained. Much of what matters happens quietly, between the lines.
I want to write more about this book in Practice.
Now it has a place on my shelf in Library.

When I first discovered the world of Ralph Lauren, I knew almost nothing about the man behind it.
For me and my friends, who were fascinated by American style, he became a reference point. Something inside told me there was something real behind those clothes. We wanted more of it and did not want to lose the thread.
Today, many years later, I look at his legacy with different eyes.
Ralph Lauren was not a tailor. Perhaps that is why he saw clothing a little differently.
He understood that clothing remembers.
Savile Row. The American West. The working man’s jacket. The cowboy. Military uniform. Native American traditions.
He did not mix these things. He translated them.
And America saw itself for the first time.
Perhaps that is why his influence on me became something more than the influence of a celebrated designer.
He showed me that the new does not have to begin by destroying the old.
Sometimes it is enough to see in something familiar what others no longer notice. To understand its history and preserve its character. To place it beside something else so that the two begin to speak to each other.
I look for those same paths, seeking a thoughtful connection between different languages of clothing.

Recently, I watched the biographical film Very Ralph. It shows the scale of the journey of a great American. But what interested me most was not the scale of his brand.
At the center of this story is a man who saw more than others, trusted his intuition, and was proven right.
It is difficult to compare him with Armani or Yamamoto. He is American.
Lauren was first, and he remains unique.