If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, ARTNews may receive an affiliate commission.

Calendar applications are convenient, but no smartphone tool can truly replace a material planner. It’s helpful to have one physical space where you can write down all your important dates and deadlines and be able to flip through it to compare weeks or months at a glance. For most people, this kind of simple agenda is really all you’ll need, although some may like planners that aim to motivate, with sections for aspirations and goal tracking.

Planners come in all formats, from daily to monthly. You’ll probably start your search knowing which of these works best for you, but when choosing your book, it’s important to think about the binding quality, durability, weight of paper, and compatibility with your writing (or drawing!) medium, in addition to general factors like size and appearance. After all, planners keep you organized, but more than that, they are diaries of how you’ve spent your time and how your life has changed from year to year, and it’s nice to make this act of recording a pleasurable experience. More practically, you want to plan your schedule without fear of distracting ink bleeding.

We’ve found some of the best planners to suit a range of planning styles, including planners for people whose lives don’t fit the January to December model; read about them in our reviews below. But remember: the best agenda is probably the one that best satisfies your individual needs.

Jules, Luke and Jim convene at Ramble HQ with just one more sleep before the most exciting day of the year: the World Cup 3rd/4th play-off!

We hear your suggestions for replacing this fixture - including an Gianni Infantino vs Florentino Perez pillow fight. Speaking of which, Gianni’s been in front of the mic again and we re-launch a competition of our own: it’s Moore vs Breach in Jack’s Encyclopaedia!

Tweet us @FootballRamble and email us here: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Sign up for our Patreon for exclusive live events, ad-free Rambles, full video episodes and loads more: patreon.com/footballramble.

***Please take the time to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your pods. It means a great deal to the show and will make it easier for other potential listeners to find us. Thanks!***

Archaeologists determined that an ancient toolkit found near Stonehenge was used to make a variety of gold objects.

According to new research, published in the journal Antiquity, microscopic residue on the surface of the tools is ancient gold, revealing these stone-and-copper-alloy items were used as hammers and anvils, and to smooth the objects being crafted.

“This is a really exciting finding for our project,” said Rachel Crellin, lead author and archaeologist at the University of Leicester, in a statement. “What our work has revealed is the humble stone toolkit that was used to make gold objects thousands of years ago.”

Originally excavated in 1801, the toolkit was found in the Upton Lovell G2a burial which is thought to date to the Bronze Age, around 1850–1700 BCE. Marked by an earthen mound near Stonehenge, initial investigations revealed two individuals and a wide assortment of grave goods.

One figure was placed sitting upright, with her head close to the top of the barrow, and buried with a fine shale arm ring and a necklace of polished shale beads. The other figure was wearing a ceremonial cloak, with pierced bone points as a necklace, thought to be a specialized costume.

The sadness of thinking about a year in reading is how little of it endures! As I try to recover lost time by rereading the terrible handwriting in my journal I find so many abandoned or forgotten books, and even the ones that remained in my memory are now reduced to an image or a sentence or a feeling—but maybe this is universal, and therefore not so sad.  

The book that stayed with me the most this year was Tove Ditlevsen’s The Copenhagen Trilogy, not just because of how moving it is and how it performs such relentless moves with doom as she details her struggles with external demons (family, class, addiction) but because I still don’t understand exactly how she accomplished this. Whenever I’ve tried to define it in conversation, I end up saying something hopelessly abstract, like, “The series invents its own authority.” This hopelessness made me want to come up with a corresponding new aesthetic category, something that would precisely and permanently define the compulsive.  

In a very different mode: I keep remembering images from Jean-Patrick Manchette’s crime novels, which I read this summer in some of NYRB Classics’s reissues. My favorites, perhaps, were No Room at the Morgue and Nada, which aren’t so much noirs as rapid phenomenologies of politics. There are dense technical descriptions of guns and scenes of people waiting in dark rooms, but operating through these minute details is a sense of a larger system.  

These, I’ve realized sadly, are the memories of reading I’m left with now. But maybe this awareness of forgetting has been prompted by an experience I loved at the beginning of the year—listening, online, to Alice Oswald’s lectures on poetry at Oxford. The first, from 2019, is called “The Art of Erosion,” and uses the seventeenth-century poet Robert Herrick as an example of a writer with a way of working that she admires. It wasn’t only her argument about poetry and erosion that I found both moving and invigorating, her idea that there is a poetry that builds up and a poetry that uncovers or erodes; it was the use of Herrick—someone so apparently outmoded and forgotten!—as her model for thinking through those subjects. Of course, I’ve forgotten many other aspects of those nighttime lectures. So much is already eroded at the moment of listening, or reading. How any writer makes something survive—even for a year—is still a mystery.   

Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie star in 'messy, dazzling epic'

To receive Morning Links in your inbox every weekday, sign up for our Breakfast with ARTnews newsletter.

The Headlines

ARTIST, CURATOR, AND EDUCATOR Deborah Willis, whose influential career has focused on how Black people and gender are represented, has won the $200,000 Don Tyson Prize for the Advancement of American Art from the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. Given every two years, the award has previously gone to Project Row Houses, vanessa german, and the Archives of American Art . An exhibition organized by Willis, “The Black Civil War Soldier,” which features photographic portraits, is now on view at the New York University Kimmel Windows Gallery. In 2020, Willis’s work was profiled in ARTnews.

BLACK AND BLUE. What is going on at Superblue? When the experiential-art venture—from the Pace Gallery and Laurene Powell Jobs’s Emerson Collective—launched in the summer of 2020, there was talk of having locations on three continents and finding ways to “reinvent how art is shown.” Today, it has a single branch, in Miami. In ARTnews, Daniel Cassady has a deep dive into “cost overruns, mismanagement, and a board structure that has plagued decision-making” at the firm. The Emerson Collective has stepped back, giving up its board seats, and Pace CEO Marc Glimcher has, too, shifting from chairman to adviser. For more, head to ARTnews. 

The Digest

The pandemic catalyzed the growing trend of listless wealthy people outbidding one another via online auctions, turning any possible luxury acquisition into a “so-called alternative asset class.” This inadvertently spurred the art auction market to new heights, with global auction houses Christie’s and Sotheby’s reporting sales totaling $7.1 billion and $7.3 billion, respectively, for 2021. Recent sales reports indicate that 2022 looks set to retain that level, even though Sotheby’s reported a decline in fine art sales from 2021.

Notably, Asian art buyers were a major factor for this growth, making up 31 percent of Christie’s global sales, 36 percent of Phillips’ global spend, and 46 percent of lots sold for more than US$5 million at Sotheby’s. While all three auction houses reported a drop in bidders and buyers from Asia in 2022 as compared to last year, they are still doubling down on their focus on the continent.

In July 2021, Christie’s revealed plans to move into a 50,000-square-foot, four-story Asia-Pacific headquarters in Hong Kong in 2024. The Russian-owned Phillips partnered with Poly Auction for its Hong Kong sales and announced plans to move into new, expanded premises next to the new M+ museum in the West Kowloon Cultural District in March 2023, coinciding with Art Basel Hong Kong and their inaugural 20th century and contemporary art sales in the city. Sotheby’s will also be moving to its brand-new headquarters at the upcoming Six Pacific Place in Hong Kong, a short distance away from the auction house’s newly announced year-round exhibition space, both set to open in 2024.

International auction houses have also been expanding their teams in the continent. Bonhams made a slew of new appointments recently, with its Asia team now the biggest it has ever been. This is in addition to opening a new office in Shanghai in June 2021. Back at Sotheby’s, Alex Branczik, former London-based head of contemporary art, and Max Moore, a New York–based specialist focusing on NFTs, joined the house’s Asia team last year.

Intriguingly, this year in particular, specific cities, beyond China and Hong Kong, have caught the attention of the global auction market. At the end of August, Sotheby’s held a successful auction sale in Singapore for the first time in 15 years while Christie’s hosted a highly popular public viewing of a controversial Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton in the city. Moreover, Christie’s posted a job ad for an associate specialist in Singapore. And Phillips will hold a pop-up exhibition showcasing works by California-based artist Brett Crawford in Singapore during the week of the launch of ART SG, the city’s biggest art fair.

Making its rounds on social media over the past two weeks is a story from The Atlantic about the end of high school English class. It’s not necessarily what you think it might be. The author, a high school teacher in Berkeley, California, explores how ChatGPT, a conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) system, might radically alter the future of English education. Students can, for example, feed the system a prompt for class and develop an essay with the help of the AI, never needing to do the actual work of writing and editing from scratch themselves. While sure, AI could make cheating a lot easier, this reads a lot more like a problem of an insular wealthy community in the backyard of Silicon Valley than one that would radically change English classes outside that bubble.

A quarter of Americans still do not have broadband internet access at home. This segment of Americans includes young people who are in school. Can AI impact those students utilizing it at school? Absolutely. But the fact of the matter is, this shouldn’t be the concern of the shifting face of high school English classes. Censorship should be.

Censorship, happening across the country at never before seen speed by right-wing Christian nationalists, fueled by group think, by big pocketbooks, and well-connected politicians, is the true threat to what a high school English class offers. English, which explores reading and literacy, teaches writing and critical thinking, and dives into the art and science of rhetoric, is being irreversibly changed by the current climate of censorship. Regardless of whether a book has been pulled from curriculum or from school library shelves, educators are at the mercy of adults who are making a hobby of creating chaos via challenges, via undermining their expertise, and via actual threats to their safety. We’ve seen quiet/silent censorship become more talked about in the wake of all this, but all we can ever know about how widespread such soft censorship is that it is impossible to measure. Unless educators fess up to changing curriculum, to avoiding certain conversations in the classroom, or not recommending or sharing certain books, then that censorship goes unnoticed. Critical conversations that help form the basis of English education, including argumentation, evidence that supports said arguments, and introduction to a wide range of ideas meant to be discussed openly and frankly, are halted when “Critical Race Theory” or “Social Emotional Learning” or “Pornography” or “Grooming” are casually tossed about by white supremacists demanding education look exactly as they want it to. English that is whitewashed, falsified, and fabricated.

To worry about AI changing English classes is to ignore the enemy already sitting in the classroom. It is to ignore the fact that there are students across the country, in vast numbers, who do not have access to books or reading outside of the classroom. Who do not have access to books with people who look or act or think like them because a few white women declaring themselves the experts on what is and is not appropriate said so. It is akin to suggesting that banning books is a good thing, actually, since it’ll “sell a lot of books.” Indeed, some banned books see sales increase, but that statement overlooks the actual issue. Banning books is intellectual suppression. Banning books is revoking First Amendment rights.

At the end of the day, students lose when their access to books of all kinds is restricted.

Since about 2014, I’ve always kept an eye on Pantone’s Color of the Year. I like this idea of a color defining or giving shape to an upcoming year, much in the way I like thinking not about resolutions but about words or phrases as a means of organizing the next 12 months. Over the years, I’ve found some Pantone Color of the Year choices to be excellent — 2018’s Ultra Violet was great, as was 2019’s Living Coral — while other choices have left me really underwhelmed — the choice of Gray and Yellow for 2021 felt a little bit too much like a 2011 Pinterest Wedding Board to me, and the choice of 2020’s Classic Blue just…boring. It’s neat to see where and how these colors do or don’t trend throughout the year. What can we expect from the Pantone’s Color of the Year 2023, Viva Magenta? It’s a bold, energetic blend of red, purple, and pink and, in my opinion, one of their best choices. It’s a very alive color.

Keeping Viva Magenta in mind, I thought it would be fun to create a palate of books across genres, voices, and categories that utilize the color (or something very similar to it) as the focus of the book cover. This is your roundup of Viva Magenta book covers. Grab one or several and read your way through the Pantone color of the year. I definitely plan to grab some of these…and maybe a notebook in this vivid color, too.

I’ve tried to credit cover designers where possible. This is the regular plea for publishers to put this information right on your landing page for each of your books to give the credit where it’s due.

You’ll notice something interesting here, as I did while poking around for these covers: Viva Magenta is a VERY tough color to match. Because it has a range of tones, even the swatches for the color are different, one being more pink and one more purple. Your screen resolution will make a difference here, and in some cases, the cover’s take on Viva Magenta goes more one direction than the other. The effect, of course, remains.